Letters to the Oregonian

Duh!!!

2010-11-30T07:48:00.000-08:00

http://chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2052-grand-delusions-the-regressive-results-of-progressive-markets.html

But the flaw in this noble scheme is readily apparent: seeking to "make money while filling a social need." These are two entirely separate endeavors, with two entirely separate goals. Once a market is created, with whatever benign intentions, it is inevitable that it will be used, and eventually dominated, by those seeking to maximize their profits, regardless of social needs. There is no great scandal in this fact; that's what markets are for. And this inevitable heedless maximization is now happening in India, as the Times reports:

Follow the link to continue the duh . . .

Obama's great good war

2010-11-30T07:36:00.000-08:00

Start here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/18/AR2010111806856.html

"We've taken the gloves off, and it has had huge impact," one of the senior officials said.

Continue here: http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/11/murderous-us-government-explained.html

We need a reckoning

2010-11-29T22:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2274412

Eric Holder and Barack Obama have taken pains to tell the American people that water-boarding is illegal torture. So what? That's just their opinion. President Bush disagrees. The persistent failure to hold anyone accountable at any level for years of state-sanctioned abuse speaks louder than their words. It has taken this issue from a legal question to a matter of personal taste. What we choose to define as torture is now just another policy disagreement, like extending the Bush tax cuts or picking a caterer. This is precisely the kind of sliding-scale ethical guesswork the rule of law should preclude.

Uggh! She is repellent.

2010-11-29T17:49:00.000-08:00

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/clinton-calls-leaked-documents-attack-world/

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the leak of hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic documents is an attack not only on the United States but also the international community.

Yay! The system rocks!

2010-11-28T20:11:00.000-08:00

http://mobile.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2010/11/17/gates/index.html

"The Obama administration continues to shield Bush-era torturers from accountability in civil proceedings by blocking judicial review of their illegal behavior," said Steven Watt, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. "To date, not a single victim of the Bush administration's torture program has had his day in a U.S. court. The U.S. can no longer stand silently by as other nations reckon with their own agents' complicity in the torture program" . . . .

Read about immediate reaction to the wikileaks: http://m.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/nov/28/wikileaks-us-embassy-cables-live-blog?cat=news&type=article

a future

2010-11-28T19:30:00.001-08:00

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/11/nassim-taleb-predicts-what-will-break-and-what-wont-by-2036.html

The great top-down nation-state will be only cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians’ misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralised systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence. Currencies might still exist, but, after the disastrous experience of America’s Federal Reserve, they will peg to some currency without a government, such as gold.

Broke down

2010-11-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

Finally got a toy: A touch!

So, first post from it here! Yay!

David Hume in 3 Minutes

2010-10-01T13:38:00.000-07:00

Old Spice!

2010-07-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

See more funny videos and Funny Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Fun Video

2010-06-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

See more funny videos and TBT Videos at Today's Big Thing.

Amended with:

Required Viewing: Evolution Rap

2009-12-21T11:55:00.001-08:00

Required Viewing

2009-12-16T22:04:00.000-08:00

Required Reading

2009-11-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

The administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/19/obama/index.html

Can anyone reconcile Obama's homage to "our legal traditions" and his professed faith in jury trials in the New York federal courts with the reality of what his administration is doing: i.e., denying trials to a large number of detainees, either by putting them before military commissions or simply indefinitely imprisoning them without any process at all?

The Real Price of Trying KSM
http://www.slate.com/id/2236146

Good criminal defense attorneys are seldom deterred by futility, so it's reasonable to expect that KSM's lawyers will make all the arguments there are to make: They'll allege a violation of KSM's right to a speedy trial, claiming that the years he spent in CIA detention and Gitmo violated this constitutional right. They'll seek suppression of KSM's statements, arguing (persuasively) that the torture he endured—sleep deprivation, noise, cold, physical abuse, and, of course, 183 water-boarding sessions—make his statements involuntary. They will insist that everything stemming from those statements must be suppressed, under the Fourth Amendment, as the fruit of the wildly poisonous tree. They will demand the names of operatives and interrogators, using KSM's right to confront the witnesses against him to box the government into revealing things it would prefer to keep secret—the identities of confidential informants, the locations of secret safe houses, the names of other inmates and detainees who provided information about him, and a thousand other clever things that should make the government squirm. The defense will attack the CIA, FBI, and NSA, demanding information about wiretapping and signal intelligence and sources and methods. They'll move to dismiss the case because there is simply no venue in the United States in which KSM can get a fair trial.

. . .

In an idealized view, our judicial system is insulated from the ribald passions of politics. In reality, those passions suffuse the criminal justice system, and no matter how compelling the case for suppressing evidence that would actually effect the trial might be, given the politics at play, there is no judge in the country who will seriously endanger the prosecution. Instead, with the defense motions duly denied, the case will proceed to trial, and then (as no jury in the country is going to acquit KSM) to conviction and a series of appeals. And that's where the ultimate effect of a vigorous defense of KSM gets really grim.

At each stage of the appellate process, a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM's years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent "clean team" statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.

Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/renouncing-islamism-to-the-brink-and-back-again-1821215.html

    He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."

  .  .  .

    To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."

    But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"

    But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.

How the US Funds the Taliban
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston

    In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.

  .  .  .

    The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: "The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money." That is something everyone seems to agree on.

  .  .  .

    Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: "We're basically being extorted. Where you don't pay, you're going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to." Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. "Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It's based on the number of trucks and what you're carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they're not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more."

    Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. "If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially."

The Two Percent Robustness
http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson11022009.html

    At first the "public option" was to be a massive but less-than-universal healthcare plan that would prove so efficient and effective that over several years the public would all opt into it. It was a backdoor to a civilized system of Medicare for all. Now what's left of it? Now it's a public option for 2 percent of Americans, and in some states 0 percent, to be run by private corporations, with prices set to avoid any efficiency or competition for the wasteful health insurance companies.

  .  .  .

    Is that better than nothing? No, it's worse, because this pathetic scam of a healthcare plan is plastered like lipstick on a pig to a bailout for the health insurance corporations. (Sure, the bill contains some reforms to the insurance corporations' practices, but that's like trying to reform piranhas.) And when the healthcare crisis continues to worsen in the coming years, the blame will be placed on the nearly nonexistent public option, thus justifying making things even worse, if possible. And the same bill goes out of its way to prevent states from solving the problem on their own, allowing them to opt out of the perverse public option (opting into which would hardly be noticeable anyway) but denying states the ability to create real healthcare funding for their residents. Congressman Kucinich's amendment to remedy this has been stripped out by Speaker Pelosi.

Is there a correlation between teacher pay and class size?

2009-11-20T21:08:00.001-08:00

http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/09rankings.pdf

Letters: What tired Oregon teachers say

2009-11-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/susan_nielsen/index.ssf/2009/11/what_tired_oregon_teachers_say.html

Dear Editors and Teachers:

There are a number of problems with Susan Nielsen's attempt to evoke
sympathy for teachers in her article "What tired Oregon teachers say"
on Sunday 11/15. While I agree that teachers are woefully
under-appreciated and under-valued - their role being among the most
vital to any community - along with this comes equally strenuous
responsibility. My experience leads me to believe that where the
system is failing is inculcating, fostering, and sustaining in
teachers a goal of "eudaimonia": Each and every students needs to
flourish to their maximum potential. I recognize the difficulty in a
class of 30 or so, and it would even be hard with only 10. But, I have
found that most teachers unwilling to work with me to achieve this for
my children, let alone for their class as a whole. Further, some
districts such as mine actively disallow in-class volunteering.
Consequentially, I reject the notion that teachers are lacking
volunteer support.

IQ^2 Debate: Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good?

2009-11-14T10:50:00.000-08:00

Required Reading

2009-11-10T08:26:00.000-08:00

Factual errors cited in cases against detainees (from 2006)

The US military's accusations against detainees at Guantanamo Bay contain factual errors and some easily disproved assertions, according to declassified records, raising questions about whether the US military has thoroughly investigated its cases against the roughly 400 inmates.

For instance, one detainee is accused of belonging to an Al Qaeda cell ``circa 1998," according to the summary of evidence prepared for his hearing. But Pentagon records show the detainee was born in 1986, making him 11 or 12 in 1998.

In another case, a detainee stands accused of attending a terrorist training camp in July 2001. But copies of pay stubs show he was a chef in London at the time.

The United States as Cho Seung-Hui: How the State Sanctifies Murder ("old" Arthur Silber post)

The similarities between Cho's psychology and the forces that drive United States foreign policy ought to be startling, and profoundly disturbing: the feelings of vulnerability, victimization, humiliation and rage are the same -- as is the determination to restore one's own dominance through violence and murder. But be sure you appreciate the the chronology and the causal chain that Lifton correctly identifies: just as Cho did not suddenly become a murderer on the morning of April 16, but only reached that awful destination after years of inexorable psychological development along one particular path, so too the United States was not instantaneously transformed into an unfocused, rage-filled international murderer after 9/11. As Lifton states, "The war on terrorism, then, took amorphous impulses toward combating terror and used them as a pretext for realizing a prior mission aimed at American global hegemony."

'Going Muslim' (it should be needless to say, but still I say it, that you can only believe I endorse this if you have read no other posts from this blog; in which case, go read another post from this blog)

The difference between "going postal," in the conventional sense, and "going Muslim," in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological "snapping" point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage--the camouflage of integration--in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of "harassment" as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not "snap" in the "postal" manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away--to a neighbor--a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious "departure."

Required Reading: On Healthcare

2009-11-09T09:26:00.001-08:00

The Two Percent Robustness

Is that better than nothing? No, it's worse, because this pathetic scam of a healthcare plan is plastered like lipstick on a pig to a bailout for the health insurance corporations. (Sure, the bill contains some reforms to the insurance corporations' practices, but that's like trying to reform piranhas.) And when the healthcare crisis continues to worsen in the coming years, the blame will be placed on the nearly nonexistent public option, thus justifying making things even worse, if possible. And the same bill goes out of its way to prevent states from solving the problem on their own, allowing them to opt out of the perverse public option (opting into which would hardly be noticeable anyway) but denying states the ability to create real healthcare funding for their residents. Congressman Kucinich's amendment to remedy this has been stripped out by Speaker Pelosi.

Required Reading

2009-11-08T17:10:00.000-08:00

Bury the Chains

The American author Adam Hochschild on the British struggle to abolish slavery: one of the most ambitious and brilliantly organised citizens' movements of all time, the forerunner of the human rights movements of the last century. Its birth - among a group of Quakers and two Anglican activists - coincided with the departure of the First Fleet of convicts to Botany Bay. Its ultimate success, with the emancipation bill of 1831, preceded the ending of transportation to Australia.

Why Aren't Progressives Disrupting ObamaCare Town Halls?

Many progressives are getting all bent out of shape over the "brown shirt" rabble organized by health industry PR firms to disrupt the so-called "town meetings" being organized all over the country by Democratic members of Congress.

What they are conveniently forgetting is that these are not really "town meetings" at all, at least in the sense of the town meetings I grew up with, and started out covering as a young journalist in Connecticut--that is, meetings called and run democratically, with leaders elected from the floor, open to all residents of a community.

These "town meetings" are really nothing but propaganda sessions run by members of Congress who are trying to burnish their fraudulent credentials as public servants, and trying to perpetrate a huge fraud of a health care bill that purports to be a progressive "reform" of the US health care system, but that actually further entrenches the control of that system by the insurance industry, and to a lesser extent, the hospital and drug industry.

ObamaCare is to health reform what bank bailouts are to financial system reform, which is to say it is the opposite of what its name implies.

The right-wing nuts who cry that ObamaCare is introducing euthanasia for the elderly and infirm, or that it is socialism, are ignorant wackos, to be sure, but they are right about one thing: Americans are about to be royally screwed on health care reform by the president and the Democratic Congress, just as they've been screwed by them on financial system "reform."

The appropriate response to this screw-job is the one the right has adopted: shut these sham "town meetings" down, and run the sell-out politicians out of town on a rail, preferably coated in tar and feathers they way the snake-oil salesmen of old used to be handled!

Martin Luther King Would Have Loved the Teabaggers, Not Called Them Racists

A few weeks ago, I attended the teabagger protests in D.C. The thing I noticed the most about the folks there was that, for the most part, they were friendly, nice, hardworking people. Sure, there were some crazies; sure, there were some racists. For the most part, though, they looked like the type of folks I grew up with in the labor movement, coming to D.C. to participate in a protest and spend the rest of the weekend taking in some monuments and museums. These weren't rich suburbanites; the teabaggers I saw were mainly poor people, whose trip to D.C. was probably the only the vacation they would be able to afford this year.

Fascist America III: Resistance for the Long Haul

Nothin' but good times ahead. Now that they're organized up and had a little practice, the possibilities for further mayhem are limited only by the boundless paranoia and unfettered fantasies of the right-wing mind. Out at our local county fair this past weekend, the GOP booth was festooned with a wide array of buttons, tees, and bumper stickers proclaiming the owner's status as a "Proud Member of the Right-Wing Mob," and other similarly, um, assertively empowered sentiments. Judging from the general belligerence of the collection on offer, that seems to be the GOP's whole political identity now. They're determined to move boldly into 2010 as the party of America's union-, immigrant-, democracy-, and (if necessary) head-busting squadristi -- and they're damn proud of it all, you betcha.

Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

I recall suggesting that Conyers might have "sold-out", after which most of his staff refused to speak to me. I'm sure someone did call him a traitor, and I can't imagine what's worse than that. Perhaps someone said that he was complicit in the death of 1.3 million Iraqis. That's pretty bad. But that charge would not be baseless. We had a situation in which a majority of Americans wanted impeachment, a majority of Conyers' constituents (including his wife) wanted impeachment, 100 cities passed resolutions demanding impeachment, impeachment resolutions were introduced and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the chairman of that committee believed the offenses were "among the most impeachable in our nation's history," the charges included the launching of the war on Iraq, and the chairman refused to act. It's possible that his actions would have failed in the House or the Senate. It's possible that his actions, whether failing or succeeding, would have had some other negative consequence. But the fact was that he refused to try, and as many of us read the Constitution that was a failure of duty.

Destroying the Democratic Majority

Meanwhile the bill itself will force people to buy insurance, provides inadequate subsidies, and falls hardest on the middle class and young people—forcing them to spend a huge chunk of their discretionary income on average, and doubtless pushing many families into bankruptcy (plenty are on the verge, it is impossible to imagine that this won’t push them over the edge).

The Inhuman Stain: Saying Yes to State Terror

I've been writing about the case of Maher Arar since December 2003. He is the innocent Canadian man who was seized by U.S officials on his way back to Canada and then, at the order of the Justice Department, "renditioned" to Syria, where it was known that the authorities would torture the alleged "terrorist." They did, brutally. He was finally released, and his innocence was confirmed by the Canadian government, which paid him some $9 million for its part in his ordeal. – The United States, on the other hand, made no apologies, no restitution; instead, the government has resolutely blocked any attempt by Arar to seek justice in American courts.

Exclusive: I Was Kidnapped by the CIA

There is nothing particularly unusual about Abu Omar's story. Torture is a standard investigative technique of Egypt's intelligence services and police, as the State Department and human rights organizations have documented myriad times over the years. What is somewhat unusual is that Abu Omar ended up inside Egypt's torture chambers courtesy of the United States, via an "extraordinary rendition"—in this case, a spectacular daylight kidnapping by the Central Intelligence Agency on the streets of Milan, Italy.

Stone Walls and Steel Bars: America's War on its Own Keeps Raging

The cruel and unusual punitiveness of American society is a frequent topic on these page. (The most recent piece is here.) No nation on earth puts as many of its people in jail -- both in real numbers and as a percentage of the population. And few if any have "justice" systems so savagely targeted at racial minorities. For the past 30 years -- concurrent with the organized effort by the monied, militarized elite to destroy any and all restraints on their predatory appetites -- the United States has waged an unrelenting war on its black population, and on other minority and marginalized groups as well.

Feeling Proud?

2009-11-05T12:47:00.000-08:00

2009-08-04T16:10:00.000-07:00

From zerohedge, yea the economy is doing real good now.

Blinded by Hope

2009-06-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald keeps a continuous eye on difference between Obama and Bush: It is kind of like playing find Waldo here [].

Obama Sucks as President

2009-03-16T21:01:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald - I have to say (again): No regrets on NOT voting for him.

After many years of anger and complaint and outrage directed at the Bush administration for its civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses, the last thing most people want to do is conclude that the Obama administration is continuing the core of that extremism. That was why the flurry of executive orders in the first week produced such praise: those who are devoted to civil liberties were, from the start, eager to believe that things would be different, and most want to do everything but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones.

But it's becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that. After all, these are the exact policies which, when embraced by Bush, produced such intense protest over the last eight years. Nobody is complaining because the Obama administration is acting too slowly in renouncing these policies. The opposite is true: they are rushing to actively embrace them. And while there are still opportunities to meaningfully depart from the extremism of the last eight years, the evidence appears more and more compelling that, at least in these areas, there is little or no intent on the part of the Obama administration to do so.

Required Viewing: Goodness Jon Stewart is Awesome!

2009-03-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

The Awesomeness that is Obama's Iraq Plan!

2009-03-05T21:05:00.001-08:00

Required Viewing

2009-02-28T21:59:00.000-08:00

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Letter to the Oregonian: Regarding Hovde on Family Leave

2009-02-23T07:58:00.000-08:00

Dear Editors:

Removing the chaff from Hovde's opinion piece ("Paid family leave? Let's give it a deserved rest", Sun. 22) reveals the wheat of her anti-humanitarianism. She conflates the deserved responsibility of "personal choice" with the vagaries of personal "circumstance". She dehumanizes people as "employees" or "co-workers" and finds their concern for each other as "odd" or "burdensome". She isolates people as "individuals" who "need to do their part" and appropriately "plan" and is unable to see them as her community and the care of young and old its point. But ultimately she would prefer to punish the many families in need than find out her yuppie neighbor got her $42. What a sad person.

Coffee Klatch Research: Government Transparency

2009-01-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

Executive Orders from the Obama Whitehouse.

US Supreme Court Decisions

Useful Blogs on Opinions:

SCOTUSBLOG
Balkinization

Flight of the Conchords: Yay!

2009-01-20T21:19:00.000-08:00

Required Reading: Israel & Terrorism, Impeaching Bush, Torture

2009-01-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

Israel

Arthur Silber: The Necessary Violence of the Murderous National Bully
To think that Israel "lost" reveals a significant failure to understand the operations of the State, and of a particular kind of State. Just as the U.S. drive to American global hegemony means that the U.S. government intends to have its way no matter what, Israel intends to have its way within the smaller territory which it claims for its own dominance. From this perspective, it can be seen that the exercise of power in the manner just demonstrated by Israel is not a strategy toward a further end: the exercise of power is the end. Terrorizing an entire captive population, making large numbers of people (including many entirely innocent people) believe they have no choice but to obey, and visiting destruction and death upon them if they do not do exactly as they are told -- all of that is the purpose. To summarize this point, which applies to the governments of both the United States and Israel:
The fundamental lesson is unmistakable, and unmistakably evil in intent and execution (a word made horribly appropriate in more than one sense by our government's actions): you will do exactly as we say -- or else.
Israel did all this -- and no one stopped it. When Israel does it again, it is almost certain that no one, certainly not the U.S. government, will stop it then, either. That, I submit, is precisely what victory looks like.
As the Arabs see the Jews, His Majesty King Abdullah, The American Magazine, November, 1947
Our case is quite simple: For nearly 2,000 years Palestine has been almost 100 per cent Arab. It is still preponderantly Arab today, in spite of enormous Jewish immigration. But if this immigration continues we shall soon be outnumbered—a minority in our home.

. . .

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.

. . .

Such fragmentary records as we have indicate that the Jews were wandering nomads from Iraq who moved to southern Turkey, came south to Palestine, stayed there a short time, and then passed to Egypt, where they remained about 400 years. About 1300 BC (according to your calendar) they left Egypt and gradually conquered most—but not all—of the inhabitants of Palestine.

. . .

Only once, during the empire of David and Solomon, did the Jews ever control nearly—but not all—the land which is today Palestine. This empire lasted only 70 years, ending in 926 BC. Only 250 years later the Kingdom of Judah had shrunk to a small province around Jerusalem, barely a quarter of modern Palestine.

In 63 BC the Jews were conquered by Roman Pompey, and never again had even the vestige of independence. The Roman Emperor Hadrian finally wiped them out about 135 AD. He utterly destroyed Jerusalem, rebuilt under another name, and for hundreds of years no Jew was permitted to enter it. A handful of Jews remained in Palestine but the vast majority were killed or scattered to other countries, in the Diaspora, or the Great Dispersion. From that time Palestine ceased to be a Jewish country, in any conceivable sense.

This was 1,815 years ago, and yet the Jews solemnly pretend they still own Palestine! If such fantasy were allowed, how the map of the world would dance about!
LA Times: Israel declares unilateral cease-fire in Gaza Strip
Israel faced growing international pressure to halt the incessant airstrikes and thundering ground offensive, which by today had killed more than 1,200 Palestinians, a third of them children, according to Gaza Health Ministry figures that the United Nations deemed credible. At least 13 Israelis -- 10 soldiers and three civilians -- have died.

Officials in Israel also said they wanted to stop the fighting before Barack Obama is sworn in as president Tuesday to avoid clouding a historic day for the Jewish state's main ally and creating friction with the new U.S. administration.

. . .

The Jewish state has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006 but continued to preach Israel's destruction. Hamas took exclusive control of the territory in June 2007, ending a power-sharing government with the rival Fatah faction, which now controls only the West Bank.
Chris Floyd: Sham, Shock and Awe: False Peace Process Bears Bitter Fruit in Gaza
Although Siegman does not cast it in these terms, what we have been witnessing in Palestine over the past several decades is a remarkable echo of the dispossession and destruction of the Native American nations by the United States. There are myriad differences, of course, but the broad outline is basically the same: a people denigrated as primitive and inferior are being stripped of their land, driven into poverty and desperation, and killed in large numbers by another people who believe that their "manifest destiny" and moral superiority justify violent conquest and repression. Any violent resistance to the conquest is treated as barbaric terrorism -- and another justification for yet more repression, for even harsher tactics to grind down the conquered, secure "the frontier" and make it safe for "settlers" and the "civilization" they bring.
Chris Floyd: The End of Hypocrisy: Crime's Gleeful Abandon in Gaza
But now the masks are falling away -- or rather, they are being flung aside with gleeful abandon. America's top officials -- including the president and vice president -- openly admit to ordering torture...and they are praised for it, even held up as shining examples for future leaders to follow. Vast swathes of the corporate media labor mightily to justify the ancient evil of the water torture, and other "high-end interrogation techniques," to use the diabolical terminology of CIA Director Michael Hayden. The escalation of the on-going American war crime in Iraq -- the so-called "surge" -- is lauded as a "success beyond our wildest dreams" by the new, "progressive" manager of the empire, Barack Obama. (Imagine calling an action that allowed a known serial killer to extend his spree for years into the future a wild, dreamy "success.") Citizens of the "liberal democracy" in Israel -- the "light unto the nations" -- gather in safety and comfort on open hillsides to watch, cheering, as bombs fall on the trapped and helpless civilians penned in the Gaza ghetto. These macabre celebrations are echoed across America, where bitter partisan foes put aside their differences to come together in their unstinting, uncritical support of child murder across the sea.
Glenn Greenwald: Tom Friedman offers a perfect definition of "terrorism"
In any event, Friedman's column today is uncharacteristically and refreshingly honest. He explains that the 2006 Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon was, contrary to conventional wisdom, a great success. To make this case, Friedman acknowledges that the deaths of innocent Lebanese civilians was not an unfortunate and undesirable by-product of that war, but rather, was a vital aspect of the Israeli strategy -- the centerpiece, actually, of teaching Lebanese civilians a lesson they would not soon forget:
Israel’s counterstrategy was to use its Air Force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”
Friedman says that he is "unsure" whether the current Israeli attack on Gaza is similiarly designed to teach Palestinians the same lesson by inflicting "heavy pain" on civilians, but he hopes it is:
In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.
The war strategy which Friedman is heralding -- what he explicitly describes with euphemism-free candor as "exacting enough pain on civilians" in order to teach them a lesson -- is about as definitive of a war crime as it gets. It also happens to be the classic, textbook definition of "terrorism."
Via Glenn Greenwald:

Conyers and Impeachment

Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment
I recall suggesting that Conyers might have "sold-out", after which most of his staff refused to speak to me. I'm sure someone did call him a traitor, and I can't imagine what's worse than that. Perhaps someone said that he was complicit in the death of 1.3 million Iraqis. That's pretty bad. But that charge would not be baseless. We had a situation in which a majority of Americans wanted impeachment, a majority of Conyers' constituents (including his wife) wanted impeachment, 100 cities passed resolutions demanding impeachment, impeachment resolutions were introduced and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the chairman of that committee believed the offenses were "among the most impeachable in our nation's history," the charges included the launching of the war on Iraq, and the chairman refused to act. It's possible that his actions would have failed in the House or the Senate. It's possible that his actions, whether failing or succeeding, would have had some other negative consequence. But the fact was that he refused to try, and as many of us read the Constitution that was a failure of duty.

Torture

Chris Floyd: Head Cases: History's Clear Answer to the Torture Debate
When the question of what to do about the torturers was put to Barack Obama on TV this week -- after it was voted the single most important question that viewers wanted the president-elect to answer -- he responded with his usual mealy-mouthed blather about a preference for "moving on" and "looking to the future not the past," etc., etc., while throwing in a couple of non-commital pieties about the rule of law and so on. He even refused to say whether he would direct his attorney general to make a specific inquiry into allegations of torture -- by anyone in government, much less top officials. Again, it seems clear that if it is at all possible, Obama will bury the issue several fathoms deep -- just as Bill Clinton thwarted and killed off several investigations into high crimes by the first George Bush and his crew.

In any case, the "debate" on this question in the rarefied climes of Establishment goes on, even as the principals -- George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- openly confess their crimes in a series of self-justifying "interviews" with pathetic, bootlicking toadies; i.e., the nation's "media elite." Yet on the same day that Obama was waffling about "moving forward" from that little spot of bother about interrogations, Bush was also on national television, openly confessing to at least one clear-cut, indisputable war crime -- again, a capital crime under U.S. law: the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks. Bush said he authorized the use of a "list of tools" for interrogating KSM -- tools which included waterboarding, as Dick Cheney confirmed in yet another television confession.

Perhaps the strangest thing about the torture "debate" is that there is any debate at all over "what to do" about those who ordered the crimes to be committed. Scott Horton at Harper's explains what hundreds of years of Anglo-American jurisprudence clearly says about heads of state who order and countenance torture: they should be tried, and if convicted, executed. In fact, the verdict passed on the last head of state in this legal tradition who was found guilty of torture was that "he be taken to a place of execution, where his head was to be severed from his body by an axe."

Talking with A Believer: How did it Start?

2009-01-17T20:30:00.000-08:00

As I briefly mentioned before, it came about that I started talking to George for two reasons:

I got/am kinda tired of talking to "liberals"; AND
I have read the books by prominent atheists: Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

The first has been a long time brewing. Discussing pretty much anything with American 'liberals' -- not to speak of those sad pathetic characters who 'see both sides', are 'practical', and/or are socially 'liberal' but economically 'conservative', uggh -- is frustrating and depressing. The reality of any situation is actually pretty easy to determine (for example, see this on the current Israel/Gaza horror) and the appropriate moral judgment (the universality of morals) is all too obvious. The state of 'liberalism' in American is crap: Just take the Democrat's complicity in Bush's "War on Terror" and the delusions in effecting change by voting for a war criminal. It is also the case that most 'liberals' are not serious in their politics. By this I mean their beliefs come from internalizing popular/public 'liberalism'. There is very little thought or effort put into their beliefs.

As for the second, after reading these atheistic attacks on religion/dogma I am very interested in understanding the 'religious'. I truly do not understand why one would believe something for which one has no proof (ie. on faith).

Quick digression: I believe the "way to Truth" is via the Scientific Method. Conjecture, evidence, experiment, and theory is essientially a methodology to incrementally correct one's guesses. This method can not prove something true, but it can prove something false or more correct.

I have also been reading for some time philosophy books and following blogs on morality, ethics, Consequentialism, Freethinkers, and radical movements in history. All of this is because I am trying to come to a good and true epistemology. At this point I have pretty much settled on Naturalism, Stoicism, Humanism, Utilitarianism, and Scientism and pull from them what I want when I want. So I am curious: Why do people believe in Gods and have religious epistemologies? And why are these epistemologies believable?

So, one day I was in the cafeteria at my work place early in the morning for breakfast. I noticed a person reading/studying something pretty seriously. I had noticed this person on several occasions doing this. While there are many many things to study intently, the Bible is an obvious and popular one. Given that I work in high-tech it was not unreasonable to also guess something nerdy. I gave the odds about 50/50. So I introduced myself and asked saying something like (from memory): "Excuse me. I have noticed you here studying something. Would it be the Bible?" He said "Yes." I was half way there! I then asked the 'big' question: "I am an atheist. I am looking for someone religious to discuss philosophy and religion with. I am only going to bother you once: Here is my [work] email address. If you want to talk, send me an email and we can set it up."

It may seem strange or very forward of me to ask in this way, but it really was not. First, I really did nothing more than leave the decision in his hands; he had all the power and so would probably not feel pressured. But more importantly I made one large assumption: Anyone studying the Bible, at work, in the cafeteria, on more than 3 occasions, is in all likelihood someone who takes it seriously. From this, it is not unreasonable to conclude that an invitation to talk about his religion would welcomed because nearly all religions are looking to convert people. This is not meant to be insulting. I believe there are very few discussions on matters of import where the participants are not looking, in some degree, to convert (ie. convince) each other. I also do not mean to say that converting me immediately came to his mind (nor did he ever try as we shall see). But, I believe that because of certain aspects of human psychology, discussing particular topics such as religion, politics, economics, morality, and ethics, the participants are to some not insignificant degree looking to convert (ie. convince) others that their belief(s) is the correct one. At this point all that might seem like reasonable assumptions, but you are still wondering: Why did he announce himself as an atheist? Well, I pretty much assume that the religious look at atheists the way I just described looking at the religious: Incredulous. Even people who I consider only just barely religious have a hard time when I answer the question: 'What happens after you die?' with: "Nothing. That is it, final, finished." I figured this would more likely be a hook rather than a turn off.

That was it! I had introduced myself to someone who was religious and seriously so: He met the criteria of seriousness that 'liberals' do not possess and an epistemology I can not understand anyone having. I was very excited!

So far (reverse chronological):

George introduces himself...

2009-01-17T09:44:00.000-08:00

As I have briefly mentioned before, I have been talking with George: A self-avowed Fundamental Baptist Christian; a "Believer". He and I have been discussing weekly (for the most part) for the last 5 months our respective philosophies. Unfortunately, he has become unavailable for further discussions. I would now like to reflect on the discussions, but first I asked George for a short self-introduction:

I believe that Jesus Christ was God come in the flesh; the Christ (Messiah); that Jesus laid down his life to be crucified to pay the penalty for my sins, that he was buried, and that he arose from the dead three days later; that in his resurrection he proved he had power over death and sin; that because I have accepted God’s gift of Jesus’ payment for my sins that when I die he will give me eternal life.

Obviously no person or their epistemology can be summed up in a few sentences so first I thank George for attempting. It should be noted therefore that he is much more than this and that any assumption you make from this are your own. In following posts I will be reflecting on the discussion and presenting George's position or words to the best of my recollection. You should of course assume that I did not fully understand or recall correctly.

Judging George from these posts would be wrong: Judging me would be right.

Before I introduce George...

2009-01-16T20:43:00.000-08:00

I should perhaps introduce myself. Right now I am best able to define myself as:

Naturalist
Humanist
Anarchist
Libertarian Socialist
Eudaimonia (ie. human flourishing) is the goal or purpose of life and occurs when preferences/interests/desires are met
No expectations (ie. nirodha)
3 Step Ethics
1. Assert the definitions of "good" and "bad".
2. Have a methodology for deciding on how to act.
3. The result(s) by definition are what is "right" and/or "wrong".
People are basically good
Do to others as they would want done to themselves

Here are some real world/practical things that help to define me:

I will vote for pretty much any/all tax increases
I will vote for pretty much NO increase in prison or law enforcement
I will vote for pretty much anything having to do with libraries or schools
I do give money to things like the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, People for the American Way, etc.
pro-abortion & euthanasia

Among my favorite authors are:

Among my favorite historical philosophies and figures are:

That is probably enough for now.

Thank Goodness for Python!

2009-01-13T22:22:00.000-08:00

Pie Iesu domine, dona eis requiem:

Five is right out!

Goodness, I wanna stop posting about Israel!

2009-01-13T22:07:00.000-08:00

Chris Floyd quotes Uri Avnery:

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army “revealed” that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.

Later the official liar claimed that “our soldiers were shot at from inside the school”. Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.

What about Obama? Screwing us already?

2009-01-13T21:49:00.000-08:00

Hey! What is Obama up to? Oh, goodie!!

Chris Floyd: Enduring Priorities in an Age of Change: War and Profits Over People

If you want a glimpse of the fundamental moral obscenity that underlies our bold new era of hope and change, look no further than Barack Obama's promise this week to "overhaul" Social Security and Medicare. This effort to cut back on support for the sick, the old, the weak, the unfortunate and the abandoned will be a "central part" of the new administration's economic program, a linchpin of its struggle to curb federal spending, Obama declared.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/us/politics/08obama.html

President-elect Barack Obama said Wednesday that overhauling Social Security and Medicare would be "a central part" of his administration’s efforts to contain federal spending, signaling for the first time that he would wade into the thorny politics of entitlement programs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/business/economy/08deficit.html

"We expect that discussion around entitlements will be a part, a central part" of efforts to curb federal spending, Mr. Obama said at a news conference. By February, he said, "we will have more to say about how we’re going to approach entitlement spending."

Naomi Klien: Torture & Israel

2009-01-13T21:26:00.000-08:00

'Never Before!' Our Amnesiac Torture Debate

Suffice it to say that choosing Panama to declare “We do not torture” is a little like dropping by a slaughterhouse to pronounce the United States a nation of vegetarians.
. . .
It’s a history that has been exhaustively documented in an avalanche of books, declassified documents, CIA training manuals, court records and truth commissions. In his upcoming book, A Question of Torture, Alfred McCoy synthesizes this unwieldy cache of evidence, producing an indispensable and riveting account of how monstrous CIA-funded experiments on psychiatric patients and prisoners in the 1950s turned into a template for what he calls “no-touch torture,” based on sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain. McCoy traces how these methods were field-tested by CIA agents in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program and then imported to Latin America and Asia under the guise of police training programs.

Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction

Required Reading: Israeli Immorality

2009-01-11T20:25:00.000-08:00

Chris Floyd: Moloch's Altar: Child Sacrifice and the War on Terror

A Tiny Revolution: How Did Reality Get On My TV? ( w/ video )

From Glenn Greenwald:

It is not a justification to say that Hamas, if possible, would kill all Israelis. It is not a justification that Jews have been persecuted throughout recorded history. It is not a justification to say that Hamas uses civilians as shields (especially in an urban setting).

Offended? There is no equivalence...

2009-01-10T16:21:00.000-08:00

Is someone afraid in Sderot? Probably. Is the terror there equivalent to the terror in Gaza. Hardly. Pay attention:

A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.

Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."

Somewhere in Beit Hanoun, Ashraf El-Masri's family cowered in their concrete tenement home, their neighborhood surrounded by Israeli soldiers. El-Masri said that five residents had been killed by Israeli shelling that morning, and the blasts had traumatized the youngest of his nine children into a terrified silence...

On the hilltop overlooking Beit Hanoun, Pilchick squinted into the sharp sunlight. He'd taken time off from his job at a foreign exchange bureau in Jerusalem and driven down to Sderot with a friend on Saturday, the day the ground operation opened...Sderot residents — some of them carrying binoculars — have gathered on the hilltop since the offensive began for a glimpse of the fighting...

In their darkened home in Beit Hanoun, Ashraf El-Masri's children were in utter distress. No one has stepped outside since Israeli ground forces entered the town Saturday night, and more Israeli shelling awakened them Monday morning, including a strike on a nearby mosque.

Israelis, sipping Pepsi, watch bombardment of Gaza town

Oh, and I forgot to add... (still NSFW)

2009-01-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

It is not like we fuck around in the politics over there do we?

Fuck you.

UPDATED: What You Don’t Know About Gaza

This post is NSFW

2009-01-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

To those who think Israel's current actions in Gaza are justified:

Fuck you.

Israel criticised after 'shocking' discovery of exhausted children

Four exhausted children have been discovered cowering in a house next to the bodies of their mothers by staff of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which today accused the Israeli military of "unacceptable" delays in allowing medics safe access to injured Gazans.

The Red Cross workers found the small children, who were so weak they could not stand, sheltering next to the bodies of their mothers in a house in Zeitoun, southeast of Gaza City. Another man was found alive, but again too weak to stand. At least 12 bodies were lying on mattresses.

First off the whole discussion is moot: Israel is not at all in danger of being wiped out.

So here is Wikipedia's page on the the current conflict in Gaza. Hmmm, I wonder why there was an increase in rocket attacks in November when before there were nearly none?

Could Israel have started the current conflict? Nah:

So read something.

And just in case you forgot: Fuck you.

Religious Moral/Ethical Decision Making

2009-01-09T16:46:00.000-08:00

Remember discussing moral/ethical decision making? I tried to fit George's moral/ethical decision making process into my 3 step process:

Assert the definitions of "good" and "bad".
Have a methodology for deciding on how to act.
The result(s) by definition are what is "right" and/or "wrong".

So, I asked if this was a fair fit of his beliefs:

What is “good” and/or “bad” is declared to be what God say via the Bible; AND
Given God is the ultimate authority doing what he says one ought to do, acting to bring about “good” as defined by him, and/or acting to reduce the “bad” as defined by him; AND
Determines a “right” or “wrong” act.

( I have left in my poor grammar! Wink! )

He said yes.

Here are some important points in this for me:

The Bible is completely true.
The Bible is prescriptive, ie. it has rules one ought to follow.
God is the ultimate authority and therefore ought to be followed.

George pointed out (my interpretation and inference in a follow up discussion) that because God is good, perfect, and infinite in ability, that makes him the ultimate authority and makes sense to follow his rules. He also pointed out that God's rules are given in the Bible. Therefore, the Bible must be the word of God and also perfect.

Of course there is also one (other) vital point:

One ought to follow any/all of God's rules.

This implies that George -- if sufficiently convinced -- would follow any commandment given to him by God, even ones that would seem to me to be immoral/unethical. Of course, given he believes God is good, I think he believes that such a thing -- such as killing a baby -- would not really happen. But theoretically he would do so if commanded. This is unconfirmed and I have requested if this is so. Stay tuned!

Redundant

2009-01-07T18:24:00.000-08:00

From my phone!

Required Read: Further

2009-01-06T17:25:00.000-08:00

Disinformation, secrecy and lies: How the Gaza offensive came about
Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces "Cast Lead" operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning.

The disinformation effort, according to defense officials, took Hamas by surprise and served to significantly increase the number of its casualties in the strike.

. . .

The plan of action that was implemented in Operation Cast Lead remained only a blueprint until a month ago, when tensions soared after the IDF carried out an incursion into Gaza during the ceasefire to take out a tunnel which the army said was intended to facilitate an attack by Palestinian militants on IDF troops.

On November 19, following dozens of Qassam rockets and mortar rounds which exploded on Israeli soil, the plan was brought for Barak's final approval. Last Thursday, on December 18, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the defense minister met at IDF headquarters in central Tel Aviv to approve the operation.
Gaza: the logic of colonial power
I have often been asked by policy analysts, policy-makers and those stuck with implementing those policies for my advice on what I think America should do to promote peace or win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. It too often feels futile, because such a revolution in American policy would be required that only a true revolution in the American government could bring about the needed changes. An American journal once asked me to contribute an essay to a discussion on whether terrorism or attacks against civilians could ever be justified. My answer was that an American journal should not be asking whether attacks on civilians can ever be justified. This is a question for the weak, for the Native Americans in the past, for the Jews in Nazi Germany, for the Palestinians today, to ask themselves.

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Required Reading

2009-01-05T12:50:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald
- Obama's impressive new OLC chief
  I first read these posts of Johnsen's a few weeks ago when a reporter asked me about my reaction to the possibility that she might be appointed to head the OLC. Beyond these articles, I don't know all that much about her, but anyone who can write this, in this unapologetic, euphemism-free and even impolitic tone, warning that the problem isn't merely John Yoo but Bush himself, repeatedly demanding "outrage," criticizing the Democratic Congress for legalizing Bush's surveillance program, arguing that we cannot merely "move on" if we are to restore our national honor, stating the OLC's "core job description" is to "say 'no' to the President," all while emphasizing that the danger is unchecked power not just for the Bush administration but "for years and administrations to come" -- and to do so in the middle of an election year when she knows she has a good chance to be appointed to a high-level position if the Democratic candidate won and yet nonetheless eschewed standard, obfuscating Beltway politesse about these matters -- is someone whose appointment to such an important post is almost certainly a positive sign. No praise is due Obama until he actually does things that merit praise, but it's hard not to consider this encouraging.
- Orwell, blinding tribalism, selective Terrorism, and Israel/Gaza
  So many of these conflicts -- one might say almost all of them -- end up shaped by the same virtually universal deficiency: excessive tribalistic identification (i.e.: the group with which I was trained to identify is right and good and just and my group's enemy is bad and wrong and violent), which causes people to view the world only from the perspective of their side, to believe that X is good when they do it and evil when it's done to them. X can be torture, or the killing of civilians in order to "send a message" (i.e., Terrorism), or invading and occupying other people's land, or using massive lethal force against defenseless populations, or seeing one's own side as composed of real humans and the other side as sub-human, evil barbarians.
Via A Tiny Revolution -- Tom Engelhardt: The Ponzi Scheme Presidency
With Bush's "commander-in-chief" presidency only days from its end, the price tag on his "war" continues to soar as dollars grow scarce, new investors refuse to pay in, and the scheme crumbles. Unfortunately, the American people, typical suckers in such a con game, will be left with a mile-high stack of IOU's. In any Ponzi scheme comparison with Madoff, however, one difference (other than size) stands out. Sooner or later, Madoff, like Charles Ponzi himself, will end up behind bars, while George, Dick, & Co. will be writing their memoirs and living off the fat of the land.
Arthur Silber: Witness the Lightbringer, the Harbinger of Hope and Change, the Man of Peace, and His Wondrous and Mighty Works
As my title notes, in many contexts -- and indisputably in this one -- silence means consent. But Obama has repeatedly told us that he not only consents: he actively supports this policy -- not only with regard to Israel, but in Iraq, and in connection with the American ruling class's determination to maintain, consolidate and expand its global hegemonic role. Also see here and here, and many other articles linked therein. If anyone is surprised by any of this, he has only himself to blame. On many occasions, Obama told you precisely what he believed and what he would and would not do -- and many people, out of a stupidly misguided "hope" or, much more contemptibly, out of a desire to acquire power for "their" gang of criminals, chose not to believe Obama's own words (or to disregard them). They appear not to realize the nature of the insult they thus leveled at the impliedly loathsome vessel which they selected as the repository of their feeble, unfounded hopes: if you didn't believe what he said and preferred to believe he actually meant something else -- that something else being what you contend you believe -- that can only mean you thought he was a liar, which indeed he is. And yet many people still voted for him, even after concluding Obama was a calculating manipulator of the first order, one who was primarily interested in acquiring power and nothing else at all. (I discussed one example of this self-delusion in the concluding section of this article.)
This is the article that Arthur riffs from.

Required Reading: Continued

2009-01-03T13:15:00.000-08:00

On Obama: My Brilliant Career by Mike Whitney
Obama has remained serenely detached while American-made F-16's have dumped more than one hundred tons of lethal ordnance on the captive population of Gaza. In fact, the president-elect has spent more time working on his abs at the Semper Fit gym in Honolulu than trying to stop the bloody onslaught which has already resulted in the deaths of over 300 Palestinians, half of who are civilians.

When asked why he hasn't given his opinion on the conflict, Obama spokesman have blandly stated, "There's only one president at a time".

Uh-huh. So why was Obama so quick to condemn Russia's invasion of South Ossetia? Is the yardstick for measuring aggression different in the Caucasus than it is in the Middle East? Or is it because politicians are just too afraid to cross Israel?

"If somebody shot rockets at my house where my two daughters were sleeping at night, I'd do everything in my power to stop them," Obama proclaimed on a recent visit to Israel.

Right. It's too bad Palestinian parents can't claim that same right without being branded as terrorists.
Shock, Awe and Lies: The Truth Behind the Israeli Attack on Gaza
Dean Baker: Free Market Myth
The extraordinary financial collapse of recent months has been commonly described as a testament to the failure of deregulation. The events are indeed testament to a failure—a failure of public policy. Blaming deregulation is misleading.

In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. “Less” regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.

Framing regulation debates in terms of more and less is not only inaccurate; it hugely biases the argument toward conservative positions by characterizing an extremely intrusive structure of, for example, patent and copyright rules, as the free market. In the realm of insurance and finance over the last two decades, calls for deregulation have been cover for rules tilted starkly toward corporate interests. And the recent change in bankruptcy law, hailed by conservatives, requires much greater government involvement in the economy.

False ideological claims have circumscribed the public debate over regulation and blinded us to the wide range of choices we can make. Without these claims, what would guide regulatory policy? What kinds of choices would we have?
On Obama: Arthur Silber
In the months leading up to the November election, I repeatedly argued that both major presidential candidates were war criminals. The truth is considerably worse than this statement would indicate: given the United States' corporatist-authoritarian-militarist identity and nature, a major national political candidate must be a war criminal. If he (or she) is not, he will never rise to the national level in the first place. (The rare exceptions only prove the point: they are of vanishing importance, and they exercise no power whatsoever.)
( Chomsky has said this for years. )
NYRB on Torture Books
Because so many of the facts surrounding the torture policy are now well known, Sands's book is illuminating not so much for breaking new factual ground as for the human insight he brings to the events. Through his interviews, he tells a story about how ordinary human beings, all working within an institution designed to fight by the rules, felt tremendous pressure to bend the rules—and in most cases did so without apparent concern or self-doubt. A narrowly pragmatic ethos guided virtually all actors. The real arguments were for the most part not about whether coercive tactics were legally or morally acceptable, but about whether they worked. Some, especially those in the FBI, felt strongly that they were counterproductive, and that building rapport through noncoercive questioning was the only way to gain credible intelligence from captives.[4] Others thought the idea of building rapport with al-Qaeda suspects was foolish; it could not be done. But with the courageous exception of Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, few argued that coercive tactics were wrong because they were immoral and illegal, whether or not they worked. In America after September 11, idealists were few and far between, and an amoral, blinkered pragmatism ruled the day.
Glenn Greenwald: Committing war crimes for the "right reasons"
But we don't accept that justifying reasoning when offered by others. In fact, those who seek merely to explain -- let alone justify -- the tyranny, extremism and/or violence of Castro, or Chavez, or Hamas, or Slobodan Milosevic or Islamic extremists are immediately condemned for seeking to defend the indefensible, or invoking "root causes" to justify the unjustifiable, or offering mitigating rationale for pure evil.

Yet here we have American leaders who now, more openly than ever, are literally admitting to what has long been known -- that they violated the laws of war and international treaties which, in the past, we've led the way in advocating and enforcing. And what do we hear even from the most well-intentioned commentators such as Douthat? Yes, it was wrong. True, they shouldn't have done it. But they did it for good reasons: they believed they had to do it to protect us, to guard against truly bad people, to discharge their heavy responsibility to protect the country, because we were at war.
WHO ENDED THE 6 MONTH CEASE-FIRE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE?
More crucially, Israeli and international sources from the first week of November 2008 – sources that are scholarly and (otherwise) more reliable than the NYT – shed further light on the misleading claim by the NYT editors. They include, but are by no means limited to:
The Israeli Haaretz, November 5, 2008: "Israel Defense Forces troops yesterday killed a Hamas gunman and wounded two others in the first armed clash in the Gaza Strip since a cease-fire was declared there in June. […] An Israeli army spokeswoman said troops had entered the territory."

The Israeli Yediot Ahronot, November 5, 2008: "For the first time since the ceasefire took effect in June, IDF forces operated deep in the Gaza Strip Tuesday night."

(Note: had the NYT editors bothered to consult Hebrew sources they would have easily found that the Hebrew version of the news item cited above is even clearer.)

The Times (UK), November 5, 2008: "A five-month truce between Israel and the Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip was foundering yesterday after Israeli special forces entered the besieged territory and fought."

Amnesty International, November 10, 2008: "A spate of Israeli and Palestinian attacks and counter-attacks in the past 24 hours could spell the end of a five-and-a-half-month ceasefire. […] The killing of six Palestinian militants in Gaza by Israeli forces in a ground incursion and air strikes on 4 November was followed by a barrage of dozens of Palestinian rockets."

The Guardian, November 5, 2008: "Hamas militants fired more than 35 rockets into Israel today, hours after the Israeli army killed six people inside the Gaza Strip in the first major exchange of fire since a truce took effect in June."

The Independent, November 5, 2008: "Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired more than 35 rockets towards Israel today, the army and the Islamist group said, hours after the Israeli army killed six militants in the coastal territory."
( Ed: See links on original. )

Required Reading: More

2009-01-02T15:45:00.000-08:00

More Glenn Greenwald
- Salon Radio: Pam Spaulding on Rick Warren
- Torture ambivalence masquerading as moral and intellectual superiority
  There's an irony to the fact that this infinite capacity to self-justify is purely adolescent in nature. As the above-excerpted clip demonstrates, those who view American Torture as a fascinating moral dilemma over which Serious People publicly agonize -- as Drezner put it: "if you're a national security person, you don't care about the legal niceties . . . it is a complicated question; it's not cut and dried" -- have actually convinced themselves that their refusal to make clear, definitive judgments is a hallmark not only of their moral superiority, but of their intellectual superiority as well. Only shrill ideologues and simpletons on either side believe that the torture question is "cut and dried." They actually believe that their indecisive open-mindedness on such clear moral questions is a sign of their rich and deep complexity, even though it's nothing more than an adolescent inability to assess the world through any prism other than their own immediate reflexive desires and self-interest.
- Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel
  Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation. It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.
- Torture prosecutions finally begin in the U.S.
Bernard Chazelle on the liberal respect for authority
The question is useful because it disposes of the rejoinder: "You're not being serious by defending shoe throwers." For Perlstein, the parallel stops there. He is clear about it. It's not about the person but the authority behind it: a "leader of a sovereign state, no matter how much he's deservedly hated" deserves respect. Two interesting points: first, Perlstein presumably confines his sphere of respect to "our kind of leaders" (not Pol Pot, Kim Jong-il, Saddam, etc.) Second, Kant's theory of respect-for-persons as an end in itself is neatly swept aside. It's OK to spit at a terrorist but not at a president. Why? Because, as liberal bloggers write, out of spectacular ignorance, one should "despise the man but respect the office." Do they realize the essence of the Enlightenment was to reach precisely the opposite conclusion? That shoes should be aimed at kings and presidents, not at the persons behind them.

Capitalist Alienation of Labor: Chomsky on Anarchism

2009-01-02T11:11:00.000-08:00

Chomsky on Anarchism, Noam Chomsky, p123-124:

Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that "every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist." Similarly Bakunin, in his "anarchist manifesto" of 1865, the program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist.

A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production(1) and the wage slavery(2) which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will "become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life," an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: "no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious than another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself." A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor(3) but also the stupefying specialization of labor(4) that takes place when the means for developing production
mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power....
Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production. The society of the future must be concerned to "replace the detail-worker of today...reduced to a mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours...to whom the different social function...are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural powers." The prerequisite is the abolition of capital and wage labor as social categories (not to speak of the industrial armies of the "labor state" or the various modern forms of totalitarianism or state capitalism). The reduction of man to an appurtenance of the machine, a specialized tool of production, might in principle be overcome, rather than enhanced, with the proper development and use of technology, but not under the conditions of autocratic control of production by those who make man an instrument to sever their ends, overlooking his individual purposes, in Humboldt's phrase.

Wikified for your enjoyment!

UPDATED: Added some notes to my commentary as to what it means to me.

(1) Notice that this is a prohibition of private ownership of the means of production, eg. the factory, and NOT an abolition of private ownership per se, eg. cars, homes, chairs, food, etc. I am not clear why socialism and/or anarchism are rightly criticized as doing away with private property?
(2) My understanding of what wage slavery is: When the means of production are privately owned then the means of distribution are privately owned allowing for inequitable allocation. This inequity forces people to work for even the most basic fundamental needs of life: Food and shelter. Hence they are slaves to the owners of production; assuming they wish to live.
(3) My understanding of alienated labor is: When the means of production are privately owned then the worker is not free in, ie. in control of, either the methodology in their labor(s) or the results of their labor(s): They do not get to decide how to do their job or what to do with the final product(s).
(4) Specialization impedes the prospect for human eudaimonia (ie. human flourishing). Radical theories such as Parecon and Libertarian Municipalism have addressed this. But in brief, we each would be swimming in our own garbage without garbage people. Both at home and at work we throw away thoughtlessly: We know that someone will come and get it and take it away. And sure if you scratch the surface in discussion with someone about this they will agree that this role is vital, but of course we do not remunerate accordingly. And this role is certainly uncreative and mind-numbing, massively so in comparison to those reading this in all likelihood. This is specialization at the national economic level, and within corporations is assumed. It is also clear that one's position in the corporate capitalist system directly affects their health and well-being. Most do not flourish in a capitalist conceived economy.

Moral/Ethical Decision Making

2009-01-01T17:53:00.000-08:00

I have been talking on a weekly basis at lunch with a "Believer", George. This came about for two reasons:

I got/am kinda tired of talking to "liberals"; AND
I have read the books by prominent atheists: Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens.

So I both wanted to talk to someone who's beliefs are not derived via osmosis of mainstream culture and to talk to someone these atheists writers are writing about.

The discussions with George have been very enlightening. To the first order, his beliefs are not dangerous. I can not imagine him personally participating in any sort of violence. In fact, I can even imagine him standing up to any authority he does not feel is given from God, much to his credit. Also, his interpretation of the Bible and Jesus is as far as I can tell non-violent. He has contrasted (his) Christianity and Islam in their propensity towards violence: He asserts that it is not written that Christians ought to spread their beliefs via "the sword" vs. Islam which does have such violent proscriptions. To the second order though, I do believe his actions could and do cause real suffering: His beliefs inform him on the classic political topics of our time such as the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, etc.

But that is not the objective of this post. Instead I wanted to relate a part of one of our discussions where he asked me how I decide between good and bad and right and wrong. I came up with this three step process:

Assert the definitions of "good" and "bad".
Have a methodology for deciding on how to act.
The result(s) by definition are what is "right" and/or "wrong".

Here is mine:

The satisfaction of desires/preferences/interests is "good" and obstacles to them are "bad".
The expected consequences -- as determined from historical analysis and/or imagination -- inform completely our decision and discrimination of our act(s).
The result(s) by definition are what is "right" and/or "wrong".

( Of course this is not new: This comes from my reading, most specifically Peter Singer and of Consequentialism, specifically Utilitarianism. It is probably obvious. )

The discussion between George and I has only recently been on political/real life topics. In our last meeting, I specifically requested citations on homosexuality. I made a guess at his decision making process fit into these 3 steps and asked him if it was fair. I hope to go over this at the next meeting and will report back then.

Required Reading

2008-12-30T21:13:00.000-08:00

Dean Baker on the gall of the Washington Post
Yes, I'm talking about the Washington Post, which had the gall today to run a column by Jim Hoagland complaining about how "we" are passing on a bad world to our children. The "we" in the column is meant to refer to the generations currently in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, who he claims are leaving huge problems to our children.

. . .

The reality is that the Washington Post and the elite clique for which it is a mouth piece have badly failed us and our children. The housing bubble was easily recognizable. The economic disaster that we are now facing could have been easily avoided if the Washington Post and its elite friends (e.g. Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Henry Paulson) were not too incompetent or corrupt to see the evidence of problems everywhere. Needless to say, those of us who did try to issue warnings were ignored by this elite crew.

Louder than Bombs: Andrew Exum considers the paradox of deterrence.
All signs point toward another war – just as disastrous as the last one. For despite Hizbollah’s claims of victory, there was no winner in 2006. Hizbollah’s followers in the south were punished to a degree that exceeded previous Israeli bombing campaigns in 1993 and 1996; one million Lebanese were driven out of the country or internally displaced; and more than 1000 civilians were killed. One horrific massacre in the Biblical town of Qana left some 30 dead – half of them children – in an echo of a similar slaughter there 10 years earlier. If the war really was a “victory from God” as Hassan Nasrallah claims, then consider me a convert to atheism.

On the Israeli side, meanwhile, hundreds of thousands were either displaced or driven into shelters, a traumatic experience for a population which thought it had turned a page on Lebanon by withdrawing its occupation forces in 2000. Worse, the vaunted IDF – rightly hailed as the region’s finest military machine – was upstaged by its Lebanese adversaries, even as many of the villages that put up such ferocious resistance were defended in large part not by Hizbollah regulars but by residents who functioned as a kind of “national guard”.

Philosophers on God: Boston Review
The traditional arguments for God’s existence are very much worth our attention, though, for at least three reasons: they are of great intrinsic interest; popular discussions of them often fail to pin down their defects; and one argument, the “design argument,” has had a new lease on life as the intellectual underpinning of the intelligent design movement.

Our Excellent Strategy in Afghanistan
The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

"Take one of these. You'll love it," the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes -- followed by a request for more pills.

We have no words left: Palestinians are at a loss to describe this latest catastrophe. International civil society must act now
"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those chilling words were spoken on al-Jazeera on Saturday by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defence official in the Sderot area adjacent to the Gaza Strip. For days Israeli planes have bombed Gaza. Almost 300 Palestinians have been killed and a thousand injured, the majority civilians, including women and children. Israel claims most of the dead were Hamas "terrorists". In fact, the targets were police stations in dense residential areas, and the dead included many police officers and other civilians. Under international law, police officers are civilians, and targeting them is no less a war crime than aiming at other civilians.

Palestine's Guernica and the Myths of Israeli Victimhood
2. Israel claims that Hamas violated the cease-fire and pulled out of it unilaterally.

Hamas indeed respected their side of the ceasefire, except on those occasions early on when Israel carried out major offensives in the West Bank. In the last two months, the ceasefire broke down with Israelis killing several Palestinians and resulting in the response of Hamas. In other words, Hamas has not carried out an unprovoked attack throughout the period of the cease-fire.

Israel, however, did not live up to any of its obligations of ending the siege and allowing vital humanitarian aid to resume in Gaza. Rather than the average of 450 trucks per day being allowed across the border, on the best days, only eighty have been allowed in - with the border remaining hermetically sealed 70% of the time. Throughout the supposed 'cease-fire' Gazans have been forced to live like animals, with a total of 262 dying due to the inaccessibility of proper medical care.

Now after hundreds dead and counting, it is Israel who refuses to re-enter talks over a cease-fire. They are not intent on securing peace as they claim; it is more and more clear that they are seeking regime change - whatever the cost.

Has Global Stag-Deflation Arrived? by Nouriel Roubini
The latest macroeconomic news from the United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets confirms that the global economy will face a severe recession in 2009. In the US, recession started in December 2007, and will last at least until December 2009 – the longest and deepest US recession since World War II, with the cumulative fall in GDP possibly exceeding 5%.

. . .

With a global recession a near certainty, deflation – rather than inflation – will become the main concern for policymakers. The fall in aggregate demand while potential aggregate supply has been rising because of overinvestment by China and other emerging markets will sharply reduce inflation. Slack labor markets with rising unemployment rates will cap wage and labor costs. Further falls in commodity prices – already down 30% from their summer peak – will add to these deflationary pressures.

Policymakers will have to worry about a strange beast called “stag-deflation” (a combination of economic stagnation/recession and deflation); about liquidity traps (when official interest rates become so close to zero that traditional monetary policy loses effectiveness); and about debt deflation (the rise in the real value of nominal debts, increasing the risk of bankruptcy for distressed households, firms, financial institutions, and governments).

From the Haaretz: The neighborhood bully strikes again By Gideon Levy
Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, I wrote: "Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn't be provoked into anger... Not that the bully's not right - someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction!"

Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation "Cast Lead" is only in its infancy.

Obama and Rick

2008-12-24T22:28:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald provides two links to -- in his opinion -- the two strongest pro/con pieces regarding Obama's choice of Rich Warren to give his inaugural speech:

Pro: Juan Cole says:

What Obama has done in elected office in the past and what he does after the inauguration are the things we should focus on, not a small nod to the evangelical right in the spirit of inclusiveness.

That is the stupidest thing I have heard of. Does he really believe anyone is convinced? Actually, this type of thing is what continues to encourage me in my decision to vote for McKinney: This action by Obama is pure politics. It convinces no one in any real power and allows at best something to point to in the 30sec sound-bite world of TV.

Presidential Morph

2008-12-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

The 56, 5 Book Meme

2008-12-03T13:05:00.000-08:00

' thought themselves bound in conscience to the public justice

The Century of Revolution: 1603 - 1714
Christopher Hill

Pass it on:

1. Grab the nearest book.

2. Open it to page 56.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these # instructions.

5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

[ h/t: http://devlishgenius.blogspot.com/2008/11/56-5-book-meme.html ]

Required Reading: Writing the posts I wish I could

2008-12-02T08:42:00.000-08:00

I assume you all are constantly and consistently reading Silber? No?

Get to it (hope you -- Arthur -- do not mind me fully quoting this one!?)

Can't We All Just Get Along?, or: Kiss, Kiss, Kill, Kill:

I'll have much more on the necessarily unchanging changiness of the soon to be upon us Obama Administration in my new series, "Clinging to the Wreckage" (briefly described in the intro here). With much more to come on this topic, I emphasize that you must always keep in mind Silber's Iron Law:
Any individual who rises to the national political level is, of necessity and by definition, committed to the authoritarian-corporatist state. The current system will not allow anyone to be elected from either of the two major parties who is determined to dismantle even one part of that system.
As I discussed in the earlier piece, there are a few minor exceptions to this law, but they are only that: very minor exceptions, allowed precisely to convince you that you are availing yourself of a meaningful method of opposition. You are being allowed nothing of the kind.

Before I get to my own longer analysis of the issues involved, I want to note a few recent blog posts that I came across in my recent travels attempting to bring myself up to date on blogospheric happenings. I should have added this site to the blogroll some time ago, just for the name alone: Stop Me Before I Vote Again. I have a fantasy of my own along those lines. Too many of you ruined it. I dunno what you people were thinking. Nothing at all, certain testimony would indicate. I suppose a self-induced coma helps. And yet many of you still wonder how horrors happen on this earth. You shouldn't (see the last half of that essay in particular, and apply the lessons as you are able, which for certain people obviously isn't much). And always ask yourself what you are supporting (see here, too).

As is true of more than a few entries there, a recent post at Stop Me Before... offers a certain mordant humor:
My liberal, Obamaphile friends are rapidly losing their sense of humor.

Oddly enough, it was more or less OK for me to be a Grinch before the election. Now, however, it seems to be in very poor taste. I'm getting a lot of sour looks and testy emails, when I chortle about Rahm Emanuel, and Tom Daschle, and Larry Summers, and Hillary, Hillary, Hillary.

My friends fell in love, it seems; and the love-object is, well, dumping them -- dumping them with almost indecent haste.

Oh yeah, sure, it's kinder to dump an ex-lover quickly and briskly, instead of drawing it out. But there's something creepy about a person whose heart is so much under his control that he can act on this undoubtedly sound principle, and never turn a hair.
And this comment to the post is worthy of note, providing more of that gallows amusement that provides so many opportunities for dying laughter ("dying" being the operative word there):
Ever since Bubba's first term, I've gotten an up-close-and-personal look at [how] the Donkeycratic Party treats its "Left", and it's a classic spousal abuse pattern. He beats her and fucks up her head, and tells her shit like how nobody cares and how she's got noplace else to go; she eventually despairs to the point of actually believing him, and just hoping that he'd change, but of course he doesn't and -- as I understand, in many cases -- eventually beats her to death some night.

This first hit me early in the '96 campaign, just after Ralph Nader had announced for the Greens and there was this small but noticeable rippling of scoffing and dissing -- which barely disguised the smell of fear -- coming from the Donkeycrats' general direction, most specifically in the form of a quote in a Washington Post article from some high-level White House flack whose name escapes me, saying the the DP Left "had noplace to go" in terms of how to vote in '96. This, of course, after Somalia, Waco, NAFTA, an attempt to pass a version of the Patriot Act, an attempt to impose direct state censorship of the Internet, oh, I could go on, but, anyway...

I've often wished that the DP leadership would just grow a goddamn' pair, already, and just go on TV together and look us all -- us all, being those of us on the Desperately Hopeful Pwogwessive "Left" -- right in the eye, and tell us to go fuck ourselves...and in those exact words, too. Get 'em a goddamn' exemption from the FCC for the half-hour it should take that whole crew to get up in front of the the camera and tell us that they never cared about us and never will, and that we should just kiss their rosy-red asses, take a goddamn' hike and go fuck ourselves...just so perhaps we'll know a hundred percent where we stand regarding the Donkeycratic Party, get off our asses, and move on.

(heh, heh, I said 'MoveOn')
This is a scenario thoroughly admirable in its conception. But as I'm sure its author realizes himself, it wouldn't have anything remotely approaching the desired effect. Can't you see the responsive posts from Atrios, HuffPo, Daily Cosset, et al. before your eyes at this very moment?
Oh, well, they have to say that. But they don't actually mean it. Their hearts are in the right place, because...well...um...ah...oh, shit, because they're Democrats! If they could do what they really want to do, peace and liberty would break out all over the wurld, we'd have the bestest health care system the plannet ever, ever seed, and everyone would get a puppy or a kittycat. And a rainbow! A rainbow called Obama!

They have to say those mean things about us, 'cuz of the effect it would have if they didn't on the election in Flat Ass, Alabama in...um...well...2356!

See? SEE??? If you don't, you're no better than those evil Republicans!!!! Now STFU!!!!!

Asshole.
You can bank on all of it, including the "asshole" part. That reminds me: I'm also planning an upcoming essay (or two) about the moral and psychological intimidation -- or should I say, terrorism -- that is becoming so popular these days. This time, on the left.

And you had thought only rightwing bloggers and conservatives were greasy apologists for the ruling class, and for authoritarianism, corporatism and endless war. Aren't you the silliest goose.

Meanwhile, even people who lost the election feel as if they didn't: "HAPPY THANKSGIVING: Leaving the Bush tax cuts alone. Putting Iraq-war supporters in as Vice President and Secretary of State. And now keeping Bush's Defense Secretary on. I'm beginning to feel like I won this election!"

And the Democrats did win! So, especially since what Obama stood for (and didn't) has been entirely clear to any chunk of rock for well over a year, I think all those liberals and progressives should STFU themselves!

Hah!

Shucks, I'm sorry. Honest, I am. It's about The Unity, baby. I'm all about The Unity. Love, sweetheart. That's all we've got. We've changed and hoped and transcended! Woweee shazam hot damn jumpin' gee whillikers and gadzooks!

We gotta sink or swim together. Or swim and then sink. Or just drown.

Whatever.

P.S. And I see that Michael J. Smith has saved me a brief post I had on the drawing board. Thank you, sir! Dems say no gay marriage in New York for us pathetic faggots. Thanks, Dems! It's immensely comforting to know that you still think we're freaks. But someday, someday we may not be -- just in time for that election in Flat Ass several centuries hence! I luvs me the Dems. Is there anything more worthless than the Democratic Party? No, not the Republicans. In certain respects, the Democrats are worse: see here, here, here and here (and lots of other essays too, but those will give you the idea).

"Two percent less shitty than Pure Evil" is still evil. Many people expend untold energy to avoid that very simple, indisputable fact.

Someday, they might consider stopping that. Then, perhaps, we might begin to make some genuine progress, and start to extricate ourselves from this morass of suffering and death.

Coffee Klatch Research: Why Tom Friedman is an Asshat

2008-11-10T07:51:00.000-08:00

Critic

Tom Friedman was much an Iraq war critic as I have been a Barack Obama critic. I have been critical of Obama many times, but I still wanted him to win this election. Even though I was a supporter of Obama, I am not a child. I recognize that the Obama Presidency will not be the fantasy Atrios presidency. He will do what he does, and I will have little to no influence on that. Still, if Obama fucks everything up, I will have some responsibility for that. I raised money for him, I voted for him, and used my mighty blog to encourage others to do so.

Tom Friedman was a supporter of the Iraq war. He encouraged it, and even as it went bad, kept telling us to hang in there for another 6 months. Perpetually. He has criticized how the war has unfolded, but he has about as much influence on that as I have on President Obama. He is war supporter and critic, as I am Obama supporter and critic. And when hundreds of thousands of people died, a consequence with nontrivial probability in a war zone, Tom Friedman had some responsibility for that no matter how critical he was of those who engineered the war he wanted.

Uh oh! Here comes Obama!

2008-11-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

Hahaha!

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

Rachel Maddow w/ Obama

2008-10-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

Lots of Good Vids

2008-10-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

Whazzup!!

Infomercial

New ad on McCain, the economy and Palin

Keeping an Eye on Oregon voting

2008-10-30T14:00:00.000-07:00

This PDF gives % of early voting in Oregon.

This site tracks nationwide.

Squealing like a Repub!

2008-10-29T19:07:00.000-07:00

Mitch McConnell highlights his ability to bring home the pork to Kentucky. How this is not massively hypocritical as a Republican and how Republicans can not see that he is showing off his pork is beyond me.

Are you voting from fear?

2008-10-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

I am not.

Daily Show and Colbert

2008-10-22T13:58:00.000-07:00

ACORN:

Real American:

On ACORN

2008-10-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

Pay the fuck attention!

Michael Winship: The Republican ACORN Hoax

You see, the ACORN “election fraud” story is one of those urban legends, like fake moon landings and alligators in the sewers, and it appears three or four weeks before every recent national election with the regularity of the swallows returning to Capistrano

The New Yorker: Hendrik Hertzberg Blog: Voter-Fraud Fraud

During this election cycle, the Times reported today, ACORN has deployed thirteen thousand mostly paid workers, who have registered 1.3 million new voters. One or two per cent of these workers turned in sheaves of forms that they filled out themselves with fake names and bogus addresses, and, even though at least a hundred of these workers have already been fired, the forged forms have been submitted to election boards.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes.

. . .

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot.

. . .

And on and on...

F*ck All Y'all

2008-10-21T20:45:00.000-07:00

Dividing America:

Viva la Mashup!

2008-10-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

+

=

Political Catch Up

2008-10-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

People for the American Way: Hate You Can Believe In: ACORN Deluged with Threatening and Racist Voicemails and Emails

Rolling Stone: Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty by Tim Dickinson

New York Mag: Is John McCain Bob Dole? By John Heilemann

The recommendation of Colin Powell is a dubious distinction IMHO. And this.

Catching Up with Afghanistan

2008-10-19T15:42:00.000-07:00

Chris Floyd

Road to Perdition: Yet Another Atrocity in Afghanistan, More to Come
No doubt the "NATO-led" investigation of the Helmland "incident" will find that yet another magnificent feat of arms has produced an unfortunate by-product: i.e, the corpses of at least 15 innocent children, including a six-month old baby. But as Seamus Milne points out in the Guardian, the mounting death toll of Afghan civilians is the result of deliberate policy, not "regrettable" accident or the mischance of war:
The Wounded Shark: 'Good War' Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On
Don't tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief -- the "good war" in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand -- is already lost. Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire -- not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan -- will only lead to disaster.

Who says so? America's biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan -- Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan -- both said that the war was "unwinnable," and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy "doomed to fail."

Notorious MSG!!

2008-10-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

Notorious MSG

Daily Show on McCain's FUD

2008-10-16T10:27:00.000-07:00

Coffee Klatch Research: Who Pays Taxes?

2008-10-16T08:16:00.000-07:00

Via the Tax Foundation:

UPDATE 1

From the CBO:

Vile Repubs

2008-10-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

Continued excrement from the Right:

Stanley Kurtz: Wright 101: Obama funded extremist Afrocentrists who shared Rev. Wright’s anti-Americanism

Melanie Phillips: On Obama

Previously:

The Daily Show: On Finance

2008-10-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

That said...

2008-10-13T11:09:00.000-07:00

So, McCain is nastier, but it is just politics and such right?

Hmmm...

I personally think the objection that McCain is not somewhat accountable for his supporters' behavior given his own campaign (as documented below) is absurd and dangerous: Plainly he and the Right are looking the other way to actively encouraging such behavior/belief.

Coffee Klatch Research: McCain / Obama Equally Nasty?

2008-10-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Game Over: There is no equivalence

Via: http://www.youtube.com/user/JohnMcCaindotcom

McCain's Ad regarding Ayers:

"Too Risky"

McCain / Palin interview by Sean Hannity on Fox: Part 3

VS.

Via: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom

Obama's 13 minute Keating Video

"Seven" Houses of McCain

McCain "Same" as Bush

( If you think there is a much worse Obama ad on McCain please tell me. )

Coffee Klatch Research

2008-10-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

A data dump of Iran and Israel modern fighter aircraft:

Iran:

40 MiG-29A

Israel:

104 F-16A/B "Netz"
121 F-16C/D "Barak"
101 F-16I "Sufa"

And now for something a bit lighter...

2008-10-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

Financial meltdown links cont.

2008-10-07T15:19:00.000-07:00

Peter Morici: The Dow Tanks as Bank Bailout Fails to Restore Confidence

It’s official! The bank bailout has not worked.

Global stock prices are in a panic rush to the bottom.

The bank bailout cannot fulfill its primary mission to restore investor confidence, because it does only half the job.

The bank bailout will provide banks with much needed liquidity but it does not address the compensation and management practices on Wall Street that drove irresponsible decisions and gave rise to the crisis. It does not address the void of sound leadership at the top of major financial institutions like Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.

Dean Baker: The Fed Can Buy Commercial Paper Directly From Corporations: Who Knew?

Remember way back to last week when it was going to be the end of the world if Congress didn't pass the bailout package? Remember the Washington Post's account in which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told President Bush, "there is no Plan B."

Well, it looks like the Fed has discovered a Plan B. It turns out that the Fed can buy commercial paper directly from non-financial corporations needing credit to maintain operations. This will keep the credit markets working even if the zombie banks aren't up to the task. In other words, the threat of a complete meltdown in the absence of a bailout was nonsense and the media once again got taken for a ride by the Bush administration.

Paul Krugman: The International Finance Multiplier

Finally, if you think Obama is going to be any better, then you really do not understand that our system of government is actually corporatism. See opensecrets.org:

Speaking of Michael

2008-10-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

Now Michael Berube is a good guy. So I interpret him as such. I am sure he only wants to kill the bad guys (could not find something more recent via the great Google, sorry):

The anti-imperialist left correctly believes, for instance, that the American bombing of Kakrak in early July (a massive "intelligence failure" that killed about 50 Afghans attending a wedding party) was an atrocity; but it cannot admit that, on balance, the routing of the Taliban might have struck a blow, however ambiguous and poorly executed, for human freedom.

Now we could interpret him as being not too terribly worried about this bombing as it has "struck a blow ... for human freedom". But then so have each additional bombing since. But that would be wrong: Michael is a good guy and means well. I wish he would be a bit more charitable towards others though.

Here is what I have taken away from my reading of Chomsky, Zinn, et al:

War is almost always a net negative thing for everyone involved; and especially the innocent and those on whos behalf the war is being fought.

[ And of course it should be pointed out that we, eg. US, are the ones doing the deciding who the war is for: Particularly galling for the "anti-imperialists". ]

Finally this by Chris Floyd is required reading.

Arthur Silber post to remember

2008-10-06T16:23:00.000-07:00

In Praise of Contextual Libertarianism

Not So Fast, Please: Contextual Libertarianism, One More Time

Financial duh

2008-10-06T11:44:00.000-07:00

The bailout failing:

Market plummets

Google's interactive market graph

Always seems to end up justifying the dismissal of animal interests

2008-10-06T11:17:00.000-07:00

In this post by Michael Berube over there at Crooked Timber, he is displeased with Peter Singer:

Anyway, I won’t post my entire text, not because it would break the Internets again (this post will do that handily enough on its own) but because the conference proceedings are going to be published someday, and I think I’m supposed to save the Whole Thing for the dead-tree edition. But I will put up one of the challenges I issued to one of the conference’s more controversial speakers, a guy named Peter Singer:
In his 1994 book, Rethinking Life and Death, Peter Singer famously claimed that “To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player” (213). Back in 1994, when Jamie was only three, I might have fallen for this; I once believed—and wrote—that Jamie would not be able to distinguish early Beatles from late Beatles or John’s songs from Paul’s, and now he knows more about the Beatles’ oeuvre than most of the people in this room. His interest in Star Wars and Galaxy Quest has given him an appreciation of science fiction, just as his fascination with Harry Potter has led him to ask questions about innocence and guilt. He is learning a foreign language, having mastered the “est-ce que tu” question form in French and being able to charm young women at the cheese counters of French supermarkets by saying “je voudrais du fromage de chèvre, s’il vous plait.” I confess that neither of us has the least interest in chatting about the latest Woody Allen movie; but perhaps Professor Singer will be interested to learn that Jamie and I have had a running conversation over the past five years about the film Babe, which introduced Jamie not only to the question of whether it is right to eat animals but also to the fact that there are various theories out there as to why humans eat some animals and not others.
Alas, I said all this on Thursday evening, and Professor Singer was not in the room at the time. But I have to give him his due for sticking around for all of the Friday and Saturday sessions in a largely hostile environment.

A commenter then writes:

now he knows more about the Beatles’ oeuvre than most of the people in this room. His interest in Star Wars and Galaxy Quest has given him an appreciation of science fiction, just as his fascination with Harry Potter has led him to ask questions about innocence and guilt. He is learning a foreign language, having mastered the “est-ce que tu” question form in French and being able to charm young women at the cheese counters of French supermarkets by saying “je voudrais du fromage de chèvre, s’il vous plait.” I confess that neither of us has the least interest in chatting about the latest Woody Allen movie; but perhaps Professor Singer will be interested to learn that Jamie and I have had a running conversation over the past five years about the film Babe, which introduced Jamie not only to the question of whether it is right to eat animals but also to the fact that there are various theories out there as to why humans eat some animals and not others.

Michael, it sounds as though you’re arguing here that not all people with Down’s Syndrome are what Singer (or most of us, anyway) would call severely cognitively impaired rather than against the claim that “it is less wrong, all other things being equal, to kill someone with severe cognitive impairments than to kill you or me.”

Also, what if Singer had set the bar lower and instead of “to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketballer or tennis player” had said “to use language at all, to play a sport at any level, to watch a movie or distinguish between music and noise”?

I know you’ve written a lot about this, probably on CT as well, so feel free just to refer me somewhere else.

To which Michael responds:

I’m just not buying the utilitarian calculus at all, no matter where Singer sets the bar. The fact that he underestimated the potential of some people (and did so with considerable certainty, I might add, pointing to the “we cannot expect” line) is in itself, for me, reason enough to resist any moral calculus that involves a performance criterion for being human.

All this is quite fascinating but I never understand this criticism of Singer:

Singer is comparing babies, mentally deficient, the brain damaged with animals. He says they are similar in "personhood" so we can treat them alike. Fuck Singer! Killer!

Instead the much more obvious interpretation and certainly the more charitable one is:

Singer is comparing babies, mentally deficient, the brain damaged with animals. He says they are similar in "personhood" so we can treat them alike. Fuck me! Killer!

There are two ways of interpreting Singer when he says something like:

For on any fair comparison of morally relevant characteristics, like rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, autonomy, pleasure and pain, and so on, the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy -- which if we make the comparison with a fetus of less than three months, a fish, or even a prawn would show more signs of consciousness. (Practical Ethics, 118)

We can read him as saying:

Hey! Babies are like pigs. We treat pigs like shit. Let's treat babies like shit.; OR
Hey! Babies are like pigs. We treat babies nicely. Let's treat pigs nicely.

Why interpret Singer as encourage or advocating any sort of mistreatment of any organism? Even animals that he would consider much lower on the "personhood" scale he would never advocate mistreating.

So, returning to Michael Berube's quote of Singer: To have a child with Down syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. It can still be a warm and loving experience, but we must have lowered expectations of our child’s ability. we ought not interpret Singer as suggesting mistreating these people, but as he advocates for animals, we should interpret him as advocating for taking their interests into consideration.

Then a commenter recommends this paper by Jeremy Waldron. This paper is quite interesting and here is its own summary:

The idea of basic equality connotes that, for normative purposes, the range of humans is not subject to any fundamental differentiation along the lines of the differentiation that some people maintain between humans and animals. We humans are all basically alike.

What is with the desire to separate humans and animals? It all really seems like a rationalization not for better treatment of different sorts of humans, but a defense of not taking animal's interests into consideration.

Peter Singer Day! Yay!

2008-10-03T20:15:00.000-07:00

Peter Singer

Origin of Ethics

Singer on Colbert

Singer's top 10 books

Financially F*cked

2008-10-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

Nouriel Roubini: Financial and Corporate System is in Cardiac Arrest: The Risk of the Mother of All Bank Runs

House Passes Bailout Bill
Here is the vote: Wu voted for it. Gotta call and make my displeasure known.

Paul Craig Roberts: Why Paulson's Plan is a Fraud

Paul Craig Roberts: Can a Bailout Succeed?

Mike Whitney: Why the Bailout Stinks

In Other News

2008-10-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

When Settlers Attack (in Israel)

Nir Rosen reports from Majd al Anjar, where the rage of young men mixes with the sectarian fervour spilling over Iraq’s borders.

A philosophy link: Equality

2008-10-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

Do not want to forget this: Jeremy Waldron: Basic Equality

Thanking Wyden!! Have you?

2008-10-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I never got through to Wyden either via the capital switchboard or direct: Busy or put on hold.

But, Wyden voted no!! Yay!

Just called him and thanked him. Will also send a nice email. Grin!

Of course "small government" Smith voted yes. Honestly, I need someone to tell my why they are Republican or why they vote Republican!??

Now I need to contact Wu and tell him to stay strong!

My understanding cont.

2008-10-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

As my good friend corrects me, we should not be bailing out the banks at all.

Admittedly I came up with the "dollar-for-dollar" solution mostly because I thought it was reasonably pragmatic: I just can not imagine Congress not paying off the bankers and financiers that they whore to. But as it says right here on this blog: Everything revolutionary is impractical: I should have been more revolutionary! I will endeavor to be next time.

And little did I realize that the solution is not completely stupid: Glenn Greenwald documents a number of "real" economists suggest simply buying the "toxic" mortgages: A bailout for the little guy. Glenn also provides a number of links to other solutions.

Glenn's post is not really about solutions though. It is about the media -- specifically one award winning journalist: Steven Pearlstein -- who just can not stand the little people having their say. You should read it.

Capital switchboard has been busy!

2008-10-01T09:36:00.000-07:00

Tried to call my (Dem) Senator but the switchboard was busy both times!! Yay! I hope Congress is getting an earful.

I guess I will try calling direct...

UPDATE 11am: Put on hold with Wyden.

My understanding of the financial meltdown

2008-10-01T07:06:00.000-07:00

In answer to my good friend, I believe this is being called a "credit" crisis because right now the biggest problem is that the "shadow banking system" is near collapse: Banks are afraid to lend to each other. If this happens, the US and global economy will pretty much halt: 60 - 0 in nanoseconds. That is definitely not good.

But this is just a symptom of the real cause: sub-prime mortgages ( again, as my good friend points out ).

I am no economist, but I certainly have my opinion. I am quite happy that the bailout was rejected in the House. But the probable effects on "average" people -- those outside Wall Street -- is real. So, my suggestion is a dollar-for-dollar bailout: For each dollar given to "write-off" a "toxic" mortgage/asset, a dollar goes to write-down the mortgage of a needy home owner; eg. one of those "toxic" mortgages. $350billion in funds for the "shadow banking system" and $350billion in mortgage write-downs.

Now I am not really happy with any sort of equal treatment between "Wall Street" and "Main Street" -- I would prefer the whole $700billion to write-off the mortgages -- but this seems reasonable: To me, not an economist.

Anyone with comments?

Required Viewing

2008-09-30T20:29:00.001-07:00

My favorite image so far:

Some link from the Oregonian!

2008-09-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

Majority of Oregon's House members vote against bailout: Yay! I am glad our reps voted as they did! I will be calling Wu and thanking him and asking him to stick to it.

DeFazio offers alternative to $700 billion bailout: Go DeFazio!

Financial markets regain much of the ground lost yesterday: Heard on NPR some other Congressperson's scare tactic that the 750+ pt loss in the market wiped out something like $1.5 trillion dollars! And so now "much" of that "loss" is "regained"? Talk about Monopoly money.

Required Learning

2008-09-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

Dean Baker: Why Bail? The Banks Have a Gun Pointed at Their Head and Are Threatening to Pull the Trigger

Matt Taibbi: The Chicken Doves ( why the Dems suck too )

Kucinich on the bailout plan:

McCain as Nostradamus:

Republican Politicians Suck

2008-09-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Matt Taibbi: The Worst Congress Ever

"I remember one incident very clearly -- I think it was 2001," says Winslow Wheeler, who served for twenty-two years as a Republican staffer in the Senate. "I was working for [New Mexico Republican] Pete Domenici at the time. We were in a Budget Committee hearing and the Democrats were debating what the final result would be. And my boss gets up and he says, 'Why are you saying this? You're not even going to be in the room when the decisions are made.' Just said it right out in the open."

. . .

The GOP's "take that, bitch" approach to governing has been taken to the greatest heights by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee is chaired by the legendary Republican monster James Sensenbrenner Jr., an ever-sweating, fat-fingered beast who wields his gavel in a way that makes you think he might have used one before in some other arena, perhaps to beat prostitutes to death. Last year, Sensenbrenner became apoplectic when Democrats who wanted to hold a hearing on the Patriot Act invoked a little-known rule that required him to let them have one.

"Naturally, he scheduled it for something like 9 a.m. on a Friday when Congress wasn't in session, hoping that no one would show," recalls a Democratic staffer who attended the hearing. "But we got a pretty good turnout anyway."

Sensenbrenner kept trying to gavel the hearing to a close, but Democrats again pointed to the rules, which said they had a certain amount of time to examine their witnesses. When they refused to stop the proceedings, the chairman did something unprecedented: He simply picked up his gavel and walked out.

"He was like a kid at the playground," the staffer says. And just in case anyone missed the point, Sensenbrenner shut off the lights and cut the microphones on his way out of the room.

. . .

In 1977, when Democrats held a majority in the House, eighty-five percent of all bills were open to amendment. But by 1994, the last year Democrats ran the House, that number had dropped to thirty percent -- and Republicans were seriously pissed. "You know what the closed rule means," Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida thundered on the House floor. "It means no discussion, no amendments. That is profoundly undemocratic." When Republicans took control of the House, they vowed to throw off the gag rules imposed by Democrats. On opening day of the 104th Congress, then-Rules Committee chairman Gerald Solomon announced his intention to institute free debate on the floor. "Instead of having seventy percent closed rules," he declared, "we are going to have seventy percent open and unrestricted rules."

How has Solomon fared? Of the 111 rules introduced in the first session of this Congress, only twelve were open. Of those, eleven were appropriations bills, which are traditionally open. That left just one open vote -- H. Res. 255, the Federal Deposit Insurance Reform Act of 2005.

In the second session of this Congress? Not a single open rule, outside of appropriation votes. Under the Republicans, amendable bills have been a genuine Washington rarity, the upside-down eight-leafed clover of legislative politics.

. . .

And the cost? Republicans in the Clinton years spent more than $35 million investigating the administration. The total amount of taxpayer funds spent, when independent counsels are taken into account, was more than $150 million. Included in that number was $2.2 million to investigate former HUD secretary Henry Cisneros for lying about improper payments he made to a mistress. In contrast, today's Congress spent barely half a million dollars investigating the outright fraud and government bungling that followed Hurricane Katrina, the largest natural disaster in American history.

. . .

Sensenbrenner has done his bit to squelch any debate over Iraq. He refused a request by John Conyers and more than fifty other Democrats for hearings on the famed "Downing Street Memo," the internal British document that stated that Bush had "fixed" the intelligence about the war, and he was one of three committee chairs who rejected requests for hearings on the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Despite an international uproar over Abu Ghraib, Congress spent only twelve hours on hearings on the issue. During the Clinton administration, by contrast, the Republican Congress spent 140 hours investigating the president's alleged misuse of his Christmas-card greeting list.

. . .

When one considers that Congress has forsaken hearings and debate, conspired to work only three months a year, completely ditched its constitutional mandate to provide oversight and passed very little in the way of meaningful legislation, the question arises: What do they do?

The answer is easy: They spend. When Bill Clinton left office, the nation had a budget surplus of $236 billion. Today, thanks to Congress, the budget is $296 billion in the hole. This year, more than sixty-five percent of all the money borrowed in the entire world will be borrowed by America, a statistic fueled by the speed-junkie spending habits of our supposedly "fiscally conservative" Congress. It took forty-two presidents before George W. Bush to borrow $1 trillion; under Bush, Congress has more than doubled that number in six years. And more often than not, we are borrowing from countries the sane among us would prefer not to be indebted to: The U.S. shells out $77 billion a year in interest to foreign creditors, including payment on the $300 billion we currently owe China.

. . .

Favors for campaign contributors, exemptions for polluters, shifting the costs of private projects on to the public -- these are the specialties of this Congress. They seldom miss an opportunity to impoverish the states we live in and up the bottom line of their campaign contributors. All this time -- while Congress did nothing about Iraq, Katrina, wiretapping, Mark Foley's boy-madness or anything else of import -- it has been all about pork, all about political favors, all about budget "earmarks" set aside for expensive and often useless projects in their own districts. In 2000, Congress passed 6,073 earmarks; by 2005, that number had risen to 15,877. They got better at it every year. It's the one thing they're good at.

Even worse, this may well be the first Congress ever to lose control of the government's finances. For the past six years, it has essentially been writing checks without keeping an eye on its balance. When you do that, unpleasant notices eventually start appearing in the mail. In 2003, the inspector general of the Defense Department reported to Congress that the military's financial-management systems did not comply with "generally accepted accounting principles" and that the department "cannot currently provide adequate evidence supporting various material amounts on the financial statements."

Required Video: Does your philosophy cover this?

2008-09-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

Honestly, how does this not discredit all "market" ideologies?

2008-09-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

Michael Hudson: America's Own Kleptocracy

A kleptocratic class has taken over the economy to replace industrial capitalism. Franklin Roosevelt’s term “banksters” says it all in a nutshell. The economy has been captured – by an alien power, but not the usual suspects. Not socialism, workers or “big government,” nor by industrial monopolists or even by the great banking families. Certainly not by Freemasons and Illuminati. (It would be wonderful if there were indeed some group operating with centuries of wisdom behind them, so at least someone had a plan.) Rather, the banksters have made a compact with an alien power –not Communists, Russians, Asians or Arabs. Not humans at all. The group’s cadre is a new breed of machine. It may sound like the Terminator movies, but computerized Machines have indeed taken over the world – at least, the White House’s world.

Here is how they did it. A.I.G. wrote insurance policies of all sorts of that people and businesses need: home and property insurance, livestock insurance, even aircraft leasing. These highly profitable businesses were not the problem. (They therefore will probably be sold off to pay the company’s bad gambles.) A.I.G.’s downfall came from the $450 billion – almost half a trillion – dollars it was on the hook for as a result of guaranteeing hedge-fund counterparty insurance. In other words, if two parties played the zero-sum game of betting against each other as to whether the dollar would rise or fall against sterling or the euro, or if they insured a mortgage portfolio of junk mortgages to make sure that they would get paid, they would pay a teeny tiny commission to A.I.G. for a policy promising to pay if, say, the $11 trillion U.S. mortgage market should “stumble” or if losers placing trillions of dollars in bets on foreign exchange derivatives, stock or bond derivatives should somehow find themselves in a position that so many Las Vegas patrons are in, and be unable to come up with the cash to cover their losses.

A.I.G. collected billions of dollars on such policies. And thanks to the fact that insurance companies are a Milton Friedman paradise – not regulated by the Federal Reserve or any other nation-wide agency, and hence able to get the proverbial free lunch without government oversight – writing such policies was done by computer printouts, and the company collected massive fees and commissions without putting in much capital of its own. This is what is called “self-regulation.” It is how the Invisible Hand is supposed to work.

Expecting Obama to be different on the Economy

2008-09-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Obviously you are not paying attention:

Sector	Total	To Dems	To Repubs
Agribusiness	$7,587,571	$2,945,870	$4,624,051
Communications/Electronics	$34,228,994	$25,358,758	$8,793,921
Construction	$16,754,615	$7,158,588	$9,572,327
Defense	$2,071,922	$1,111,020	$951,802
Energy & Natural Resources	$8,955,401	$3,348,737	$5,601,614
Finance, Insurance & Real Estate	$114,465,564	$59,847,674	$54,548,348
Health	$30,141,119	$18,411,015	$11,679,446
Lawyers & Lobbyists	$75,555,649	$56,936,901	$18,583,593
Transportation	$6,530,813	$2,261,194	$4,261,821
Misc Business	$60,335,832	$35,476,723	$24,754,609
Labor	$756,158	$727,063	$28,195
Ideological/Single-Issue	$18,220,844	$13,535,021	$4,684,122
Other	$117,873,314	$70,654,807	$46,893,782

Finance cont. 3

2008-09-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

Letters to the Oregonian

Duh!!!

Obama's great good war

We need a reckoning

Uggh! She is repellent.

Yay! The system rocks!

a future

Broke down

David Hume in 3 Minutes

Old Spice!

Fun Video

Required Viewing: Evolution Rap

Required Viewing

Required Reading

Is there a correlation between teacher pay and class size?

Letters: What tired Oregon teachers say

IQ^2 Debate: Is the Catholic Church a Force for Good?

Required Reading

Required Reading: On Healthcare

Required Reading

Feeling Proud?

Blinded by Hope

Obama Sucks as President

Required Viewing: Goodness Jon Stewart is Awesome!

The Awesomeness that is Obama's Iraq Plan!

Required Viewing

Letter to the Oregonian: Regarding Hovde on Family Leave

Coffee Klatch Research: Government Transparency

Flight of the Conchords: Yay!

Required Reading: Israel & Terrorism, Impeaching Bush, Torture

Talking with A Believer: How did it Start?

George introduces himself...

Before I introduce George...

Thank Goodness for Python!

Goodness, I wanna stop posting about Israel!

What about Obama? Screwing us already?

Naomi Klien: Torture & Israel

Required Reading: Israeli Immorality

Offended? There is no equivalence...

Oh, and I forgot to add... (still NSFW)

This post is NSFW

Religious Moral/Ethical Decision Making

Redundant

Required Read: Further

Required Reading

Required Reading: Continued

Required Reading: More

Capitalist Alienation of Labor: Chomsky on Anarchism

Moral/Ethical Decision Making

Required Reading

Obama and Rick

Presidential Morph

The 56, 5 Book Meme

Required Reading: Writing the posts I wish I could

Coffee Klatch Research: Why Tom Friedman is an Asshat

Uh oh! Here comes Obama!

Rachel Maddow w/ Obama

Lots of Good Vids

Keeping an Eye on Oregon voting

Squealing like a Repub!

Are you voting from fear?

Daily Show and Colbert

On ACORN

F*ck All Y'all

Viva la Mashup!

Political Catch Up

More financial meltdown links

Catching Up with Afghanistan

Notorious MSG!!

Daily Show on McCain's FUD

Coffee Klatch Research: Who Pays Taxes?

Vile Repubs

The Daily Show: On Finance

That said...

Coffee Klatch Research: McCain / Obama Equally Nasty?

Coffee Klatch Research

And now for something a bit lighter...

Financial meltdown links cont.

Speaking of Michael

Arthur Silber post to remember