Point Guards

Tuesday Misc

• But join all these morons in supporting Obama!!
• It has been over 2 weeks since we've heard from Arthur. With his bad health, that is scary. Hope he's ok.
• On Sunday I saw Romeo and Juliet for the first time. I think I read it in high school but never saw a production. It was ok. Those two sure are a couple of stupid little kids.
  
• Belief in god and support for government both linked to feelings of low personal control. That seems appropriately pathetic.
• I got my bike a couple weeks ago, and use it for my 5.4 mile round trip daily commute. I love it. I plan to do that until it is too cold or icy, then I'll have a free bus pass when I need it. Not using a car is great.

A dozen things

1. Softball is fun. I can't believe I never bothered to play softball before.
2. Beerfest at the grad student pub is fun. I can't believe I never went to beerfest before.
3. No limit hold'em is fun. I can't believe I never played it very much before.
4. This structure is fun. I can't keep it up much longer.
5. I've been meaning to do some kitteh blurghing but I can't find my camera and I feel like any kitteh blurghing must have photographic accompaniment. So I should get around to that eventually.
6. Canada is sweet, yo.
7. I'm going to the theatre this weekend to see Romeo and Juliet, which I'm pretty sure I've never actually seen. That's probably against some rule about being a cultured white person, so I guess this is all part of the deal.
8. Despite being non-plused with the preview, I want to go see Dark Knight, but I don't want to pay $11 (x2 for the wife) cause that seems excessive.
9. Speaking of the wife, she just got a very cute haircut. Very cute. She donated most of her hair to cancer kids or something nice like that, so it is very short, but in a way that really works for her. So now the hair she sheds at German Sheppard pace will be much shorter.
10. I can't wait until Kira experiences the 1-2 punch of a nice compliment about her hair then comparing her to a dog. That should be fun. I ruin everything.
11. Charles Darwin was a nifty fellow, or so I hear.
12. Fresh local produce is the only way to eat. At least in the summer.

Fin.

Why I won't vote: "Tennis on the Titanic"

During the Gore/Bush/Nader presidential election, while the entire nation was hypnotized by the spectacle, I had a vision. I saw the Titanic churning through the waters of the North Atlantic toward an iceberg looming in the distance, while the passengers and crew concentrated on a tennis game taking place on deck.

In our election-obsessed culture, everything else going on in the world - war, hunger, official brutality, sickness, the violence of everyday life for huge numbers of people - is swept out of the way while the media covers every volley of the candidates. Thus, the superficial crowds out the meaningful, and this is very useful for those who do not want citizens to look beyond the surface of the system. Hidden by the contest of the candidates are the real issues of race, class, war, and peace, which the public is not supposed to think about.

That's the opening of a Howard Zinn essay included in his book A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. Here's the closing.

The ferocity of the contest for the presidency in recent elections conceals the agreement between both parties on fundamentals. The evidence for this statement lies in eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration, whose major legislative accomplishments - destroying welfare, imposing more punitive sentences on criminals, increasing Pentagon spending - were part of the Republican agenda.

The Demacrats and the Republicans do not dispute the continued corporate control of the economy. Neither party endorses free national healthcare, proposes extensive low-cost housing, demands a minimum income for all Americans, or supports a truly progressive income tax to diminish the huge gap between rich and poor. Both support the death penalty and growth of prisons. Both believe in a large military establishment, in land mines and nuclear weapons and the cruel use of sanctions against the people of Cuba.

Perhaps when, after the next election, the furor dies down over who really won the tennis match and we get over our anger at the referee's calls and the final, disputed score, we will finally break the hypnotic spell of the game and look around. We may then think about whether the ship is slowly going down and whether there are enough lifeboats and what we should do about all that.

This analogy is pretty fucking good. So fuck Gore and Bush and fuck the 2000 election. Fuck BO and McCain and this stupid election too. All the candidates are the same. Stop wasting your efforts on this bullshit.

Look at this! (Ignore that.)

As BO's supporters see their list of excuses shrinking hourly, they increasingly hide behind "but... Iraq!!" Apparently BO's expressed desire to shift a small percentage of our machinery of death to focus elsewhere is some kind of improvement, one of his impressive examples of change. That's like using your VISA to pay off your Mastercard balance, and citing the improved Mastercard situation as evidence of your financial accumen. Except instead of redistributed credit card debt, it's redistributed slaughter of innocent brown people. But... different brown people!!

No shelter here

Obviously this is quite disappointing to me.

Canada has deported Robin Long, a US Army deserter who fled the country rather than accept deployment to Iraq. The majority of Canadians wanted to let such soldiers stay, and Parliament passed a non-binding resolution saying they should be able to stay, but the conservative Harper government deported Long anyway.

My transition to casual poker

It has been over two years since poker was my primary income source, but I've played occasionally in that time. I haven't keep nearly as good records as I used to, but I think I've lost in the low four figures. I don't like that I've been a losing player for two years, and I recognize that there are a few adjustments that I was slow to make.

I think the biggest mental adjustment is that playing a lot less means my variance over any given period of time is going to be a lot higher, and I need to adjust my expectations accordingly. Grinding out hands at a modest win rate fosters a mentality of not taking short-term swings too seriously, but when I only play a thousand hands per month, it extends the weird emotions associated with variance without the return to the grind as a release. And part of me is tempted to want to try to make something interesting happen rather than wait 5 years until I reach my mythological long run expectation. What I really ought to do is just look at every session as profitable leisure time, not as pure gambling, which means I need to derive pleasure from making good poker decisions, not from the bottom line.

A mental adjustment that I've been pretty good about making is recognizing that I'm just not as sharp as when I was putting in lots of hands. Practice matters, and rust can lead to bad decisions. Also I hardly ever read poker strategy any more, so I'm spending a lot less mental energy on improving or maintaining my poker skills (which is a good thing for my life generally, just not for my poker results). I've been playing fewer tables simultaneously, which gives me more time to think about each decision and replay hands in my head. Still there have been situations where I was too quick to add tables when I thought I was playing well and I probably should have been more conservative.

The poker world has been changing while I've been away, which just means that I can't assume that a given game is going to be the same as it was 2 or 3 years ago. I think the limit games are much harder now, even taking my rust into account. I stubbornly tried to stick with familiar limit games even once it should have been obvious that no-limit was the way to go. Lately I've been playing a lot more no-limit, and it has been fun and easier. I think switching to more no-limit also is good for facilitating the first adjustment I mentioned, because the variance is lower compared to win rates. I think the 6-max no-limit games are a lot different than they used to be, which more people increasing their aggression for the shorthanded games, whereas the same stakes full tables seem passive and easier. (That's just my impression; I have no idea if anyone would agree with those comparisons.)

As a last catch-all point, I just need to stop thinking like someone who is playing for a living. Something about sitting in this chair with Full Tilt or Poker Stars loaded up puts me into the old mindset. About a month ago I was trying to quickly clear a reload bonus, so I decided to play limit, and at higher stakes than I would have chosen if not for the bonus. I played well though, and felt very comfortable. Then towards the end of clearing the bonus I was at a table with a terrible opponent who I was crushing. I followed him to a new table when he left, and continue that pattern for a while, to a nice profit. Then suddenly he sat at much higher stakes, but I decided to follow him there too and give it a shot. I played one round and without any marginal decisions I gave back 6 times the profits I had made off the bad player. The bonus made back only a fraction of the loss. There was a time where taking a shot at a bigger game when I'm feeling good and know I can sit with position on a terrible player would have been a risk that I'd have been happy with either way. But today there was no reason to push it like that. And furthermore, there's no reason to force myself into weird situations just to chase a bonus. (I should also add that I don't know how I feel any more about chasing a player around to take his money. If I knew he was some bored rich lawyer blowing off steam I wouldn't think twice about the ethics of it, but what if it is some guy with a gambling problem? This moral ambiguity bothers me now. And no, "he's going to lose it all anyway, might as well be to me" isn't a satisfactory resolution.)

All of this analysis is really only specific to me and my situation; I'm not putting it out there as advice anyone else should follow. I don't make much money, and I don't want to gamble for entertainment. I want to play profitable poker for fun every once in a while, at stakes that are within my means and where the swings won't be worrisome. These are different circumstances and goals than I've had for the vast majority of my poker experience, and so I need to keep reminding myself of the big picture when I make game selection decisions.

Why I won't vote: same shit, different wrapper

Everyone who justifies their support for Democrats with the logic that they might not be great but they're better than Republicans really ought to read this kind of thing. Democrats do all the exact same things as Republicans, they just do them more discretely. Bush isn't unique for the kinds of things he's done; he's unique because he's so open about it. Obama will do all the same basic things, only he has half the country under his jedi mind shit so they'll support him to the bitter end. Good little liberals express bitter amazement that middle class people would ever be so stupid as to vote decidedly against their own interests for the Republicans, while they vote decidedly against their own interest for Democrats. Kiss the boot that stomps on your face forever. It is the American way.

finishing up strong

George W. Bush, restoring dignity to the White House:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution."

Mr Bush also faced criticism at the summit after Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, was described in the White House press pack given to journalists as one of the "most controversial leaders in the history of a country known for government corruption and vice".

The White House apologised for what it called "sloppy work" and said an official had simply lifted the characterisation from the internet without reading it.

Concluding the three-day event, leaders from the G8 and developing countries proclaimed a "shared vision" on climate change. However, they failed to bridge differences between rich and emerging nations on curbing emissions.

Via

Kill your TV

If I could pick any imaginary superhero power, I think I'd choose the ability to peacefully destroy every television in the world. Liberate some minds and whatnot.

Seriously y'all, get rid of your fucking TVs. Everything is better.

concerning canadians

Today's observation/wild generalization is that Canadians love Facebook. I don't have an account myself. Maybe I should get one.

Update: Canadians love Facebook so much that the Ontario government blocked it from use by government employees. Presumably the province would grind to a halt if not for the ban.

stupidness: my transcript

I have 2 degrees from the University of Maryland. I have a bachelor of arts from the school of behavioral and social sciences, for my economics course work. And I have a bachelor of science from the business school, for my finance course work.

Now the reasons that I think so little of my undergraduate degrees are numerous and probably require a great deal of explanation, but there's something so simple in just noting the absurdity of the nomenclature. The dismal science seems to be exercising some surprising humility by handing out arts degrees, which I guess is fair enough because undergraduate economics isn't especially scientific. But it is a fuck of a lot more scientific than anything the business school has to offer, and yet somehow they're handing out science degrees?

This of course isn't uniquely a Terp thing. Everybody's doing it, which must mean it makes sense somehow, right?

My summer job

My graduate supervisors were nice enough to give me a job for the summer, and they were even nicer to let me use much of my time to pursue my own interests. (I also contribute to ongoing lab research, mainly finding economic statistics and trying to make sense of them. If you're interested, here's an overview of the general area I'm investigating; the papers mentioning economic/income inequality are the most relevant.) So far that pursuit has been mainly an attempt to identify, or at least narrow down, what my own interests are. So I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking, which is pretty much what I spent the last year doing, only now I have more resources at my disposal and I'm getting paid for it. Not bad for a summer gig.

In regards to pursuing my own interests, I'm to figure out what kind of project I want to be doing for my graduate work, research that would (most likely) become a Master's thesis. It seems that most accepted students already had a much better idea what theirs would be, but my supervisors were willing to take a gamble on a less conventional candidate. I feel like I'm making progress, although now that I'm thinking about writing about it here, I'm worried that it will sound like pretty much everything I've ever written about my interests, and then I won't feel like I've made any progress. Nevertheless...

I'm starting by thinking about what motivations I have, and I think there are a few interrelated high-level reasons why I'm going to be doing what I do over the next 2 to 6 years. I want to foster a world with more "rational" behavior. That probably being an unrealistic goal, I at least want to understand what rational behavior really means, and seek to understand why it might seem so elusive.

A specific kind of behavior that I think is rational and that I want to encourage is subversion. I think that many if not all of mankind's power structures are morally illegitimate and make the world worse for the vast majority of the population, and thus I'm motivated to contribute towards the disruption or dismantling of such power structures.

I tend to want to mention all that shit about trying to make the world a better place first, but perhaps a more important motivating factor is that I want to try to understand myself better. Understanding the world around me is a big part of that, and so is understanding human nature. I think I'll also learn something about myself by being in new situations where I can interact with lots of smart people who have a variety of specialized knowledge. This blog has more or less chronicled what has felt like a very rapid and radical change in my outlook, and I'm curious to see what that will mean to me when I'm back in a school environment again. I guess maybe I'm just highly self-absorbed, but I put a lot of energy into trying to make sense of myself, and in a way that's a big part of what this whole grad school thing is about for me.

Reading about evolutionary psychology was the first time I remember thinking that there was a satisfactory explanation for a feeling I'd had for many years, which is that I felt like I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole in the world. I remember learning the word "Procrustean" and thinking it was the Best Word Ever. The insight I gained from reading about evolutionary psychology, which I've noted here before, is that humans really are built for a different world than this one. We're all strapped into this Procrustean bed, not just me. As such, evolutionary psychology has already helped me understand myself better, and understand some of the underlying caused of the seemingly irrational behavior that I'd like to discourage.

So those are my high level motivations and inspirations. With that as background, I'll move on to other considerations of my interests in research areas in a future post.

TomDispatch: Iran, Oil, Reality

The latest TomDispatch argues that the attack against Iran urged by the Cheney faction of the Bush Regime is looking less likely, largely due to the tremendously negative consequences of likely Iranian retaliation strategies. Notably, the price of oil would explode beyond its already stratospheric level. The piece is shaped by the idea that eventually reality catches up to people who act as if they can create their own reality, which certainly applies to Bush and Cheney.

Basketball War Crimes

Jesus Christ, people cream their shorts for military leaders. The link is to ESPN's pro basketball blogger, Henry Abbott, drooling over NBA commissioner David Stern's decision to hire retired General Ronald Johnson to the newly created position of VP of Referee Operations.

See the NBA has had some image problems lately, such as refs threatening to beat up star players, or refs working games where they gave "tips" to organized crime figures. So in what Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is calling "the exact right move," the NBA brings in an Army General to straighten things out.

I guess it is the exact right move the way Abbott is responding, too blinded by the uniform to realize that this guy was the leader in an organization of tens of thousands of trained killers, a manager in a war crime responsible for the deaths of over a million people. I guess genocide and frenzied looting and war profiteering make fixing games and starting fights seem like less of a big deal. The article mentions that in Iraq, Johnson oversaw billions of dollars of reconstruction. As far as I know, the reconstruction has been little more than a sloppily run corporate boondoggle, with billions of dollars missing and completely unaccounted for. Not sure exactly what role Johnson played, but "oversight of Iraq reconstruction" isn't something I'd highlight on a resume.

So, yeah, way to go NBA.

Pessimism

I keep trying to write a post about how pessimistic I've gotten about the prospects for our species. But I keep getting too depressed by it to continue writing or putting effort into adding some good research to my points. I'll try again today.

The bottom line is that as far I can see, everything is fucked. The "Western" world's way of life is devastatingly unsustainable, which as a recent TomDispatch piece points out, is linked to three related impending crises: energy, agriculture, and global warming. And furthermore through NAFTA and the IMF and various other fucked-up neoliberal globilization efforts we've forced the impoverished part of the world to restructure their societies to meet our needs, destroying their way of life so we can maintain ours, the continuation of which is certain to result in suffering and death on an unimaginable scale, threatening the existence of human civilization and maybe even human existence.

I just don't see how there's any hope that any of this will be happily resolved. The leadership structures we have in place are incapable of addressing these matters; it simply isn't what our failed institutions are built to do, and it isn't what the people who occupy leadership positions are interested in doing. Rather than address these problems that are certain to devastate us without systematic changes in our day-to-day life, they continue to escalate the problematic policies (continuing to subsidize terrible agriculture practices, half-heartedly pursuing retarded alternative energy strategies, continually delaying meaningful carbon emissions regulations, advocating more oil exploration and resulting environmental damage) , and instead invest massively in genocidal resource wars.

It is hard to predict what the exact form of the impending devastation will be. (Somewhere in this doomsday rant I feel like I ought to mention that I'm obviously distinguishing here between death and destruction on the usual scale and on an even larger scale. Presumably the functional distinction is that the latter actually personally touches privileged people like me.) We're already watching the US economy crash as oil price soar. Tens or hundreds of millions of impoverished people are being driven the edge of starvation by rising food prices. We're seeing unprecedented natural disasters on a seemingly regular basis, but nobody is willing to explore the connection to global warming, yet alone use it as motivation to restructure our fucking societies around sustainable food and energy practices. And the ruling class in the US is threatening yet another war, this time with Iran, and belligerently mentioning nuclear weapons all over the place. Wars could well destroy everything before those other things get a chance to. Shit, we have nuclear arsenals in the hands of insane fanatics in North America, the Middle East, all over Europe and Asia.

I read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed a few years ago, in which he documents how over and over in human history, people have been unable or unwilling to change their unsustainable ways to prevent the collapse of their own societies. I was thinking about rereading it. But maybe I shouldn't bother. I can just watch it in real time.

America!

via 51

Priorities

I chimed in a bit on Crispin Sartwell's video commentary on "the new atheism" but overall I've kind of lost interest in writing much about atheism advocacy and the associated criticism of religion and theism. I was writing a lot on that for a while, but with all the other bullshit in the world, it just seems like less of a priority. This is based only on my own attention span; there are too many other things that I'm pissed off about to spend my outrage energy on pious fools.

This isn't to say I don't think atheist crusaders are doing something important. Many religious people are victims of repressive ideology. And it could well be the case that clearing the religious nonsense out of people's heads helps free their minds to then start dealing with other problems in a productive way. Atheism could well be the key to the whole fucking mess. And if it isn't, there's still nobility in fighting for reason, and fighting against lies. I'm just more motivated lately to fight against other lies than the one about the magical sky daddy.

Perhaps this shift is because I've come to terms with all the bullshit that realizing my own atheism caused in my personal life. I'm not talking about a crisis over lost faith; I never really had any to begin with. But various personal relationships were shaken up as a result of publicly announcing my own atheism; some improved, many deteriorated. But all that turmoil has settled down and I know where everything stands now and I assume it is all for the better. But there's new turmoil of course. After opening my eyes to the sham of religion, I then opened my eyes to the sham of politics, government, and popular history. That awakening has also shaken things up in my life, much more severely I think. I'm still working through it, and using this blog as a way to help accomplish that.

Declaring Independence: A See For Yourself Announcement

Well I don't imagine that when I started this stupid blog 3.5 ago that I'd still be doing it, and I certainly wouldn't have imagined I'd be saying some of the crazy ass shit I'm saying these days. I wouldn't have imagined I'd actually make a little bit of money off of it (thanks to online poker companies with more money than they know what to do with), and I wouldn't have imagined that I'd get over 50,000 hits.

Actually fuck all of that, who cares what I imagined. I didn't imagine anything. I was just writing shit cause it I had shit to say, and I didn't imagine too much of anything in regards to the medium itself. And I've said some shit and it has been fun. But everything has to come to an end, and for me that time is now. I'm declaring independence on July 4, 2008.

After a lot of reflection, I've decided that I'm going to stop calling Barrack Obama by his name (Barrack Obama) effective immediately. He will henceforth be referred to here as BO, for reasons of the implication that he is like body odor. Which he is. Why else would he have those initials? I'm free of using his full name, hooray!

Here is a picture of me celebrating the new stinky nomenclature while my mother-in-law looks trepidatious/sassy:



Sorry for the false setup. I had you all worried, didn't I? I actually have thought about ending this blog from time to time. I'd just start a new one though, so what would be the point?

July 4

Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852:

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

...

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

...

The right of the hunter to his prey stands superior to the right of marriage, and to all rights in this republic, the rights of God included! For black men there is neither law nor justice, humanity nor religion. The Fugitive Slave Law makes mercy to them a crime; and bribes the judge who tries them. An American judge gets ten dollars for every victim he consigns to slavery, and five, when he fails to do so. The oath of any two villains is sufficient, under this hell-black enactment, to send the most pious and exemplary black man into the remorseless jaws of slavery! His own testimony is nothing. He can bring no witnesses for himself. The minister of American justice is bound by the law to hear but one side; and that side is the side of the oppressor. Let this damning fact be perpetually told. Let it be thundered around the world that in tyrant-killing, king-hating, people-loving, democratic, Christian America the seats of justice are filled with judges who hold their offices under an open and palpable bribe, and are bound, in deciding the case of a man's liberty, to hear only his accusers!

In glaring violation of justice, in shameless disregard of the forms of administering law, in cunning arrangement to entrap the defenceless, and in diabolical intent this Fugitive Slave Law stands alone in the annals of tyrannical legislation. I doubt if there be another nation on the globe having the brass and the baseness to put such a law on the statute-book.

...

Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation (as embodied in the two great political parties) is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen. You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria and pride yourselves on your Democratic institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and body-guards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina. You invite to your shores fugitives of oppression from abroad, honor them with banquets, greet them with ovations, cheer them, toast them, salute them, protect them, and pour out your money to them like water; but the fugitives from oppression in your own land you advertise, hunt, arrest, shoot, and kill. You glory in your refinement and your universal education; yet you maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the character of a nation-a system begun in avarice, supported in pride, and perpetuated in cruelty. You shed tears over fallen Hungary, and make the sad story of her wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and orators, till your gallant sons are ready to fly to arms to vindicate her cause against the oppressor; but, in regard to the ten thousand wrongs of the American slave, you would enforce the strictest silence, and would hail him as an enemy of the nation who dares to make those wrongs the subject of public discourse! You are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or for Ireland; but are as cold as an iceberg at the thought of liberty for the enslaved of America. You discourse eloquently on the dignity of labor; yet, you sustain a system which, in its very essence, casts a stigma upon labor. You can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a three-penny tax on tea; and yet wring the last hard earned farthing from the grasp of the black laborers of your country. You profess to believe "that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth," and hath commanded all men, everywhere, to love one another; yet you notoriously hate (and glory in your hatred) all men whose skins are not colored like your own. You declare before the world, and are understood by the world to declare that you "hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights; and that among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, "is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose," a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.

Fellow-citizens, I will not enlarge further on your national inconsistencies. The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad: it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing and a bye-word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. it fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement; the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet you cling to it as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes. Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!

Come to America, where we can abduct and torture you!

I don't know how I even manage to work up any outrage any more, but I just did. As Mahatma X Files quotes:

Dear Discover America,

I find via the Financial Times that the US government has a plan to "launch a tourism charm offensive in the UK, to persuade holidaymakers to take advantage of sterling’s strength against the dollar and make the US their next holiday destination".

I first visited the US in February 1995. I stayed two weeks, visiting friends in Baltimore, California, and Washington, and had a wonderful time. Between 1995 and 2004 I visited the US multiple times, and enjoyed each visit very much. I've been to California, Arizona, Illinois, and New York: I've loved the country and enjoyed meeting Americans.

I haven't visited the country since US-Visit was set up in 2004, and I will not be back. I will not even change planes in a US airport when I make a long-planned visit to Canada next year.

The US government's tourist campaign was especially badly timed: on 30th June a federal Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that no crime was committed when U.S. officials arrested a non-US citizen changing planes in a US airport, locked him up for a fortnight, refused to let him have access to a lawyer and a court, and then sent that non-US citizen to Jordan and then to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured for nearly a year.

If the US government claims the right to arrest any non-US citizen, lock them up, deny them due process, and ship them to another country to be tortured, then the US government must be insane to think that any non-US citizen should take the risk of entering such a country.

I loved visiting the US. I'll never go back.

The case he references is that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar. Read about Arar's ordeal and think what it says about our country that 1) we did that to him, and 2) our courts refuse to grant him any recourse.

I still use first person adjectives, "our" and "we," when referring to the United States but I don't know why. Whatever this monstrous entity is, it isn't mine any more. If you think the government represents you, think again.