2 + 2 = 4

Don't go looking at FP magazine.

2011-10-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

If you are a fan of the Rachel Maddow show you have probably already seen her wonderful segment on the undisputed King of Wrong, Paul Wolfowitz, and how he has co-authored an "article" about the war in Afghanistan. She did a wonderful re-cap on Friday night's show of all of the "wrong-ness" when he was in a position of power and influence. I particularly like this zinger:

"If you hear something clangingly, obviously wrong in America - look around - Paul Wolfowitz is somewhere near you."

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You may be tempted, like me, to go to the magazine's site and leave a comment. Two bits of info to keep in mind:

1. This is a web 'zine and not a publication with much of any reputation at all. Even free web publications that have any proven reputation for having good quality content show up in at least one or two commercial databases. I checked. None of the half-dozen databases to which my library subscribes carries this title.

2. "Publications" like FP magazine like to publish "controversial" (English translation: dead wrong about everything) people in order to increase their page views and even gain more registered users (you must register to comment). Visiting the site in the hope of leaving a snarky comment about how the author and therefore the publication lack credibility actually plays into their hands. They want you to get angry, go to the article, register to leave a comment, then tell them off.

Information is not the commodity, information is not the product sold in this venture. You are. We are. Our eyes on the page seeing the ads. Any evidence that verifies the number of viewers, or registered users, obtains more advertising revenue.

If anyone tries to tell you that the invisible hand of the free market guarantees the best quality at the lowest cost - keep this in mind. Given that information that we actually seek is not the product, we continue to have to witness such spectacles as Wolfowitz pontificating on war, Penn Gillette served up as a public intellectual (his highest educational level is clown college - not kidding) by a site calling itself "Big Think" and worse.

Sadly, often times information that we find useful, meaningful and actionable does not make enough people angry enough to generate lots of comments and draw page views. Presenting controversial points of view has a very important role in journalism and I commend any effort to introduce ideas with evidence to support them which make rational inferences from verifiably real evidence. We do not see enough of that. There exists a very big difference between finding conflicting viewpoints on matters of public policy which have intelligent, articulate people disagreeing with each other on the one hand and serving up crap designed to piss off lots of people to generate traffic on a web site (serving no other useful purpose) on the other.

Ultimately, no one should consider Paul Wolfowitz a controversial figure, anymore than we would consider a controversial thinker someone who believes in unicorns, or Big Foot. When the "Big Foot spotter" of foreign policy writes anything about foreign policy, the best way to proceed is just not to click on the link. Don't go there. Nothing worth looking at there.

Unfair and Imbalanced

2011-10-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

See the video below which Fox News taped but did not air. (How do we know this? Notice that the man interviewed gestures to his right then the camera taking the video you are actually watching pans to show the Fox News camera).

My favorite part comes when the Fox talking head ratchets up the smug and smarmy by mentioning that this interview will (but not in the reality the rest of us occupy) be aired and that Fox is "giving" him the same coverage as they did the tea party. Hint to Fox: if you do not actually air the interview, you're not actually giving anyone anything even pretending to be fair or balanced.

Good idea that - having your own camera taping at the same time.

The Fiendish Gun-Control Plan

2011-10-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Rachel Maddow show on Friday had a segment on the wonderfully demented head of the NRA expounding upon President Obama's fiendish plan to take away their guns. Those liberals who find themselves a bit disappointed with the President might find this a bit encouraging - that is, until you find out what the leader of the NRA finds so upsetting.

I suggest you watch this segment before reading further for the full humor effect - no one can deconstruct entertaining crazy quite as well as Maddow can. Below the embed you will find spoilers.

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The bad, scary liberals are coming after their guns by …

… NOT coming after their guns. Seriously.

Later in the show in another segment she makes reference to a right-wing religious nut who thinks that the U.S. should go to war against demon grizzly bears (not kidding). And Bryan Fischer (Mr. Demon Grizzly Bears) is scheduled to speak at a "Conservative Values" shindig right after someone he considers the anti-Christ himself: Mitt Romney. (For those not fully up to date on right-wing nuttery Fischer is rabidly anti-Mormon and Romney is one - now that's entertainment!).

Why do these live-action cartoon people have such national prominence and obtain so much exposure in the media? It's not just for their entertainment value to me. They act as the attack dogs of the one percenters: a de facto aristocracy who, despite the Constitution banning titles of nobility enjoy all the powers and privileges of the aristocrats of old.

It's important to keep in mind that the causes of most interest to the rabid right remain of little interest to the very rich. Abortion? Outlawing it in the U.S. will not trouble a multi millionaire: he (sorry, most of them are "he's") can fly his wife, girlfriend, daughter or mistress to Canada or Denmark or some other place where abortion remains legal and safe. That's just combining a brief vacation with an errand. Guns? The private security firms will have all the weaponry they need regardless of any controls that ever do come out of a legislature. We already have a well bifurcated legal system with a different set of laws for the wealthy and powerful than the rest of us have to follow. (Goldman Sachs engaged in investments that effectively bet against their own customers. Any prosecutions?) The crash of 08: aside from peripheral bottom feeders such as Madoff and other "mini-Madoffs" - any prosecutions? Has anyone actually responsible for illegal acts that contributed to crashing the world's economy even so much as seen the inside of a courtroom?

The immunity that the ridiculously wealthy enjoys reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

"The law, in its majestic wisdom, punishes the rich and the poor equally for the crime of sleeping under a bridge." --- Anatole France.

The Fiendfire Burns Everything

2011-09-16T16:33:00.000-07:00

By now most people have seen the 2nd part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. For those who have neither read the book nor seen the last movie beware: this metaphor has spoilers.

Remember the scene in the room of requirement while in its form as the place to stash crap? One of the thick-headed toadies, Crabbe, tries to kill the heros by conjuring "fiendfire" - a kind of living fire with intelligence and homicidal tendencies. Crabbe dies in the resulting blaze. Two very nasty Deatheaters taught him this curse, but as Ron comments, "Shame he wasn't concentrating when they mentioned how to stop it, really."

In response to the backlash about her anecdote during the republican debate in which Michelle Bachmann claimed that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation she has not so much continued to deny reality but defended her statement on the basis that she is not a medical doctor. "I didn't make any statements that would indicate I'm a doctor, I'm a scientist, or making any conclusions about the drug one way or the other… " For those who would like to see for yourselves, the initial question comes at 0:47 in the video below and she starts to address the original point of the question around 1:27.

OK, so what does this mean? I'm guessing she means that she did nothing illegal because she did not represent herself as a medical doctor therefore no state can prosecute her for practicing medicine without a license. But what about the implications of that? Should we disregard everything she says regarding medicine and science because she has no credentials or degree in those areas? I say yes. And then everything else she says on a topic in which she lacks any formal training or certification should we also disregard for the same reason? Again, I vote yes to that one.

So, in what area does Bachmann have credentials? She claims to have a J.D. degree from Oral Roberts University's Coburn School of Law. Ok, we'll not get into the whole ABA accreditation question, just for simplicity's sake. Has she ever practiced law? Although some of the pro-Bachmann crap on the web claims that she worked for the IRS as a "tax attorney" even the pro-republican site 2012 Republican Candidates readily admits that she never took or passed a bar exam. Does that mean we can "trust what Bachmann says" in regards to matters of law but not its practice or practical application(!?) And that's all she's got. Given she has no formal expertise on any other given topic, by her own reasoning we should disregard whatever she says. The fiendfire burns everything.

There Will Be Math: review of Contagion

2011-09-11T10:10:00.001-07:00

Some astute movie fans will see the pun in the title of this post. Math has no political agenda, it has no biases or prejudices. Math makes no assumptions of facts not in evidence, it makes no speeches and it tells no lies. In its honesty it has an element of cruelty but the cruelty of reality, not of malice. Consequences follow upon actions, whether anyone intends anything does not matter. Math doesn't care.

(Spoilers only occur below the "Spoilers warning line." from this point until that line you remain safe from spoilers).

I saw the movie Contagion because I read in several reviews that it "gets the science right, for a change." As an informed science supporting skeptical librarian, for what it's worth, I think the other reviewers are correct: the science as shown in the movie looks far more realistic than anything I have seen in TV or movies in decades. In particular, the scientist characters speak the way we can reasonably expect them to. Lawrence Fishbourne's CDC administrator carefully avoids making any speculative statements, even in behind-closed-doors conversations. His Dr. Cheever realizes that speculative statements by a person in authority soon turn into fact in the minds of non-scientists and especially the majority of the general public. He carefully avoids making this mistake. He makes another mistake instead.

The first person we see is (unfortunately, but don't worry her character dies before she got on my nerves) Gwynneth Paltrow. Under Paltrow's face we see "Day 2" in big red letters. She's not feeling well. The movie shifts to Hong Kong, from where Paltrow returned recently, as well as Japan and London. We see that this small handful of people have died - suddenly and inexplicably. The symptoms people suffer are not too bad. No one even considers going to a hospital until it's way too late. We soon learn that it was way too late before they even felt sick.

Rather than mire in the "human drama" as in other disaster movies, the action in Contagion quickly focuses on the work of scientists and doctors. They prove far more interesting anyway. Fishbourne's Dr. Cheever quickly grasps all what a specialist can at such an early stage and manages those under his authority with great intelligence and insight. To Kate Winslet's Dr. Mears he says as he sees her off to go to a site of the epidemic (I paraphrase) "If you need more resources call me, if you encounter any obstacles - call me, if need anything - call me, if you find yourself awake at 3 a.m. staring at the ceiling - call me." I want to work for this man.

When Mears briefs a group of municipal officials we learn some essential concepts. A new word for most, "Fulminant" means that the disease can spread from someone touching a surface or object then touching their face. A particularly clueless administrator balks when Winslet states that most people touch their faces between 1 and 2 thousand times a day. Mears realizes that she needs these twits to act and not bog down in idiotic arguments. She tersely states that people, even unconsciously, touch some part of their face 2 to 3 times a minute and concludes with "do the math." The second term is S(0) [prounounced "S zero" -- 2+2=4]. This is the measure of how fast a given disease spreads as measured by the number of persons a given sick person infects. At such an early stage they do not know if the virus is fulminant nor its S(0). Until they do they can not make predictions or know exactly what to do about it.

Throughout the movies the script gives us little reminders of how little we really control our environment - despite the fact that most of us like to think that we do. A Homeland Security official questions Fishbourne, asking him "could someone have weaponized this?" Fishbourne calmly replies that birds do that already. Another wonderfully done but very subtle moment comes when a non-scientist pencil-pusher mentions "the over-reaction to the N1H1 virus." Fishbourne's very soft-spoken Dr. Cheever responds so calmly that you almost miss the significance of what he says: "it wasn't an over-reaction."

What the scientists can figure out quickly is what kind of bug is it. The script does not explain this well enough for most of the U.S. audience: a bat flu virus met a swine flu virus, most likely in the body of a pig. What most people fail to realize: viruses mutate all the time and when two similar viruses meet in the body of the same host they exchange genetic material. Most of the time this results in no significant change. The Flu viruses and the immune systems of birds, bats and pigs have largely come to a kind of standoff in which the immune system does not kill the virus and the virus does not kill its host. But there exists no intelligence in a virus, it can not make decisions nor control its own procreation. Someone posting in a biology forum on MySpace years ago dismissed the idea that a virulent flu could wipe out millions of people by declaring "that would not be a good survival strategy for the virus." I can only hope he's too stupid to vote.

Viruses have survival strategies?! This is the reason I write a movie review here. I do not think this guy is very exceptional - chances are good there's lots more just like him or worse. We do not have nearly enough resources for a public health emergency and I see this lack resulting from a profound failure on the part of the general population of the U.S. to understand fundamental concepts in biology and even the nature of reality itself.

Sock puppets for reality.

The script writer, Scott Z. Burns, does an admirable job of taking on numerous misunderstandings and misinformation that I find prevalent and even endemic in the U.S. population. To respond to the twisted libertarian biology mentioned above the dialog mentions the Spanish Flu of 1918 several times, including the fact that it killed 1 percent of the world's population (a higher body count than World War I). Homeopathy gets a nice, hard (and highly gratifying) kick in the groin. The "blogsphere" receives an appropriate drubbing too. Without even mentioning the idiotic autism/vaccine hysteria, the script places vaccines in their appropriate place of honor in the history of science, for details see below the spoiler line.

I find this the best pro-science educational without preaching drama that I can ever remember seeing. It should be required viewing in all high school biology classes.

***** SPOILERS WARNING *****

*****SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT *****

Rich and Poor.

The movie touches on certain divisions in the world between have's and have-not's without preaching or even taking a clear stand on the questions raised. The paranoia and the widespread belief that those on in power will look after themselves, leave the rest of us twisting in the wind and also do all they can to make enormous profits from other people's desperation all figure into the story. We see no definitive answers, only the questions. This works well as any shifting of focus from the doctors and officials fighting the epidemic would only ruin the movie, effectively turning it into a Michael Moore docudrama. The best example of dramatizing the class divide comes in a key scene in which Fishbourne takes advantage of his position of power and privilege, possibly without even consciously realizing that aspect of his behavoir: over the phone he warns his fiance to get out of dodge ahead of a massive quarantine he can see coming. But a janitor overhears him. How the script handles the resulting confrontation I will leave to you to find out. It's one of the defining moments.

Defending science by explaining it.

More about homeopathy:

In his review of this film Roger Ebert (to me quite inexplicably) declares Jude Law's subplot superflouous. He states: "The blogger subplot doesn't interact clearly with the main story lines and functions mostly as an alarming but vague distraction." I disagree. Jude Law, in a key scene, live video blogs himself taking a homeopathic remedy for the killer virus after describing the symptoms he suffers. Melodramatically he declares, "If I'm still alive tomorrow, we'll know that it works." This subplot is the foot that crushes the testicles of homeopathy. Several times in the script the doctors mention that the mortality rate for the virus is 20-30%. So even if Jude Law's nutblogger did have the deadly virus, it's only deadly for up to 30% of those infected. We learn at the end that he did not even have the deadly flu that killed Paltrow and others, but likely a plain vanilla flu - assuming he even really felt sick at all (which is a mystery I'll let you experience for yourself). Mr. Nutblogger also gets caught on tape revealing greed and attention-seeking as among his motivations for attacking the efficacy of vaccines.

I also defend the blogger subplot on the grounds that it shows a predictable element of what we can reasonably expect to happen in an actual epidemic: look what has happened with Jenny MacCarthy and the hysteria over vaccines. Idiots who look "telegenic" can exerts a very pernicious influence over impressionable people. A subplot such as this can go a long way towards vaccinating us against pseudo-science (how do you like that pun?).

And most importantly, without any "monologuing" or other ham-fisted dramatic devices, vaccines rise from the autism idiocy to take their well-deserved place as possibly the most life-saving medical breakthrough of all time. The doctor's find a vaccine which then saves millions of lives. And like Jonas Salk the ones who do the most, and the most dangerous, work do not make themselves wealthy from it, even though they clearly could. I will leave it to you to see how this plays out and let me know what you think in the comments.

Now They're Just Laughing At Us

2011-09-03T08:12:00.000-07:00

A recent segment of the Rachel Maddow show with guest host Melissa Harris-Perry interviewing Jared Bernstein, former Economic Policy Adviser to VP Biden, deconstructs the latest Republican Bizarro-World political platform: reducing or eliminating corporate taxes. Several of the Republican candidates for President propose this idea as a way to "encourage job creation." But as Harris-Perry lays it out in this segment, corporations already have recovered from the recession and already have posted huge profits, but they have not created jobs. Why will giving them more concessions inspire them to create more jobs if they're already swimming on profits?

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Who should Recuse?

2011-06-14T17:53:00.000-07:00

In the Proposition 8 case working its way through the courts the question arises : should the former federal district court judge who first heard the case and found Proposition 8 unconstitutional have recused himself because he is gay?

According to the SF Gate story: "Proposition 8 supporters argued that Walker should have been disqualified from presiding over the case because his 10-year same-sex relationship gave him an interest in the outcome of the trial."

But what about a heterosexual judge married to someone of the opposite sex? Why would that judge not have an interest in the outcome of the trial? If we take the core argument by the Prop 8 supporters at face value, that the extension of marriage rights to gays constitutes some sort of harm to the institution as practiced by straight people, how then does a straight married judge not have an interest in the outcome of the case?

Any ideas?

Scary pictures outlawed in Tennessee

2011-06-14T07:48:00.000-07:00

Here's one that belongs in one of those books about wacky laws. Only this one is brand new. Tennessee passed a law that imposes a 1 year jail sentence for someone who

"transmit[s] or display[s] an image" online that is likely to "frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress" to someone who sees it.

That's right. Tennessee has given it's citizens the right not to be frightened, intimidated or distressed by a picture on the internet.

Rachel Maddow's show has a great segment on this:

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And here's the post from Roger Ebert's blog that tempts the fates. Definitely look at the pictures that Ebert has posted: they're hilarious and wonderful.

Which of the pictures on Ebert's blog post do you love/hate the most? Which picture(s) would frighten, intimidate or cause you emotional distress? Please post your list in the comments.

Pictorial subjects that could get you a year in jail if I were a citizen of Tennessee and decided to press charges:

Michael Jackson
Ronald Reagan
Sarah Palin
Any stills or clips from the movie Waterworld
Clowns
Jesus on the Cross
Speaking of which, also any stills or clips from the movie The Passion of the Christ.
New Jersey (Maps, satellite pictures, landscapes, Google Earth pictures, all of it)
The Confederate flag
Food arranged on a plate in the shape of a "happy face"
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker
Actually, make that any and all televangelists who ever lived.
That weird furniture in the design section of the MOMA that makes me dizzy.
Pope Ratzi (or whatever his Pope name is, I can't be bothered to look it up).

I could go on, but I have to end this post sometime.

Protecting the Man-Cave

2011-06-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

Editorial

[Correction. In the original post I mistakenly identified Richard Nixon as the President who signed Medicare and Medicaid into law. That was actually LBJ in 1965].

People in the right-wing rank and file, I strongly suspect, know full-well that certain of their most cherished "principles" do not, in reality, actually work. They very happily vote into office right wing-nuts who carry out certain right-wing policies which embody certain cherished right-wing principles but expect that government will inflict these policies on people the right-wing rank and file despise.

This explains why "supply and demand" and "private industry" and "freedom of choice" all justify policies that crush worker's rights while no one makes any move to apply these same "free market principles" to doctors, lawyers or other high-income people. Somehow it's OK for low-wage workers to compete with each other to see who can work for the least money without the benefit of collective bargaining while the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association actively restrict the number of people who can become doctors or lawyers. Thus we see unions busted and jobs shipped overseas to the sound of right-wing rank and file cheering while the number of high-earning professions remains artificially low.

But when the same "free market" principles apply to the right-wing rank and file, something strange and amusing happens. They totally lose their shit then scream for government intervention. They whine about the evils of entitlement programs but when eliminating one has obvious adverse outcomes for them, then, suddenly, the program in question receives a special exemption from their ire. And even better, when the justifications for the elimination of such a valuable and important program as medicare state their most "cherished principles" they treat us to the awesome spectacle of watching the worst of the right-wing, Republican, "conservative," rank and file totally NOT buying the lies that they themselves have been screaming into our faces for years.

The Paul Ryan "Kill Medicare" budget bill has opened up a pandora's box of weirdness in U.S. politics. Just consider the basic, fundamental assumptions the right holds dear, the memes which their leaders pound out day after day, the simplistic crap they hold as self-evident truths:

1. "Free market" solutions are inherently superior to any other kind.

2. "Competition" assures the best products at the lowest prices.

3. The "Law of supply and demand" will inevitably generate solutions to every kind of problem.

4. 1-3 above makes private enterprise "more efficient" than government and therefore handing over responsibility for dealing with any sort of problem to private industry will obtain a better result than anything the government could do.

A little history:

Medicare and Medicaid came into existence when, of all People Richard Nixon, tried to bring about a national health care service in the United States. By the Nixon administration all other industrialized democracies had implemented such a system. Social-demographic changes in the post-WWII U.S. together with the de-regulation of the health insurance industry brought about the realization by a large segment of the voting population that private health insurance has one big, obvious flaw: no one wants to insure a bad risk. (For a detailed explanation of this concept, see Are you a good risk or a bad risk). By ~~Nixon's~~ LBJ's time the health insurance premiums for senior citizens had risen to unaffordable. This generated a voter push for a national health care system, as private insurance companies do not want to insure people who are nearly certain to have expensive health problems (if they don't have such already). Medicare and medicaid prevented the implementation of a single national health care system run by the government by co-opting the huge voting block (seniors) who found themselves looking at destitution in their old age.

Of course die-hard libertarians - Those winners of the birth lottery - will argue that if you have not saved enough money by the time you retire to pay for private health insurance you deserve to die in misery and destitution. But leaving aside those psychopaths, the backlash against the Republican attempt to kill Medicare and replace it with a coupon for private insurance shows that most of the right - the ordinary citizens who vote - knows that private health insurance companies will fuck them the first chance they get. They also realize that Medicaid is on the chopping block as well and fully realize it's implications.

Jeff Liszt from the polling firm Anzalone-Liszt Research appeared on the Rachel Maddow show Friday and mentioned that the attempt to kill Medicare has a greater area of effect damage for the Republican party than just seniors. Because Everybody Knows that the demise of government run health care for seniors extends beyond Medicare. As Liszt points out:

Liszt: … They [Republicans] are just starting to realize how deep the rabbit hole goes on this one. And it's not just medicare it's medicaid and 4 out of 5 seniors in nursing homes. I mean it's the fact that if you have a man-cave downstairs all of a sudden you are going to have your mother or mother-in-law living there and it's going away.

Maddow: If they have to get out of the nursing home because of the Medicaid cuts, so it's the protect, when you're a pollster do you call that, like, the "protect the man-cave effect?" Have something creepy like that?

Liszt: It's brand new, we're still trying to brand it.

The exchange above takes place about 9 minutes into the segment:

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What I find most amusing comes from the fact that the Republican Party demanded a TV station to take down a campaign, claiming it was somehow "not true" that they voted to kill Medicare. Despite her membership in the "liberal media" what Maddow said in that segment not only holds true, but the polling numbers and recent special election results we have already seen verify that most of the conservative republican rank and file understand this the same way Rachel Maddow does:

Medicare is a single-payer government health insurance program that old people get instead of having to buy private insurance. The Paul Ryan plan says you don't get that anymore, you get a coupon, go buy private insurance with your coupon grandma. You can still call your coupon medicare, you can call it "Timmy," you can call it "peas and carrots" you can call if whatever you want. It doesn't matter what you call it. If you vote to do something like that you are voting to kill Medicare. If we as a country get what you voted for what is Medicare right now goes away.

And all but the craziest are losing their shit over it.

Torture and lies

2011-05-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

AR sent me this link to a segment from Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC, who as AR wrote: "shoots down the Bush Administration leftovers who are trying to take credit for killing Bin Laden. "

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The one politician in Washington who actually has experienced torture, John McCain, spoke on the Senate floor (as well wrote an OpEd piece in the Washington Post) denouncing torture. But this has not stopped the liars from trying to link torturing detainees to the discovery of Bin Laden's location

Leon Pannetta, the current Head of the CIA, wrote a letter to McCain, which is now public, very specifically and emphatically disconnecting any link between the lie that tortured detainees gave up Bin Laden's location (or information leading to its discovery). But Pannetta debunking the lie in no uncertain terms has not stopped the liars from trying to link torturing detainees to the discovery of Bin Laden's location.

The O'Donnell segment goes into more detail and is well worth a viewing. In particular, I want to draw attention to this part of his closing:

As hard as it was for Navy Seal team 6 to kill Bin Laden it is even harder to kill political lies. Political lies can not be killed simply by the truth. Political lies will be told as long as there is a politician near a microphone with an incentive to tell that lie. And so the lie about torture leading to Bin Laden will be with us for a few more decades. It will no doubt grow quiet in its old age and then it will die. And it will finally be buried not by politicians but by historians.

No President Schwarzenegger

2011-05-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

Update 1 and Update 2

Those who feared an amendment to the Constitution followed by "President Schwarzenegger" can breath easy now. He has taken the Bill Clinton path. I read this morning that he fathered a child with "a member of his household staff." He had sex with the maid? Did I hear that right? Could his life be more like a movie cliche? Or a porno movie.

My favorite part is the following quote from the former Governator:

"I ask that the media respect my wife and children through this extremely difficult time,"

Really?!

Update:

This will teach me to read more before posting. The child was born before he took office as Governor. So I guess the lesson here is not whether voters should judge a politician's behavior in personal life as part of his qualifications for office but that a rich powerful man can get away with whatever he likes as long as he doesn't get caught.

More to the point, all the talk of "family values" means nothing. It's just a stick or stone to throw in a fight.

And all this only generates political theater anyway. The differences between Democrat and a Republican have grown fewer and fewer over the years. This news, however amusing, only serves to distract. We are in a depression, the wealthy do not need ordinary American anymore, and we're fighting Seven Wars. That a rich movie star can buy and act his way into the California Governor's mansion while he can't resist cheating on his wife then gets away with the same behavior that resulted in the impeachment of a President unpopular with right-wing zealots is only a symptom. The disease remains untreated.

Update2:

The latest info on how Arnold managed to do the needed damage control to stave of the blatant hypocrisy of the Republican "family values" voter. His behavior, as noted above, totally jumped the rails so badly that not even the most obtuse right-wing Republican could ignore it. What do you do when the wreckage piles up so high that the tabloid have endless fodder to work with?

Easy. Buy them. See The Last Word segment below for how a movie star with a bachelors degree in physical fitness from the University of Wisconsin can buy political office.

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Maybe we should just auction off public offices. That would likely obtain the same result while reducing the deficit.

Osama Sleeps with the Fishes

2011-05-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

Editorial --- Editorial --- Editorial

There once was this organized crime family that had a sweet operation. It owned the Caribbean and Central America. Then it moved into South America. Later, when lots of money started coming out of the ground in the Middle East and parts of Africa, the family moved in there too.

Everywhere the family went, they knew how to grease the local wheels. Organized crime can't exist without the help of supposedly upstanding citizens.

But then the Family had a huge gang war with another big gang. During that time they had to hire a lot of local talent. One of the locals, a really ruthless hitman, looked really promising. So the family trained him - they trained him really well. Then after the family won its war lots of the local talent who used to work for the family went into business for themselves. You know what happens then. Inevitably the small operations grow big enough to compete with the family's operations. This guy tried to muscle the family out of one of its territories - he wants to be a Don himself. Then it's war again.

The family tried put out a hit on their old hired help but he kept one step ahead of them. He knew their tricks - they taught him well. He kept hitting their operation. And not just dropping a few bodies here and there but really spectacular stuff. Pretty much screaming "catch me if you can" with big explosions. The family killed some of their old hitman's new gang plus lots of taxpayers caught in the crossfire. Their former go to guy hit back with more of the same.

One day the family promoted a favorite son as head of the whole operation. Out of respect to an old and venerated Don the capos agreed to have his son put in charge. No one really took the son seriously nor expected him to have to do any heavy lifting - the operation was pretty much running itself by that time. Everyone treated him like a figurehead. But then one day the upstart yelled "Catch me if you can" with an explosion so big that no one could pretend he was just another wannabe. The family still couldn't find him and to be blunt the "favorite son" couldn't find his own sofa in his living room - but that's another story - so the family lashed out against anyone who they thought even might have known something about the big job.

The family goes on a tear for ten years and blows up tons of stuff trying to act like badasses and make up for being made to look like chumps. The favorite son wears out his welcome everywhere he goes, talks tough but can't ever find the Wannabe much less put a bullet in his head. Some of the guys the family gets its hands on turn up really badly worked over - and they're the ones found alive. Others treated to the family's hospitality are not so fortunate. The favorite son arranged some really sloppy and badly planned hits, killing lots of bystanders in the process. He did order a few successful hits on some pretty nasty competitors, but never the one guy he really wants. By the time the Family replaced him the situation wasn't getting embarrassing, it had been - and for quite some time.

But eventually Mr. Wannnabe's luck ran out. Informants tell us that the family once considered giving him up to the feds but he knew too much. No, they decided to do the hit, just as they planned all along, so no loose ends. No one wanted to hear this birdie sing at trial. And more importantly, they wanted to send a message to any other wannabe who thought he could take on the family: you mess with us then you sleep with the fishes.

Bradley Manning

2011-04-23T13:50:00.000-07:00

I sent the following message to my Congressional Representative:

I am writing to you about the case of Pvt. Bradley Manning and the conditions of his detention. I have read that the conditions of his detention at Quantico, Virginia where until recently he was held in 23-hour a day solitary confinement, forbidden to exercise, unable to interact with any other people, constitutes inhumane treatment according to international and U.S. laws. Although the conditions of his confinement may improve given his recent transfer to Leavenworth Prison, I find many of the facts of his case highly disturbing.

First, The Obama administration forbade an unmonitored visit from the UN torture investigator Juan Mendez.

Second, even a tyrannical dictatorship such as Tunisia does not hold anyone in solitary confinement for more than 10 days. Manning was in solitary for 6 months.

Third, in his recent public comments, the President declared Manning guilty, stating on camera: "We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law." But Pvt. Manning has yet to go to trail, much less stand convicted. Given that military officers will try Pvt. Manning report to the President as Commander and Chief I find his statement prejudicial and contrary to the core concept of the presumption of innocence that, until recently, distinguished the U.S. from other countries.

I request that you do the following:

Please make a public statement of your position regarding the conditions of Pvt. Manning's detention at Quantico.

Please initiate or do all in your power to initiate congressional hearings on the conditions of Pvt. Manning's detention.

I would like to see the United States uphold the standards of due process which once made our legal system the standard for others to follow. A king has the power to throw a person in a dungeon for months or years without trial. A President in a democracy should not have such power. Congress can hold a President accountable for such actions, should the Representatives and Senators choose to do so. Please do so.

So This is America?

2011-02-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

Did Hilary Clinton think that she was performing in a Monty Python skit?

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.

-- From So This is America From Common Dreams

It gets better. This all happened under the watchful eye of a video camera and lots of people taking pictures:

In this more detailed article in OpEd News we learn more about Ray McGovern's views on Hilary Clinton and war:

Hillary is the driving force, together with a few others, behind the wars in Afghanistan. She's one of the big hawks in Iran. When I look at her and her husband that they don't know the first thing about war. I do and so do my fellow Veterans for Peace.

(Neither Hilary Clinton, nor her husband or daughter Chelsea have ever served in the military.)

Earlier in his life McGovern used the same tactics in his Catholic Church in protest to its refusal to ordain women priests.

With this latest example, what Glenn Greenwald calls American Exceptionalism has reached Bizarro World proportions. Were it not for the real life violence, that video showing Clinton continuing to plow through her speech condemning governments that arrest peaceful protesters while shadowy security men drag one out of the room would look like a scene from Duck Soup. Real life imitates a Marx Brothers' movie?!

I hope the cask-strength insanity of this latest assault on civil liberties wakes up some people.

Screwed by "Efficiency"

2011-02-13T08:33:00.000-08:00

A NY Daily News story explains how the City of NY has spent $700,000,000 to create unfinished and undistributed software to track the hours worked by its employees. Of course back in the Giuliani administration the sales pitch was that this was only going to cost somewhere around $68,000,000, or less than a tenth of what its cost and counting.

Obviously, its an economic disaster at a time of shrinking budgets, but the extra magical part is the plan to have city workers sign in and out and in again using biometric palm scanners. That is right! There is so much theft of city services by city workers that they have to submit to being scanned every time they leave for lunch and come back. Here is the relevant quote, "The most contentious part of the program has been biometric palm scanners. City labor leaders consider it a huge violation of privacy rights. About 19,000 of the 45,000 workers on the system are being required to use the scanners to clock in and out each day and during lunch hours.

"It's absolutely outrageous, like Big Brother," said Jon Forster, vice president of the Local 375 of AFSCME, which represents the city's architects and technicians.

Now, in the age of swine flu, Forster notes, hundreds of people in various agencies must put their hands into these machines that often get sweaty and unsanitary.

Those who do not use hand scanners must punch in using a time clock each time they log on and off of their computers, or by filling out electronic time sheets. The city has left it up to individual agencies to decide which workers will use which system."

So not only do we not have a functioning new computerized time keeping system, if we do get it we will be asking our municipal workers like the NYPD & FDNY (a.k.a.: our first responder heroes) to give up their civil rights and biometric information multiple times a day just to make sure that nobody signs them in a little early. As Juan Gonzalez writes in his article, "Do the math for a moment: $700 million to track 140,000 city workers is costing $5,000 per worker - all for a new-age time clock!"

- By AR (but posted by Steven).

Gun fantasies

2011-02-11T18:36:00.001-08:00

AR sent me the following video in which Rachel Maddow explodes the myth that a well armed populace will reduce gun violence by means of return fire. 2nd amendment fans please watch to the end before commenting.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On the topic of the "gun fantasy" : I suspect that pop culture with its very contrived situations in which friendly fire fatalities never happen may contribute to this fantasy. Contrary to the history documentaries and war movies, a dirty secret about warfare, especially in the 20th century, is that "friendly fire casualties" are endemic. Also in smaller scale rescue operations it frequently occurs that the rescuers kill or wound some number of the people they are trying to rescue (The raid on Entebbe in the 70s comes to mind). The military takes pains to avoid publicizing some of its own research which bears this out, time and again. In the book, War by Gwyne Dyer, you will find a description of how a military doctor during WWI performed autopsies on hundreds of soldiers on both sides who died in combat. Examination of the bullets or fragments indicated that half of the soldiers on both sides were killed by their own people. Most people learn history from TV or movies. Sad but true. Although the book Band of Brothers describes incidents of friendly fire fatalities, none of these appeared in the mini-series. Perception vs. reality.

Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather go to Washington

2011-02-09T18:03:00.000-08:00

Crazy libertarian politicians provide free (well, taxpayer funded) entertainment. The public spectacle of a crazed economist who hates Abraham Lincoln called by a Republican to testify before a Congressional committee dominated by Republicans. Watch the snake eat itself. It's like watching a car wreck.

The above post from Rortybomb also gives a somewhat interesting history of the schism in the Libertarian party/movement.

Professor Feather:

Then there's Obama to cut heating oil assistance to the poor. Most of whom are elderly. Not kidding. I guess the reasoning here is that they can't vote him out of office in 2012 if they freeze to death in 2011. That's assuming any reasoning was behind this decision.

OK, you can have a gold star

2011-02-08T21:24:00.000-08:00

Frank Luntz is the republican strategist who wrote a memo to the effect that "climate change" is a better phrase to use than "global warming" as a way to attack and undermine the scientists. Here's a video in a series about global warming that has Luntz on camera (for PBS) admitting that he now accepts global warming as real. You might find his boasting somewhat amusing. Or surreal.

(By the way, the Greenman3610 videos are all great. Along with Potholer54 he has produced some of the best educational videos on climate science I have seen.)

-- Steven.

The weirdest thing about the Frank Luntz interview with Deborah Amos is that he insists that he did a great job and is a good boy. He wants her to be impressed with his skills. Its great language after all, so he's great at his job. Talk about having a narrow field of vision. The other weird thing about Luntz is how much more attention seeking he is compared to most of the people in his business. He is a camera hog, loves the spot light, wants people to publicly acknowledge his brilliance. Can you name another person who does what Luntz does for a living without a Google search? I can't.

-- AR

The Koch Bros. meet Monty Python

2011-02-03T06:23:00.000-08:00

From the "striking it rich does not make you smart about everything" department:

Remember the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which one of the peasants start ranting "I'm being oppressed! See, he's oppressing me!" Well, imagine the billionaire Koch brothers in that stellar role.

The Koch brothers hired goons to intimidate reporters at their annual retreat for their loyal followers. From: The problem: you're viewed as sinister moguls, the solution: hired goons.

No Decision Points in Decision Points

2010-12-28T07:03:00.000-08:00

In Bush Meets Foucault, Eliot Weinberger gives us a critique of Decision Points as a post-modernist work. The entire review of Bush's new autobiography in the London Review of Books is well worth reading in its entirety. Weinberger makes reference to Michel Foucault's approach to literary criticism which focuses on questions such as 'who is the author?' and 'Is it really he and not someone else?' In the case of a book "by" George W. Bush, the answers to such questions, to paraphrase Colin Powell, are blindingly obvious inasmuch as the answer can not be "George W. Bush." Most amusingly, decision points "is business-speak for a list of factors, usually marked by a bullet in PowerPoint presentations, that should be considered before making a decision. There are no decision points in Decision Points."

My favorite passage follows, in which Weinberger lists much of what's missing from the book, 'points' far more significant than anything in the book:

This is a chronicle of the Bush Era with no colour-coded Terror Alerts; no Freedom Fries; no Halliburton; no Healthy Forests Initiative (which opened up wilderness areas to logging); no Clear Skies Act (which reduced air pollution standards); no New Freedom Initiative (which proposed testing all Americans, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness); no pamphlets sold by the National Parks Service explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood; no research by the National Institutes of Health on whether prayer can cure cancer (‘imperative’, because poor people have limited access to healthcare); no cover-up of the death of football star Pat Tillman by ‘friendly fire’ in Afghanistan; no ‘Total Information Awareness’ from the Information Awareness Office; no Project for the New American Century; no invented heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch; no Fox News; no hundreds of millions spent on ‘abstinence education’. It does not deal with the Cheney theory of the ‘unitary executive’ – essentially that neither the Congress nor the courts can tell the president what to do – or Bush’s frequent use of ‘signing statements’ to indicate that he would completely ignore a bill that the Congress had just passed.

I also really enjoyed reading the passage that starts with "Decision Points flaunts its postmodernity by blurring the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. That is to say, the parts that are not outright lies – particularly the accounts of Hurricane Katrina and the lead-up to the Iraq War – are the sunnier halves of half-truths."

Then follows a comparison/constrast between the confirmed facts of the Bush Administration, on the one hand, and the restatement of the biggest lies printed in Decision Points on the other. The review contains too much detail to quote here. Most of it is just stuff you already know. I find breathtaking the degree to which the ghost writers and Bush insult our intelligence.

The more important insight, one which I realized from the start back in 2001, but still bears repeating, comes when Weinberger analyzes the bizarre statement in Decision Points that Bush considered the worst moment of his presidency the time that Kayne West said Bush did not care about black people. Weinberger does not consider Bush to be at all racist. No, racism does not explain Bush's behavior. "It wasn’t that he didn’t care about black people. Outside of his family, he didn’t care about people."

Pale Blue Dot

2010-12-20T15:06:00.000-08:00

AR recently sent me the following e-mail:

Steve,

I find myself feeling a bit nostalgic and slightly sad at the news that Voyager 1 is leaving our solar system. I guess its because we were both in high school when it lifted off and began its journey, so the thought of it brought me back to my 17 year old self who loved NASA and sci-fi and all things other worldly. I remember watching Carl Sagan talk about Voyager 1 on the Johnny Carson show and remember the record (a gold plated phonograph record- how retro?) of sound and images that it carried out into the vastness, as well as its message saying hello to the cosmos. What a very optimistic thing to add to a tool, a machine? I think it embodied a wonderful zeitgeist of the late 70s. I'll leave you with Carl Sagan talking about a picture that Voyager 1 took of the earth from millions of miles away, the "pale blue dot" picture.

Bobby Jindahl: Nero 2.0

2010-12-20T14:30:00.000-08:00

Rachel Maddow has done the most wonderful take-down of a political failure: Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindahl's boondoggle "idea" to use sand berms to contain the BP oil spill.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This illustrates the rot at the top we have now: it's not about disagreeing over the best course of action, it's not about who has the better ideas about how to govern, it's not about who has the better administrative skills. It's about winning. From George Bush Sr. enthroning his idiot son to President Obama continuing to build the wall of secrecy the idiot son started we can see example after example of politicians from both parties behaving as if the country and its government belong to them as the spoils of some sort of victory. This idiotic behavior, again and again, proves enormously destructive.

Lies, lies, lies.

Contradictions indicate that the speaker is lying. Note to government-hating right-wing nuts: call yourselves anarchists already. You claim to hate the waste of money. But then someone like Jindahl comes along and wastes tons of money for no good purpose in order to impress you - and succeeds?! This impresses you?! Are you going to try to tell me that Jindahl is your hero for standing up to the big, bad, wasteful federal government, that he was right? Don't spit on my cupcake and call it frosting.

This is about the federal government "wasting" money on social spending. But you can't go into any detail about what exactly you find wasteful without sounding like one of the townspeople from Blazing Saddles. So you lie. You and Jindahl deserve each other. But sadly, the rest of us don't deserve either one of you.

Thanks go to AR for finding this one. And of course to Rachel Maddow.

Must... Resist ... Schadenfreude

2010-12-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

I read a short article from the wire service about the death of pecan trees and the resulting lawsuit against a coal-fired power plant.

That sulfur dioxide from coal fired power plants kills pecan trees has already been established. That this takes place in Texas is the great irony here. The place that attacks science and modern liberalism. Here's your libertarian mechanism at work: only after the damage is done can something happen as a reaction, and then as in all court cases a lot depends on other factors than the facts. But go ahead and wait until the damage is done, then sue.

Too bad this approach won't work for global warming.

(Note: I have no idea whether any of the unfortunate pecan growers are the short-sighted, liberal-hating, anti-regulation, anti-science, lynch-the-environmentalists type of Texans. That's why I have to fight off the feeling of Schadenfruede that comes over me whenever respect for science, evidence and rationality would have saved someone who's going under).

The Electronic Plantation

2010-12-09T21:07:00.001-08:00

AR sent me this link to an interview with a Facebook employee. It's well worth a read through. But here's what truly horrified me:

I think the coolest thing about the work environment is the trust. They don’t care what, where, how, when, as long as you get your shit done. If you want to work at a bar, the ball game, a park, the roof, they don’t give a fuck. Just get your shit done. Hence I was able to ditch work, come have two pitchers with you, and I will literally be able to go back and get my work done. And it goes a long way. Because I know I can get these things done. I know I’m going to have to go back. And I may be there until ten or eleven tonight.

[Emphasis added]

I e-mailed the following to AR:

I find myself very uncomfortable with the separation of time clocked-in with completion of tasks. At this stage I see it "sold" to employees as empowering but I'm waiting for the electronic plantation to rear its ugly head. This amounts to a kind of 21st century piece-work.

A management scientist named Frederick Taylor in the 19th century wondered why workers in a steel factory so vehemently opposed his changes. After all, they were paid piece-work so the more they produced, the more money they made, right?

No. When productivity increased management reduced the piece-work rate. The game was rigged, and the workers knew it.

There was also some resistance by management to the creation of clothing factories because they negotiated different piece-work rates for different women who did the sewing by hand at home. Eventually the greater productivity of sewing machines won out.

Back to the present, if the tasks accomplished become too separated from the 8-hour day, then how does one determine a reasonable amount of productivity? As usual the arrogant know-nothings populating the tech industry are screwing themselves and will no doubt act very suprised when the consequences hit them. They complained bitterly after the boom went bust then the tech jobs went to India. Wait until they have to work 12 hour days for peanuts just to keep their jobs.

Sorry about the tone. Rough morning.

AR Responds:

Steve,

Your tone seemed perfectly appropriate to me. I just saw a CNBC "documentary" on Google, where they showed how Google did laundry, made gourmet food, provided massages, etc so that their employees never had to leave the Googleplex and never had stop working. I'm thinking of a B.F.Skinner box with gourmet California cuisine replacing the mice food pellets. For many of the type-A personalities and for most of the functional autistics who make up the employees at Google, staying there and being "productive" is what they most dearly want and need (especially the autistics). For the rest of the US population work is merely one aspect of our lives and that separation is just fine and was hard fought for.

Where Google's ethos becomes a problem is that your very average middle manager at whatever generic office/business gets delusions of grandeur and thinks that his/her office/business should emulate Google's work ethos. Of course they don't have the money of Google and are nowhere near as bright as Google's founders and the work is nowhere near as innovative, useful and creative as Google's, yet "If it worked for Google, it can work for us." becomes the mantra of the generic middle manager. Look at any Dilbert cartoon drawn in the 90s for a deeper understanding of this process/lifestyle. I've seen a similar ridiculous belief in working 16 hours a day for 6 days a week in my friends who drank the Wall Street Kool-Aid in the early 90's. They were used, then spit out once they burned out. A very similar fate befell my associates in the late 90s who were all about their Internet Start-ups. After looking down on my work in old media academia, some even had the amnesiac nerve to ask me if there were any openings once every single one of these dot coms went belly up and smelled like bad fish.

This is just the latest iteration of the Protestant Work Ethic in America. The French have it partially right when they call it an Anglo-Saxon model. They simplistically leave out the Protestant roots of this Anglo-Saxon model. What most media in the US refuse to look at is how prosperous Germany is without most of its people working more than 40 hours per week and with most of its people having at least a month off every summer for holiday. The same with both Denmark & Sweden, the subjects of a new book on their apparently baffling creativity and wealth. All three of these Protestant nations have intense productivity, which I'm perfectly willing to label as Protestant. What they seem to lack is the Anglo-Saxon obsession with work and with staying at work for ridiculous amounts of time. I cannot see how people can possibly stay focused and productive for all those hours per day, unless they are a Google autistic. The business press is the major generator of these productivity myths, which is why they are and always will be redoubtable. Academia has plenty of problems, as we both know from direct experience, but I'll gladly take its myths over those of the business world and take 4 weeks off every summer too. Deutschland uber alles during summer holidays.

New commenting software

2010-12-06T17:59:00.000-08:00

I realize that we have very few comments here and most of those come from a mentally ill Canadian.

Well, due to the slight annoyance of the spammer I have implemented a free comment system from disqus. To comment you must have a free account at disqus (single sign-on with multiple registration services, such as WorldPress and typepad may follow someday if this blog ever takes off with lots of comments - I can dream, can't I?). After I installed the new commenting system I deleted all the crazy Canadian's junk.

BTW, this is the person who coined the now (in)famous bit of word salad: GOATS ON FIRE! Yes, in all caps followed by an exclamation point without any context whatsoever - entertaining, but not for very long.

Blogger does not offer any way to block or ban commenters. Sadly, the realities of life on the internet make this necessary. At this point, only spam and the overtly mentally ill will be banned. If we ever actually do have discussions which attract trolls, I will use the PZ Myers POO test.

For the moment, we can list this one under problems we wish we had.

The FBI foils its own plot again?

2010-11-28T09:46:00.000-08:00

Remember last July's Bill the Galactic Hero works for the FBI?

Here's an update: Glenn Greenwald on how the FBI has foiled it's own plot. Again.

Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus

2010-11-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

Updated below.

Recently, a mentally ill man named Dennis Markuze posted a comment to this blog. It made no sense. I recognized the poster's name "David Mabus" as an alias of a well known internet spammer : Dennis Markuze. I deleted that first message. Then he posted the exact same comment to the same post, this time under the Google account "DM." Deleted it again. Then came the exact same post as "anonymous." Normally, I would be thrilled to receive hate mail, but this does not make me feel special. Dennis Markuze hates everyone. No, it's not my or AR's insightful, biting commentary on the state of the world that has angered some blow hard. It's a man likely afflicted with schizophrenia backtracking every comment on the Pharyngula blog looking for more blogs to spam. Oh well.

Matthew Miller has posted the best response to the ravings of Dennis Markuze, this obviously mentally ill person who spams blogs. I feel no enmity toward him. He badly needs help.

Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus - former computer salesman - Montreal, Canada.

please seek advice.

http://www.montrealtherapy.com/
1-800-THERAPIST network

Montreal Psychology Office
Obtain help for depression, anxiety, smoking cessation, relationship issues, and more...
http://www.psymontreal.com

If you are more comfortable in a French speaking environment
Luc Blain, psychologue clinicien
La vie est une succession d'événements qui amènent l'individu à les subir, à les nier, ou encore à les transformer pour les rendre digestes psychiquement. Dans le processus de transformation, la personne retrouve une plus grande liberté intérieure dans différentes dimensions de sa vie: capacité d'avoir du plaisir, d'aimer et d'être aimé, de s'épanouir dans un travail ou des activités.
http://www.lucblain.ca

Picked up off the net, but you may need reminding.

If anyone who reads this lives in Montreal and you see this man, please exercise caution, do not engage. No one knows whether or not he could prove truly dangerous in person.

Dennis Markuze aka David Mabus

Update: I asked in the comments on the next post for Dennis to comment in this thread instead. No luck. Anyone who is interested to read the spam of a mentally ill Canadian can take a look at "The end that's rising as the other end goes down."

The end that's rising while the other end goes down

2010-10-09T10:52:00.001-07:00

By Steven.

Roy Zimmerman has a 2 and a half minute song that describes the behavior and mentality that led to the crash of 2008. This makes most of the articles you can find in economics journals redundant.

I only wish that the central part of his metaphor was actually true. I do not think that the wealthiest hucksters who perpetrated this ponzi game will ever "sink." For more about this see The Rich Don't Need Us Anymore.

2010-08-09T18:50:00.000-07:00

By Steven

One of my favorite blogers, Bob Harris gave the closing keynote address to Web Directions North, a gathering of executives from internet companies (such as Yahoo and Google), on the future of the Internet’s influence on global culture and politics. This may sound dry but Harris is funny, intelligent and very amusing (numerous laugh out loud moments). The video embedded below is the first of 10 parts, each part about 3 or 4 minutes long. I sat down to watch the first one then couldn't stop. He's a very engaging speaker with an optimistic take on life and humanity.

If you like this you can click on the "YouTube" link or click this link to go directly to all 10 parts on Bob Harris' channel.

You can find a link to his blog in the right-hand column:

The Rich Don't Need the Rest Anymore

2010-07-27T06:32:00.000-07:00

By Steven.

Economist Michael Lind has an op-ed in salon.com this morning that set my teeth on edge. This happens when someone writes something that I have been trying to tell people for years. In Are the American People Obsolete? he writes that the rich no longer depend on U.S. citizens for their wealth or protection nor to provide them services anymore. Immigrants without voting rights serve as maids and cooks, and perform other service tasks.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently revealed the plutocratic perspective on immigration when he defended illegal immigration by asking, "Who takes care of the greens and the fairways in your golf course?"

Offshoring has done wonders to free the rich from dealing with the U.S. workers' demands for a living wage, as Lind explains:

A member of the elite can make money from factories in China that sell to consumers in India, while relying entirely or almost entirely on immigrant servants at one of several homes around the country.

Lind mentions the growing use of mercenaries (called "Contractors" since the start of the Iraq War) as the final reason rich people do not need ordinary citizens of the U.S. anymore. He also speculate about a foreign, immigrant police force of the future.

My favorite part of Lind's piece comes from his tying this all to the hatred for taxes:

If the American rich increasingly do not depend for their wealth on American workers and American consumers or for their safety on American soldiers or police officers, then it is hardly surprising that so many of them should be so hostile to paying taxes to support the infrastructure and the social programs that help the majority of the American people. The rich don't need the rest anymore.

For many years, in conversations with friends and acquaintances, I have brought up this idea. Always I have received either uncomprehending stares or condescending responses. Silly doom-crier, they need us as consumers. Or, where else does the wealth come but from the rest of us? Well, now it's coming in from elsewhere, they have taken away retirement for most of us and have Social Security in the cross-hairs now. Does anyone think that the wealthiest 2 percent of the U.S. has need of the other 98% as anything more than sheep to be fleeced?

Footnote: For a body of empirical supporting data take a look at Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it from Yahoo finance.

Paper of record? Not so much.

2010-07-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

By AR.

I gave up reading the NY Times years ago after their disastrous coverage of the lead up to the war in Iraq and several other internal scandals. I do not consider them "the paper of record". Sadly, lots of the media still take them as such. I have been getting more news from McClatchy, since an analysis of the media in the aftermath of the Iraq war showed that they actually got the story right. They had no Judith Miller that they had to apologize for. So that covers much of my news needs. As to opinion, I'm not much of a fan of the Times either. God knows that their opinion people get plenty of coverage on the Sunday morning blabfests, as well as on NPR. So it’s not like I don’t get to hear their opinions over and over. I used to read the Times for the “Circuits” computer section, but that has long since been folded into another section. Not a great loss as it had gotten pretty thin. The main contributor to it is a total Mac fan boy and I just reached a point of exhaustion and boredom with his work. The only section of the Times I will occasionally look at and still consider worthwhile is the Arts section. They still do have some of the best reviewers in the country, especially Holland Cotter.

Can someone be informed without the Grey Lady? I think so. I got a much better sense of the lead up to the Iraq war with Air America's coverage at the time. I got a much deeper understanding of the current financial crisis via Planet Money on PRI. I got a good understanding of what we are currently doing in Afghanistan due to Rachel Maddow's recent great work. I get a much better sense of what happens in the rest of the world thanks to the BBC. Then there is the solid day in day out reporting in McClatchy. Note that most of those sources were not in the form of text on paper, but radio and video over the Web. It just seems to me that the Times is far from indispensable. Frankly, I don't feel that the Times matters very much, except that their endorsements for local & state judges races here in NY are definitively consequential. I think that as you move out of that local range into larger state and national races they have much less of an impact. Culturally, they are also losing ground. They may be the be-all in terms of classical music reviews, but for most other kinds of music, they really don’t carry much weight. They are important for Broadway. But how important are Broadway plays and musicals to most people under 50? The Times is important to people’s grandparents and some middle-aged parents. If you are in your twenties or thirties, the opinions and recommendations of Time Out NY will be way more important. There is a kind of official culture that the Times can still be said to represent. Actually, I think that it’s more a culture of officials, like the judges that get their endorsements, or the college presidents that want nice articles about their latest educational initiatives, or the arts administrators who really want to get a nice write up about a current show or upcoming performance. If you aren’t part of that culture of officialdom does the Times really serve your interests? That is up to you to decide. For myself, the answer has increasingly been no. I think that they have come to believe their own ads, which is always a bad sign.

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube

2010-07-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

By Steven.

How long has internet been a household word? Who does not know about the Google cache? For all the fear that information would become ephemeral as we make the transition from print to electronic, some have learned - the hard way - that once you post something really awful, to paraphrase Shakespeare: the evil men do doesn't just live after them, it goes viral.

Tea Party Express organizer Mark Williams reacted to the NAACP's resolution denouncing racist elements within the Tea Party movement with a blog post which attempted to characterize the resolution as somehow "against freedom."

Bear in mind this is an old trick that political operatives have used since forever: Re-frame the "debate" in terms that favor your position, ignore any information that you can not argue over, try to position your opponent as somehow standing "against" something "good" or "in favor" of something "bad." Thus, Williams' blog post had to characterize the Tea Party as not racist (good luck) and the NAACP as against freedom.

He attempted to accomplish these goals with a faux letter from Benjamin Jealous, the president of the NAACP, to Abraham Lincoln, asking for the repeal of the 13th and 14th amendments, repeated characterized African-Americans as not wanting to work, then (as if those pearls of eloquence were not enough) signed the "letter" with phrases: "Tom's Nephew" and "Head Colored Person."

Strangely, some silly people saw this as overtly racist, clueless in the extreme and astonishingly ugly. To me, it reads like something one of my bigoted classmates from High School would have written. What does Williams do after revealing himself as "brain-dead to the underlying realities of how this world works?" He takes down the post, then takes down his whole blog *. What does this accomplish? You can still read the letter as originally posted. If he does shoot himself in the foot again by claiming the reproductions of his post are fabrications, there's always the old friend to memory, the Google cache.

The overt racism of the "letter" has not stopped CNN from presenting him as a pundit and representative of the tea party movement. As Justin Elliott at Salon.com has noted none of the CNN commentators asked Williams about his "letter to Abraham Lincoln" during any of the segments in which he appears.

Nor have I seen any other "tea partiers" denounce his racism. How do you do that without antagonizing your base?

If you do not care to click through to the letter, here are some highlights. Racist self-revelatory screeds don't get much better than this:

Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn't that what we want all Coloreds to strive for?

How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn?

Had enough? I know I have.

Footnote: I tried a link to the letter on Williams' blog "Marktalk" (http://www.marktalk.com/blog/?p=10387) this morning and receive a "server not responding" message. The post itself first re-written to remove references to "Massa" then the post taken down appeared in the Elliott article above.

Truth and Consequences and Secrecy

2010-07-11T16:16:00.001-07:00

By Steven

So far three psychologists who allegedly aided in the torture of detainees have found their licenses to practice coming under review. The state licensing boards in New York, Ohio and Texas have received complaints about Army psychologists as a result of evidence mostly found in a 2008 Senate Committee report (a large .PDF may take a long time to download). Democracy Now has the best report on this I can find, and the article in Salon.com contains some interesting quotes. In particular, this statement in the complaint filed with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists by Northwestern University law professor Joseph Margulies:

"Regardless of what legal categories these techniques fall within, one conclusion is clear: a psychologist who helps inflict such cruel and shocking abuse on a defenseless human being would appear to have violated basic standards of conduct of the profession,"

Let that sink in for a moment. "Regardless of what legal categories these techniques fall within ... " This constitutes the first explicit rejection of what an administration and Congress chose to make legal. Just because some fools and maniacs made this legal does not make it right.

Another observation pertains to secrecy. Dr. James Mitchell, facing a complaint filed in Texas, had this to say (from the Salon.com article):

"Obviously, I'm not free to discuss any work I may have done for the CIA," Mitchell told the AP. He called the complaint libelous and said it is "riddled throughout with fabricated details, lies, distortions and inaccuracies."

Let me see if I understand this correctly: Mitchell claims that the U.S. Senate report is "riddled throughout with fabricated details, lies, distortions and inaccuracies." He may have directed his remarks to the complaint, but the source of the information comes from the Senate report. Best of luck with that defense, Dr. Mitchell. And secondly, for once secrecy does not necessarily afford protection. Once the cat is out of the bag, poor Dr. Mitchell is not able to provide any additional context to support his defense because of secrecy rules when one works for the CIA. I hope I am not getting ahead of myself when I say "hoist on your own petard?" Maybe you should not get mixed up in torture in the first place?

Absentee landlords from hell

2010-07-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

By Steven

Alex forwarded to me this Rachel Maddow segment on how our tax money works in Afghanistan.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Nice neighborhood. Now take a look at what other people in Afghanistan live in:

(Image from the RAWA web site)

Does anyone remember that the so-called "Norther Alliance" the Bush Administration recruited to kick out the Taliban are actually a bunch of warlords who have committed numerous crimes against, well, pretty much everyone? (see Our Scary New Best Friends from Salon.com from right after the beginning of the war).

Can we really afford to keep throwing money at people who are already insanely rich?

Update: I had trouble making the video play just now. I case this happens to your here's the link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#38139587

Bill the Galactic Hero works for the FBI?

2010-07-06T18:01:00.000-07:00

by Steven.

In Harry Harrison's satirical Science Fiction book one of the chapters has the hero, Bill, infiltrating a terrorist organization. At the end, during a stand-off with police (they have the "terrorists" surrounded in their "headquarters"), two competing law enforcement agencies call for their informers to come out. One by one every one of the members of the big bad terrorist group leaves the building and runs to his handler. Only one man is left in the building, the Big Boss. The Big Boss begs and pleads with his handler, but to no avail. Someone has to be the terrorist, or the operation will be all for nothing. The last informer, the one who founded the terrorist organization in the first place, perishes in a hail of gunfire. Someone had to be sacrificed for "justice to prevail."

Silly SciFi right? Guess again! In Salon today I read Stage-Managing the War on Terror by Stephan Salisbury in Tom's Dispatch. The "terrorist" attacks averted since 2001 include "the Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four." In each case an FBI informer supplied the money, the plan, the rhetoric and the "explosives." Even a federal judge, Colleen McMahon who presides over the Newburgh case, calls it the "un-terrorism case."

Especially the Newburgh case looks more like a horrible con perpetrated on desperate, unemployed (and in one case mentally ill) black men. A Pakistani shows up at a mosque flashing lots of money and making extravagant offers. The more astute members of the congregation smelled a rat. As Salisbury reports:

In fact, more substantial members of the mosque had pegged Shaheed Hussain as an informer almost the moment he arrived, but had no idea what to do about him. “Maybe the mistake we made was that we didn’t report him,” Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, imam at Masjid al-Ikhlas, told congregants shortly after the May 2009 arrests. “But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?”

In the Liberty City case, one of the defendants had actually called the Philadelphia police "in mid-plot" to complain that "he was being pressured to commit radical acts by what turned out to be an FBI informer." The FBI paid the informer $230,000. Nice work if you can get it. The article details the "Bill the Galactic Hero" conduct of the FBI in each of the other cases listed above.

Aside from these cases what do we have? The shoe bomber (brilliant, telling everyone what he's doing before failing to light the fuse), the underwear bomber (need I say more) and the pathetic Times Square bomber. Either incompetent idiots who could barely blow their own noses or poor, pathetic, men who could not do anything without the money, supplies and leadership the FBI supplied. The Salon.com re-printing of this article has the best tag line for the whole astonishing waste of everyone's times and resources, "The FBI : foiling its own plots since 2001."

The albatross called the South

2010-07-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

My friend AR and I exchanged e-mails about this piece by Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. We both respect and admire Greenwald - he has always called attention to the misdeeds and hypocrisies that take place all across the political spectrum, and for that we commend him. After reading Greenwald's take on the recent (June 8, 2010) primary AR had this to say:

I hope Greenwald is NOT asking for a third party, like the redoubtable Ralph Nader. Progressives have a very shallow time line. It will take at least a generation to move this country to the left again, if it can even be done.

In national electoral politics in America we are dealing with the albatross called the South. Most of the Blue Dogs that Greenwald laments come from the old confederacy. The Dixiecrats still exist and Lincoln is one of them. They never cared for or served their poor white constituents, but only those who always had the money in the agricultural economy of the old South. Her being a corporatist is the modern incarnation of the same thing. The poor people of the South needed single-payer health care as much as any poor person in the North, Midwest or West Coast. Yet this group of people can be counted on to vote constantly against their own interests. The ugly truth is that as long as the majority of Southerners hold their conservative values there is a limit to what can be achieved on a national level. The great idea of Howard Dean was to realize that one could pull support from progressives even in that part of the country. I honestly wish that Dean was being listened to by Obama, rather than Emmanuel.

One bright spot is that Lincoln is the sponsor of anti-derivative legislation. I hope that she is serious about that legislation because it would force a fundamental change in the structure of American banks. I suspect that Greenwald would be happy about that change. I still smell the left-over late 60s in Greenwald's writing. I think that there is way too much personalization in his attacks on her. She is useful if she can get the anti-derivative legislation passed. (BTW, Barney Frank is said to be against that legislation. WTF?) I think that Greenwald is confused about what a political "cost" is. He shouldn't be happy to maim her. He should be trying to work with her on what they agree on, like the anti-derivative legislation. If you are trying to show an exercise of real political power, coming a close second is not enough. We all laugh at how the tea-baggers come in second to many on the right. What is the difference? Working with someone like Blanche Lincoln is a long run strategy. You may hate her guts about some issues, but hold your nose and get out of her what you can. Some people feel the same way about Barney Frank.

On some level I think that Greenwald needs to grow up and realize that he doesn't have all that much power. I think that his group needs to develop soft power as well as what they think was hard power, which really didn't work. I think that Obama will break the hearts of the left as much as 30 years of supposedly pro-life Republicans have broken the hearts of many truly committed right-wingers. These folks are still horrified that Abortion is legal and that they have only reduced it at the margins and mainly on the state & local level. Reagan was right when he said that if someone agrees with you 80% of the time he is your friend and worth working with. Larry Wilmore was right when he said that America thought that Obama was a "magic negro" and that, of course, Obama is not a "magic negro." Look at this clip from the Daily Show:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The First 364 Days 23 Hours

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

And for no other reason than I can't help myself, while we're talking about an albatross, let's see the classic albatross skit, via YouTube:

The behavior of voters may look this absurd, but nobody does absurd better than Monty Python.

Social Security, pensions and medicare in the crosshairs

2010-06-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

(Updated below)

I want to spread this far and wide because Cenk Uygur has raised a point I've been going on about for years: The richest people in the U.S. are going after the last remaining pot of money to plunder: our retirement and medicare.

The only thing I can add is that they do not even mention the wars and the cost of those wars. Also, why, Mr. Carlson, are there not enough rich people to pay down the deficit? Did they hid the money too well? Anyway, I would like to test that hypothesis.

Stick with this video to the end to hear about Colorado reneging on its State pensions and how corporations are "looking at Colorado" for inspiration.

Yikes! I say, yikes!

Update

Links to additional background information (links via MoveOn.org):

Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters, Alternet March 28, 2010.

Social Security Finances: Findings of the 2009 Trustees Report, National Academy of Social Insurance Social Security Brief, May, 2009

Social Security Beneficiary Data, Social Security Administration.

Thunderf00t in mouth?

2010-06-24T08:26:00.000-07:00

There is a person who goes by the handle ThunderF00t on YouTube. He makes
pro-science and anti-superstition videos. I have enjoyed most of what he does, especially his Why People Laugh at Creationists series. He recently made one about the South Park episode that obtained death threats:

Although I do not agree with some of his statements, the fact that Viacom or someone claiming to be Viacom had filed a DMCA complaint had video taken down shows how easy it is to censor someone one YouTube. (Yes, I know it's a commercial venture and not a public forum, but it advertises itself as a public forum and it uses a national resource, the internet, which was created with public funds then pretty much handed over for free to a bunch of empty suits like Google. But I digress). It's a free speech issue for me.

The statements that trouble me may not be acts which Thunderf00t wants to happen but it may be only predictions. But his overall tone of anger makes it sound like he wants violence to happen. I'm not sure. I'd be interested in other opinions on this one.

To which AR responded:

I think this is an anti-Islamic screed. I think that he IS threatening the "Islamic World". I can't stand Islamists, much as I can't stand Fundamentalists of any other religion. I share the same enemies as this guy, but I don't think I'm on the same side as him. In his ridiculously simple minded view of the West living in the age of enlightenment, he neglects to mention all the enlightened terrorism of colonialism, slavery and bigotry of the first world (i.e.: Christendom). I don't know what moral high ground this character THINKS he's living on, but it is in its own way as manufactured as the gods that he lambastes. I think this is a prime example of an intolerant secular humanist. He should change his screen name to ThunderF00t-in-mouth.

(note: this exchange took place last April. I post it here because I found the exchange interesting and would be interested in seeing if anyone would care to comment. -- Steven).

Welcome new blog author: AR

2010-06-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

One of my closest life-long friends has agreed to post to this blog. He prefers to go by the letters "AR." I have had many interesting e-mail exchanges with AR and often wished I could put his writing on this blog. Now there's someone with whom to interact and disagree with me on occasion.

I started out in the mid-90s maintaining a web site which tracked various forms of censorship and examined what was then the new phenomenon of "alternative media." Well in internet years it's been a couple of centuries since then. Alt media has developed and mainstream media has experienced some set-backs. There's more to write about than only censorship. In the U.S. we also have seen, since 2001, an astonishing frontal assault on the Bill of Rights, the writ of habeas corpus, and a President who "put out a hit" on a U.S. citizen. AR and I write about more than just the narrowly focussed topics with which I started in the mid-90s.

Looking back on the last 10 years, I can only summarize with: Yikes! I say, Yikes!

How long have babies been around?

2010-06-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

There's a story on the AP wire this morning that 7 companies that manufacture cribs have recalled about 2 million of them. Design flaws have led to the recall. The movable slide can detach or "malfunction" (?!) leading to babies' heads trapped, injury or strangulation.

Humans have been placing their babies in cribs for how many millennia now? Their physiology and frailty long ago fully studied, documented and understood, yes? Why is it that in the 21st century some nitwits can't figure out how to design a crib so it does not kill the person using it? Who do they think they are, the tobacco industry?

Guess what? Torture wasn't needed in the Time Square Bomber Case.

2010-06-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

By AR.

Faisal Shahzad, the self-admitted Time Square bomber, has confessed to all ten charges against him. I hope that he will enjoy his life as a prisoner after sentence is passed in October. What I would like to point out is that he was not tortured. It will probably be confusing to Dick Cheney and the rest of the pro-torture crowd, but it is something that makes me proud. We do not need to torture terrorists. We do not need to send them to secret prisons, like the one at Bagram Airfield. Our legal system can actually handle these kinds of cases. I wish President Obama would keep that in mind. It seems to slip in and out of his mind at times. The Christmas day underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was also not tortured and is reported to have given up lots of information. Fairness and decency seem to work when dealing terrorists. This is a point that cannot be made enough and is certainly never heard from the chicken hawks on the Right. I wish this had been more a part of the coverage of Faisal Shahzad's confession yesterday.

Jon Stewart on Obama and Presidential power

2010-06-16T07:34:00.000-07:00

I wanted to make the punch line the title for this post but I don't want to give it away for those who have not yet seen it. From an excellent post by Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald on the Obama's record on executive power. He deconstructs the lefty-liberal defense we typically see for the President's actions (or lack of same).

Then at the bottom of the post there's this gem from the Daily Show:

Respect my authoritah.

BP's hostages

2010-06-15T17:19:00.000-07:00

I was inspired by Tom Tomorrow's latest This Modern World cartoon to look for citations for the statements of fact I found in it. Sad to say I am so disconnected that I had to learn about this from a cartoon:

BP has responded to the disaster with all the resources at its disposal: money, personnel, lawyers. That's right. It's responded aggressively to the PR disaster.

For the wonks among you, here are the sources:

International Business times on BP's buying keyword searches to direct people to its own page about the oil spill. and the ABC news story on the keyword buying spree.

A YouTube video showing a segment from CBS News which shows a member of the U.S. Coast Guard (rank unknown) saying "BP's Rules, not ours." He is accompanying a boatload of BP contractors who tell journalists they can not go to the oil fouled beach.

Even more obnoxious: BP forces clean up workers to sign non-disclosure agreements. Since that last was a less well known source, here's another on non-disclosure agreements from CNN.

Don't worry folks, it gets worse. Yahoo news on BP blaming sick clean up workers illnesses on food poisoning. (For some reason this conjured up the memory of 19th century mine owners in Rhodesia publishing articles that claimed that black mine workers suffered from scurvy due to poor oral hygiene - we give 'em toothbrushes but they just don't use 'em). And, of course, there's worse: Amy Goodman interviews clean up workers (formerly fishermen) who BP has threatened with firing if they wear their own respirators.

And now for the comic relief.

ABC News on BP's $50 Million dollar ad campaign. Darn, $50 million does not buy as much belief as it used to. Credulity inflation.

And the winner in the comic relief dept: A conservative liberal-baiting internet news site's report on Haley Barour's statements that the media is doing more harm than the spill (was he trying to channel Bagdad Bob?!).

The big issue I have not seen covered very much:

Here's a Reuters story on the structural economic blackmail that keeps BP politically protected: it accounts for 12 percent of the dividends paid into British retirement funds. Don't impose any realistic accountability on BP or the old limeys are screwed. This, what I call structural blackmail, has to change before corporations lose their power over the world. As long as corporations such as BP have hostages they can shoot the rest of us can not do much without harming each other.

Update:

One more in the PR hit parade: BP has hired mercenaries (call them security guards) in addition to enlisting local law enforcement and the Coast Guard.

The Pope and the cover-up

2010-04-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

After reading Salon.com's This week in crazy featuring the latest attempts to salvage the personal reputation of Pope Ratzi, I discovered these gaping holes in what I consider logical thinking. See if you find any of this makes sense to you:

Logical conclusions.

In a recent attempt to "defend" the Pope against charges of personally participating in the cover-up of child-molesting police, the Vatican mouthpieces have provided us with the very entertaining spectacle of press releases praising the then Chief investigator's efforts to deal with pedophile priests. (Of course this was not his title, but "head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF)" is a lot to say, so I abbreviated it). Read some examples here and here.

Logic break folks - think about this for a second. What does the act of praising the person responsible for policing the ranks of the priesthood tell you in light of the extent of the misconduct (again, not really the best word to use, but then "vile, monstrous, sick, perverted and blatantly illegal abuse of power over children" is a lot to say, so I abbreviated it). This dwarfs GW Bush's infamous "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" statement he made while people continued to die from neglect in New Orleans. What's next? Praising Emperor Nero's expert fire-fighting prowess?

Does anyone else see the pratfall of praising a chief participant in what can only be either a massive cover-up or a miserable failure? Liar or incompetent? Hmm.. It's got to be one or the other, so if I were the hapless PR flack trying to do damage control on this mess I would choose incompetence. He suffered from dementia that decade. He suffered some brain damage when a golf ball hit him in the head. We put him in charge of investigating priests' misconduct while he was in recovery after a month-long binge on tequila and peyote. Anything, and I mean anything but "he did a heck of a job cracking down on those pedophiles." Revelation of the blindingly obvious: No One did even a marginally adequate job of protecting children from monsters. And documented evidence continues to pile up that proves the Church perpetrated a cover-up of massive proportions. What elephant?

Hint to the Vatican's PR agents: praising someone in the face of such obvious facts and blatant failure (or criminal cover-up) ranks with putting out a fire with gasoline in the pantheon of blunders.

Now to the U.S. government's role in this mess (Oh, yes, they laid some interesting ground work relevant to recent developments in legal action against the Pope).

The argument (raised by the Vatican's lawyers) that he has immunity as a head of state from prosecution in the U.S. brings to mind the case of Manuel Noriega. Noriega was a head of state too, right? He served time in U.S. prison for drug offenses committed outside the U.S. Has anyone else pointed this out?

The U.S. has embarked upon a policy of extra-territorial prosecution, even to the point of using "extraordinary rendition" to capture individuals suspected of crimes against the United States committed outside of its borders. We have a prison in Guantanamo for such people. President Obama has neither shut it down nor repudiated its existence.

So, in principle, according the the precedents set down by the two Bushes and Obama, why not send a rendition team to Vatican City and drag the pedophile-protecting old monster back to the U.S. to stand trial? I know this would never happen, but it raises the question of selective prosecution. If you have an Arabic name that matches that of a suspected terrorist then you receive an all-expense paid trip to Gitmo (or worse). If you head a corrupt organization with a decades-long record of covering up for pedophiles, you receive a free pass. Think about it.

Another excellent piece on "the public option"

2009-09-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

In salon.com I read I love my socialist kidney . Excellent piece with a combination of personal experience and hard data.

A few bits to point out:

The author explains how private insurance outright refused to provide coverage for kidney failure. None. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Until the government stepped in.

Shows how Medicare is cost effective and private insurance is not.

Points out how for-profit dialysis "centers" (as opposed to government supported home care in other countries) have crappy outcomes.

The Republicans once upon a time supported universal health care (Nixon, for crying out loud, tried to enact it).

Good to read the whole piece if you have time.

2009-09-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

I love the use of language. When clever people figure out ways to combine internet with chaos theory we obtain results such as the following:

As a result of a gay humorist, Dan Savage, and a relatively small number of people maintaining blogs or web sites, the name "Santorum" has become a slang word for a substance resulting from anal sex. It only takes a small number of people to "Google bomb" a given word. Here's how it works:

After you perform a search on Google, you see a ranked list of links. How does Google rank the search results? Google will not tell. But some people have found that one of the algorithms involves examining whether the word(s) appear as a "link name" and if so, the linking address (URL) that appears the most for the word or phrase searched rises to the top of Google's search results. If you click on the hyper link Rick Santorum, the link takes you to the URL : http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/

After enough people do that, you can type in either "Santorum" or "Rick Santorum" into a Google search, and the definition at http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/ will appear at the top of the results. If you click on the "I'm feeling lucky" button, it will take you directly to the "Spreading Santorum blog." Although Savage has not done anything with this blog since 2004, it still appears as the number 1 first link on all searches using the word "Santorum."

Now that former Senator Santorum has decided to run for President, we can anticipate the Google bombing of phrases such as Santorum for President, Elect Santorum, and whatever campaign slogans he comes up with.

I have heard that all it takes is 10 people to tie a given phrase to a given web address. I first heard of this when some people google-bombed the phrase "Miserable failure" to President George W. Bush's official biography on the White House web site. Sadly, this doesn't work anymore (Google fixed it). Since as of this writing, the Santorum bomb still works, I am guessing that Google needs to "fix" these bombs manually, one at a time, and therefore the algorithm continues to work as before.

Single-payer vs. two-tier healthcare

2009-08-14T17:41:00.000-07:00

Updated below.

I wrote a lengthy reply to a friend's message containing an idea about providing greater efficiency to the health care system in the coming years. My reply took on a life of its own and turned into an editorial on the current state of the "reform effort."

Keep in mind I reproduce below mostly as I originally wrote it a message to a friend. This provides the context: I replied to an idea that promises to streamline the presently bureaucratic process we all must suffer when we need to go to the hospital.

Well if the right-wing is going to combat healthcare reform with "Obama wants to kill your grandmother" then what do you expect them to do with this? There exist some privacy, security and fraud "holes" that I see no iron-clad air-tight way to fix. You know how Republicans/Conservatives combat reform: they point to the problems and ignore the benefits thus making it impossible to defend a change unless it's a 100% solution. Anyone can nit-pick a plan to death. Given the viciousness we have seen already I am reluctant to invest any money and (no offense) even much time in a technological element that has such obvious vulnerabilities to political attack.

Now to the other political/social consideration. You know I respect you and realize you have knowledge, expertise and experience in this field that goes way beyond my meager collection of information. I will venture an opinion/argument anyway. When Cindy and Alex visited Canada a few years ago Cindy sustained a minor injury and needed to go to the hospital for outpatient care. When they asked about payment or insurance the Canadians laughed and told them there was nothing for them to sign, no forms to fill out, no idiocy with which they had to deal. They walked out of the hospital without so much as a co-payment. If you want efficiency, single-payer makes any sort of plan such as you envision totally unnecessary.

Single-payer also obtains greater cost-effectiveness than any private insurance. It's a myth and a lie that government is intrinsically incapable of accomplishing anything. The overhead expressed in dollars per $100 of reimbursement for most HMOs is $15. The most efficient is Kaiser which has about $12 per $100. What about Medicare and Medicaid? Try $3 each. This from the GAO and also reported (twice) in Consumer Reports (non-partisan and accepts no advertising). Recall also that back on April or May the Health Insurance industry offered Obama a trillion dollars in savings over 5 years. Think about it - that's how much they planned to over-charge us.

You understand the insurance business better than I do. You understand then, why when Canada changed the rules to allow private insurance to operate the one most important rule they enforce is that the private insurance can not underprice the government. In other words, there's no poaching the good risks. If you only insure the people who have a very low incidence of serious illness or injury, and who recover from injuries quickly, you rake in money. Freed from the expense of actually providing healthcare, you can spend the profits on bonuses so your executives can afford yachts and summer homes. The money is not spent on healthcare. Then, when the "good risks" age and become "bad risks" you either cancel their policies or price them so astronomically high that the "customer" must opt into the government-run system.

This is what I foresee happening: a two-tiered system in which the very wealthy have the very best healthcare but the private insurance companies otherwise will insure only the good risks, then dump them into the government-run half of the "system" when they actually need expensive treatments. Essentially what, according to documented cases, the private insurance companies do now. And I'm not just talking about "Sicko." I have also read numerous cases of policy cancellations and/or denial of treatment outside of Moore and his grandstanding silliness. The difference between $3 per $100 vs. $15 is not better health care (at least not in most cases). It's yachts and summer houses. A single-payer system will give us greatly reduced costs just by spending the money on healthcare.

In England the doctors have incentives to encourage their patients to lose weight and to quit smoking. With more time spent with patients the doctor can spend more time on educating patients and that can translate to more effectiveness in changing diet and behaviors that lead to obesity and other maladies. The present system of pressuring the doctors to see patients for as little time as possible does not serve me. I find it ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy the argument that there are some who ruin their own health and drive costs up for everybody but then we do not let doctors have the time necessary with their patients to help them change. There are also some "cross purposes" with other industries, in particular the agribusiness industry which does research to design foods that lead to over-eating (especially snack foods are specifically designed to encourage the consumer to eat the whole package and still feel hungry). We have lots of people trying to gouge as much money from us as possible without regard to any sort of "greater good."

The English and Canadian systems are not perfect. But they are well liked by the majority of the populations of those countries. This morning on my clock radio NPR reported that some U.S. anti-healthcare liars duped some English people into complaining about their National Health Service on camera for what the English thought was a documentary. The two dupes have stated publicly that they have complaints but would never dream of replacing the NHS with an "American style" system. Likewise, when Canadian journalists at a press conference chided Michael Moore about "Sicko" pointing out that they thought he painted an unrealistically rosy picture of the Canadian healthcare system he asked them if they would prefer to switch to the American one instead. The Canadian journalists did the equivalent of crossing themselves a dozen times and said absolutely not.

In the present farce of a debate taking place you have a Senate full of millionaires (no exaggeration, I think that Al Franken is one too, given his successful show business career) all of whom enjoy government-provided healthcare, many of them telling us how evil, inefficient, bad and (gasp!) socialist a government-run system would be. I don't see any of these jackals signing up for Kaiser. I want what they're having.

What does "Green" mean?

2009-06-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

Update I and Update II below.

One of the great advantages to working in academia comes from what you can learn just chatting with a colleague. A few weeks ago one of my colleagues explained to me what he learned from a moslem member of his department: What green means. In a discussion about the use of the word "green" in the U.S. (and enthusiastically adopted by our workplace) to mean "environmentally friendly" he told me that in the Islamic world, green is the symbolic color of Islam itself. "Going green" in that context means becoming more Islamic, more religious.

In the news reports about the political unrest in Iran following an obviously (and sloppily) rigged election, I have yet to find any news outlet that points out the symbolic meaning of the green head gear, green flags, green banners, etc. that we see on the TV. Maybe someone did explain and I just missed it. Nonetheless, the idea of right-wing bloggers changing their color schemes on their blogs in support of the protesters in Iran makes me chuckle a bit. Nevermind, that only a short time ago (a couple of years) Senator McCain made a tasteless joke about killing Iranian en masse ("Bomb, Bomb, Bomb... Bomb, Bomb Iran"). I have grown accustomed to the ease with which ideologues can turn on a dime. But I digress...

I read this morning two items that have coalesced in my head, and hope to do justice to that here. Glenn Greenwald on salon.com discussed the hypocrisy we witnessed when the President sang the praises of the power of the visual image to reveal the violence and brutality of the Iranian regime while chuckling at the reporter who asked about the suppression of the torture pictures by the same President (The Neda video, Torture and the truth-revealing power of images). Evidently not only right-wing ideologues turn on a dime - lots of people have that talent these days. And Greenwald gives us more scary for the day: a Washington Post/ABC poll shows that support for torturing "terrorist" suspects stands at about 50% (?!). I realize that no empirical evidence could ever tie this to the 7 seasons of torture porn broadcast as the television series 24, but I believe that popular culture, or even culture in general, has the ability to influence opinions on that most basic level: people's assumptions (assumptions are what you don't know you're making).

To make matters even more surreal, NPR (Nominally Public Radio) has made a decision to stop using the word "torture." Consider reading (or, I hope, re-reading) the essays of George Orwell (including the one at the end of 1984) about euphemism and dishonest use of language. NPR's Alicia C. Shepard writes an apologia for dropping the use of the word "torture" that reads like something out of the Ministry of Truth. I guess she would argue that it's only torture if you actually open the rat cage? Happily, many who have left comments on this atrocity have called bullshit on her. (Read about this whopper and comment as you please).

Culture and cluelessness combine in fascinating ways in Iran now, as I read an anonymous Iranian's report about how the regime has tried to keep people at home and complacent by showing them more movies that usual. To this end, they have started a Lord of the Rings marathon. I can almost imagine these imagination-challenged, ignorant, authoritarian hacks picking this out: "Oh, look. Harmless escapist fantasy, no relationship to reality here." Right. As if religions do not pillage the popular culture of the times for their holy books. These idiots never guessed that Tolkien artfully distills hundreds of characters, myths, legends, themes from around the world -- the stuff of popular culture throughout the centuries -- into an epic story that has to touch on at least some cultural references familiar to nearly any given person anywhere in the world. Not that Lord of the Rings necessarily borrows anything directly from the Koran or Iranian epic poetry (I have no idea, maybe it does?) but that (more likely) Tolkien's trilogy borrows from the same sources. In Tehran Dispatch: The regime shows us movies the anonymous Iranian explains the Iranian interpretation of the films. Please read this yourself. I will give you a spoiler, though: the Iranian regime looks a lot like Mordor. Who'd have guessed?

Update

I can not resist mentioning my favorite of all the comments I have read thus far on Shepard's Orwellian nightmare apologia:

Don McAdam (dmc) wrote:

The next time NPR does a story on child abuse or date rape, they should refer to those immoral acts as "enhanced parenting techniques" and "harsh dating practices".

Beautiful.

Update II

Here's someone who beat me to the punch:

Overton Glavlit (Googie) wrote:

I recognize that it's frustrating for some listeners to have NPR not use the number 4 to describe certain sums of 2 and 2. But the role of a news organization is not to choose sides in this or any debate. People have different definitions of what 2+2 equals and different feelings about what constitutes "4". NPR's job is to give listeners all perspectives, and present the news as detailed as possible and put it in context.

Fear and loathing in Healthcare "reform"

2009-06-14T07:03:00.000-07:00

Republicans know how to set people against each other. According to an AP story Senator says tax on health benefits is unnecessary we read that republican senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa has suggested that a tax on employer health benefits could fund President Obama's proposal to provide healthcare to everyone. Despite Senator Dodd's comments to the effect that such a tax is unnecessary and counter-productive the damage is done.

Just the suggestion is enough to frighten those who have healthcare benefits from their employers to fear additional taxes. The idea of taxing people with jobs to supply healthcare others already has a firm link in many people's minds.

There's an easy way to resolve this problem. I wrote back in 2007 Are you a good risk or a bad risk that private insurance poaching the "good risks" diverts money from health care and spends it on six-figure salaries, bonuses, and a huge campaign war-chest for giving to politicians and both parties as well as PR efforts to fend off a single-payer system.

According to reports from the GAO to Consumer Reports private insurance and HMOs have an overhead (measured in number of dollars per $100 in reimbursement to health care providers) of about 15%. Some have overhead as high as $18 per $100 of reimbursement. What about the "grossly inefficient" government programs? Medicare and Medicaid consistently come in at $3 per $100. If you were simply to replace the current spending on private health insurance and divert the same funds to a single-payer system, you could pay for health care for everyone and have enough left over to give back money to both employers and employees.

The republican disinformation campaign and scare tactics take advantage of existing prejudices against poor people. Not all poor people are lazy, collecting welfare and uninterested in work. Many under-employed people to not receive employer health benefits. Many small businesses can not afford to offer health benefits and state laws do not require them to either. The stereotype of the lazy welfare recipient does not hold true for millions of people without health care.

Also keep in mind that back in 2007 GM griped about the competition from Europe. The European car companies do not have to pay health benefits but the U.S. ones do. If not for humanitarian reasons then for economic ones why not have a single-payer system that spends the premiums on health care instead of influence and astronomical salaries? Just a thought

Prolonged Preventative Detention

2009-05-22T19:20:00.001-07:00

Although I never expected President Obama to live up to the expectations of the many liberals who jumped to the conclusion (without evidence) that he would enact the liberal's wish list, I did not see this one coming. As I viewed the President's speech yesterday I felt a growing sense of shock, astonishment and horror. He proposes the introduction of preventative detention - the detention of individuals without trial or even charge. I was expecting a centrist technocrat. Where's the pod?

Although he calls it "prolonged" detention, that word serves as a euphemism so disgusting that I shudder when I type the words. But others have done a far better job of parsing the President's speech. (See Rachel Maddow's expert deconstruction below).

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

In addition, Glen Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer and very articulate writer of the blog Unclaimed Territory as usual did a thorough job of examining the implications and the constitutional issues. Speaking of the Constitution, that President Obama chose to deliver that attack on civil liberties and the rule of law at the National Archives in the presence of the original Constitution suggests that he used the Constitution as nothing more than a prop. For Bush it was the "Mission Accomplished" sign.

I appreciate the sort of political bind in which Democrats find themselves. Ever since Willie Horton they have lived in fear that a person released from the custody of some government agency who subsequently commits a crime will give a great campaign issue to the republicans. If someone released from U.S. custody commits or participates in an act of terrorism, then we (and I guess Obama sees this coming) will see the Republicans howling with outrage. "We had him! But then the cowardly democrats let him go!" But recall that Benjamin Franklin once said that those who would trade liberty for safety deserve neither. (And I would add that they will have neither). This from someone who had a price on his head during the Revolutionary War.

We have already seen the U.S. law enforcement mis-use the RICO statue to confiscate property of ordinary people based solely on arrest (without convictions). I wrote about that here. A law promoted as a tool to combat organized crime police subsequently use to confiscate the homes of cancer patients growing their own medicinal marijuana. And have we forgotten about George W. Bush's "free speech zones" or the police round-up of journalists and activists in advance of their doing anything during the Republican Convention last summer in Minneapolis? The notorious "no fly" list which has excluded a baby and a U.S. Senator from flying comes to mind as well. We have seen plenty of examples of laws "intended" for foreigners and/or terrorists used on citizens as well. Speaking of the distinction between "foreigners" and citizens, you may recall the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

Rachel Maddow used a reference to the movie Minority Report as a scary example in which police arrest people for "pre-crime" : crimes that they will commit but haven't yet. I find this a good and clever reference to the sort of Orwellian nightmare that lurks behind "prolonged detention." I can think of another movie reference: A World Apart. This film took place in Apartheid South Africa and dramatized an actual, frequent practice of preventative detention. Barbara Hershey's character stays in jail for the legal limited period of detention without charge. Then the police have to release her. She leaves the jail-house then almost makes it to a public telephone before the police arrest her again for another period of detention. Remember this if in response to public outrage President Obama amends his plan to place a time limit on how long the U.S. government entitles itself to detain a person without charge or trial.

Remember back in 2002 when Bush set up his torture regime while his head of the newly created "Homeland Security," Tom Ridge, described civil liberties as "... the most precious gift we offer our citizens." First it starts out as an inalienable right. Then turns into a gift that the government deigns to give to us. How much longer will we keep it?

Questions not asked

2009-05-15T19:18:00.001-07:00

Here's an obvious question that I have not seen any talking heads of TV ask:

That was the little-noticed message from the made-for-TV spectacle that administration officials called a healthcare "game changer": In saying they can voluntarily slash $200 billion a year off the country's medical bills over the next decade and still preserve their profits, healthcare companies implicitly acknowledged they were plotting to fleece consumers and have been fleecing them for years. With that acknowledgment came the tacit admission that the industry's business is based not on respectable returns, but on grotesque profiteering and waste -- the kind that can give up $2 trillion and still guarantee huge margins.

From salon.com: Obama, the healthcare Riddler By David Sirota.

I like how David Sirota has grasped the obvious. But he does not plumb the depths of the depravity here. We have numerous HMOs, PPOs, and whatever other initials the health insurance industry can throw at us. But the free-enterprise champion always goes on about how competition provides us with the best of whatever at the lowest price possible. Where do you see any effectiveness of this philosophy at work in the health insurance industry? Where's the effect of this philosophy? Where's the efficiency that competition supposedly compels?

Obama vs. Habeas and Obamaniacs vs. reality

2009-04-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

Glen Greenwald has a post today that sums up better than anything I can write the current situation with civil rights in the U.S. Which is to say we may not have any before long. Maybe I'm over-reacting. I hope I'm proven wrong.

President Obama has taken the same position on Habeas Corpus as President Bush: he's against it. Read Greenwald's post on this development. Obama's Dept. of Justice has argued that Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan lies beyond the law, that detainees flown there have no right to contest their detention. Same as the Bush administration.

Now here's the scary part. Obamaniacs, in the comments on Juan Cole's blog and other places, have made much the same arguments in support of President Obama running roughshod over the rule of law and effectively abolishing habeas corpus that Bush's admirers made in support of former President Bush running roughshod over the rule of law and effectively abolishing habeas corpus. For summaries of the comments in question see here and also here.

What is it on both sides of the political spectrum that leads people to so adore leaders even in the face of evidence of a monumental betrayal not only of promises that carried the leader into office but of bedrock principles of the civilized world?

Yikes! I say, yikes!

The ones who caused the crash remain in power

2009-04-04T08:39:00.001-07:00

Bill Moyers Journal on Friday April 3 had William K. Black, economics professor and former regulator, give a fresh perspective on the current financial crisis and its origins. Black describes how the entire financial industry perpetrated a fraud, how "Liars loans" constitutes an organized criminal enterprise and how specific individuals directly responsible for the current financial crisis occupy positions of power. Tim Geithner in particular, has kept the same CEOs and CFOs who ran their banks into the ground in their current jobs. Black argues that the Obama administration has chosen to do this in order to contain from the public the extent of the damage in an effort to restore public confidence and prevent worse problems. Some of Black's statements still require verification. But see for yourself. From this link you can watch the video or read a transcript.

As a follow-up to that broadcast, Glenn Greenwald wrote a post, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and Wall Street's ownership of government that provides a very complete and eloquent summation of the corruption of the Obama administration's officials (and don't forget Alan Greenspan). He uses facts publicly available to illustrate the revolving door between the government and private sector linking the gutting of laws and regulations that resulted directly in the crash (and in profits for the Obama administration officials) to the actions of those individuals: Geithner, Lawrence Summers and others. The mainstream media has not touched any of this.

Greenwald cites this article from Stanford magazine about Brooksley Born and how Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Alan Greenspan successfully blocked her attempts to regulate exactly those derivative financial instruments (Credit Default Swaps) that everyone now agrees caused the economic disaster we all have to face.

Greenwald's summation states the case better than anything I can think of:

Just think about how this works. People like Rubin, Summers and Gensler shuffle back and forth from the public to the private sector and back again, repeatedly switching places with their GOP counterparts in this endless public/private sector looting. When in government, they ensure that the laws and regulations are written to redound directly to the benefit of a handful of Wall St. firms, literally abolishing all safeguards and allowing them to pillage and steal. Then, when out of government, they return to those very firms and collect millions upon millions of dollars, profits made possible by the laws and regulations they implemented when in government. Then, when their party returns to power, they return back to government, where they continue to use their influence to ensure that the oligarchical circle that rewards them so massively is protected and advanced. This corruption is so tawdry and transparent -- and it has fueled and continues to fuel a fraud so enormous and destructive as to be unprecedented in both size and audacity -- that it is mystifying that it is not provoking more mass public rage.

This is the Obama Administration?! Does this look like change to you?

One last piece of priceless snark from A Tiny Revolution: Lawrence Summers in 1999, when he was Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary, on the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act.

And speaking of the repeal of Glass-Steagall, Mike Taibbi wrote a great article in Rolling Stone that gives a good background: The Big Takeover. For those keeping score, this travesty occurred under the Clinton Administration. This is also only one of the reasons that the thought of Hilary Clinton as President struck terror into my heart. Not that President Obama has proven much of an improvement, having enshrined the thieves and liars who now cover-up their misdeeds and raid the treasury again and again with impunity. Great way to restore confidence. Oh well.

Real life imitates a bad TV show, or is it the other way around?

2009-03-13T07:13:00.000-07:00

I only just caught up with this one.

U.S. Halted some raids in Afghanistan

I knew about predator raids mistakenly killing civilians as long ago as 2003-04. I did not realize that the horrible TV show, "The Unit," has an analog in real life. And because of the secret nature of the missions, we can not know which came first, the TV show or the real-life commando operation.

Quick summary: in making a public announcement that the U.S. is shutting down commando operations in Afghanistan due to high numbers of civilian casualties, we see an admission that the Bush Co. lunatics were running commando hit teams in at least Afghanistan (and who know where else?). Pull on a thread, the tapestry unravels.

Also, I realize that Seymour Hersh has added some speculative musings about the extent of these operations. I hope that people can sort out his speculations from what U.S. government officials and military officers have publicly admitted.

Unmoderated comments

2009-03-06T17:18:00.000-08:00

I finally learned how to configure this blog (it took me long enough). Since I have seen a few comments from people I never met before, I realize that some few people are actually reading this. I will keep the comments unmoderated, unless there's some sort of problem, in which I'll try deleting the off-topic or abusive ones before going back to moderated comments.

President Obama and secrecy

2009-03-06T17:14:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald's blog entry for February 28th : The Obama DOJ engages in still more efforts to preserve the detention and secrecy architecture built by its predecessors.

This involves the Obama administration taking up the the Al-Haramain case in which a charity is attempting to sue the government in matters relating to the warrant-less spying under Bush & co.

One passage in particular stands out:

"Obama defenders take note: this is not a case where the Obama DOJ claims more time is needed to decide what to do, nor is it even a case where the Obama DOJ merely passively adopted the Bush DOJ's already filed arguments. Here, they have done much, much more than that. Obama lawyers have been running around for weeks attempting one desperate, extreme measure after the next to prevent this case from proceeding -- emergency appeals, requests for stays, and every time they lose, threats of still further appeals, this time to the U.S. Supreme Court. "

This is not a question of time or resources but of the way the new administration uses the resources it already has.

A spontaneous "tea party revolt" it's not

2009-03-06T17:12:00.000-08:00

Although this article is a bit dense and may prove somewhat tedious to plow through, the chain of evidence requires a full explanation. Ingeniously using the google cache as well as examining the timing of the creation and initiation of web sites, two reporters have established that the supposedly "spontaneous" right-wing "tea party revolt" was planned months in advance, at least as far back as August 2008. Actions surrounding and preceding Santelli's "rant" on CNBC indicate that this was a scripted and deliberate PR stunt.

BTW, I have also learned a new term from this article - when the right wing fabricates a fake grass roots movement it's called "Astroturfing." Wonderful.

Exposing the rightwing PR machine

Not your Great Grandfather's crash.

2009-03-06T17:10:00.001-08:00

This graphic speaks for itself.

I have double-checked the figures. Yikes.

Why some enjoy anonymity (and "Octo Mom" does not)

2009-02-27T17:02:00.000-08:00

Updated below

One of the everyday hypocrisies in the U.S. (and something that I find myself falling into sometimes) comes from the obsession with very ordinary and "small" people who have committed relatively minor offenses while very "big" people commit far more major offenses live in comfortable anonymity.

Lindsay Beyerstein, blogging at Majikthise has a post about Nadya Suleman the "Octo Mom" who now has 15 children. One paragraph in particular I found noteworthy:

In the grand scheme of things, the resources consumed by 14 extra poor kids in California is (sadly) negligible compared to other conspicuous consumption that is accepted as normal. We may look askance executives who earn and spend thousands of times as much as the average worker, but they don't usually get accosted by angry mobs at gas stations like Suleman was.

By the way, I don't like her either, but let's have some perspective, folks.

Current events have made the phrase "privatizing profits and socializing losses" far more common than I ever dreamt possible. Looking beyond consumption, I wonder why we do not see similar outrage in reaction to raiding the treasury whenever a huge corporation screws up royally. The jobs of ordinary people remain the hostages in the relationship between the government and multi-millionaires. But let the government try employing people directly, and the howling and hissing from the right can frighten wildlife (thank you Bob Harris for that expression).

Republicans must stop another New Deal any way they can. Another New Deal would succeed (as the last one did). They can't let that happen. If it does, then they will languish for decades in electoral obscurity and they know it. (Of course, the Democrats can figure out a way to screw up. You never can tell.) The Republicans will obstruct a known, proven solution that has already worked once before (that is to say, the last time the Republicans and Wall Street crashed the economy). They do not care how many people have to suffer - the rest of us are expendable.

But it's the Octo Mom who faces the angry mob?

Update2
Republicans have made much mileage since the 70s over taxes. Taxes have no constituency to defend them. No one likes them. Attacking taxes has strangled programs (whether good or bad) by making the constituencies attack each other. Now that government is the only lifeline available to a growing number of people, their self-interest informs them a bit differently now. Those taxes don't look so bad anymore.

Censorship at You Tube

2009-02-22T10:42:00.000-08:00

Updated below

There now exists a kind of censorship that looks like an off-shoot of "commercial" censorship in which a business suppresses a given expression by means of refusing to transmit it. Of course, businesses are free to transmit whatever, I get that. The trouble comes when a business represents itself as "open" and "promoting freedom of expression" as an advertising and marketing "message" but then pulls the content anyway. You Tube started out as a small operation with these ideals in mind. Then Google ate it.

This becomes one of those "privately owned public commons problems." On the one hand the openness of the internet provides us with the "many to many" mode of mass communication. But then when a 500 lbs. gorilla like Google eats every platform that has any degree of success in facilitating this kind of communication, you have the removal of the public commons into a private domain.

In two instances (that I know of, there may be more) a small band of close-mined jackasses have misused the social networking features on You Tube to attack videos they do not like. Creationists and zealots have flagged as offensive videos without any "dirty words" (or the same sort of dirty words that the average junior high student hears and says every day) or "obscene" visual imagery. They have filed bogus DCMA complaints and also used "vote-boting" to lower a videos ratings artificially. The vote-boting works by deceiving Google's automated processes into thinking that the video in question is some crap that no one likes. Used together, these tactics make a given video look like it has only crap content, has few or no viewers thereby making it "safe" to remove and in some cases even an entire channel is also "safe" to remove. The principle victims of this censorship campaign have been atheist science-geek types who post satirical/humorous or serious science-oriented videos that dispute creationist and/or authoritarian religious views very directly and effectively. Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway because I'm pissed off) if one's own views/videos are so self-evidently clear, convincing and true, why then would you have to censor videos that express disagreement or derision?

But the last time Google/You Tube tried to take the easy way out and allow a small group of users to manipulate it into censoring a video or a channel, this behavior backfired. They tried to squash a British comedian named "Pat Condell" last Fall and that blew up in their faces as his viewers (and I proudly among them) posted his videos far and wide and raised hell with You Tube. Now another Brit has need of that same kind of assistance.

Thunderf00t has posted a video explaining his difficulties with You Tube's management in dealing with vote-boting, false flagging and false DMCA complaints against his videos. He suggests sending e-mail to You Tube's advertising address, rather than its help address, as You Tube really does have to read every message in its advertising mail box or risk losing business.

What do we want You Tube to do?

I suggest if you write to You Tube as Thunderf00t asks, that you ask them to fix the holes in their social networking functionality, in particular to prevent "vote-boting." Also ask them to enforce their terms of service cudgel on the users falsely flagging videos and more importantly on those users filing false DMCA complaints. (BTW, the threadbare basis for these bogus DMCA complaints is the use of another user's video in one's own - a use very specifically protected under "fair use" as small portions copied for the purpose of criticism and parody have always enjoyed the affirmative defense of the fair use doctrine).

Other things you can do:

You can go to Thunderf00t's channel then subscribe to it and also add it as a "friend." The advantage of adding it as your "friend" is that in the future if Google/You Tube/500 lbs. gorilla tries to remove his channel (again) then he can distribute word of this to us and therefore mobilize a reaction. You Tube also looks at subscriptions to see how "popular" a channel is. Lots of subscribers will make them think twice about mindlessly blocking/removing someone's video and/or channel. From the link above you can view his videos, including the "Why do people laugh at creationists" series which first triggered the efforts to make You Tube remove them.

I noticed when looking for the video detailing his troubles with You Tube that numerous people have re-posted the video as a way to prevent Google/500 lbs. gorilla/You Tube from taking it down. If you have a You Tube account and the technical facility to do so, you may want to repost it yourself. I have also rated all of the re-posts that I could find as a way to make automated censorship more difficult.

You may also consider subscribing to and adding as friends other channels not presently under attack that have content you like, just as a preventative measure.

Keep in mind, just in case I did not make clear, that I do not accuse You Tube of taking the side of creationists or purposely censoring science or political/religious views. Google is a business taking the easy way as much as possible to reduce costs and maximize profits. This is what businesses do. A relatively small number of dishonest authoritarian kooks has figured out a way to exploit this corporate behavior to their advantage. If we want to keep You Tube or the internet in general a place for freely expressing and finding meaningful content, we need to act. If the 500 lbs. gorilla figures out that it's angering 10 times more viewers that the ones it's appeasing, its self-interest will kick in. Otherwise, You Tube will devolve into another Fox News channel.

Update, Feb 27, 2009: Thunderf00t has a new video detailing the victory over censorship. He asks that people stop e-mailing You Tube because his account has been restored, his channel open and all attempts to suppress his videos have ceased. You can view his third video on this matter. It includes some details of the vagueness of You Tube's acceptable use policy.

Reagan wins a draw! Oops, I meant Palin

2008-10-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

I remember the Reagan/Mondale debates of 1984. After Reagan tanked badly during the first one (eerily similar to Palin's word salad babble to Couric) everyone thought he was through. Then the talking heads speculated that if he could hold his own in the second debate then maybe he could still win the election. I thought he sounded pathetic and possibly suffering from some sort of progressive degenerative brain disease (he was -- Alzheimer's). But before the second debate someone stole Mondale's briefing book (which turned up in the Reagan camp's hands). Reagan held up better in the second debate, not great, but at least he didn't grind down into a long garbled run-on sentence as he did in the first debate.

What do you think the headline was the next day? "Reagan wins a Draw!" (How does one "win" a draw? Oh, nevermind).

Already the talking heads are going on about how great Palin did because she could make subjects and verbs agree and speak in more-or-less clear sentences. Somehow this proves she's a viable candidate and is supposed to erase from our memories the word salad and the inability to name a newspaper or to describe a single example of McCain's "Maverick-ness" or, oh, nevermind. This is all sadly predictable. Has nothing changed in 24 years? Oh, and the media is run by a bunch of liberals. Right.

Habeas Corpus

2008-06-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

Although I probably recall reading about the vote in question two years ago when it happened, Greenwald's summary of this (pasted below) gave me my first LOL of the day.

The paragraph below comes from Glenn Greenwald's blog entry about the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding Habeas Corpus :

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was -- and remains -- one of the great stains on our national political character. It was passed by a substantial majority in the Senate (65-34) with the support of every single Senate Republican (except Chafee) and 12 Senate Democrats. No filibuster was even attempted. It passed by a similar margin in the House, where 34 Democrats joined 219 Republicans to enact it. One of the most extraordinary quotes of the post-9/11 era came from GOP Sen. Arlen Specter, who said at the time that that the Military Commissions Act -- because it explicitly barred federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions brought by Guantanamo detainees -- "sets back basic rights by some 900 years" and was "patently unconstitutional on its face" -- and Specter then proceeded to vote for it.

Is Specter the devil? "It's bad. It's evil. It's wrong. I LIKE it!"

What Children do matters

2008-03-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

Editorial

When the topic of diversity in the workplace comes up, I often mention that I do not think my own profession has the best record. That prize goes to truck drivers. I worked (very briefly) in a number of different low-skilled jobs when I was younger. One of them had me on a loading dock for the summer of 1979. I met numerous truck drivers then. I have met others now and then since. I have never encountered a more diverse profession. Anyone, all colors, all religions, from a Ph.D. to a 3rd grade drop-out, can be found behind the wheel of a big-rig. The Queen of England was once a truck driver. I'm not kidding.

During World War II the royal family considered it their duty to set an example. The war posed a threat to all of Great Britain. All of Great Britain would serve, somehow, someway. Any member of the royal family who came of age during the war joined the military. At that time the English Army had a female branch called the WTA -- The Women's Transport Auxiliary. Then Princess Elizabeth joined in 1944. She learned how to drive and repair trucks and drove a truck carrying military supplies throughout southern England. The male royals served in combat roles. Looking at this example, one wonders about the ethos of those in power who advocate most strongly for war.

In particular, consider John McCain and Hilary Clinton. I understand and accept that one can not order one's grown children into the service. During World War II King George VI had no authority to compel his daughter Elizabeth to join the WTA, nor any male family members to serve in combat. He did manage to instill in them the sense of duty and the sense that they could not hold themselves "above" serving Great Britain. I would put to you that any candidate for President, or any member of Congress, who has voted to authorize or has supported the Iraq War but who can not convince his or her own grown children of the importance of the war, fails to show the leadership needed to remain in elective office. If you can not even convince your own kids of the importance of the continued U.S. presence in Iraq, what do you expect the rest of us to think? If your own military age offspring do not see the war as a crisis requiring sacrifice for a greater good, why should anyone else?

Just as a side note, I omit Barack Obama because he has not supported the war. Although he did not come to the Senate until after the War began, he repudiated the rush to war at the time (and the people of Illinois elected him anyway - think about it) and has opposed the war since.

Also, I realize this is a side-note to the election campaign. I would not change my position on the war (against) even if all the sons and daughters of all the candidates and all the members of Congress who voted for this mess joined up. I am only pointing out an elitism, an arrogance of privilege, to which even the British royal family did not sink. (And do not even mention President Bush's daughters, nieces and nephews. Arrogance and privilege along with a sense of entitlement sum up all they have to offer. And one or more of them will run for office some day). Does no one else notice this?

New Jersey Uber Alles!

2007-09-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Read the NYT story about the town of Riverside, NJ and how it banned illegal immigrants. Then it's economy tanked. You would think they never even heard about the movie A Day without a Mexican. Or maybe they thought it only applied to California?

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

As quoted in the blog Bitch, Ph.D. "DUH." (Thanks, also to Bitch, Ph.D. for brining this one to my attention).

There's numerous laugh out loud bits in this article. It's worth a look. One last delicious quote from the mayor: "[the ordinance] put us on the national map in a bad way,” Mr. Conard said.

Well what did you think would happen?!

Disaster capitalism

2007-09-21T18:43:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting interview with Naomi Klein in salon.com

In particular, this stood out:

There is a new level of integration between homeland security companies and media companies. General Electric, which owns NBC, has been in the weapons industry for some time but has become very active in the homeland security business. They recently purchased InVision, which provides bomb detection for airports. Since 9/11 InVision has received $15 billion in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security -- more such contracts than any other company. A company like that gains from the atmosphere of crisis and fear that is spread through media outlets. It's war against evil everywhere with no end. That's a war that can't be won, and you couldn't ask for a more profitable business plan. The only thing that threatens it is peace.

This reminds me of the media coverage of the Soviet Union and Nicaragua in the 1980s. No conflict of interest when the news and the arms producers are the same company. We trust them! Right.

I'm not sure how to verify this next passage, but I find the attempt to connect the dots between the events hard to dispute:

I look at torture in two ways in the book. The first is as an enforcement tool used by states that are trying to push through an economic transformation of a country that is so wildly unpopular that terror -- including torture -- must be used to control the population. Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the 1970s are classic examples of places where very real shocks to bodies were used to spread terror, making it possible to impose economic shocks. China is another example. And I argue that the use of torture by U.S. forces in Iraq was related to the huge social unrest sparked by Paul Bremer's attempt at an extreme country makeover. Many analysts agree that his decision to dissolve the army, to fire huge numbers of public sector workers, to push through investment rules that decimated Iraqi industry, and to cancel local elections all contributed to the rise of the armed resistance. And it was at that point that the war moved into the jails and torture spread.

The whole interview is worth a look, even if Salon.com makes you sit through an ad first (sorry). I find Klein gives some concrete verifiable examples of the idea that the so-called "free market" relies on government intervention, bail-outs, and various tricks to "rig the game."

Numbers

2007-09-14T20:12:00.000-07:00

I just read several blog entries on This Modern World concerning the number of Iraqis killed as a result of the war. The posts discuss the Lancet study and its contested results, as well as a new study and its methodology. You can read the original posts here, and here.

But the most revealing part of the story comes from what no one mentions anymore: the U.S. military has actively interdicted attempts to count civilian casualties. In November of 2004 the assault on Fallujah started with the capture of the cities hospitals. According to the Salon.com story at the time:

One unnamed senior American officer acknowledged that the hospital had become a "center of propaganda," reflecting the military's frustration at the high death tolls doctors frequently announce after American bombing raids.

The Pentagon does not report "collateral" casualties. The Iraqis can not. So what does that mean? If you do not count them, they're not dead?

I am not surprised by the attack on factual information. Truth is, after all, truly the first casualty of war. What surprises me is the success.

Cholera comes to Iraq

2007-09-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Yes, a disease unknown in the parts of the world with functioning public services has now arrived in the place the Bush Administration claims has improved lately. According to the Associated Press the epidemic remains only in Northern Iraq. This is a pre-20th Century disease that literally has not been a problem in the region for over a century.

From the AP story: "As of Sept. 10, 6,000 have been reported with symptoms such as diarrhea and vomiting in the province of Sulaimaniyah, another 7,000 in Tamim province, and 3,000 in Irbil province, the WHO said in a statement."

Diebold edits away computer scientists' concerns

2007-08-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

According to a database that tracks the sources of anonymous edits to Wikipedia, Diebold, the manufacturer of defective and easily hacked touch-screen voting machines has had someone heavily edit a Wikipedia article about these voting machines. According to Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, someone from Diebold deleted "wholesale a 15-paragraph section describing computer scientists’ concerns with the devices."

Read the Chronicle of Higher Education article that alerted me to this rather unscholarly editing job.

Here's a link to Wikipedia scanner the database of the origin of edits.

Are you a good risk or a bad risk?

2007-07-13T11:01:00.000-07:00

Most of us start out as good risks, but we all become bad ones eventually. "Good" and "Bad" here do not have pejorative meanings: they refer to concepts that insurance executives understand very well. In health insurance, those of us born without any serious health problems start out as good risks. As we age, we become more vulnerable to illness, the injuries that only slow us down a bit in our youth can prove catastrophic when our bones become more brittle and we take longer to recover. As our life spans have increased, we come down with diseases that our ancestors did not live long enough to contract. These natural and predictable changes to our bodies make us "bad" risks. Not all young people are good risks. Some have congenital conditions or genetic diseases, or even just genetically based "odds" of having a serious health problem in youth or middle age. But no matter what, we all will become bad risks if we live long enough.

For an insurance executive, you make a profit insuring the good risks and you avoid insuring the bad risks. The premiums private insurance companies offer to young healthy people cost so much less than those they offer to older people that the young healthy ones can not resist the bargain. Also, many young people starting out in life do so under a mountain of student load debt. For most of them the jobs they have usually do not pay very much either. But even when an older person has climbed the ladder and has a higher income (and not everyone does) the premiums for health insurance become astronomical. This is way out of proportion to the greater income that an older person may have. They are bad risks. They must pay more.

The structure of this system, the "rules of the game," dictate that all health insurance companies must do all they can to attract the good risks, not insure the bad risks, and then boot the good risks out of the system as soon as they become bad risks. A company that does not have enough good risks will quickly go out of business. When their competitors lure away the good risks with lower premiums the company will have mostly bad risks left, which cost more than the premiums an ordinary member of the community can afford. But if you keep the good risks pooled with the bad, it all works out. Some of the good risks die (accident or quick killing disease) early enough in their lives to create a "gain" in the pool of funds to which all contribute. New "good risks" entire the pool all the time and the "bad risks" do not live forever. Someone who lives longer and needs more health care than the person "pays" for, benefits from the funds that the unfortunate unlucky good risks contributed before their untimely deaths. In a system that pools both good and bad risks, It's all about sharing risk.

This is not conspiracy theory. By allowing "free market" rules to reign you create a structural problem. Allowing companies to compete for "good risks" and dump the "bad risks" results in lower premiums for the good risks. But if you allow for this segmentation, sectioning off the two risks into separate pools, one pool of risks generates windfall profits while the other can not pay its own expenses. This also flies in the face of sharing risk. We're all part of the same life-cycle - we all become bad risks eventually, even if we start out as "good" ones. Those who decry this criticism with accusations of "conspiracy theory" miss this point, do not understand the nature of sharing risk, or have some other agenda. The structure of the industry, the "rules of the game" compel them to separate the risks.

But what you must keep in mind is that the good risks so seldom get sick or sustain serious injuries that even with the much lower premiums, the insurance company can amass a truly huge war chest containing hundreds of millions of dollars. They can throw millions of dollars at any candidate running against any elected official who stands up to the insurance industry. The good risks' premiums make the for-profit insurance industry so flush with funds that many of them can run dozens of TV commercials a week telling you what wonderful humanitarians they are. But their humanitarian face they show to people with lots of money or to good risks. Other people see a different face. Oh, and the good risks are so good that the insurance companies even have enough funds to pay 6 and 7 figure salaries to their top executives, give bonuses to the claims examiners who deny the most coverage and pay for 4 lobbyists for each member of Congress. What if we used that money to provide health care?

The news of layoffs of Ford Motors in Business Week mentioned the cost of providing health benefits now constitutes a cost the company can no longer afford. We (the U.S.) is no longer competitive because other post-industrial countries have national health care. Their companies do not have to provide health benefits. They have no link between employment and health care. The U.S. is the only industrialized country without a national health care service.

A successful national health care service must utilize what's called the "single payer" model, or some form of it. In the single payer model, the good risks and the bad risks pay the same premiums. The "surplus" from the good risks who seldom face serious illness and heal from injuries more quickly pays for the care of the "bad" risks that we all we become some day. Everyone is part of the same cycle. Instead of political campaign contributions and TV commercials the good risks' premiums go to providing care. This system also keeps the price affordable. When you remove the incentive to charge "what the market will bear" for medical diagnostics and surgeries, etc. the prices come down. For years I have read articles about how uninsured pay more (when they can afford a hospital stay at all). The explanations from the health care industry is that they charge the same for everyone, but the insurance companies and HMOs, PPOs, etc. can negotiate a bigger discount. Think about it. If you don't realize this is insane stop reading now and please don't bother to comment. The "discount" kind of argument is called "Sophistry" and the dishonesty shines through no matter how you phrase it. Put another way: don't think of it as socialism, think of it as the uninsured negotiating a really big discount.

And all the screaming about government inefficiency does not stand up to the facts. Consumer Reports has published lengthy articles about health insurance in which it compared the "overhead" of HMOs with that of Medicare and Medicaid. The overhead measured as a number of dollars per hundred dollars of re-imbursement breaks out as follows: Medicare and Medicaid: $3 per hundred ; HMOs average around $15 per hundred with the most cost-effective one, Kaiser Permanente, holding at about $12 per hundred. Think of all the money we would have to spend on health care if the marketing executives and the upper management had to go find something useful to do. When you see Michael Moore's movie Sicko! look past the grandstanding and the PR stunts while you consider that even the insured do not receive the health care the Insurance companies promise to deliver. Anecdotal, you say? String enough anecdotes together and you have research. And when we talk about efficiency, the private corporation proves very efficient -- at taking our money then not giving us what they promised in return.

The chief criticism of our present system concerns prevention. If a person receives regular check-ups, proper diagnostic procedures and spends enough time with a physician to learn about nutrition and exercise, we can reduce costs. And the policy of only insuring people with jobs will prove self-defeating as well. Imagine a young person just starting out. The person is unemployed, or under-employed. If that person does not receive medical attention for a problem in its early stages then that person enters the insured pool with a serious chronic condition which requires far more resources and money to deal with than had we allowed the person to see a doctor in the first place. If the system no longer forces uninsured people to neglect their health then they will not have only the ER to turn to and have to wait until the condition becomes serious or life-threatening. The ERs are overloaded now because there are so many people without primary health care. That makes the ERs big money pits, which is why hospitals are getting rid of them. There are now half as many ERs in the San Francisco Bay area as there were during the Loma Preita earthquake in 1989. But the population has increased. Nice to know we're prepared.

An MRI in Japan costs less than half as much as one done in the U.S. Grossly overweight patients need a whole different machine - one that is not only larger but also uses more radiation to make a picture. MacDonald's spends hundreds of millions of dollars advertising its food, not as an occasional treat, but as a staple. I can tell you as an insider in the education business that education costs money. If we want people to live more healthy lives those hundreds of millions that MacD's has to throw at advertisement directed very specifically at children would really come in handy. No exaggeration: MacDonald's spends more advertising to children than the Federal Government does in aid to public elementary schools. Stopping people from eating crappy food costs money. But not as much money as the medical costs obesity incurs. Preventative care saves money.

But a National system can not work if it has to "cooperate" with private insurance. If we let private insurance poach the good risks and then dump them in the government-run part of the system as soon as they start to cost too much, the government-run system will rapidly turn into a money pit and the private companies will continue to stuff hundreds of millions of dollars into their campaign war-chests, ready to crush any politicians who try to implement a single-payer system. If we enter into a system in which each person can only have as much healthcare as they have "paid" for (health spending accounts) then we have no sharing of risk, and that system breaks down eventually too.

Which is why the democrats can not save us. Obama did not even have a health care plan until after a person embarrassed him with a question about one and all the other democrats present had an answer. Now that he has had his staff come up with something, he promises not to do away with private insurance (of course not). Edwards' rhetoric sounds good until you listen carefully. He stresses that no one "with a job" should be without health care. This panders to the element in the U.S. population that goes into apoplexy over the possibility that some lazy someone somewhere is receiving something paid for with the apoplectic's tax money. Edward's "plan" according to a June 14 Associate Press article, includes requiring health insurance companies to spend 85% of the premiums they collect on patient care. Sounds great until you remember that's the average amount that private insurance companies pay already. Phrased the same way, Medicare and Medicaid pay the equivalent of 97%. His plan ignores the reality that the profit private insurance companies gain from poaching the good risks. He promises to "tax millionaires" to pay for his plan. This may prove difficult as millionaires have resources and power they can use to squash a health plan that relies on taxing them. But all this misses the point: if you stop letting private insurance poach the good risks and then dump them into the government paid part of the system later on we will have the money to pay for a universal health care system. Private, for-profit insurance company CEOs may have to sell a summer home or two to get by after their layoffs and the people who actually do the work can join the publicly run system as auditors, fraud investigators and claims examiners. We will still need people to combat fraud and abuse of the system. And if democrats and republicans do not place adequate safeguards in the system then white collar criminals will take advantage of it (and the pundits will all cry about how that proves that government can't run a health care system).

Speaking of critics of national health care who claim that government run programs remain intrinsically inefficient, Michelle Malkin tried to argue that the scandal resulting from the revelations of how badly the Bush Administration's VA hospitals, and Walter Reed in particular, treat Iraq War veterans means that government run health care does not work. I'd like to say that only Malkin could torture logic that badly, but sadly we can expect others to take up this canard. Some interesting facts: Dr. David S.C. Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs ran the VA's health care into the ground. According to Salon.com:

... Chu and Winkenwerder had the wrong priorities, focusing on cutting costs while greater numbers of returning soldiers struggled against an increasingly strained military health care system. Both men know how to manage costs: Chu is an economist and mathematician who once worked in an Army comptroller office. And Winkenwerder is a former health insurance industry executive. But their résumés also point to the problem, according to their detractors. "The military tried to run military health care on the cheap -- like an HMO," said Paul Sullivan, who until March 2006 was a project manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs in charge of data on returning veterans. "And the consequences are the medical catastrophe and the bureaucratic nightmare that we see right now."

Anyone can create an inefficient system. That part is always easy. The United States could create a viable, single–payer universal health care system that reduces costs and improves health. This requires oversight and public involvement. If we let a handful of people tell us what can have, we will continue to have a mess. Universal health care does not make a 100% solution. We will always have frauds, bureaucrats and hypochondriacs making the system less than 100% perfect. Instead of focusing on the lack of a perfect solution, consider an improved one. Every other industrialized country has some kind of universal health-care system. We don't we?

Big Blue's Secret memo about Sicko!

2007-07-11T23:15:00.000-07:00

I have discovered the a VP for BlueCross wrote a memo about the movie Sicko! which someone leaked to Micheal Moore. Although Moore's web site lambasts many elements in this memo, I found a few additional points worth mentioning.

Barclay Fitzpatrick, VP for Corporate Communications for Blue Cross saw Sicko! and reported his experience in the (no longer) secret memo. The single most interesting part of his 4 page description and commentary comes from the fact that he did not take issue with any of the factual information presented in the film. He decries its "divisiveness," and "divisive tone" but does not deny the accuracy of the cases or data it presents. For example:

You would have to be dead to be unaffected by Moore's movie, he is an effective storyteller. In Sicko Moore presents a collage of injustices by selecting stories, no matter how exceptional to the norm, that present the health insurance industry as a set of organizations and people dedicated to denying claims in the name of profit. Denial for treatments that are considered "experimental" is a common story, along with denial for previous conditions, and denial for application errors or omissions. Individual employees from Humana and other insurers are interviewed who claim to have actively pursued claim denial as an institutionalized goal in the name of profit.

Let's take this apart one piece at a time. First, "selecting stories, no matter how exceptional to the norm..." How does one establish a norm? Is a norm true in 90% of the cases? 51% of the cases? He does not say. "Denial for treatments that are considered "experimental" is a common story." But he does not say that this "common story" is false. He also ignores (and in so doing, confirms as undisputed) that Moore shows these "exceptional to the norm" stories simply do not happen in countries with universal health care. Most importantly, the sentence: "Individual employees from Humana and other insurers ... who claim to have actively pursued claim denial as an institutionalized goal" does not in itself dispute the claim. The wording deftly implies falsehood without actually stating such outright. Think about it. If the "claims" were false and such never happened in the industry, would not the writer state such in a memo designed to give guidance for "damage control?" He also fails to mention Laura Pimo's testimony, which Moore makes the centerpiece of the film's section on the inner workings of the Health Insurance industry. She testified under oath before a Congressional committee bluntly admitting that she wrongly denied coverage to a person who died for lack of medical care. When evaluating damage control memos you should look at what the writer does not say as much as what he does. Barclay Fitzpatrick crafted an astonishing evasion of the blindingly obvious.

Second, in a list of "key areas of misperception cultivated by the movie" he mentions

"Perhaps most damaging of all, Moore completely fails to address the most significant driver of health care costs - our own lifestyle choices - and seeks to focus attention and efforts on the alluring 'quick-fix' of universal health care. It has taken a generation of poor nutrition and exercise to get obesity and related health issues - and subsequent costs - to their current levels, and Moore's movie fails to acknowledge the causal relationship or need to change (he briefly touches the subject in a non-memorable way)."

I remember the part of the movie Fitzpatrick refers to as touching on "the subject in a non-memorable way." Moore interviews a doctor in England, discovering that the doctors there receive bonuses for reducing the number of smokers in their practice, or lowering the blood pressure or cholesterol levels of their patients. Gee, I found it memorable. (Or maybe he refers to Moore's passing mention that our mortality rate is just above that of Slovakia, making us 43rd in the world. If so the fact that he failed to note the difference in physicians incentives between the U.S. and Britain speaks volumes in itself). Fitzpatrick continues:

"Contrast this to the recent Health Care Symposium held in Harrisburg - where a panel of representatives from Government, Insurance, Hospitals, Business, Physicians, and even Lawyers agreed on one thing - that there was no quick fix and that Health and Wellness was the critical area of focus."

If "health and wellness" is truly the critical factor, then why doesn't the U.S. health insurance industry reward doctors the way the British one does? And why do they expect that doctors can educate their patients about healthier living if they are forced to see so many a day that they can only spend 5 to 10 minutes with each one? Also, this Panel at the "Health Care Symposium" did not include patients (but it did include "even lawyers!"). This omission tells us how much health insurance executives cares about patients. Along the same lines, the attempt to blame costs on our poor habits fails to explain how obesity influences the cost of MRIs? The 18-month old who died while traveling from one ER to an "in-network" one did not look obese, nor did the young woman denied chemotherapy for cancer. But I understand when cancer goes untreated a person can really slim down a lot.

More guilt by omission occurs in another part of the memo:

" The Impact
Moore's movies are intentionally intense and his objective in Sicko seems to be to revive the earlier Clinton efforts - not to achieve universal coverage with this movie, but to push the topic to the top of the agenda. He will be just as successful whether proponents mount momentum or discussion entails key stakeholders defending why it won't work. [emphasis mine]

I find the last 5 words fascinating, especially the word "defending." Not "explaining," not "proving," not "demonstrating." Also who are the "key stakeholders" anyway? My guess would be the "representatives from Government, Insurance, Hospitals, Business, Physicians, and even Lawyers" mentioned above (not patients). And the memo does not state why "it [universal healthcare] won't work" nor do the "talking points" at the end give so much as a sketchy reason why "it won't work." That "it" works in other countries Fitzpatrick does not dispute, another telling omission. If it works in France and Britain, why will it not work in the U.S.? Any concrete reasons? All the memo gives are condescending descriptions of Universal health care as an "alluring 'quick-fix'" and that in other countries "Everybody gets along and takes care of each other and life is beautiful because there is universal health care," as well as the references to Moore's "diviseness" mentioned above. My favorite quote along these lines is "Positive change to our healthcare system can be best achieved through shared responsibility, not recrimination." OK, so who's sharing responsibility for the dead people? You know, the ones that prompt medical attention (or any medical attention at all) could have saved? Who is "sharing responsibility" for the September 11th volunteers who do not have insurance? Who is sharing responsibility for Edith Rodriguez, who bled to death in an ER last may, vomiting blood while the nurses ignored her? The government managed to take responsibility for the health care of the prisoners at Guantanamo (and other prisoners in our penal system). I would never suggest denying medical care for prisoners. I only wonder why rest of us can't have the same treatment as a prisoner. For the uninsured (and uninsurable) the medical care a prisoner receives constitutes a vast improvement over his present situation.

Health insurance companies have the money and the power to dictate policy. Fitzpatrick laments that in Sicko! "Legislators are presented as bought stooges for the political agendas of insurers and big Pharma." If you didn't want us to see them as your stooges you shouldn't have shoveled millions of dollars (paid for with members' premiums) into their re-election campaigns. Universal health care works in other industrialized countries and the main reason we do not have it in the U.S. is that people like Barclay Fitzpatrick, people who occupy positions of power and influence but do not hold elective office nor find themselves subject to any accountability except to their boards or stockholders, who lie by omission or misdirection, who write secret memos, will not allow it to work.

Court of the Queen of Hearts

2007-07-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Updated below
In another example of the legal system imitating Alice in Wonderland the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down a lawsuit which challenged the warrant-less surveillance of all of us. Because the plaintiffs, a group of lawyers and journalists led by the ACLU, "had no standing to sue" (meaning that they could not prove damage). In legalese, the decision vacates an order of a lower court and sent the case back to that court for dismissal.

Remember the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Caroll's story? How else do you wrap you mind around a case in which the secrecy protects the government from challenge because the people objecting to the loss of their rights can not pierce the veil of secrecy enough to find evidence they need to proceed with any legal remedy? Any lawyers care to comment?

Update:
Glenn Greenwald posted a lengthy and excelent analysis of this decision and its implications on his blog at salon.com. It's well worth the read.

The misfortune of being born Iraqi

2007-05-13T09:08:00.000-07:00

A New York Times Magazine article by Nir Rosen about the Iraqi refugee crisis contains the following gem:

“What I find most disturbing,” [Kenneth] Bacon [president of Refugees International] went on to say, “is that there seems to be no recognition of the problem by the president or top White House officials.” But John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control and international security in the Bush administration, and later ambassador to the United Nations, offers one explanation for this lack of recognition: it is not a crisis, and it was not triggered by American action. The refugees, he said, have “absolutely nothing to do with our overthrow of Saddam.

“Our obligation,” he told me this month at his office in the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, “was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war”…

When I read John Bolton’s comments to Paula Dobriansky — the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs — and her colleague Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, they mainly agreed with him.

I immediately recalled an public appearance by former CIA agent John Stockwell which I attended in 1989. I remember during his recounting his experiences as the Vietnam War ended, he had a conversation with the CIA station chief in Saigon. In response to Stockwell's begging him to authorize the evacuation of CIA assets (English translation: Vietnamese people who worked for the CIA at great risk, who would most certainly die at the hands of the victorious North Vietnamese) the station chief refused and stated flatly, "It is not our fault that these people had the misfortune to be born Vietnamese."

Oh, and courtesy of This Modern World I read this wonderful exhibit from the memory hole: “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude. That's the problem here in America: They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq." -- George W. Bush, last January.

I suppose these kinds of disconnections must exist in order for administrations, present and past, to function at all. I wonder what the people who voted for Bush in 2004 think of this?

George Tenet on 60 Minutes

2007-04-29T21:19:00.000-07:00

I usually do not watch 60 Minutes as the creative editing of any given interviewee tends to show what the producers and the talking heads want the audience to see. Despite this, I could not resist watching George Tenet's interview. I had already read a juicy passage from his new book, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory, that woke me up this morning.

A New York Times piece recounts the passage that describes Tenet's discovery of an "off the books" operation to de-stabilize the Iranian government. During a meeting with Italian intelligence officials the Italians ask him about the recent contacts between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents living abroad. When they realize that none of the Americans at the table knew what they were talking about they quickly changed the subject.

Tenet on 60 Minutes scared the crap out of me. He refused to acknowledge that the U.S. intelligence agencies use torture. He yelled at the interviewer and insisted that "he wouldn't debate semantics" with him and repeatedly stated that they do not torture. But the use of the words "enhanced interrogation techniques" he left undefined. I also caught how he limited his comments to "just the program we're discussing" in order to confine his comments to only one operation by the CIA while under his leadership. Thus he very deftly avoided incurring any accusation of lying on TV when details of other "programs" come to light (some already have). He can always say he wasn't talking about that program. The talking head interviewing him let this pass.

His account of how the Niger uranium bogus allegation found its way into the State of the Union address sounded very fishy. He claimed that he had shot it down and insisted on its removal from two previous speeches. The State of the Union one he delegated to an underling. Oops. What does that say about the staff in the White House that they kept trying to put this bogus statement into speeches after repeated rebuffs from the CIA director? And what does it say about Tenet that after the speech he did not resign in protest? (Keep in mind that Tenet and other high ranking government officials are millionaires. He wouldn't starve or have to work as a town dog-catcher).

And one additional interesting revelation came during the part about the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. On September 12th Tenet comes to the White House with airline manifests showing the Al-Queda members on the airplane and Richard Perle tells him that Iraq is going to have to pay for this attack. In the interview Tenet stated emphatically that he told the White House that there existed no connection whatsoever between Iraq, and Saddam Hussein with Al-Queda and Bin Laden. How did it happen then, that opinion polls of soldiers on active duty in Iraq showed that over 60% of them believe that Iraq had some involvement in the September 11th attacks? How did they get that idea? Will this 60 Minutes interview find its way to the airwaves in the U.S. Military bases in Iraq (maybe they can squeeze it in between the continuous feeds of Rush Limbaugh shows?)

As a friend of mine commented recently, the rats are leaving the sinking ship, and they're really obvious about it. In his attempt to jump clear of the Bush Administration's coming train wreck Tenet did not come off very well. He and others proved willing and enthusiastic enablers to keep their positions of power and status by going along with the Bush Administration's plans and machinations. I find it very indicative of his character that by his own admission Tenet resigned not when White House staff sidelined his Agency when they opened up a Oliver North-like rouge operation and did not tell him about it. But he resigned when someone (as yet unknown) leaked an embarrassing statement to make him into the scapegoat for the intelligence failure that justified the war. The interview tonight makes clear to me that he had plenty of opportunities to see where allegiance to the Bush Administration would lead him and plenty of opportunities to resign in a way that would have allowed him to "take the high road" and preserve his integrity. If he didn't want to go down with the cult then he shouldn't have drunk the Kook Aid.

The Capital Eye

2007-04-26T19:11:00.000-07:00

In the 90s I enjoyed reading through web sites such as The Coin Operated Congress by Mother Jones (discontinued in 2001) and The best congress money can buy from the Center for Responsive Politics (Discontinued in 1994). I recently discovered the legacy of one of these sites: The Capital Eye. Although it does not include a searchable database such as the ones from the 90s, it has loads of factual information from the Center for Responsive Politics. Find out who's buying Edwards, Clinton and Obama (as well as Giuliani, McCain and Romney - to name a few).

Freedom of Speech vs. the Public Airways

2007-04-15T11:53:00.000-07:00

I highly recommend to anyone who can find a copy, that you watch the Bill Moyers' documentary Free Speech For Sale. He reviews three instances of the freedom to say whatever you like enjoyed only by those who can afford it. In particular, the Telecommunications reform act of 1996 (a monstrosity signed into law by President Clinton, for those who are keeping score of Republican v. Democratic misdeeds) consolidated a still growing monopoly of broadcast media in the hands of a few billionaires. You can say what you like, but in many cases, you can not even Pay to be heard.

The most notorious of the examples of an advertisement that could not get on the air was in 1993 when a group of non-profit healthcare advocacy organizations could not find a network to air a 15 second spot in which a grandmother sitting in a rocking chair asked simply how much more money we would have for health care if we did not have to pay for marketing, advertising and the high salaries of top management of HMOs and other insurance companies. The do-gooders had the cash to pay for the commercial to air, but no one would take it. At the time the Nation reported that the networks feared antagonizing the Health Insurance industry and lose much more advertising revenue (you know, all those commercials telling us how wonder Kaiser or some other HMO is) than just the few hundred thousand dollars it cost to show a 15-second spot only once. (Beltway bandits: Banned in Boston The Nation. New York: Jun 14, 1993.Vol.256, Iss. 23; pg. 824, 1 pgs)

What does this have to do with some asshole in a cowboy hat making racist comments about a women's college basketball team? I find most the discussion about free speech implications of this incident somewhat absurd. The loud-mouths like Imus or Howard Stern or others have little or nothing to say of any interest to anyone. But they prove entertaining in their pointless rants and pursuit of cheap laughs. They sell advertising. I read this morning that CBS has pulled the plug on Imus' radio show. Does this constitute censorship? No more than Me not having a radio show constitutes censorship. If Imus thinks he has something important and/or entertaining to say he can do his own podcast, just like the rest of us. Imus comes under the same sort of rules that govern the rest of us. We can have a radio or TV show if we can find advertisers to sponsor us. Both inflicting Imus on the airwaves as well as removing him from broadcast media resulted from business decisions.

The networks have a government enforced license to broadcast at a given power level on a given frequency in a given geographic area. Our tax money pays for the FCC and other law enforcement agencies to kick down doors (sometimes literally) to shut down pirate radio stations that "step" on the license holder's frequency. In order to keep the airwaves usable, and not a constant buzz of static as a mass of heterodynes cancel each other out, the FCC and some sort of orderly system for allowing a given party to use a given frequency in a given place must exist. But because the airwaves belong to the pubic, the license holders must provide some form of public service. In theory we should receive a variety of views and investigative reporting that actually reveals something important. Instead they gave us Imus. That the networks pulled the plug on Imus does not constitute censorship. That they inflicted him on us in the first place was the censorship. The empty place in the airwaves that should contain some better service to the public, the empty place in the airwaves where the commercials such as the one mentioned above should have run, the empty space in the airwaves where the public good demands investigative reporting -- they have to fill that empty space in the airwaves with something. If Imus had ever said anything worth listening to in the first place the networks would have pulled the plug on his show ages ago. No one would mention any content or comment as the cause, only "declining advertising revenues." The same reason they have pulled the plug on him now.

The excuse that the networks only give us what we "want" remains absurd on its face. GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out. If sponsors refuse to advertise on Air America or Hightower Radio then how can we know what we are missing? Does the world lack dynamic speakers who call attention to aspects of the day's news that others do not? Does the world lack people who can speak eloquently about issues of interest to most of us? How can we know if no one will sponsor a radio show for them? A media monopoly has effectively filtered out anyone who in any way challenges or does not support the corporations that control the airwaves. For the rest of us there are podcasts and blogs. Some asinine shock-jock got his racist ass kicked off the corporate media gravy-train. Imus is nothing more than a monkey who shit on one welcome mat too many. The real problem we have is with the organ grinder.

What if a Clinton did this?

2007-04-10T09:41:00.000-07:00

Standard disclaimer: I am not a fan of the Clintons. I regard Hilary Clinton's "promises" of a national health care system the way that Charlie Brown should regard Lucy's offer not to pull the football away instead of letting him kick it. I do not perceive the Clintons or most any democrat as "liberals." After the fall of labor unions the democrats had to go to the same trough as the the Republicans to gather enough money to run a campaign for public office and had to rely more heavily on privileged white college students for campaign workers. This turned the U.S. into a de facto plutocracy resulting in the degree of cluelessness and paralysis that our government displays, regardless of which "party" happens to be in power. That said, the democrats have proven considerably less toxic than the neocons that the GOP has installed into the Presidency.

And the question of whether the same standards apply to everyone still stands. Do the Republicans' followers and the voters fail to see how inane they look when they have a cow over something that a Clinton does then not raise an eyebrow when one of their own does the exactly the same? I would never seek to defend President Clinton's administration (but my disapproval comes from very different reasons than the silly-assed scandals that Kenneth Star & co. manufactured). But I am certain that if all the people who scream about morality and ethics and "does he have the character to lead" would apply the same principles to everyone more-or-less equally we would have a very different (and somewhat improved) government.

Take a look at this entry in the Salon.com blog: Neocons in Love. Paul Wolfowitz, currently President of the World Bank and previously the architect of the present war in Iraq, installed his girlfriend in a high position within the World Bank, gave her raises in contradiction to Bank policy. When caught, she landed in a job in the State Dept. (while still on the payroll of the World Bank). Presently, she earns more than Condoleeza Rice.

Now imagine if a Clinton did something like this. To paraphrase one of my favorite bloggers, (Bob Harris : "We'd hear howling and hissing from the right-wing that would frighten wildlife."

Definition: Government run by and for the wealthy.

What they didn't teach us in Library School

2007-04-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

Libraries as 19th century lunatic asylums

This essay in Tomsdispatch describes why I do not work in public libraries anymore. People use them for anything but places to read or research. People use them as free day-care for their children, and also as day facilities for homeless mentally ill people. We're not trained for this and caring for possibly dangerous deeply disturbed people is not what most expect when entering the library profession. But the unwillingness of the rest of the society to deal with this population means, at least during operating hours, we librarians have to.

Librarian Chip Ward wrote an incredible and very imporant essay on his real life experiences dealing with homeless mentally ill people on a day to day basis. Read the essay and introduction for yourself.

The most interesting part of this was the reference to studies that show we pay between $20,000 and $150,000 per mentally ill homeless person per year, depending on the city, for the costs of caring for them when they do go to the hospital or have to be incarcerated. I hope to find more information about these studies and will post them here if I can. If the figures prove verifiable then we are paying an awful lot to ignore people.

Hidden subtexts and innocence is no defense

2007-04-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Salon.com published an editorial by one of the fired U.S. Attorney, Bud Cummings, which contained a reminder of the power that the people have given the government. I must admit, this consideration remained hidden to me until I read a passage of Mr. Cummings' editorial which hit me like a brick:

"When a federal prosecutor sends FBI agents to your brother's house with an arrest warrant, demonstrating an intention to take away years of his liberty, separate him from his family, and take away his property, you and the public at large must have absolute confidence that the sole reason for those actions is that there was substantial evidence to suggest that your brother intentionally committed a federal crime. "

I almost forgot: due to another draconian piece of legislation, The RICO Act, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can, with only an arrest, strip you of your property. It's called "Civil Asset Forfeiture" and various State and Local police have used it to fund their agencies, even reviewing old cases looking for "seizure opportunities." In the 1990s, Barlett and Steele of the Philadelphia Inquirer reviewed about 10,000 such cases and found a disproportionate number of people who were not really part of organized crime had their property confiscated without a trial or conviction. RICO's asset forfeiture provisions specifically target the suspect's assets before trial because of the resources available to organized crime members to hire high-priced lawyers. But the actual application of this has hit people like cancer or glaucoma patients who grow their own weed for their own use in self-medicating. My favorite is a case that reached the Supreme Court: "Bennis v. Michigan" in which a woman lost the family car she needed to go to work to support her children because her husband was arrested in it-- caught in the act with a prostitute. The majority opinion upholding the confiscation amounted to "innocence is no defense."

Years of the rest of us allowing blatant injustices and draconian legislation come to pass will come back to bite us all. Imagine this sort of power in the hands of someone intent upon using the agencies of government to punish and harass his political opponents. Oops! Already happened. Nixon, whose administration spawned the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld, already tried that. And now the Bush administration has worked tirelessly to bring about a "unitary President." The steady erosion of civil liberties and protections may someday reach a saturation point (if it hasn't already) resulting in a President who can crush any political opposition with confication of property, IRS audits, and unfounded accusations gone unexplained because of the FBI's policy on not commenting on an ongoing investigation.

For years I have read or heard the rationalization: but if you're innocent you have nothing to worry about. Sorry, but innocence is no defense.

Another historical footnote:

I recall throughout the 80s and 90s the FBI would have a former agent accuse anti-war groups of "links with terrorist organizations" or "involvement in terrorist activities." Every time someone asked for substantiation, the official FBI spokesmen would say the standard disclaimer that the FBI has a policy of not commenting on an ongoing investigation. But starting in the late 1990s the National Security Archive at Georgetown University and the ACLU obtained documents showing no evidence of terrorist or violent activities by these groups. While trying to tack the "terrorist" label on Mothers Against Nuclear War the FBI wasted time and resources in addition to smearing people whose politics the FBI dislikes. One of my favorite references to verify this comes from an FBI agent named John Ryan, who in the 80s the FBI dismissed due to his refusal to follow orders to investigate anti-war groups such as Veterans Fast for Life and Swords to Plowshares. (He worked out of the Peoria, IL office and received the orders from the Chicago office). He stated flatly "I believe that in the past members of our government have used the FBI to quell dissent, sometimes where the dissent was warranted." (Herbert Mitgang's Dangerous Dossiers, NY : Fine, 1988, pp. 312-313).

Those interested in more information about the FBI and its practice of "bad-jacketing" take a look at Churchhill and Wall's Agents of Repression [corrected edition] (Boston : South End, c1990).

Airbrushing history

2007-03-31T14:39:00.000-07:00

Enemies of reality

What is Google [or its management] thinking? A recent AP story points out that "Google Earth" maps used to show satellite images of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina now show pre-Katrina New Orleans. What's up with that? Does Google hope to curry favor with the Bush Administration for some reason? I write that as a joke, but now I wonder. What could Google possibly hope to accomplish with this?

The House Committee on Science and Technology's subcommittee on investigations and oversight asked Google's CEO some pointed questions about this. I especially like the subcommittee's chairman's comment when he accused Google of "airbrushing history."

Down the memory hole

There exists some precedence for this sort of concealment of reality. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Panama the photographic services destroyed all the pictures of the devastation of Panama City and other parts of that Country, including the tent cities that sprang up in the wake of the U.S. military's destruction of poor people's homes. Without having to "store" loads of print photographs or negatives, those who, for whatever reason, wish to cover up the images of reality need a better excuse than whatever Google cooks up. Storage space for bits and bytes has never been cheaper.

Stealth regulation

2007-03-27T19:37:00.000-07:00

In the 90s I first learned of the tactic of "stealth legislation:" Legislation that the general public does not know about and Congress would like to keep it that way. When last I actively tracked this tactic I found changes to bankruptcy law, attempts to link clear-cutting forests to school funding and John McCain repeatedly trying to slip internet censorship into various funding bills.

Now Salon.com found a major bit of stealth regulation. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency attempted to keep a draft of the proposed destruction of the Endangered Species Act secret but someone leaked a copy. Although regulations, in theory must have a public review (meaning they can't keep it a secret forever) an Agency can stage a press conference without releasing the proposal far enough in advance to allow for anyone to mobilize against the proposed changes until after the PR battle has already started. This is not democracy.

Here are some highlights from
Inside the secretive plan to gut the Endangered Species Act:

The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.

In recent months, the Fish and Wildlife Service has gone to extraordinary efforts to keep drafts of regulatory changes from the public. All copies of the working document were given a number corresponding to a person, so that leaked copies could be traced to that individual. An e-mail sent in March from an assistant regional director at the Fish and Wildlife Service to agency staff, asking for comments on and corrections to the first draft, underscored the concern with secrecy: "Please Keep close hold for now. Dale [Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] does not want this stuff leaking out to stir up discontent based on speculation."

Administration critics characterize the secrecy as a way to maintain spin control, says Kieran Suckling, policy director of the Center for Biological Diversity, a national environmental group. "This administration will often release a 300-page-long document at a press conference for a newspaper story that will go to press in two hours, giving the media or public no opportunity to digest it and figure out what's going on," Suckling says. "[Interior Secretary Dirk] Kempthorne will give a feel-good quote about how the new regulations are good for the environment, and they can win the public relations war."

Call or write your Representatives and Senators now. And the full article is worth reading. Salon makes you sit through an ad (sorry) in order to read the full text without a subscription.

Also, if anyone knows of any mainstream news outlet reporting on this please put that information in a comment on this post!

It's a big gang

2007-03-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

I originally intended to write this as an update to the post about the Haditha murders but realized this new bit of tragedy and irony deserves its own post. While listening to Sergeant Frank Wuterich on 60 minutes he said something that I almost missed: a reference to the men fleeing from the car (who he shot and killed) as "military age men." Why should that matter? Then, a few days ago, I read about the court martial of another soldier, Staff Sergeant Ray Girouard, in which the phrase "military age men" appeared again. Girouard and three other soldiers face murder charges over the killing of three Iraqi prisoners on May 9, 2006. Girouard is the only one who has not entered a guilty plea. All of them point the finger at their fearless leader, Col. Michael Steele. As the news story reports:

"Military investigators found several witnesses who said they heard Colonel Michael Steele tell his troops to "kill all military-aged males" in the assault on a suspected insurgent base on an island in the Tigris River north of Baghdad.

Oh, and it gets worse. This lunatic managed to go so far into his delusional world that he allowed someone to film him giving the "pep talk" from which reporters have extracted this gem:

"Don't let them live to fight another day. They’re going to breed, multiply . . .,’You'll be eaten unless you act like the dominant one on the food chain...rely on your training to do what's right, do not hesitate...you’re the hunted … don't bring any of them back."

Does any of this ring a bell? In another war against a civilian population the U.S. military routinely searched for "military age males" in a given village and arrested all such men they found. If they were military age, the were supposed to enlist in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. If they did not, they were assumed to be the enemy. The Bush administration sent the U.S. military into the Iraqis country and now soldiers such as Girouard and Wuterich get to decide who lives or dies, based on assumptions fed to them by people like Col. Steele. A "military age" Iraqii is Not free to choose Not to join a military or police force? The Military spokespeople have played this one as a rouge officer acting as a bad influence over the men in his command. Also, statements about the U.S. soldiers suffering under stress and fatigue play into their defense.

Another gratuitous pop-culture reference:
How many remember the character of the helicopter gunner from the movie Full-Metal Jacket? He fired his machine gun at every Vietnamese they flew past. He said to the others: "If they run, it means they're VC. You know what we call the ones who don't run? Disciplined VC."

Which brings us back to Haditha. Military age males ran. Did that made them guilty of being undisciplined insurgents?

And the best part comes from a direct quote from one of the soldiers in the May 9, 2006 incident comparing what he did to a gang initiation: "That's what the army is, a big gang," said Private Corey Claget ..."

If these incidents constitute some inevitable effect of war, should President Bush have unleashed "a big gang" in the first place? Those of us who do not believe that war should ever start many can dismiss as naive or "moonbats" etc. But even those who believe that war is sometimes necessary usually also agree that one should not start the horror without a clear and present danger to the U.S. or its citizens. The right wing has reduced itself to screaming lies that only a handful of narrow-minded lunatics believes anymore. Sorry wing-nuts, but no one found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no one found evidence of collaboration by Iraq with Al-Queda or the Sept. 11th attacks. (Despite these facts, opinion polls of U.S. military personnel in Iraq have revealed that the majority of them believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had something to do with the Sept. 11th attacks). And while the Democrats dither around -- fearing that pulling the plug on the war will brand them as cowards allowing Republicans to win elections for the next 50 years by calling them defeat-crats -- the death and horror continues.

Sources:
US officer "upset" Iraqi suspects taken alive, court hears
Mar 14 08:44 AM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=070314134438.0mzife14&show_article=1&catnum=0

The Training And Conviction Of Staff Sergeant Raymond Girouard
http://www.amatotalk.com/2007/03/the_hearing_of_.html

Commander's Comments Draw Sharp Criticism: Colonel Will Not Testify In Soldier's Case
Reported By Demetria Kalodimos http://www.wsmv.com/news/11234564/detail.html
POSTED: 4:40 pm CDT March 12, 2007
UPDATED: 11:48 am CDT March 13, 2007

Chiquita and Terror

2007-03-20T17:23:00.000-07:00

A longer history than you think

How many people even recognize the name "Michael Gallagher" now? I admit, I had to do some research to find his name because I too had forgotten. But when I read that Chiquita has to pay a $25 million fine for hiring terrorists (of the right as well as the left. Well, at least Chiquita has an equal opportunity policy when it comes to hiring homicidal maniacs) to protect its plantations in Colombia.

Almost 10 years ago two men (that I know of) Michael Gallagher of The Cincinnati Enquirer and George Ventura, a former lawyer for Chiquita, received criminal convictions for illegally obtaining Chiquita company voice-mail messages that confirmed the sGallagher's story about how Chiquita routinely did business with right-wing terrorists and oppressive governments to make sure that any workers on their plantations in Central America who attempted to form a union or go on strike died horribly. He could connect the dots between Chiquita and death.

How much "harm" does a $25 million fine do to a company like Chiquita? Sounds like a lot of money? Chiquita makes $25 million in less than 2 working days. And besides, judgements against a company count as "losses" on its balance sheet and consequently reduce its taxes. Unlike most of the rest of us when we have to pay a parking ticket, the corporation gets to pay out of "pre-tax" earnings. No one at Chiquita goes to jail or has criminal convictions on their records. Remember that the next time you read about a corporation paying a big fine.

And almost lost in the memory hole: The Cincinnati Enquirer apologized to Chiquita and paid it a $10 million settlement over the story by Michael Gallagher that turned out to be the truth.

UPDATE: I found a link to an old salon story that is still live: Rotten Banana, by Bruce Shapiro

Debt and Doublespeak

2007-03-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Today's News, March 16, 2007, available by subscription only) I read that the New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, sent a warning letter to 400 colleges and universities concerning "problematic practices" he office has uncovered in the deals between lenders* and higher-education institutions. He has found evidence of kickbacks and other corrupt practices including colleges which have:

Received referral fees and a percentage of revenue for recommending particular loans to student borrowers.

Steered students to "preferred" lenders that may not offer the best terms and conditions.

Solicited money or other benefits from lenders in exchange for inclusion on their preferred-lender lists.

Delayed the certification of loans from lenders not included on their lists.

But here's the good part, and it's worth quoting at length:

"But some lenders say the attorney general's efforts could hurt the borrowers who depend the most on the advice of their financial-aid offices: low-income and first-generation students. If those students feel they can't trust their colleges' counsel, they may make unwise borrowing decisions based on misleading marketing, the lenders say."

So let me see if I undertand this. Calling attention to corrupt practices can disuade students from trusting the financial aid officials, some of whom deliberately mislead them, thereby allowing the students to fall prey to some other sharks than the ones who paid good money (to the school) to be the sharks who get to lend the students money at usurous rates?!

* On a personal note, I co-signed a student loan for my nephew. The sharks charge 8.5% interest compounded daily with repayment "generously" deffered until he is no longer enrolled as a full-time student. A $10K loan (with a $900 lending fee added) will cost between $30,000 and $40,000 in 4 to 5 years. And people wonder why the middle class has started to buckle under the weight of enormous debt. What did you think would happen?

Haditha nightmare

2007-03-18T21:31:00.001-07:00

First impressions of the 60 minutes interview

I just finished watching the 60 minutes interview with Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the man principally responsible for the killing of 24 civilians in the city of Haditha on November 19, 2005. He said he would do it again. His defense relies on the assertion that he followed his training.

Sadly, the unmistakable similarity to Vietnam struck me most during the interview. In the statements by Vietnam veterans, in writing and in documentaries, you can read and hear that they "cleared hooches" by throwing grenades into them. These and other details one can read on books such as Bloods and in the compilation of The Winter Soldier affidavits. Wuterich, sadly, tells much the same story.

The killing of 5 men who were in a car near the IED explosion that killed one of the Marines I found especially distressing. Wuterich stated that "Iraqis know the drill, they know what they're supposed to do." They are supposed to lie flat on the ground and put their hands up. I remember a Vietnam veteran interviewed on the documentary about Vietnam done in the 1980s describing how he shot an old woman who ran at the sight of him. He realized in retrospect that she just panicked and ran in terror. He shot her without giving it a second thought at the time but during the interview he admitted (in tears) that she must have been "running from the big bad American" and nothing more. The Iraqi men Wuterich shot dead were unarmed. Maybe they just did not want to go to Abu Ghraib. Would you?

Wuterich found nothing wrong with "clearing" two houses by throwing grenades into them without warning and then shooting everyone inside. There's an old Doonesbury cartoon involving the "Uncle Duke" character who one night shoots Zeke Brenner. While explaining this to a police detective in the next day's cartoon Duke says, "I'm cautious by nature. I don't like to walk into a dark room until I've softened it up." Life imitates art?

How does the presence of U.S. troops in Haditha make Iraq safer?

What the news forgot to tell us about the Plame scandal

2007-03-17T18:24:00.000-07:00

The memory hole:

I have a podcast of an interview Al Franken did on Air America with Larry Johnson, a former CIA agent. Johnson "graduated" from the same training group as Valerie Plame. (7/21/05 Al Franken Show interview with Larry Johnson)

I have listened to this again and have a compilation of facts, all well established parts of the public record, that the mainstream news forgot to mention this week in the aftermath of Valerie Plame's appearance before Congress.

First, a quick re-cap:

Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece pointing out that he had determined, long before President Bush's 2003 State-of-the-Union address, that the evidence (the only evidence anyone has ever had) indicating that Saddam Hussein had re-started his nuclear weapons program, proved totally bogus. The letter in question has already had a thorough debunking*.

Shortly after the publication of the letter, right-wing columnist Robert Novak published an editorial which revealed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a covert operative for the CIA and made the assertion that she recommended her husband for the task of meeting with the President of Niger, therefore she sent her husband on a junket, and therefore his information was "tainted" by the nepotism and misconduct of his wife in having him sent to confirm the "intelligence" in question.

The list of what I have not seen reported in the Mainstream Media:

1.) The CIA, and NOT left wing bloggers or liberals, took the matter of the leak to the Justice Department. The CIA collectively "wigged out" over the leak and insisted on an investigation. This is not some "liberal" plot against the White House.

2.) The leak of her identity as a CIA agent could have killed Plame. She was a "non-official cover" agent, meaning there was no "visible" link to the CIA. NOC: Non-official cover. For this and other reasons, Larry Johnson characterizes the leak of her identity as an act of treason.

3.) The damage extends well beyond Plame herself. Johnson points out that Plame acted as if a private citizen. The leak of her identity compromised everyone she worked with. The smear campaign that the right wing has raged for the last 4 years characterizes her as a "desk jockey" in order to minimize what Plame's job actually was. She worked in the CIA's Counter-Proliferation Division (according to a Senate Intelligence committee report mentioned by Johnson in the interview) working to detect and identify people offering to sell uranium, chemical agents or biological precursors of weapons. "She worked directly to identify individuals who were involved with those transactions or were offering to help us [The CIA] put a mole inside those transactions." Important work, is it not? And all of it blown to hell by the leak of her identity. Enemies can "follow a trail of bread crumbs" to her assets and contacts and possibly kill people who were trying to help the CIA interdict ingredients for weapons of mass destruction.

4.) Bush reversed his initial assurances that he would fire anyone in his administration who had anything to do with outing a CIA agent. When the investigation started to reveal direct involvement by his underlings he revised his stand and "lowered the bar" by saying that only if someone were convicted of criminal acts in connection with the leak would he fire them.

Additional background and interesting bits

1st time since 1948 when CIA established that an agent was outed within the government.

The CIA did not let recruits in training tell each other their last names. Johnson did not know her last name while in the CIA. Another former CIA agent told him shortly after the leak "this is our Valerie."

Johnson is (was at the time of the interview anyway) a Registered Republican. He worked on the gubernatorial campaign of Kit Bond and was recommended to the CIA by Orin Hatch. Johnson voiced his disgust with their continuing smear of Plame and Wilson. "To watch Hatch and Bond participate in this smear is one of the most sickening, disgusting spectacles I've seen," he stated bluntly during the interview, "Right now, in The Republican Party there is no honor."

Gratuitous Pop-Culture reference:

I recall the speech that Al Pacino gave in the recent movie The Recruit: [Addressing a group of CIA trainees, and I paraphrase] : "We do not hope for recognition. We will never have a parade. The best you can hope for is after you risk your life and nearly get yourself killed, they may take you to a damp, dusty basement, feed you stale cookies and warm lemonade, and then show you your medal - you don't get to keep it, they show it to you. Then they put your medal back in the vault and you go back to work."

Larry Johnson explains that Plame did her job, as most members if the CIA do, without expectation of any recognition, commendation or public accolades. Then someone in the Bush Administration betrayed her. And all of us, too.

* On the web site of the Federation of Atomic Scientists you can see a number of interesting examples: A Congressional Record enumeration of 237 misleading statements by the Bush Administration, and you can read in the Report on the Commision on Intelligence Capabilities that the the letter that formed the basis of the claim that Saddam Hussein had re-started his nuclear weapons program was forged. The letter in question, supposedly from a government official from the African country Niger, looks incredibly bogus on its face. The person(s) responsible for it flunked forgery 101. The letter has a form of the name of the government agency from 10 years before the date. The letter is signed by a government official who has not been in office for over 10 years. This constituted the "evidence" that President Bush used to convince the nation to go to war. If right-wing nuts think there's any other evidence I'd like to know what it is. Such would contradict a National Security Council document, declassified in 2006, which indicated that the NSC told President Bush 10 days before the State-of-the-Union address in 2003 that no credible, believable evidence existed that indicated Saddam Hussein had any capability to produce weapons of mass destruction at that time.

one last bit: If anyone has an exact transcription of Al Pacino's speech above, please send it to me.

[Note: updated for clarity on March 24, 2007]

The Lives of Others are Ours

2007-03-17T08:12:00.000-07:00

You can read on Glenn Greenwald's blog (recently moved to salon.com) a detailed analysis of the scandal involving the FBI's abuse of "National Security Letters" to obtain private citizens' and legal alien's personal information without warrants or oversight. He gives proper credit to Silent Patriot for noticing that

"... the NSL reporting requirements imposed by Congress were precisely the provisions which President Bush expressly proclaimed he could ignore when he issued a "signing statement" as part of the enactment of the Patriot Act's renewal into law. Put another way, the law which the FBI has now been found to be violating is the very law which George Bush publicly declared he has the power to ignore."

I also wrote about signing statements and the slide toward dictatorship earlier. But that's not what this post is about. I found myself once again struck by the speed with which the right (or in some cases the left) will adopt the tactics they once denounced. In the theaters as I write this you can see a German film called (translated into English) The Lives of Others. The movie deals with the East German secret police in the days before the wall fell. The Lives of Others dramatizes the intrusiveness and the harm the East German Stazi did to ordinary people, all in the name of national security. Some people in the U.S. foolishly believe that the FBI can not do any harm if you're not guilty. But as Greenwald points out, the FBI has compiled records it has obtained into a database. This database contains at least 30,000 people's records to date.

The writer and journalist Eric Larsen wrote a book called "The Naked Consumer," in which he explains "Larsen's 4 Laws of Data Dynamics" with examples to verify and illustrate each one.

The First Law (also the "law of data coalescence"): Data must seek and merge with complementary data.
The Second Law: Data always will be used for purposes other than originally intended.
The Third Law: Data collected about individuals will be used to cause harm to one or more members of the group who provided the information or about whom it was collected, be it minor or major.
The Fourth Law: Confidential information is confidential only until someone decides it's not.
From:Larson, Erik. The naked consumer : how our private lives become public commodities. 1st ed. (New York : H. Holt, 1992.), p.

Once your personal information enters a computer database of any kind, you will find it impossible to extricate it. And the process by which data "merges" with other data we have already seen in the seriously defective "no fly" list which has branded infants and U.S. Legislators as terrorist threats. The way your personal data can come to harm you is a book in and of itself. From unscrupulous individuals to identity thieves (no, we never had a person with a high security clearance go bad, have we?) just the unsanctioned mis-use looks scary enough. And what if we have another President such as Nixon who maliciously uses the agencies of government to attack his political opposition? As we recently discovered with Valerie Plame "Confidential information is confidential only until someone decides it's not."

When facts just get in the way

2007-03-09T19:15:00.000-08:00

Of all the delightful idiocy that has come out of the right wing-nuts in the wake of the revelations of how badly the Bush Administration has treated the veterans they pretend to care about, nothing quit compares with Michelle Malkin's statement that the appalling conditions at Walter Reed prove that state run healthcare can not work. Wow. When reality gives you lemons, make lemonade.

What I love most about this lunacy is that Bush appointed a free-market economist and a former insurance industry executive to run the Veterans Hospitals. They immediately set about running the VA hospitals like an HMO, denying care and benefits, pinching pennies everywhere possible and reduced costs throughout the system. Voila! They ran the VA hospitals like a privately owned HMO.

Seven Wars

2007-03-04T19:29:00.000-08:00

I found this link on the This Modern World blog. The memo in question is something that the democrats could subpoena (if they grew a spine) in an investigation or hearing into the allegation that the President lied about the "intelligence" to draw us into a war with Iraq. The interview with Wesley Clark does not provide evidence, in and of itself, but if the democrats can find the guts to subpoena the memo mentioned below (and if the memo truly exists), then maybe we have something. I have no reason to think that Clark would lie, but without evidence, his word alone proves nothing. From the interview:

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a replay in what happened in the lead-up to the war with Iraq — the allegations of the weapons of mass destruction, the media leaping onto the bandwagon?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, in a way. But, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself exactly twice. What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn’t be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran.

I knew why, because I had been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”

Links:
The interview itself
This Modern World blog that provided the excerpt above

Think about this for a moment. If this memo truly exists it means that Bush, Rumsfeld and their band of merry neocons truly thought that they could Americanize 7 Islamic countries by force of arms (plus setting loose a hord of carpet baggers in the aftermath of Seven (?!), wars).

Maybe if enough people raise hell over the memo the mainstream media will have to pick-up on it? Maybe the memo does exist? Maybe a reality-based echo-chamber can force an investigation? Just a thought. I can dream, can't I?

Iraq Insurgency for Beginners

2007-03-03T20:38:00.000-08:00

Iraq Insurgency in 2007

The interview in salon.com with Evan Kohlman, a man who works as a consultant for the DoD, Dept. of Justice, FBI and CIA gives a clear and rational picture of the insurgency in Iraq and how it happened. President Bush and his Administration look like complete idiots. Some highlights (comments in brackets [ ] are mine):

it was almost like Osama bin Laden was trying to vibe into George Bush the idea: "Invade Iraq, invade Iraq." This was an opportunity they seized with amazing alacrity. As brutal and terrifying as what they've done is, you have to acknowledge they capitalized on an opportunity that we handed them.
...
We [actually the Bushites] thought that if we get rid of Saddam Hussein, people would come together and celebrate and democracy would reign throughout the Middle East. The people who thought that up are people who think Iraq is like Texas. Iraq is not Texas. To Iraqis, tribal affiliations, religion and family mean a lot more than saying, "I'm from Iraq." You know we're doing a bad job of communicating our own message when we're losing the propaganda war to people who cut other people's heads off on camera. Think about it: People in one of the most Westernized countries in the Middle East would rather trust al-Qaida than the United States. That's a terrible sign of things to come.
...
But if you want to know who is responsible for the fact that al-Qaida is succeeding in Iraq, it's Saudi Arabia. The most common nationality of foreign insurgents in Iraq has been Saudis. Where do you think all the money comes from to pay for these operations? It's from Saudi donors. I'm not blaming this necessarily on the Saudi government. But they have made some very provocative statements about the idea that if the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, they're going to actively aid Sunnis in their war against Shiites. If we're going to put pressure on Iraq's neighbors, let's put pressure on all of Iraq neighbors to stop contributing to the violence.
...
I thought perhaps, in invading Iraq, they had some long-term view that nobody else could see. But that hope faded very quickly. The Bush administration didn't reach out to anyone credible when they were asking about, for instance, the connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Anybody with any real knowledge of the region would have told them there are no connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. The only people who believed that nonsense were lunatics.

If I was going to invade Iraq, the first thing I would do is commission the top history experts, top geographical experts, top cultural experts, and sit them down at a table and say, "This is what I'm thinking about doing. Is this feasible?" That was never done. Nobody in their right mind would have taken a look at Bush's plan and said, "Oh, yeah, that's going to work." It's not possible that it could work. Every historic precedent works directly against Bush's plan. I know it's easy to say, but the best solution is not to have invaded at all. [emphasis mine --2+2=4]

Thank about the significance of this: someone who actually knows something about the region and its people would want to consult a wide range of experts (real ones, not whack-jobs from a "think-tank") before trying anything.
The Bushites represent one of the very worst qualities about U.S. society *: a contempt, even hatred, for well-educated people who make an effort to know what they're talking about. The War is a kind of victory of the anti-intellectual blow-hard who "knows what's what" and doesn't need any "eggheads" to tell him anything. There exists an element within American society who vehemently hate education and educated people. But sad to say, it's the ones who despise expertise and study who have created better and more efficient organizations and demonstrate an ability to elect candidates. We can not accuse Bush's supporters of complete and total stupidity. They played hard, they played for keeps, and they won elections. Why can't more educated and knowledgeable people do that?

*No, I do not hate America. I direct my comments to certain individuals and certain groups within U.S. society, not the whole country.

Not enough censorship?

2007-03-01T21:48:00.000-08:00

You just can't please some people

In Monroe County New York (where Rochester is) a county bureaucrat has decided that the CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act) does not go far enough. According to the American Libraries story "after local television station WHEC captured on camera library computer users viewing pornography within sight of other patrons" a county administrator names Maggie Brooks decided to withhold funding for the library until it ceased its policy of unblocking lawful content for legal adults on request. The story does not specify what the TV cameras caught or why one would consider it pornographic. And even if pornographic by most people's standards, the censorware programs (euphemistically called "filtering" in the industry) have blocked web sites of the Quakers, Greenpeace, and numerous other activist or non-mainstream web sites. (Nevermind they fail to block lots of nudity and vileness as well).

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed CIPA to stand with the proviso that a library would unblock lawful content for legal adults on request. Evidently this does not censor enough. As has happened in other cases in the 90s the library must "sanitize" the internet so that everyone can have the same Disney'fied experience.

If anyone in the Rochester area reads this and can shed some light on what's going on, please post a comment with additional info.

2007-02-16T09:44:00.000-08:00

weer legeslaters, we rite this stuf

Republicans demonstrate the they do not know or understand the law

In an AP story today I read that a "group of conservative House members" accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of copyright violation and trademark infringement by using a passage from C-SPAN on her blog. Ahem, folks, facts can not be copyrighted. Government proceedings by definition can not have copyright protection. You see, we're paying their salaries (and for the cameras that shot the footage).

Aside from the usual question - are they lying or stupid - I find this another interesting example of the nearly monarchist behavior of the "Republican Study Committee" in its consideration of government deliberations as somehow a commercial commodity for their select group to control with legal protections. What does this mean? If C-SPAN puts their trademark protected label on government deliberations then that corporation "owns" the record of what transpired and the rest of us must pay to see and to show clips of it?! And this from people who vote on laws? OK folks, lying or stupid, take your pick.

(You can find it in most sources that have AP feeds, such as Yahoo news, Salon.com, etc.)

2007-02-13T17:22:00.000-08:00

Does Reality Matter?

Pentagon investigates itself and admits to lies

In a recent Yahoo News article, brought to my attention by a great new blog I discovered recently (Peace takes Courage), The Defense Department's inspector general released a devastating report that implicates Pentagon officials in the lies that led the U.S. into war. The following is a Bureaucratese - English dictionary to help you understand what the officials are actually saying when you read the story: Report says Pentagon manipulated intel

[Bureaucratese]: Gimble's report said Feith's office had made assertions "that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community."

Translation: he lied!

[Bureaucratese]: Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman denied that the office was producing its own intelligence products, saying they were challenging what was coming in from intelligence-gathering professionals, "looking at it with a critical eye."

Translation: The information was not what we wanted it to be so we questioned everything that did not support what we wanted to believe.

[Bureaucratese]: Republicans on the panel disagreed. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said the "probing questions" raised by Feith's policy group improved the intelligence process.

Translation: But not the intelligence itself, which was horseshit. The process was greatly improved.

[Bureaucratese]: Feith said in a telephone interview that he had not seen the report but was pleased to hear that it concluded his office's activities were neither illegal nor unauthorized.

Translation: Well duh! It was not illegal to lie like rugs as we were not under oath (unlike the adulterer scum).

[Bureaucratese]: "The policy office has been smeared for years by allegations that its pre-Iraq-war work was somehow 'unlawful' or 'unauthorized' and that some information it gave to congressional committees was deceptive or misleading," said Feith.

Translation: We're either lying or incompetent. Take your pick.

2006-12-29T09:45:00.000-08:00

Now you tell us

President Ford speaks from the grave

Lost amid the tributes to a mediocre President we find that Ford thought that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney made a mistake when they launched the war in Iraq. The Washington Post published a transcript of an interview Ford did with Bob Woodward a couple of years ago.

From the article:
"I don't think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly," he said, "I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer."

Ford spoke candidly on the condition that his comments not be published until after his death. While alive he felt no obligation to oppose what he thought was a mistake, and one which would (and has) cost tens of thousands of lives? Cheney and Rumsfeld worked for Ford. Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense and Cheney remained Ford's chief of staff, as he had been under Richard Nixon after Haldeman's fall in the Watergate scandal. This is not, we learn from the same interview, the only instance of Ford's personal friendship trumping the good of the country. He admitted that his personal friendship with Nixon strongly influenced his decision to pardon the former President who attempted to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship. At the time Ford claimed that personal considerations played no part in his decision.

This draws a sickeningly familiar picture of an increasingly socially isolated ruling class that cares more for itself and its members than the people or nation it pretends to care about. What effect, realistically, would Ford's opposition to the war have had, if he had made his comments public in 2003? We will never know. We do know that he did not care enough about a disastrous mistake to denounce it at the time (nevermind over 100 public officials resigned or otherwise did make public statements in opposition to the war in 2003, some ruining their own careers in an effort to stop the madness.) Ford would have faced no financial hardships were he to have voiced opposition to the reigning Administration. In his silence Ford has not proven any different than any Democrat or Republican who opposes a reprehensible rush to war built on a foundation of lies only when "safe" to do so.

Update Dec. 30, 2006:

I had not realized that Ford played a part in the years long massacre of East Timorese by Indonesia under Suharto. Other bloggers have not only pointed this out but one also provided a scan of primary source document in which Ford gave Suharto the OK to invade. For those who do not already know about this part of history, in 1975 Indonesia East Timor, an Island in the Indonesian archipelago that attempted to declare its independence. The resulting carnage and killing of the civilian population rivaled that of Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge going on at the same time. The East Timorese posed no threat to anyone. The Indonesians wiped out about 200,000 people (or one third of the island's population). Dennis Perrin in Red State Son writes about wiping out history in general and sanitizing Ford's presidency in particular:

"Now, a civilized country that dealt with its history honestly would mention the above in any overview of that period. And had Gerald Ford been, say, a Chinese premier who ordered a client army to wipe out a third of a smaller country's population, I'm guessing that would be mentioned in American news outlets upon his death. But being the U.S. president who ended a "national nightmare," Ford's direct hand in mass murder is completely ignored. I have yet to find any mainstream mention of this, ..."

And by the way, liberals and supporters of the democrats stop patting yourselves on the back for how much "better" democrats are than republicans. President Carter subsequently sold arms to Indonesia knowing full well what Suharto was going to do with them.

And I must thank Dennis Perrin for a description of the political power in the United and its relationship with the media as "The owners of the country and their stenographers." So remember, democrats and republicans work for the same bosses.

2006-12-14T18:18:00.000-08:00

Evangelicals Über Alles?

Whose church would Jesus burn down?

Earlier today I read an interview with a former Air Force officer, Mikey Weinstein, who has founded and led an organization called the "Military Religious Freedom Foundation." The interview, These people should be court-martialed appears in Salon.com (subscription required, or you may have to view an ad).

I hope I sound paranoid and delusional when I say that I can imagine a time when I live to see a 20-something kid in a uniform pointing an automatic rifle in my face and begging me to accept Jesus as my personal savior so he doesn't have to pull the trigger. I did not imagine anything like that before today. Thanks for that image, Mr. Weinstein.

Last week (Dec. 2006) evangelicals released a video filmed "... inside the Pentagon that featured uniformed senior military officers talking about their evangelical faith ... " And on Monday Weinstein held a press conference to denounce it. Alex Koppelman of Salon interviewed him on Tuesday. The interview is worth a read in its entirety, even if you have to view an advertisement in Salon.com. In it Weinstein does not mince words, describing the evangelicals who now make up about 40% of the military as "virulently dominionist" and compares the present situation with the plot of the movie Three days of the Condor in which there existed "A CIA within the CIA." I found the following passage particularly disturbing:

These are the people who, when I talk to senior members of the military at the flag-level rank -- I don't know if you're familiar with what that means, that means admiral or general -- that have looked at me and said, "Come on, Mikey, what's your problem? We have the cure to cancer. If you had the cure to cancer, wouldn't you want to spread the word?" They don't realize when they say it, they don't have the mental wherewithal to understand that to a person who isn't an evangelical Christian, you're calling our faith a cancer.

Among the cancerous faiths the evangelicals wish to cure you will find "Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians [and] Roman Catholics." And look whose burning in hell: "Mikey, OK, Anne Frank, Dr. Seuss, Jack Benny, Gandhi," evangelical Christians tell Weinstein, "they're all burning eternally in the fires of hell." Charming.

Aside from the obnoxiousness of some annoying person trying to "save" you, what's the problem? Where is the danger? Weinstein explains:

The U.S. military, which I [Weinstein] consider a noble and honorable institution, is technologically the most lethal organization ever created by Homo sapiens. When you have the leadership believing that to be a good soldier, good Marine, good airman or sailor you have to be not just a Christian but the right type of Christian, we're no better than al-Qaida. And it's hideous, beyond belief. My kids were called "fucking Jews" and accused of total complicity, they and their people, in the execution of Jesus Christ, by superiors up and down the chain of command at the Air Force Academy. [Emphasis added].

Oh, and it gets worse.

...after the press conference in the morning, I've had nine death threats since about 10 o'clock last night. I usually get about two or three a week. They're very grotesque, everything from wanting to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel * to threatening to blow me up, threatening my house will be blown up, raping my wife, blowing up my house. We've had our tires slashed, we've had feces and beer bottles thrown at the house, we've had dead animals placed on the front door of the house.

I was in Topeka, on a book tour, and the local Episcopal priest came out to support me and five hours later his church was burned down. And the local synagogue in Topeka, where I was to speak that night, was desecrated with spray paint saying, "Fuck you, Jews" and "KKK," all that stuff.

And whose church would Jesus blow up? Peace, love and happiness ... unless you're not one of us in which case the evangelicals can hack you into pieces and feed you to the dogs with righteous impunity. Does my whacko fantasy of conversion at gunpoint still look paranoid and far-fetched? I hope so.

Blatant partisan bias: Vote for democrats. Yes, even if they are a bunch of spineless gits who have to read three days of opinion poll results before they figure it's safe to flush their toilets. I know they're useless and I know they're every bit a bunch of corporate lackeys like any Republican. But vote for them anyway. My pagan/wiccan/tool-of-the-devil crystal ball is showing me some seriously weird and disturbing images lately. If you're not even a little nervous then you're just not paying attention.

* Update December 20, 2006: Only today did I realize the significance of the threat "to gas all the Jews in America and send the corpses back to Israel." The evangelicals believe that in order to provoke the apocalypse all Jews must return to an Isreal that has been restored to its biblical borders. The bible does not specify whether the Jews are alive when they return. That's the evangelical part of the threat: the sending the corpses "back" to Israel .

For more information about evangelicals, their influence in U.S. politics and the religious beliefs which lead them to support Israel see Is Death too good for us? and follow the links to the articles cited.

2006-12-14T18:17:00.000-08:00

Intellectual Freedom Blog

Why we do this with a 2010 update.

This started out as a solo operation. As of June 2010 I have a co-blogger, who prefers to use the initials AR. I just use my first name: Steven. I am a librarian. I believe in freedom of speech in all its forms. I believe that censorship and the dissemination of lies constitute a major threat. And yes, I realize how pompous I sound.

AR has a wide-ranging background in life and in education. He works with audio-visual technology and he acquires a tremendous amount of news and information in multiple languages. He has graciously accepted my request to post here as our e-mail discussions have proven very interesting and I frequently thought "I'd like to see this on the blog." Now it will appear here.

This is what I mean by 2+2=4:

Quotes

"Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4. If that is granted, all else follows."
---George Orwell, 1984

"If you accept his assumptions, even a madman sounds reasonable."
---Proverb of uncertain origin, possibly Russian.

"We're the teachers and two plus two can add up to five if it's our classroom."
---Jim Kouf, Gang Related

"Two plus two equals four! Two plus two equals four! Two plus two equals four!"
---Trul, from The Cyberiad by by Stanislaw Lem.

Some posts that I consider somewhat better than others:

Who was Martin Niemöller and why you should care.
Who was Ignaz Mezei and why you should care
Censorship and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11
Control the pictures
Critical thinking and polemical film
Democracy in 2004 the state we're in
Democracy in 2005 new meaning
The Ghost of Henry Kissenger
The Prisoner
The Revenge Fantasy
Signing statements - the quiet coup.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
Woodward's fall
Idiocy highlights
Older Examples

Taxing unproductive learning

2006-12-09T16:48:00.000-08:00

[The following is a letter to the editor I wrote to Salon.com which they "printed." It was written in response to an piece titled, Iraq Study Group: Learn Arabic you morons!]

How many people remember the 80s? Anyone remember the time before the Reagan administration started to tax scholarships and financial aid? I was a grad student in the 80s (and Reagan's attack on financial aid drove me out of graduate school). I remember the implementation of taxes on financial aid. The exemptions prove very interesting: medicine, dentistry, the "hard sciences (i.e.: chemistry, physics), Business, Finance, Economics. The tax on financial aid, especially at the graduate level, penalized people for studying subjects without a clear, proven economic usefulness. In the peculiarly American contempt for education that does not have an obvious and simple link to a high income after school the Reagan administration taxed all "unproductive" learning as some sort of self-indulgent luxury that the society would not support by exempting grants to pay for it from taxes. This expressed contempt for other languages and cultures by discouraging the people who would like to study them.

One would think that someone somewhere in power would realize this. That the next place in the world where a U.S. administration may take an interest no one can predict. The attack on education that started in the 80s continues to this day and it bears fruit in the present mess that the Bush administration forced us into. Maybe while people in power are trying to figure out how to sort out the mess the Neocons made they can also do the pretty simple act of restoring support, or at least stop taxing support, for education.

2006-11-22T21:43:00.000-08:00

Conscription revisited

No more predictions

I have been wrong about conscription before. I will avoid making predictions. My predictions of a coming draft in two previous posts prove a bit embarrassing as the draft has not come back. The Administration no doubt fully understands the opposition to the war should the children of the wealthy and middle class have to serve in it. Rep. Charles Rangel has, once again, announced plans to reinstate conscription in the coming Congress. I will not make any predictions as to whether this will happen. But I find Rangel's rationale worth examining:

"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," [Associated Press, Nov 19, 2006].

I question whether Rangel's comments address true motivations of those involved. The chicken-hawks who have cried so vehemently for war found ways to avoid going to Vietnam. Their spawn can follow their example as well. I suggest instead that the experience of the draft during the Vietnam War makes the Administration reluctant to reinstate conscription. A draft would provide the anti-war movement with a clear rallying point and serve as a motivating factor for people to oppose the war who otherwise would not. Sadly, I suspect that many people who do not voice an opinion or who may even support the war (verbally, that is) would think differently if they had to face an all expense paid trip to Iraq. And think about this: does the U.S. feel like a country at war? How has the war changed people's lives? Sadly, selfishness and indifference, to say nothing of the hypocrisy of chicken-hawks, keep the war going by the lack of opposition to it.

How has the Bush administration avoided conscription up to now? They employ a variety of methods. The first one we can recognize readily enough in simply not sending in enough troops to accomplish what an occupying force needs to do. Not that I agree with going to war in the first place, but if you're going to do so, one would expect some thought and planning beforehand. Early news reports of cooperative Iraqis walking into U.S. military compounds with information also revealed that the U.S. military did nothing to act on the reports. For example, numerous Iraqis warned U.S. intelligence officers that the Iraqi Army had abandoned its ammo dumps and that men in civilian clothing were carrying away ordinance. No one made any attempt to guard to ammo supplies. They did not have enough troops. Now the ordinance provides the explosives for IEDs. And without enough troops to patrol populated areas during the frequent blackouts (that plagued the civilian population from the start of the war) kidnapers freely preyed upon the more well-to-do Iraqis.

For another way to avoid a draft, they use "contractors" in Iraq for tasks formerly the work of soldiers. In previous wars (and previous post-war occupations) the U.S. military has its own trucks and drivers, its own cooks and latrine diggers. Paying contractors to do these jobs reduces the need for military personnel. Fair enough.

But now we come to the third method: the contractors also have their own "security forces" for protecting their personnel and work sites. Method number three for doing without conscription has the most important implications. As Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) wrote recently: "... the four "civilian" contractors" whose murders prompted the attacks on Fallujah. They were mercenaries. They work for Blackwater, and if you go to Blackwater's Web site, it's really quite interesting. They offer two courses on sniping." The use of mercenaries has come back to bite the Bush Administration. They cost far more than soldiers (we'll be paying for this war, literally as well as figuratively, for generations). They do not have the same accountability and the U.S government has less control over them.

From a story in the Washington Post: "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them [mercenaries], so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force," said Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which is responsible for security in and around Baghdad. "They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place." (Security Contractors in Iraq Under Scrutiny After Shootings, By Jonathan Finer. Washington Post Foreign Service. Saturday, September 10, 2005; A01).

And worse to come. Alan Grayson, an attorney representing whistleblowers from Custer Battle who exposed massive fraud in Iraq says in a new documentary:

"If you are a U.S. soldier and you hurt an Iraqi civilian and that becomes known, you will be court-martialed. But if you are a U.S. contractor and you kill an Iraqi civilian and that becomes known, you will be sent home. And then, you can come back the following week, and you can work for a different contractor."
-- [From Iraq for sale Cf. AmericaBlog "Iraq for Sale": an exceptional new film by AJ in DC - 8/31/2006].

The Bush administration made a deliberate decision to go to war without conscription. As a result mercenaries run amok in the country that the Administration claims it wishes to help. If Saddam Hussein truly posed a threat, why not implement a draft? This represents a glaring contradiction. Although Bush considered invading Iraq vitally important he did not consider it important enough to make sure the military has sufficient personnel? But the plan to use "contractors" existed from the start. They made up for the small number of troops in the all volunteer military. This makes the use of mercenaries and the decision not to start conscription a deliberate domestic political decision.

This political strategy eerily mirrors the French use of its Foreign Legion in colonial wars in Algeria and Vietnam. If ones dying are not somehow "ours" do they not matter? And turning Iraq into what "Mr. Nice Blog" calls "... an Open-Air Abbatoir for Human Beings" does not matter? Who else thinks this is insane?

2006-11-11T10:13:00.000-08:00

Baby pledges to sever umbilical cord

The Democrats and lobbyists

In an AP story today (Nov 10) Nancy Pelosi announced the democrats pledge to sever ties to lobbyists. As the AP story points out, that's day 1, but day 2 they will be asking the lobbyists for donations.

More than donations or the Abramov scandal I would like to find out if they will do anything about who is writing the legislation? In 1995 after Newt Gingrich and his "reformers" cut the Congress' budget for staff no one was left to do the work of crafting the legislation introduced in the House or Senate. The representatives and senators themselves have too much other work to do to devote the needed time and effort to write the laws themselves. The majority of Congresspeople do not even have time to read the legislation that they vote on. Lobbyists have been writing legislation for a given Representative or Senator to introduce to Congress. This has remained an under-reported fact of life ever since Gingrich started as Speaker of the House.

Will the democrats restore the staff budget to allow people they hire and who work for the government to do the work of writing the legislation or will they continue to outsource this essential task to lobbyists? Nancy Pelosi and the democrats can say anything they like and they can villify the lobbyists as much as they like. If the lobbyists continue to write the laws, why should they care what anyone says?