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.

Who is the lesser evil?

That is getting harder to assess. Below are the two schools of thought that say maybe Obama is worse than McCain.

Stop Me Before I Vote Again:

So claimed the magnificent Diderot: "Two or three consecutive reigns of a just and enlightened despotism... is one of the great misfortunes of any free nation."

Sound to you like the possible pending Obama anni mirabiles? Recall that the three consecutive terms of the New Deal saved corporate America to march triumphantly under the victory arch of world war two right smack dab into the heyday of the American century.

Is this why, on some tacit, crumbling-infrastructure mind level, we rads fear Obie's success far more than his failure? Is this why we root for dismalitude? Why are we so fond of spoiling the ballots of Lady Liberty -- while she remains on the limited liability plan?

Arthur Silber:

I am not quite there yet, but I am seriously considering the following. Depending on how this campaign develops, and depending on how Obama conducts himself and -- very significantly to me -- how Obama's most devoted supporters act, I may conclude that, if you vote, you should vote for John McCain. Unbelievable, I realize, but I may have no choice but to think that the alternative is far too dangerous to countenance.

Simple.

In the last year or two we've made some major changes in the way we live.

We used to have 2 cars that we both used for long daily commutes. Now we have 1 car that is used as infrequently as possible. I walk 5.5 miles round trip between campus and back (I'll be getting a bike soon), and Kira drives about 9 miles round trip and hopefully will soon be sharing that with a carpool buddy.

We used to spend $85/month to each have cell phones, plus another $10 or $15 for a house line. Now we just have a house line and no cell phones.

We used to have a huge HDTV in our living room and a small crappy old TV in our bedroom. We had satellite service, premium channels, and Tivo. Now we have just the one crappy TV out in the living room, and no cable or satellite service. We pretty much only use it when we borrow DVDs from the library. I suppose I might get a cheap indoor antenna, but probably not.

I've given away probably a third of my clothing. I haven't bought any new clothes (though I have received some as gifts).

We used to regularly eat out or order take-out food. Now we prepare almost every meal ourselves.

We used to own our own home, but now we rent a modest apartment in a high-rise building.

We used to live in the US. Now we live in Canada.

I've made less and less money each of the last several years, really only having a "regular" full time job for about 8 months in the last 3+ years. Now I'll be a full time student with a tiny annual stipend. Now that Kira has completed her bachelor's degree, she's starting a job making half of what she made before she went back to finish.

This trajectory is in many ways the exact opposite of the conventional idea of "success," at least as far as I was concerned for the first 20-some years of my life. But I've gotten happier each step of the way.

War as environmental disaster

From here via Mahatma X Files:

Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.



The war is responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) since March 2003. To put this in perspective, CO2 released by the war to date equals the emissions from putting 25 million more cars on the road in the US this year.



Emissions from the Iraq War to date are nearly two and a half times greater than what would be avoided between 2009 and 2016 were California to implement the auto emission regulations it has proposed, but that the Bush Administration has struck down. Finally, if the war was ranked as a country in terms of annual emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war each year emits more than 60% of all countries on the planet.



Just the $600 billion that Congress has allocated for military operations in Iraq to date could have built over 9000 wind farms (at 50 MW capacity each), with the overall capacity to meet a quarter of the country’s current electricity demand. If 25% of our power came from wind, rather than coal, it would reduce US GHG emissions by over 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year – equivalent to approximately 1/6 of the country’s total CO2 emissions in 2006.



In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.



US presidential candidate Barack Obama has committed to spending "$150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure." The US spends nearly that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.

Jesus fucking Christ. The North Pole might be ice-free this summer and war is our priority.

Why I won't vote: Al Gore Iraq myth debunked

An idea that I've encountered (most recently in an email conversation with Trakker, but other times as well) in response to my stance against voting is that if only Al Gore had won in 2000, we never would have invaded Iraq. And somehow this proves that voting, and voting for Democrats specifically, is a very important obligation. I don't get the logic, but I don't think logic is really the point with this argument. Nevertheless I'll respond to it.

First of all, Al Gore did win the election in 2000 and the votes didn't matter because the Supreme Court said the son of the guy who gave them their job was the winner. And, as I've mentioned before, Al Gore in his role as Senate President blocked the attempts of a few Democrats from the House of Representatives to contest the election. So the votes didn't matter, and even the guy who won the election agreed that the votes didn't matter.

But more to the heart of it, was there any reason in fall of 2000 to think Gore would advance a less destructive foreign policy than Bush? Specifically in regards to Iraq, Gore had just been part of 8 years of the Clinton regime that imposed brutal sanctions against the Iraqi people. When it was pointed out to Secretary of State Madeline Albright that these sanctions caused the death of over half a million Iraqi children, her response was "we think the price is worth it." I think it is reasonable to assume that "we" includes Gore, and as far as I know Gore never spoke against those sanctions as a candidate.

So Al Gore was part of an administration willing to kill over 500,000 children on the theory that starving the Iraqi population would cause them to overthrow Saddam and enhance US access to Middle East oil. But at the time of the 2000 election, even if everyone could have magically known that a group of fanatical religious fundamentalists with no connection to Iraq would fly planes into U.S. buildings, we were supposed to be quite certain that Gore would be less inclined than Bush to respond by killing more Iraqis in an effort to overthrown Saddam. Decisions must be judged by the expected outcomes at the time of the decision, and I don't see any way that it would have been possible to forecast the Iraq outcome.

And so now here were are, worrying about the 2008 election and how McCain will be more of a disaster than Obama for some reason or another. And who is the headliner of Obama's national security advisory group? Madeline "worth it" Albright. As far as I can tell, the decision available to voters is between Republicans, who drop bombs on brown folks, and Democrats, who prefer to starve them to death.

Pat Tillman, revisited

At some point I started going back to look at some old posts and adding the label "embarrassing archives." In the spirit of self-examination and personal growth and admitting my mistakes, I'll highlight this recent addition to my embarrassing archives. This is probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my brief fling with mainstream political liberalism. That was posted in April of 2007, but by a year later I had figured things out a bit better.

Now I'll say this. As far as paid killers go, it might be that Tillman was better than most. He seemed to value knowledge and was even willing to skeptically examine the righteousness of the cause he had given up quite a lot to fight for. That does take courage. (Hell, if he had lived he might have even come to realize that both wars were "fucking illegal" and be an active protester.) And the way his death was lied about is of course disgraceful.

But men who go fight wars of aggression aren't heroes, even if their personal character away from the battlefield is admirable, and even if they do things on a battlefield that require a certain kind of bravery, and even if they fight and die for something they believe in very strongly. Tillman could have done a lot of great things with his life (and I'm not talking about football) but he threw his life away by choosing to go fight an unjust war. I feel very sorry for him and his family on a personal human level, but I'm no longer willing to glorify his life or death. He wasn't a hero; he was a sucker.

spending someone else's money

I haven't looked at the numbers recently as to exactly how much the Iraq invasion and occupation has cost, but I'd guess offhand that $10,000 per US taxpayer is the right ballpark. Maybe double that. Now, if the idiot Emperor had gone before the nation and announced that we were going to war and that it was going to cost each of you 5 figures, there's no fucking way he could have pulled it off. Everyone would have gone ape shit, no matter how much we all just wanted to kill some brown people.

Of course he didn't do that because he doesn't have to. They never have to. They can just go to war whenever the fuck they want, and we have to pay for it no matter what we think of it. This is morally wrong. I can think of no possible justification for the government forcibly taking taxes out of every paycheck before I even get it, and using that money to pay for a war that I don't approve of. And it is a betrayal of every tax payer that these fucking clowns can just spend as much as they want and borrow the difference if tax revenues don't cover it. That borrowing is offensive enough when we aren't using it to slaughter families while they sleep and anally rape shackled prisoners who've been locked up without charges for 5 years. But that's exactly what we are using our credit to pay for. The depths of depravity of our government are beyond words.

The only way to opt out of the whole sickening mess without risking imprisonment is to leave the country. I was able to do that, but that's a really fucking hard option to choose, no matter how pissed off you are. And it fucking sucks that it had to come to that.

Of course up here the same logic applies. There is just a significant difference in the amount of damage being done with the income the government steals.

Why I won't vote: mob lawyers and mob thugs

Here's an analogy I'm working on. Let's consider it a part of my "why I won't vote" series.

Democrats are dirty mob lawyers; Republicans are the mob enforcers. In the power struggle to be the next don, people get to choose between the no-neck tough guy (McCain) or the smooth-talking debonair schmoozer (Obama).

Think about what the mafia is. They operate in a geographical area, using a combination of violence, fear, and pay-offs to get whatever they want for the people who control the organization. It is a corrupt power structure run by amoral men to advance their own interests at the expense of everyone else. That is what government is too. Same thing.

People who live in a community where organized crime operates have to pay their taxes, and then they mostly can stay out of trouble. They're told these taxes are for their own protection. And that's true, though mostly for illegitimate reasons. There might be occasional threats - thieves, rapists, whatever - and the mafia will come down hard on those people. But that's only because those people are taking the mafia's action. The primary threat to the community is the mafia itself, its hired thieves and rapists.

So then when you in the community are generously offered a say in who takes over as the next don, you're too excited for a chance to participate to notice that you're never offered a choice to disband the mafia entirely. No, you're just offered two choices - a tough guy or a lawyer. Some of you look at the clenched jaw and the dead eyes of the brute and then at the nice smile and eloquent prose of the white-collar charmer and decide that it really isn't a contest. Yeah we'd rather have better choices, but surely the lawyer is better. He's very nice and you can invite him to a dinner party without scaring the guests. So maybe we should just support the lawyer. He's the lesser evil.

Until you realize that the mob is always run by either a lawyer or a tough-guy, and that they always advance the same basic agenda. They're always going to steal from you, threaten violence, and use violence. The lawyer's purpose is to conceal as much of it as he can, and make complex arguments about why the rest of it is really not that bad. They work within the accepted system, exploiting it for their own cynical advantage. The thug's part is to scare the shit out of people so they don't fight back. In periods of time where the lawyers are on the top, everyone is a little more comfortable, and they don't fight back as much as the mafia slowly dips its fingers into more and more things. After all, it is that nice shiny lawyer running things, and violence isn't really his style. But you're forgetting that when the next don is a thug, he'll take that increased access and ramp up the violence, use all that extra influence to take even more for himself, and everything is worse than ever. That's how the cycle has worked for centuries, and that is always how it will work. But short term choices will always make it seem like one or the other is better. But you're forgetting that the thugs can't do their thing without the lawyers. The lawyers make the thugs possible. The lawyers are thugs too. They're the same.

And so what not enough people realize is that they don't have to put up with the mafia at all. There are way more of us than there are of them, even if they have more guns. But that's why the mafia relies on fear. You're afraid that if you stand up to them, not enough people will get your back, and you'll go down alone. The mafia counts on this, and that's why they make examples out of a few trouble-makers every once in a while. That scares people, and they retreat and pay their tax and don't say anything too serious.

RIP

Help this guy

Probably the only blogger I'm willing to pay to read is desperately in need of donations. Consider giving him a few bucks.

silence the artists

This would be shocking, if we lived in a civilized country. But we don't, so it is merely outrageous.

Short version: A professor's wife died suddenly. He called 911. Police noted his history of political protest, noticed unusual art supplies (harmless bacteria; his specialty is the intersection of art and science) and some Arabic writing on an invitation to an art exhibit. He was arrested by the FBI and faced various outrageously made-up charges for 4 years, first for bioterrorism and when that was too ridiculous, mail fraud, which was also ridiculous, as the judge finally acknowledged.

This is your America, motherfuckers. Enjoy it.

Fuck you, Obama

I'm fucking pissed off today. Everyone's favorite Saintly Messiah of Democracy is really on a roll. I've been such an asshole these last few months by telling you how pathetic and worthless Obama is, what a liar, what a fucking Imperialist stooge. So I don't imagine you're paying attention now.

Obama says:

NAFTA is awesome, sorry I was harsh on it before

The best way to change our genocidal warmongering foreign policy is to hire a bunch of genocidal warmongers!

I'll campaign for Bush Democrats!

Yeah he's really changing the fundamental nature of politics. He's a real progressive visionary! Now that he's got the primary wrapped up, time to stop pretending to care about anything the left cares about. On with Empire!

Fuck you, Obama, and fuck everyone who supports you.

"weak Democrats" my ass

I've been meaning to write this up more formally but I'm just going to jot down some notes. Perhaps I'll come back and fill in links and more reasoning later.

• Read through the last few days of Greenwald's columns, covering Democrat leader Steny Hoyer's back-room maneuvers to force immunity through telecoms through Congress, while publicly lying about it, and while also arranging to be able to actually vote against the deal he creates so he'll be able to falsely claim he didn't support it.
  
• Meanwhile Obama is doing nothing to stop it, but is issuing bland statements that mildly oppose it.
• Internet progressives continue to lament the "spinelessness" or the "weakness" of the Democratic Party. Liberal blog hero Digby just can't understand why Democrats won't stop shredding the Constitution and figures there must be some deep dark secret that they're afraid will be let out or something.
  
• Wake the fuck up! Democrats WANT this shit. They don't care about the Constitution. They WANT telecom immunity! They WANT domestic spying! Their highest levels of leadership work to make it happen, while maintaining in public that they don't want it but can't help it.
  
• They'd rather you think they're weak than have you realize what they really want. That way you can believe that they're really good people deep down, but if only they had more courage...
  
• This shit is so fucking obvious, but every day you hear a new complaint about how bumbling and cowardly the Democrats are. The media perpetuates this narrative because they're in on it too.
• Remember how the Democratic takeover in 2006 was supposed to end the war but instead the war was escalated? That's because the Democrats don't want to end the war. They want to get votes from people who want the war to end. So they say they want to end the war, then they discretely make sure the war goes on, while they publicly pretend that they just couldn't fight the bully Republicans, but maybe if we elect even more Democrats then maybe they'll be able to stand up for themselves. Bullshit. Same with torture, rendition, domestic spying, Iran, and everything else. More Democrats won't do any better.
  

WAKE THE FUCK UP AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRGH

Gore compares Obama to Genocidal Maniacs

Ha:

[Gore] said Republicans criticized President Kennedy for being too young and inexperienced to be president as well, but Kennedy noted that Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Christopher Columbus all accomplished great things before they reached their mid-40s.

That's about right.

FISA, Obama, same old story

Greenwald continues to document how the Democrat-led Congress is all set to immunize telecoms for their illegal role in Bush's domestic spying program. Congress is essentially saying that the laws they pass can be broken by anyone if the President says so. Remind me what function Congress actually serves at this point.

Meanwhile, the great hope of the Democratic party, Saint Barrack Obama the First, is prepared to lead a great crusade against this travesty, threatening to filibuster and use all of his popularity and power to thwart the passage of this bill.

No wait, I got that wrong. He isn't doing anything.

Oh I suppose he might make a few mild comments, and he'll cast a meaningless vote against it once the margin of victory has been assured. That way his deluded supporters can convince themselves he opposes this kind of thing, deep down in his pure heart, where no Republican smear tactics can tarnish him and no media figures can call his principles divisive. There, he's a champion of freedom and accountability and peace and fairness and liberty and hygiene; it is only the pressures of the corrupt campaign process that force him to hide the feelings in his heart. In his heart he wants the same things I want, I just know it! But never fear! The way he uses the power of the most powerful office in human history will surely be much different than the way he's used his ever-growing power before, and the way he's using it now, and the way he'll use it before his inauguration, and the way his party leadership uses it, and the way every other Democrat President has used it. He's different! He told me so!

math coolness

Impeach? Waste of time say Democrats

As far as I know it hasn't gotten much mainstream coverage but Dennis Kucinich brought articles of impeachment against Bush on Monday. Beside being abundantly deserved, impeachment might be one of the only ways to prevent attacks on Iran (not to mention Pakistan). So the Democrats must be pretty excited about this, what with them being the opposition party who love truth and justice and all, right?

As they have previously, Democratic leaders staunchly oppose Kucinich's impeachment effort. They expect to table the resolution by referring it to the Judiciary Committee, where they expect it to die.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) suggested yesterday that engaging in a lengthy debate over impeaching Bush in the waning days of his administration is not a productive use of the House's time.

Why, it is almost as if the Democrats don't care about the law, the Constitution, justice or preventing wars. Boy that Obama guy gives some inspirational speeches though!

shut down The Fed?

Coming from an undergraduate economics background, I was raised to love The Fed and worship Alan Greenspan. I hadn't thought much about that in a while, but this is an interesting case that The Fed is a tool of tyranny. Check it out.

The pernicious role of The Fed was also examined in The Conservative Nanny State,
which is well worth the read, and a real bargain at $0.00.

girl dies so we can drink $2 bottles of wine

This is a terrible story.

A pregnant 17-year old girl was worked to death on a California grape farm. The owners made her and other laborers work for 4 hours in 95 degree weather without water or shade, in violation of multiple labor laws. When she was finally being rushed to a hospital with a temperature over 108 degree, the foreman instructed the driver to say that she had been jogging and not a worker.

The owners of this vineyard make Charles Shaw wines, the very cheap wines that Trader Joe's sells.

Here is a list of things you can do about it.

Moving to Canada, sort of a before-and-after

I started writing this a few days before I moved, but never finished.

This will probably be my last chance to blog before the move to Canada. I had considered writing some big manifesto about why I'm doing what I'm doing, but that hasn't happened yet. I do have a lot of swirling emotions about the whole thing though, so I want to get down a few thoughts.

I'm making several life-changing transitions here. I'm moving to a new country. I'm going back to school. And I'm totally changing career paths.

The easiest one to discuss is the going back to school part. I've been thinking about that ever since I finished undergrad, and I pretty much always figured I'd be back eventually. It took six years. A whole lot has happened in that time, and I think I'm much better for it.

My reason for going back to school is mainly because of the changing career paths, though there are other parts. Basically I don't know of any ways to make a living that I'm currently capable or qualified to do that I want to do. I think I like doing research (at least somewhat), and I like the idea of getting paid to learn, so it seems to me that being a professor might be a good gig. I'm not sure of that, but going to grad school is the first step, and it seems pretty low-risk to get a Masters degree. A big open question for me at this point will be how much bullshit I'll be able to tolerate (and how much of what I might be required to do will I see as bullshit). I'm heading in with an open mind and a desire to learn, but who knows what will happen to that.

That more or less addresses that side of things, at least in a shallow way, but the manifesto was mainly supposed to focus on the leaving the country part. Here are a few dimensions that are on my mind:

1. Disassociating myself from the US Government, in a moral sense.
2. Avoiding the perils of US domestic life, in terms of personal health and safety.
   
3. Searching for a culture that I can feel comfortable in.
4. Being physically far removed from my family and friends.

The decision to apply to schools in Canada was partially my solution to the first 3 items, which are goals that I've been pursuing for maybe 2 years now. The fourth is a downside of my chosen solution. Anyway, some thoughts on each item...

The first point is something that I've felt strongly about at times, but I've also felt like it is futile and/or self-obsessed. Will being a grad student in Canada for at least 2 years make me feel like I've accomplished anything in this regard? Will I care? I don't know. Do I currently have any moral responsibility for the evils committed by the USG? I've paid taxes and voted for politicians, so I think I do. Would I if I was a grad student in the US? Any more than I would as a US Citizen going to school in Canada? I don't know. I guess if nothing else, it makes a statement, but I don't know how many people are listening to it.

The second point, about avoiding the perils of life in the US, is obviously about pure self-interest without the moral dimension of the first point. Our economy is going to shit with little hope of recovery in sight, and bombing Iran will only make that worse. Aside from that, life in the US is a major health risk. I read somewhere that breast milk of the average US mother contains so many toxins that you wouldn't be able to sell it as food. That just seems so fucked up to me, and is a perfect way to summarize how bad things are here. Our food and household products are poisons, and our healthcare system is a joke. Violent crime rates here are alarming as well. How much of all that is better in Canada? Well I know crime is much better. My understanding is that they have stricter food safety regulations than the US, and much better healthcare. Their economy is probably very heavily linked to ours, so that isn't good, but I think they're a lot more energy independent so that ought to be good for something. Another safety aspect is our increasingly authoritarian domestic policies, which I think might be getting worse in Canada too, but probably not nearly as bad as here.

The point about culture is related to the first two, but it is basically about personal preferences, rather than concerns for morality or safety. From what I've seen, Canada is just a nicer place (than places I've spent much time in the US). People are more friendly. They're more liberal and less religious. They care about environmental issues. They drink beer. I just think I'll be generally more at ease with my surroundings there.

I don't really feel like finishing it, but I will say a few more things. I drink a lot less beer here than I did in Ohio. It is more expensive here and I've yet to find much of a good selection. I've also been eating differently and walking ~5.5 miles most days, so I've lost some weight I think. Most of that walk is through the woods next to a stream, amidst an assortment of happy wildlife. I joined a softball team. It is fun but I prefer basketball, tennis and soccer. Their smallest bills in Canada are $5 and they have $1 and $2 coins. I like that arrangement. I'm going to buy a used bicycle. I have no idea about Canadian politics yet. Concern for environmental practices is pervasive around here, and not just among the University crowd. I've eaten asparagus just about every day. I like the people in my department a lot so far.

blogs are a threat

Thinking out loud:

Blogs are a major threat to the establishment. They're like the new printing press. It used to be that the average person couldn't really contribute to public political dialog, until the printing press drastically reduced the cost of reaching lots of people. The printed word was power for a long time, until TV came along and everyone stopped reading and started getting all their information from TV. Highly concentrated wealth owns the broadcasting networks, and the average person can't really contribute. Now blogs come along and suddenly anyone with an email address can put their ideas out there. Good ideas draw an audience. Ideas different than those allowed on TV draw an audience. This is a threat, which is why mainstream media figures are so derisive towards bloggers.

So blogs are a weapon in the war of ideas, which is one reason I'd urge everyone to participate. Read blogs. Comment on blogs. Make your own. But an open question is whether the urge to sit in front of a computer and read or write a blog is taking away from the urge to go smash shit up in the streets.

Against the State

A Philosophical Challenge

My irritating yet astounding new book Against the State (SUNY Press) argues that all the arguments of the great philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Hegel, Rawls, Nozick, and Habermas, among others), are, putting it kindly, unsound.

The state rests on violence: not the consent of the governed, not utility, not rational decision-making, not justice.

Not only are the existing arguments for the legitimacy of state power unsound; they are shockingly fallacious, a scandal, an embarrassment to the Western intellectual tradition.

So I issue a challenge: Give a decent argument for the moral legitimacy of state power, or reconstruct one of the traditional arguments in the face of the refutations in Against the State.

If you can't, you are rationally obliged to accept anarchism.

I'd offer a huge cash prize, but I'm broke.

Henceforward, if you continue to support or observe the authority of government, you are an evil, irrational cultist.

You're an anarchist now, baby, until further notice.

e-mail responses to c.sartwell@verizon.com

Yours in anarchy,
Crispin Sartwell

bumper sticker heaven

Liberty Stickers.

live blogging my visit to Obama's website

After reading Chris Floyd's recent post, where he mentions that Obama's website "calls for fighting the War on Terror in a 'smarter way,'" I decided I'd visit this website and see how Obama presents himself. I've watched very little of his speeches (though I've read the text of many), and haven't really watched any TV coverage or commercials, so this is one of my first experiences of Obama as he wants to be seen. Let the fun begin.

I googled "Obama" and found his official site. The first thing that happens is that he asks you for money. In exchange he offers a "new direction for America" and says that "This is our time to turn the page on the policies of the past." Which policies he'll be changing are not yet mentioned, nor is the direction of the new direction. But the new direction will be new. We know that much.

Before clicking through to skip the donation page I noticed something odd. The suggested donation denominations: $5, $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000, $2300. Uh, $2300? I'm guessing there's some weird explanation for that. Obama is from Chicago right? A shout-out to Michael Jordan perhaps? Anyway.

The first thing I notice on the next page is this quote. "I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington... I'm asking you to believe in yours." He's also asking you to believe in fairies! If you believe, clap, clap your hands!

I look around the main page a bit more and find a part that asks where I'm from. I notice "American Samoa" on the list and click that, hoping against hope that it will detail Obama's position on issues of importance to the brave Samoans. Nope, just links to join local Obama teams. Back to the main page.

At the top there's a tab for "issues." On the drop down list is "faith." I click that. This should be good. The faith page tells us that Obama has made glorious speeches about faith. There's a link to "Barack's faith principles." There we learn that GOD is always present in our lives, and not only that, GOD is a constant source of hope. Wait, isn't Obama's campaign all about hope? This must mean GOD is for Obama! Next we learn that progressives ought to be approaching religion "boldly" which he explains means that "we" ought to be using it for our own partisan ends, so as to prevent others from using it for their own partisan ends. Truly brilliant stuff here. Back to main page.

Let's get into the meaty stuff. Issues --> Foreign Policy. Click.

We already know from Floyd that he has no problem whatsoever with the basic formulation of the US waging a war on an abstract concept. He just thinks we need to be smarter about it. So he's off to a good start.

He says he will end the war in Iraq. He also says he will leave troops in Iraq. Don't let that confuse anyone though; the war will definitely be over! He says he will "make it clear" that we won't have any permanent bases in Iraq. He also says we'll need to guard our embassy (the largest embassy in the history of the galaxy, which some people might mistakenly think was more like a permanent base, but it totally isn't). He also mentions humanitarian aid, which I suppose is nice, considering all the slaughter we've been doing. That ought to make us even.

He tells us that Iran has sought nuclear weapons. Dick Cheney says that too! He tells us Iran's leaders have threatened Israel. He doesn't mention if Israel's leaders have threatened Iran. They probably haven't.

He tells us that the gravest threat to the American people is a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons. I would have gone with global warming or heart disease or automobile accidents or a crippling recession. But terrorism is much more scary, allowing you to invoke disturbing images of Arabs, and you can spend lots of money on that without pissing off big business, so I guess recession and heart disease aren't as grave. That's why I now say that Africanized Killer Bees are the gravest threat to America!

Obama says he will strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Maybe that means he'll adhere to it, unlike every other President. He says countries that break the rules should face sanctions, specifically mentioning Iran and North Korea (hey didn't someone include them in an "axis of evil" at some point?), but doesn't mention whether the US should face sanctions for breaking the rules. I think we should just assume that he'll follow the laws and accept the same justice he wants to apply to everyone else. That seems like a safe assumption, given his lack of comment on the matter.

Obama says that we need a bigger military. Whew, I was worried that spending more on military than the rest of the world combined was kind of too much already, maybe even a huge fucking waste, and that when you carry a gigantic fucking hammer everything starts to look like a nail (and by "look like a nail" I mean "we better bomb the shit out of that shit"). Good to know I was wrong about that. Obama will massively swell our military into an erect stabbing machine, suitable for deep penetration into the most dangerous of deployment regions. This will arouse the passionate love of country that Americans used to feel deep in their loins, and bring us all to a quivering climax of safety and love and relaxing naps. I suspect the neighbors won't appreciate all the noise, but they're just prudes so who gives a fuck, right? Cock-blockers.

Obama specifically mentions that he support Israel's right to self defense. He doesn't mention whether the people of the occupied territories have this right. Or the people or Iraq, or Iran, or Somalia, or Cuba, or Ecuador, or Afghanistan, or Pakistan. I'll assume that they don't. Just Israel.

Obama calls for a brutal warlord to be brought to justice. So he is interested in that kind of thing. I wonder if any brutal warlords who deserve to be brought to justice will be residing anywhere in the US during an Obama Presidency? Hmmm... probably not. Better just worry about the former Liberian President.

Alright well that's about all the BarrackObama.com I can stomach for now, as fun as this has been. I've truly witnessed a new page in history, one very different from the old pages. Obama boldly offers ambiguous notions that lend themselves to whatever glorious interpretation his supporters want to hear, while never actually committing to anything that would deviate from the imperial agenda, which I think is definitely a new direction for America.

Debate

I've been having an interesting and intense conversation with my friend Trakker that has spilled over between several posts on his blog and mine. Check out these posts and comment sections:

http://trakker.typepad.com/neon_gods/2008/05/a-stupid-tone-deaf-remark-a-thoughtless-apology.html

http://trakker.typepad.com/neon_gods/2008/05/cleaning-up-after-the-bush-occupation.html

http://trakker.typepad.com/neon_gods/2008/06/lefty-obama-supporters-are-viciously-dangerously-nauseatingly-self-deluded.html

http://seeforyourself.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-i-wont-vote-every-conversation-with.html

I argue that Democrats in general and Obama in particular don't deserve support. I say not voting is better than voting for them, and that national elections are a huge distraction from meaningful political issues, designed to create the false appearance of democracy.

Trakker says that the system might be broken, but our only option is to fix it or replace it. He says that Obama represents the best chance we have of fixing it, and so is worthy of support. And since President Obama is the only realistic alternative to President McCain, we especially should support Obama.

While I admire Trakker's passion and his ultimate goals, I think he's chosen a bad strategy in pursuit of those goals. I think his arguments are weak, mostly misleading emotion, and don't really address the points I've made. But, I would think that, since I'm arguing against him, so feel free to tell me otherwise. Good debate is healthy. Go check it out!

Tomgram: Chris Hedges, War and Occupation, American-style

This Tomgram by Chris Hedges is a must-read.

This is what our war is:

"This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three.

"And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"

And this:

Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to checkpoints, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a .50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son. Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. "It's fun to shoot sh-t up," a soldier said. Some opened fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices (IEDS) went off, the troops fired wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who became, in the callous language of war, "collateral damage."

And this:

Mejía also watched soldiers from his unit abuse the corpses of Iraqi dead. He related how, in one incident, soldiers laughed as an Iraqi corpse fell from the back of a truck. "Take a picture of me and this motherf---er," said one of the soldiers who had been in Mejía's squad in Third Platoon, putting his arm around the corpse.

The shroud fell away from the body, revealing a young man wearing only his pants. There was a bullet hole in his chest.

"Damn, they really f---ed you up, didn't they?" the soldier laughed.

The scene, Mejía noted, was witnessed by the dead man's brothers and cousins.

I'm sure this was all done with the best of intentions.

Why I won't vote: every conversation with an Obama supporter

Why shouldn't I support Obama? He's way better than McCain or Hillary!

Well I think it is more complicated than just comparing the few viable candidates. The first thing you need to do is let go of your idea that the United States of America is a democracy. It isn't. Look, Dr. Chomsky says so:



He's really fucking smart, so you ought to really give this notion some consideration. America isn't a democracy.


Yeah, but, like, we have elections. We get to vote, right? That makes it a democracy!

Not really. All elections mean is that the public has a choice between various candidates. It doesn't mean that those candidates represent the interests of the people, or that the people have any say in the decisions that are important to them. All elections mean is that people can choose between candidates. The real power is in who chooses the candidates.


Uh, so... who chooses the candidates?

Well, first look at a what all the candidates have in common. You might notice that they're all politicians. They all have lots of money behind them. They're all Democrats or Republicans.


Yeah but wait, if they're all the same, how come there are Democrats and Republicans?

They aren't all exactly the same. There are some minor differences between them, perhaps even some major ones. But even major differences are dwarfed by their profound similarities. And the reason they have so many similarities is because the big money that backs them generally comes from people with very similar interests.

So now to answer the question, there are Democrats and Republicans for a few reasons, but two main reasons stand out. First, while the people who make the decisions have vast areas of common interests, they do have some differences. And so factions form that compete with each other over those minor areas of disagreement.

But far more importantly to you and me, there are Democrats and Republicans because it creates the illusion of choice for the public. The interests of the people in power, the people who control both the Democrat and the Republican parties, are very different than the interests of the public. So it is important that they make it seem as if the public has meaningful choices. Parties are kind of like marketing gimmicks. They create appealing slogans that generates enthusiasm, and use various methods of deception to get the public to overlook the fact that their actions and their rhetoric don't match. The vast majority of their actions favor the interests of those elite few, at the expense of the general public and the rest of the world.


Ok, well that all makes sense, and I kind of agree. But still, Obama is way better than McCain.

He certainly wants you to think that. It is possible that it is true, though I think it is much harder to predict than most people seem to think. Like Chomsky says, the campaigns are designed to highlight character qualities, rather than positions on meaningful issues. It seems to me that Obama has been highly evasive on issues, and quite willing to outright lie.

Regardless, putting your efforts, your time, your money, your hope, into Obama is putting your efforts, your time, your money, your hope into the Democratic party. And that Democratic party is a crucial part of that whole corrupt and disorienting system that gives the illusion of choice without actually providing one. Its primary function is to attract the votes of progressive/liberal-minded people. It does this by saying things that progressives like to hear, and very rarely by passing measures that progressives like (so long as they don't conflict with the interests of the elites), but then primarily using their electoral success to serve the interests of the elites and maintain their own personal and party power.


Yeah, I kind of felt that way after the last election...


Exactly! In 2006 you supported Democrats because you wanted them to end the Iraq war. The war escalated. You wanted Democrats to stop the US from torturing people and holding them without charges. They not only stopped it, they legalized it. You wanted them to impeach Bush and Cheney for their obvious crimes, but they said impeachment was off the table.


So just because Democrats have always claimed to offer a better alternative to Republicans, just because they've said they stand for the things that are important to me, and just because they've never actually done a single thing to back up those claims, and just because there's an extremely painful recent example for me to dwell on... wait but Obama is changing everything. He's different!

Argh! Nobody gets to the position he's in without being completely a creature of the system. Big business is pouring money into his campaign; he's selling out his friends because they say true things that are politically inconvenient; he wants to increase the size of the military; he refuses to acknowledge the turmoil wrought by Israeli action in the Middle East; the list goes on forever. He's not different.


But he's better than McCain!!

Again, he very much wants you to think that, but I'm not sure I see how. You could certainly look at one very narrow issue and conclude that Obama would handle things better in than McCain in that domain. A popular example of that is military belligerence. It might well be the case that Obama is less likely to bomb Iran, for example, although Obama seems quite unwilling to advocate non-aggression. Even if Obama is less likely to launch another war of aggression, he could be more likely to inflict massive harm on people through economic sanctions, as Bill Clinton did in Iraq. Or he might be more inclined to use his beefed up military for "humanitarian" interventions, which never seem to have humanitarian outcomes. Or Obama might have the acquiescence of a Democratic Congress that allows him to pass various measures that cause long-term harm, whereas a McCain presiding with a Democratic Congress wouldn't allow much of anything to pass, preventing harmful measures from proceeding. Or....

The point of that isn't to argue that Obama will be worse or as bad as McCain, but to illustrate the difficulty in figuring it out. Which is once again why I say supporting Democrats is a huge fucking waste of any good intentions you have, because you're supporting the system that allows a decision that is seemingly so important to be contested by people who offer you no meaningful commentary on the important issues.


So you're just saying I shouldn't support anyone? I shouldn't vote? Well then what should I do? You aren't offering any alternatives.

Why does pointing out the massive flaws of the system have to be accompanied by a specific plan of alternative action? Whatever causes you support, whatever ideals you hold that you think Obama might be slightly more likely to represent than the other idiot, you'd be better served pursuing them in other ways. Presidential elections don't change that shit. They're a huge brick wall between you and your vision, and you're just slamming your head into that wall by supporting candidates. If I come along and point out that slamming your head against the wall isn't going to knock it down, isn't that pretty fucking useful information right there? But I guess some people have hit their head so many times that they can't even recognize the futility.


I'm still going to vote for Obama.

I know you are. That's the fucking diabolical beauty of the system.

sweet freedom

No more cell phone for me. We have a house line and there's a phone in my lab on campus, and that's it. I won't be instantly reachable all the time, but I expect that somehow life will continue.