The Mysterious Red Button

Editorial:

I have spent most of my social media time on Twitter recently. The COVID19 epidemic has driven me back to blogging (as I'm sure it has for others as well). This one comes from a tweet I just read:

The key quote here is from Colin Hugeunel: "These people make me F#@&ing furious." I never heard of Mr. Hugeunel before today and I commend him for working as an ED doctor. The following is not an invective directed at Colin Hugeunel, or any other people expressing outrage at the behavior on display in the crowd of flag-waving (probably astroturf) protestors decrying the shelter-in-place order in their area.

Here's a though experiment. You know the fairy tale story about the mysterious stranger who comes to a person's home, delivers a mysterious small box with a mysterious red button on top. He explains to the recipient that if that person presses the red button they will receive a million dollars and someone will die as a result of the button having been pushed. But don't worry, says the mysterious stranger, it will not be anyone you know. Asked how the stranger will know whether someone pushed the button the stranger replies simply: "we'll know."

Now imagine that the recipient, instead of thinking about it and/or agonizing over the decision pushes the red button immediately and without hesitation, then asks "OK, where's my million dollars?"

Flabbergasted, the stranger tries to explain that the death is immediate but the million dollars will take some time -- not expecting them to hit the button right away -- we'll get the money soon. Then the recipient, in a state of rage and frustration, frantically hits the button over and over again, and so fast they no one could count the number of times the person pushed the button. Somebody dies every time, but still the million dollars just does not materialize. The recipient refuses to relinquish the button box, but instead spends years pushing the button, which activity itself prevents the delivery of the million dollars because the frantic, ceaseless pushing of the button kills off members of the mysterious "we" who are trying to deliver the million dollars but they drop dead from the button pushing before they can carry the money 10 steps towards the button-pusher's house.

Electoral majorities in low-population states have given us a GOP lock on the Senate and a racist game-show host in the White House. They have demonstrated a depraved indifference to all human lives except their own for decades. Pick your analogy: either the mysterious "We" in the story above ran out of poor people to kill or the recipient put the box in some sort of device that pushes the button for him faster than a human could and 24/7. These viciously insane two-legged creatures have existed for a very long time and have exerted their power to elect officials who carry out toxic, punitive policies that assume that all "other" people deserve shortened lives of suffering and misery to stop them from enjoying being poor or somehow stopping the GOP voter from acquiring what they believe they deserve.

This nuttery has been with us since the election of Ronald Reagan (give people a hand up instead of a hand out, but not really -- they started the shipping of jobs overseas in the 1980s while declaring that people were poor only because they refused to apply for the magic unicorn jobs). Maybe now that the insane hatred the GOP voter has always expressed towards pretty much the entirety of the rest of humanity has actually started to kill non-poor people, we can only hope that other non-poor people can figure out just how loathsome, dishonest and hateful the GOP's base always were, and stop yammering nonsense about "uniting" the country. 

No one can reach people who live in a land beyond reason where they continue to push the red button, ever more frantically, knowing it kills but so intent on receiving the million dollars they can no longer see doing anything else until everybody dies.

[I started this post in the Spring of 2020, finished it in the Spring of 2021].

The evolution of pirates

Buried in an AP story about the rescue of an American Freighter captain and the deaths of 3 Somali pirates, I found the following gem buried in the lower part of the article:

The piracy scourge appears to have evolved partly out of an attempt by Somali fishermen to protect their waters against illegal foreign trawlers who were destroying their livelihoods. Some of the vigilantes morphed into pirates, lured by the large profits they could win in ransoms.

I'm glad that the captain is safe and unharmed. I am also not terribly sad for the passing of pirates. The trouble comes from the origins of piracy the passage above mentions in passing. At least some pirates started out as fishermen driven to desperate measures by the lawless conduct of other countries' fishing fleets.

Given the poverty and non-existent government in Somalia I suspect that going to "proper authorities" never looked like an option for poor fishermen. Not to defend lawlessness, piracy or killing, I only want to point out that the "lawlessness" started with far more powerful people taking advantage of weaker ones. And or course, many of the people most directly affected by the problem had nothing to do with its causes. Let's let transnational corporations run roughshod over poor people. What could go wrong? What can poor people do about it? Well, now that piracy has proven a booming business, certain of them are no longer poor.

One of the hardest parts of examining origins of the present problem of piracy intelligently comes from the very dishonest responses we can anticipate to posts like this one. The counter-argument goes something to the effect that anyone who points out these cause and effect relationships somehow supports piracy, lawlessness or killing. This conceals the lawless behavior of corporations which do not have to clean up the messes they make. Laws matter hardly without enforcement.

(Note: I wrote this ages ago then forgot to post it. No link to the AP story)

Top 100 books

Shortly after David Bowie died a colleague tweeted a link to his list of what he considered his top 100 books. I never gave too much thought to compiling a list of 100 (top 10 was enough for me). In no particular order, here are my top 100.

If anyone would like to ask, why this book and not that one, please leave a comment.

I tend to follow authors, in the sense that if I like one book by a given writer, I will want to read whatever else s/he wrote. In this list, I avoided loading it with all or most of the books by a single individual. That said, certain writers have produced such great books that I cannot pick just one for the list. I also consider as one "book" multiple books which have a unified story-line from one title to the next. For these I either refer to the "collective title" or select one of the series which I liked the most. I selected books which I find myself quoting over the years, ones which had a profound influence on me, ones from which I learned something important or just ones which I so greatly enjoyed that I re-read them from time to time.

There are two books by two different authors with the exact same title. This is not a typo. One is non-fiction and the other science fiction.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams
Frogs into Princes by Bandler and Grinder
I Robot by Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
Don't Know much about History by Kenneth Davis
Myth Conceptions by Robert Aspirin (3d book of the "Myth" series)
The Glass Teat by Harlan Ellison
The Other Glass Teat By Harlan Ellison
Approaching Oblivion By Harlan Ellison
The Fall by Albert Camus
The Plague by Albert Camus
Cambodia : a book for people who find television too slow by Brian Fawcett
The short stories of Anton Chekov (not a book title, but I have read almost all of his short stories)
Ever Since Darwin by Stephen J. Gould
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Our Inner Conflicts by Karen Horney
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Word for the World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
Captain Jack Zodiac by Michael Kandell
The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, MacNeil
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Art Speigelman's Maus books ("My Father Bleeds History" and "And Here my Troubles Began")
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
1984 by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Caravans by James Michner
The Hawkline Monster a Gothic Western by Richard Brautigan
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradburry
The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer
Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsin
Homicide a Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
Adolph Hitler and the German Trauma by Robert Edwin Herzstein
A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
"The Lord of the Rings" trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
The Complete tales and poems of Edgar Allen Poe
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammet
M*A*S*H* by Richard Hooker
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer by Loren Graham
The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many by Noam Chomsky
Behind the Urals by John Scott
The Warlock Heretical by Christopher Stasheff
The Doctor's Plague by Sherwin B. Nuland
Biko by Donald Woods
The Good Neighbor by George Black
War by Gwynne Dyer
Blood in the Face by James Ridgeway
Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard
Wartime by Paul Fussel
Class by Paul Fussell
How We Got to Now by Stephen Johnson
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
Conformity and Conflict edited by James W. Spradley and David W. McCurdy
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Good Soldier Schweik by Jaroslav Hasek
The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Suskind
Seeing Voices by Oliver Sachs
I Claudius by Robert Graves
The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
The Naked Consumer by Erik Larson
Death from the Skies by Phil Plait
Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
A Dance with Death by Ann Noggle and Christine A. White
Action Figure! by G.B. Trudeau
Fish Whistle by Daniel Pinkwater
Naked by David Sedaris
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
"The Golden Compass" trilogy by Philip Pullman
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Slay Ride by Dick Francis
God Save the Mark by Donald Westlake
The Postman by David Brin
Adolph Hitler: My Part in his Downfall by Spike Mulligan
Shadows of Sanctuary edited by Robert Aspirin
The Phantom Tollbooth Norton Juster
Fool on the Hill Matt Ruff
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Little Women Louisa May Alcott
How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman
Lord and Peasant in Russia by Jerome Blum
The Assassination of Julius Ceasar by Michael Parenti
Drift by Rachel Maddow
Candide by Voltaire

Nelson Mandela dies in jail! Apartheid rule in South Africa unbroken?!

(A trip down the memory hole.) 

(Post updated to fix mis-spelling and a typo which added 3 Justices to the Supreme Court).

Yes, something like that could be the reality the next time municipalities or U.S. states attempt to stop doing business with an undemocratic repressive state. Lost in all the tributes to Nelson Mandela is one chilling fact: no sooner did the South African Apartheid regime end then the usual suspects cooked up a plan to stop another divestment movement from happening again. First they tried the the MAI (Multilateral Agreement on Investment). Formulation of this international agreement started in the OECD in the secret in 1995. It would have stopped localities from pursuing their own economic sanctions against an oppressive regime -- removing decision-making power from governments by making sanctions a matter of corporate rights and restricting trade decisions to economic factors only. Massive grassroots push-back created delays in voting on this in the OECD. Then France backed out causing the matter to drop at that time.

Secret negotiations took place from 1995 until 1997 when an OECD source leaked a copy of the draft agreement to a Canadian citizen group. The leak revealed that the MAI sought to establish a new body of universal investment laws that would guarantee corporations unconditional rights to buy, sell and do financial operations all over the world, without any regard for national laws and citizens' rights.

Unfortunately, the MAI continues to rise up, typically in WTO negotiations (most recently in Cancun 2003). To paraphrase Monty Python and the Holy Grail "It's not dead yet" and probably never will die. Grassroots push-back has kept it at bay up to now. 

But there's more than one way to subvert democracy. Also in the late 1990s a group called The National Foreign Trade Council (which represents major U.S. corporations that it won't name for fear consumers will boycott them) brought suit against a Massachusetts law against trade with Burma. Using a different argument than corporate rights, Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council attacked the Massachusetts law on the basis that it "impermissibly infringes on the federal government's power to regulate foreign affairs." 

On June 19, 2000 the U.S. Supreme Court decided 8-4 8-1 in favor of the National Foreign Trade Council. Souter delivered the opinion "The issue is whether the Burma law of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, restricting the authority of its agencies to purchase goods or services from companies doing business with Burma, 1 is invalid  [**2291]  under the Supremacy Clause of the National Constitution owing to its threat of frustrating federal statutory objectives. We hold that it is."

Whether this prevents future divestment movements we can not tell for certain. Most likely divestment by legislative action will have to happen at the national level or not at all. This also has nothing to do with non-governmental entities, such as private universities. (For example, at Columbia University in the 80s the divestment protests forced the administration to disclose that it had over $100 million of its portfolio invested in companies that did business with South Africa and even included some South African companies). A future divestment movement will have a much harder time than the anti-apartheid one did. 

I admit that I felt astonishment when South Africa not only let Nelson Mandela out of jail but then elected him President. That he proved a great statesman, president and world leader gave me hope that decent human beings can win sometimes. With Mandela humanity won a trifecta. 

However, (and there's always this however) what the National Foreign Trade Council and its secret members have demonstrated (along with a Supreme Court already positioned far to the right) is that they will cheerfully steam-roller over countless people in order to enjoy their wealth, power and privilege. Anything good the rest of us do they will scheme and lie and do anything they can get away with to undo it. These people have more in common with the patricians of ancient Rome than any citizen in a democracy in the 21st century. By all means celebrate Nelson Mandela's life and accomplishments. But humanity -- watch your back! 

Sources:

Citation for the Supreme Court case: 

STEPHEN P. CROSBY, SECRETARY OF ADMINISTRATION AND FINANCE OF MASSACHUSETTS, ET AL., v. NATIONAL FOREIGN TRADE COUNCIL No. 99-474

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

530 U.S. 363; 120 S. Ct. 2288; 147 L. Ed. 2d 352; 2000 U.S. LEXIS 4153; 68 U.S.L.W. 4545; 2000 Cal. Daily Op. Service 4852; 2000 Daily Journal DAR 6469; 2000 Colo. J. C.A.R. 3538; 13 Fla. L. Weekly Fed. S 441

March 22, 2000, Argued 

June 19, 2000, Decided

Citations for analysis of the case: 

Time for a new approach? Federalism and foreign affairs after Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council. James J. Pascoe. Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law. 35.1 (Jan. 2002) p291. 

Wide Impact Possible From Decision Axing Burma Law. The Legal Intelligencer. (November 6, 1998 Friday)  Pg. 4 By Leslie Miller, Associated Press.

Deja Vu all over again.

The Obama Administration has already begun to intervene in the Syrian Civil War with weapons and with advisors to train the Syrians in their use. The announcement that the Syrian Government's use of chemical warfare agents provides the basis and justification for this intervention. But "[t]he evidence is secret and we have to take it on faith…" -- (Colum Lynch Washington Post U.N. reporter).

Sound familiar? The chain of custody does not have any transparency. From the Washington Post story:  "Western governments have relied on physical evidence smuggled out of the country by rebels or intelligence operatives. Precisely who acquired the evidence and what methods were used to guard against tampering may be unknowable. If you are the opposition and you hear that the White House has drawn a red line on the use of nerve agents, then you have an interest in giving the impression that some chemical weapons have been used."

Rachel Maddow begins her show's report on this question with a description of Spanish police arresting a group of men Al-Qaeda recruited to fight in Syria. The U.S., once again, finds itself fighting on the same side as Al-Qaeda (The Mujahadeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s evolved into the Taliban and the foreign fighters there evolved into Al-Qaeda. Remember that Osama Bin Laden received his training from the C.I.A. as a matter of public record).

Really? We're doing this again!? How did U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East turn into Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football?

In this segment Rachel Maddow interviews Lynch about the questionable evidence and the already growing U.S. intervention in the Syrian Civil War. As Lynch finishes his explanation of how we may never see a "smoking gun" proving Syrian government's use of chemical weapons, Maddow adds:

Even while recognizing that people's inability to trust assertions from western governments on things like this without actually seeing it proven is an earned distrust because of our history.

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Also, John Stewart's substitute host on the daily show, John Oliver, interviews Fareed Zakaria, during which we hear a far more cogent and informative analysis of the situation in Syria than you could ever hear on the "serious" news shows.

The NSA did not notice this one

In a discussion on another blog about the 2 racist lunatics who tried to build a "death ray" to kill Moslems (I could not make something like this up - I do not have the imagination) someone raised an important point:

Please note, stoopid plot stopped by citizen reporting and good old-fashioned detective work. Yes, phone lines were tapped, but 14 months of surveillance should have been enough to not have to resort to data mining phone and internet records. I am making a big assumption here, but this plot doesn’t feel like it needed a civil liberty spying program to foil. 

I believe it’s important to call these out so we have a chance of getting our Fourth Amendment Rights back and perhaps to not be so terrified, either. (link) 

Yes. Maybe the two did not e-mail each other or chat or even use the phone to cook up their plot. Whatever the reason, spying on all of us did not accomplish anything in this case.

Asking the right questions, reporting the wrong answers

This sort of commercial self-censorship is a "textbook" example of why I started this blog (actually its pre-cursor web site) in the first place. CNN asks some good questions in its recent poll to measure the approval or disapproval of the Affordable Care Act (i.e.: Obamacare). But the headlines of the various reports about this poll grossly mis-states the results, for example: Most Americans still oppose Health Care Law. Really? But keep reading the CNN's own report on this poll to find out why.

The survey indicates that 35% oppose the health care law because it's too liberal, with 16% saying they oppose the measure because it isn't liberal enough. [emphasis added].

I can even remember the polling data as the administration floated various proposals. At the beginning of 2009 polls ran around 65% in favor of reform, but that number dropped after Obama removed the "public option" (i.e.: the way it works in other countries that have national health care systems). The polling data above remains consistent with that of the recent past. The Rachel Maddow show has this helpful chart to illustrate why this 16% matters so much:

click to enlarge

To be fair, the one question the CNN poll did not ask was of the respondents who support the Health Care Law how many would oppose it if it were more liberal. That said, the polling data from 4 years ago showed the public option with greater than 50% approval. Also, if you put the green bar representing the 16% who want a more "liberal" health care reform on top of the blue bar of the 44% who approve of Obamacare as is, you see the same 65% that polls showed 4 years ago as approving reform before President Obama withdrew the public option from the proposed bill. The chart above comes from a screen capture of the Rachel Maddow Show segment below.

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To paraphrase Strother Martin's character from Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate listen to the voters. Had the Democrats grown a spine and/or had President Obama had any dedication to reform as it actually has proven to work effectively in other countries that tried it, we would not be in this mess now. The Democrats do not find themselves in a very defensible position. What are they going to say? Look! Add the 16% of the people who want more extensive reform and you can see what spineless cowards we were 4 years ago (and now too, by the way).

To make matters worse, the Affordable Care Act only "works" in blue states. In red states the Republicans can obstruct it to death, thereby insulating their constituency from any good effects. This makes criticizing it so much more effective because the Republican voters will have no first hand knowledge of its benefits. State government officials know how popular reform will be if they let it happen.