Time Magazine Lies and the Power Perspective

Glenn Greenwald has a recent series of posts showing how Time Magazine publishes blatant lies that serve a clear political agenda (you can go find the links). The basic story is quite familiar; the writer simply asked a few partisans about a pending bill and printed their talking points without verifying the facts at all. The whole premise of his column was built around a blatant lie.

In response to the controversy, the offending writer, Joe Klein, has gone through a series of embarrassing denials, weaseling, and obfuscating. The punchline is his recent quote that "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." He seems to think this is a defense, because in his pathetic bubble world of elite beltway journalists, investigating reality is not something anyone is expected to be interested in or capable of doing. They just repeat what their sources say.

Political operatives are well aware of this, and hence are unconstrained by truth when they feed information to such "journalists." From some perspectives, this tends to favor Republicans. This isn't incorrect, though other perspectives provide more clarity: the powerful use their power to to their benefit, and the truth is rarely their friend.

college football too

From deep in the belly of the beast, Buckeye country, I risk life and limb by passing along this scathing criticism of the college football industry. A highlight:

From Creation -- Rutgers beat Princeton on Nov. 6, 1869 -- college football has been criticized for being violent, commercial, and a higher-education distraction of the first order. That's why we love it. Not to mention the chance to play war, invent fungible icons, and engage in acceptable homosocial behavior.

The true heroes of the game have not been the players -- usually too young to be interesting in their firefly careers -- but the loud, devious, flim-flam artists who convince the young that winning a game as a group is more important than any kind of individual expression. The most manipulative of them succeed by convincing "their" boys that they are a "band of brothers" who can trust only each other and need to sacrifice their bodies (more and more often now at the expense of their future health) for the greater good. Most college players understand that they are being played, but they do genuinely love the game, the contact, their friends, the steam of the locker-room.

From Pop Warner at the Carlisle Indian School through Bear Bryant at Alabama to Tom Osborne at Nebraska -- who, after I questioned his repeated "forgiveness" of a felonious running back, asked me if I'd rather have the player loose in my neighborhood -- the unstated mission of coaches has been to provide a model for controlling and exploiting young manhood for factories, corporations, and armies.

What Thanksgiving is all about

In 1970 ... the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Frank James "was selected but first he had to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it." James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you... but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People... The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans... Massasoit, the great leaders of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers... , little knowing that... before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags... and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them... Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts.... What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work towards a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was not some incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing James would have said, had he been allowed to speak, was false, excepting the word wheat.

But truth isn't important as long as we have our feel-good myths.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Although George Washington did set aside days for national thanksgiving, our modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until the 1870s.

But if they did have Thanksgiving back in Pilgrim times, what would white people have given thanks for?

King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us" for sending "this wonderful plague among the salvages [sic]."

All above quotes are from James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.

bad movie alert

We Own the Night. Don't see it. (Unless you really love Eva Mendes, in which case leave after the first 2 minutes.)

"I don't read your political blog posts"

1.) "I don't read your political blog posts." I get that line a lot. I'm curious as to how those people expect I'll react to "Hey I don't read the 95% of what you write... you know, the stuff you obviously care a great deal about. But dude that shit about the Ramen was funny! I love Ramen!!!" Thanks. Thanks a lot. (If you've said this to me recently and figure I'm talking about you, I assure you that you're not alone. My readership has changed dramatically since I used to write about poker and movies all the time.)

2.) I had a conversation recently with my mother, who loves George Bush unconditionally, trusts him completely, and fully supports his war-making. Over the course of this conversation it became appallingly obvious how ignorant she was about basic facts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She actually outright refused to believe factual information I provided that casts the actions of our military in a negative light, starkly denying the possibility that it could be true. She knows nothing but Progress and Noble Goals, and unquestioningly assumes the Goodness of The United States of America. She once told me "America is number one." I stopped and asked her what that means exactly. She paused, thought about it for a while, and said "it means that we have the privilege to live in a country that is the best."

--

This is America in a nutshell. We're occupying a country on the other side of the world that we illegally invaded, causing death and injury to untold millions, and nobody wants to know a thing about any of it. The vast majority of us are shockingly ignorant and oblivious, but that doesn't stop huge numbers from blindly supporting our course of destruction anyway, because hey, if we're doing something, it must be right, because we're Number One and being #1 means we're The Best. The Best might occasionally mess something up or have an isolated bad apple, but we're always operating with the Noble Intention of Spreading Freedom, and the net effect of our actions is always Good. (Because we're The Best. The Best = #1. America is #1. )

I don't blame you that you don't want to question these stories. I know you don't want to actually think about this. I know you don't want to discover that your country is a monster and your flag-waving friends are idiots. Do you think I do? Do you think I want to know that my own mother's carefully considered explanation for why America is #1 is that "we're the best"? That she believes every lie from George W. Bush's forked tongue and not a word from mine?

Go read that link. I know you don't want to; that's what the link it actually about, the way we censor our own conversations to avoid unpleasant reality. If you manage to suppress your urge to click elsewhere, if you actually read it, you might realize that by voluntarily ignoring the spread of evil, you're willingly surrendering to it.

Explain this phenomenon to me

I object to Bush's war and they bring up Sandy Berger. This has happened twice now, once with each parent, in incidents almost a full year apart.

[Berger was Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor who later stole classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing them down his pants. The lead prosecutor of the case indicates that he stole only copies and that no original material was destroyed, though this story is hotly disputed by Rush Limbaugh and the like, who claim without much factual basis that something much more sinister was happening.]

Who knows what the hell was going on there, but what kind of derangement is happening when you attempt to compare this to Bush's war crimes? Its like comparing the Columbine shootings to spray-painting some graffiti on a school wall. I can't even fathom what point they're trying to make by bringing it up. "Well you're saying that Bush illegally invaded two sovereign nations causing the slaughter of at least a million people, but this one guy who used to work for Clinton stole some documents!!"

Jesus approves of torturing cats

As long as it makes a musical sound


This makes Hattori so mad:

Ramener

I've been ravaged by illness for the last few days, but that gave my wife the opportunity to introduce me to one of life's great pleasures: adding egg to Ramen Noodles. Just crack one into the boiling water to add extra deliciousness to your salty noodle-water.

someone has my back

fiddle and the drum

more Morton West

If any of the kids from that school happen to see this, for what its worth, I'm with you. You're right and they're wrong. Fuck them.

francais?

Remember, remember the 5th of November

Morton West High School

Dissent will not be tolerated. These poor kids are learning their lesson early. Take a moral stand against authority, and authorities will freak the fuck out. They'll beg and they'll bargain and they'll lie. And then when they don't get what they want, they'll come down on you as hard as they can.

Read Arthur Silber's take on it, and follow his advice and sign a petition urging the school to go easy on these kids.

what is wrong with this God fellow?

God gives an adorable little girl an extra set of arms and legs that threaten her survival, and this is a gift? Of course, God kills women who obey his profoundly inexplicable and murderous rules, so extra arms does sound generous.

Helen Keller and Brian McGough

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity - this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, wrote that Keller's "mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development."

Keller recalls having met this editor: "At the time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him." She went on, "Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which was are trying to prevent.

- James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, p22. Thanks to Brice Lord for recommending it.

Rush Limbaugh:

VoteVets.org has -- they describe themselves as an organization comprised of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns who oppose current policy in Iraq. They've put together a TV ad that takes aim at me. This ad's going to run on Fox News, on CNN, it's going to run on WMAL radio in Washington, $60,000 ad buy that's going to run, I think, on our local West Palm Beach station down here. And there's a man identified as Brian McCoff -- McGough -- it's M-C-G-O-U-G-H, I'm not sure how he pronounces it, McGo, McGuff -- I haven't watched the ad.

He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there, and he says to me in this ad, "Until you have the guts to call me a 'phony soldier' to my face, stop telling lies about my service." You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into.

This man will always be a hero to this country with everyone. Whoever pumped him full of these lies about what I said and embarrassed him with this ad has betrayed him. They're not hurting me, they're betraying this soldier. Now, unless he actually believes what he's saying, in which case it's just so unfortunate and sad when the truth of what I said is right out there to be learned.

what is a boy to do?

Before the last discussion got out of hand, there seemed like there was a possibility of discussing the merits of an approach to a moral dilemma. I still want to do that. The question, simply posed, is this: given that this country is hopelessly fucked, what is a boy to do?

You might not be on board with the assumption. I'm slightly more interested in the moral issue, but I understand if you first feel the need to figure out what is so fucked and why it is so hopeless. I've explained this somewhat in this post, which also dealt with the question of what to do about it. Read all the links from that post if you want to try to understand where I'm coming from. Beyond that, authors whose writing has influenced my opinion on the matter are most notably Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. The scholarship of Jared Diamond and Howard Zinn has also contributed. Arthur Silber and Chris Floyd have blogs that relentlessly document how fucked everything is. My arguments are their arguments.

Now, given all of that... now what? Well on more than one occasion Floyd has looked to Thoreau for guidance on the matter, and found an answer that I find convincing: "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Also in that comment thread I link to three items containing ideas that I also find convincing. I'd recommend reading them. Here they are again: (1) Fuck (2) the (3) system.

Based on all of this, I put forth the idea that refraining from working when I don't need to for my immediate survival, thus minimizing my association with the government by avoiding income tax, is some kind of noble form of principled dissent. I fully acknowledge the possibility that there might be convincing arguments against this line of thinking, I don't see that any of them found their way into that discussion, but that doesn't mean they can't exist.

Here is my version of the argument offered against my idea (as opposed to arguments against the underlying assumption, or arguments about details along the way, or various invective):

But some of the theoretical tax dollars I would be paying to the government would have helped people. Needy people.

I'll assume that it is true that some tax dollars pay for things that help people, but I reject that as a compelling argument against my position on a variety of grounds, some of which I mentioned in the comments:

• Illegitimate acquisition of funds
• Immoral use of funds
• violence
• coercion
• torture
• racist behavior
• environmentally destructive policies
• energy
• transportation
• agriculture

It was pointed out that this method of weighing the good against the bad is a utilitarian approach (at least considering everything but the first bullet, to which I'll return later). In spite of repeated dismissals of the value of measuring utility only in "dollars that help" versus "dollars that hurt," there was extended discussion about how the budget is allocated. It isn't that the information about where tax dollars are spent is useless, but that those values need to be weighted in such a subjective way, and with such disparate coefficients, as to render the actual figures trivial values in the moral calculus.

To translate that to an easy example, consider an organization that collects money from its members, and uses 99% of it to give pennies to people on the streets, and 1% of it to fund the murder of small children. Giving people money helps them, and killing hurts. I don't think anyone would argue that tweaking the percentages even by a orders of magnitude would change the moral righteousness of buying into the organization. No matter how many acts of goodness they do, it will never add up to enough to surpass the evil of murder. Lots of little goods don't outweigh a bit of heinous wrong.

Going back to reality, it is obviously my contention that the way our national budget is spent does more harm than good. Whether we spend 40% or 55% or 80% of our tax revenues on social good doesn't really matter as long as we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain an illegal and immoral occupation of a nation we illegally and immorally invaded and destroyed, as long as we're holding people without charges, as long as we're torturing people, as long as we're conducting warrantless domestic surveillance, as long as millions of nonviolent drug offenders are imprisoned, as long as we're massively subsidizing unnecessary crops that ravage our environment and our health.

And on top of all that, much of the spending that on the surface may appear to be good is actually significantly less good than it appears, if not outright bad. I consider this to be the case for much of our education spending, as I mentioned, and I suspect that it would be the case for just about everything, including the State Department's involvement in the recent World Radiocommunications Conference, which was mentioned in the comments. I imagine this effect is worse than normal under Bush, whose administration has looked at absolutely every agency, program, and crisis as an opportunity to enrich their supporters, bolster their own power, and bludgeon their opposition, all while purporting to help people. Take, for example, two other purported good efforts mentioned - nuclear nonproliferation and environmental protection programs. It is true that money spent in ways that genuinely advance those causes would be doing good, but any money we spend on them and good that results is completely undermined by the way our "defense" policies and arms manufacturing and sales escalate arms proliferation and the way a multitude of our national policies wreak havoc on the environment. Those "good" programs, placed in proper context, are then nothing but pathetic fig leaves for our leaders to point to and pretend they're doing something to help fix the problem.

So, yeah, I don't think the math adds up favorably for the good of the way our tax dollars are spent. But you can even put every bit of all of this utilitarian rambling aside*, because I don't even think there's any justification for this government taxing my income to begin with, because I basically have no say in how they use it. This goes right to the heart of why everything is fucked about this country: because it is no longer the representative democracy it claims to be, though it still goes through the empty motions. Many of the authors I've mentioned have made this case quite convincingly. This essay is one of the best. I don't recognize any right by which an organization can forcibly take my money and give me effectively no say in how it is used. Even if the utilitarian calculus added up in favor of good, taking my money at gunpoint is wrong. Give your government that power, and sooner or later the people running it will start to use it for their own selfish purposes, not the beautiful noble ones they'll claim. A few centuries into the American experiment, and we're well past that point. I'm not sure that any government has ever stayed on the good side of it for long.

I can't imagine someone putting forth a case that substantially undermines the thrust of what I'm saying here, but I'd much prefer to live in a world where they could. But the idea that my opinion is some immobile monolith is hard for me to take seriously, given how wildly my opinions have changed over the last few years. I'm open to good argument, and I've found it from the authors I've cited. I don't like the idea that I live in a country and world that is so hopelessly fucked, but when someone makes that case convincingly, I'm going to accept it. And then at that point I'll try to figure out something to do about it.

And the last point here is to point out that the tragic absurdity of this quote from the comments:

"what really bothers me about your little plan of not working, and your modus operandi in general, is that if you're so convinced that everything is so fucked then do something positive to fix it, or just remove yourself from it entirely and live in a shed in the woods in Canada."

What on earth do you think I'm doing? I can't magically fix everything by myself, and my whole point is that the whole system is impossibly fucked beyond the point of fixing. The only conceivable way, in my estimation, to make anything better is by tearing the system down, and what I can personally do about that at the moment is minimize my contribution to the system, which is what I'm trying to do by avoiding income (I could also consider taking some of the measures mentioned in the "fuck the system" links above). And beyond that all I can do is try to spread awareness and urge more people to do the same.

Given that I'm doing all I can about it, what is really being said in that quote? "Either fix it or go away" reduces to "get the fuck away and shut the fuck up" The very act of acknowledging the unpleasant reality bothers people, so much so that they prefer not to hear it. This creates a pretty fucking vicious natural support for the abhorrent system to which I'm objecting. That would be funny if it weren't so fucking sad.

And yeah, rarely does a day go by when I don't think about running away from all of it.



* - If you wanted, you could structure this point into the utilitarian framework as well, and that might even be implicitly what I'm doing here. I just think it gets to complicated to write about it that way, because then you're talking about one utilitarian decision set depending on the range of possible outcomes of various possible subsequent utilitarian decision sets.

The Dude abides

I don't think I've mentioned this on here before, but I'll do so now. A significant part of why I'm not working right now is political. I don't want to earn income that can be taxed.

As Chris Floyd recently quotes:

How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.

-- Henry David Thoreau

I'm going to avoid such associations as much as possible. I don't believe this government has a right to my money, but I'm not willing to risk a direct challenge to their power. So I just won't work until I have to for pure survival, at which point I hope to be able to earn income without compromising my values.

the power of the pen

This email, whether genuine or not, reminds me very much of my personal correspondence with check my ip. It has the same aggressive condescension towards someone for questioning authority, the same disregard for logical argument, and the same sprawling agrammatical style.

It is an endless source of personal frustration that people with the mindset demonstrated in this kind of writing achieve positions of immense power. This frustration seems pretty pointless though, as there's nothing I can do to change it. There are reasons why such people are in such positions, and the reasons why they shouldn't be involve abstract values that are meaningless to people who think only in terms of raw power.

via

I was going to write this, but Winter Patriot did it first. Check him out, and take his advice.

Have you ever been several minutes into telling some kind of story and suddenly realized that there's no possible reason why anyone other than you would care about what you're saying? And then you have to decide if you finish it, or skip as quickly as possible to the ending, or just abruptly stop in mid-sentence.

Yeah.

Wouldn't that be funny if I was writing this because I was on the receiving end and wanted to drop a not-so-subtle hint to someone to stop telling me stupid shit?

Bush, Cheney: terrorist leaders

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts have made the deliberate, conscious decision to engage in state terrorism in order to advance foreign policy and energy objectives they held long before 9/11 "changed the world."

That is the true context, and content, of the war. Anyone who supports its continuation -- under any auspices, in any form, for any amount of time longer than it takes to remove all the troops quickly and safely -- is advocating the perpetuation of state terror in the name of the American people.

Yup.

6 years later, 10 points dumber

I took the GREs yesterday. That lasted about 3.5 hours and by the end my brain hurt. It was like running a mental marathon when I hadn't seriously trained in over 5 years. You get most of your score instantly, and I got 640 on the verbal and 800 on the quantitative (they're scored like SATs). My expired 2001 scores were 650 and 800, so at least I'm consistent. I expect these results to make me very competitive for any of the programs to which I'll be applying.

For reading this, you are rewarded with a picture of dust-covered Katsumoto.

Ecuador!

I hope every country in the world pays attention to what Ecuador is doing. Their President says that the U.S. can maintain its air base in Ecuador only if Ecuador can open a military base in Miami. On one level, I agree with Libby that I can't wait to see what contorted pretzel logic the White House uses in its response. But I also wouldn't be surprised if they pull out some dirty tricks to apply pressure. Nobody fucks with our Toddler-in-Chief's killin' toys.

Pete Stark backs down

Congressman Pete Stark (who previously earned See For Yourself acclaim for making his atheism public) got pissed off last week and started acting crazy. He actually told the truth. Obviously the truth is the last thing Congress wants its member to be telling us, so 173 of them voted to censure him. For some strange reason 196 voted against and the motion failed, but he gave a tearful apology anyway. (Maybe he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.)

They'll stop you from speaking out against an illegal war, but certainly won't do anything to stop the illegal war itself. They make a big fuss about the style of the complainer and ignore the substance of the complaint. The lightning rod "poor form" diversion strategy succeeds again.

Winter Patriot has written the apology that Stark should have delivered. Go read it.

We ain't 'fraid of no turrists

This is the CIA's new logo. The tragic comedy turns slapstick.

Heroes or Zeroes

This is hilarious to me, and probably only to me. I don't watch Heroes but my wife does. Last night she watched it while I was sitting nearby but not watching, so I mainly just heard the dialog. And it was TERRIBLE. I made a point of saying so, repeatedly, which got annoying to her. But I'm validated now that someone else agrees. Seriously, there were some terrible lines.

• Like after some amnesiac found a plane ticket in his name to some Canadian city (Montreal?), he said "all the signs point to (Montreal)."
• I don't remember the exact words, but at some point a mother in her 30s wanted to join some young girls playing jump rope and they started giving her a bunch of shit, like she was some dorky looking white guy calling next at a street basketball game in the inner city or something. Apparently cute little girls playing jump rope are tough.
  
• My favorite was an ominously delivered, "Its Bob," followed by a short pause and then, "he's one of them."

So... yeah. This post really was just for me. Sorry for the diversion. I'll get back to doom and gloom pronto.

simple solutions to problems

The whole thing is well worth reading, but here's an interesting tidbit:

Among the more important lessons George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, and others learned from the Vietnam conflict, he writes, was that if you want to suppress domestic questioning of foreign military adventures, then eliminate the draft, create an all-volunteer force, reduce domestic taxes, and maintain a false prosperity based on foreign borrowing.

- Chalmers Johnson reviewing Stephen Holmes reviewing Geoffry Stone (that sounds confusing because it is)

Who ever said we learned nothing from Vietnam?

Here's the prescription to cure our ills:

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

- Chalmers Johnson

While we're wishing that the American people will dismantle their empire and military, we might as well wish for flying ponies for everyone. Shall we lament how much easier it is to suppress objections to destructive rampage than to avoid destructive rampage?

Is there anything worth saving anyway?

Blogs I read lately

Chris Floyd is filling in for Glenn Greenwald this week at Salon. I'd been meaning to post about what blogs I'm reading these days, so this is a perfect occasion as two of my favorite bloggers cross paths.

Must Reads:

Floyd's Empire Burlesque - Well researched and scathing indictment of American foreign policy and military action, with lots of Bob Dylan lyrics mixed in.

Arthur Silber's Once Upon A Time - A passionate voice crying out in the dark, wishing someone would listen, knowing no one will.

Who is IOZ? - The dark comedian of dissent. A unique combination of razor sharp analysis, laser sharp wit, Friday sharp cheddars, and various other sharp things, all brilliantly poked right in your fucking eye!

The Primate Diaries - An anthropology-centered intellectual look at various topics.


Falling from the top, but still good:

Glenn Greenwald - I still like him a lot, and he is extremely effective at exposing the flaws in the system. I still read most of what he writes, and at least skim everything else. He's dropping on the list for a few reasons, the most significant of which is that the blogs above cover his approximate territory in a more convincing way. Glenn seems unable or unwilling to put the big picture all the way together, and holds onto romanticized, idealistic notions about this country that I just can't stomach. He can also be a bit tedious. Overall he's a brilliant writer, and worth keeping tabs on.

Digby's Hullabaloo - Falling for similar reasons as Greenwald. I read almost everything she writes, and she's extremely good at (justifiably) demonizing the right, but she still seems to love Democrats way too much.


Rising Stars:

Unqualified Offerings
Human Voices
Winter Patriot
Rick Perlstein

Personal Blogs:

Neon Gods
End The Cola Wars
Paulp

Inconvenient Gore?

Interesting if not surprising: Al Gore's record on global warming as part of the Clinton administration seems to be pretty damn weak. The work he's doing now is good and all, but it would have been nice if he had actually done something about it when he had some power.

get real

Maybe this is the kind of advice I need, courtesy of IOZ:

Friends, you must shred the assumption that the Republic is "not dead, only dreaming." The heart has stopped. The coin is on the tongue. Charon's poled the barge. Etc. A new reality is better than a new movie, as Amiri Baraka wrote. Listen. America isn't a constitutional republic. Repeat it. You'll feel better. Or, you'll feel worse at first, but then you'll feel better. You have to open yourself up to the notion that there are other kinds of freedom than living under a certain kind of benevolent government, which is what you've been taught since kindergarten. Liberty isn't a symptom of your State. It's surprising what happens to your mind when you start calling things by their real names.

to fight fire with fire

[At a speech at West Point, Bush] added an assertion that is demonstrably untrue but that, in the mouth of the president of the United States on an official occasion, amounted to an announcement of a crusade: "Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, in every place." The preamble to the National Security Strategy document that followed claimed that there is a "a single sustainable model for national success" - ours - that is "right and true for every person in every society... The United States must defend liberty and justice because these principles are right and true for all people everywhere."
- Chalmers Johnson, pp. 286-287

We often hear how militant Islamists want to use violence to force the whole world to follow their belief system, which they uncritically accept as superior to all others. Our response to this alleged existential threat has been to use violence to try to force the whole world to our belief system, which we uncritically accept as superior to all others.

Noam Chomsky on 9-11

There is no doubt that the 9-11 atrocities were an event of historic importance, not - regrettably - because of their scale, but because of the choice of innocent victims. It had been recognized that for some time that with new technology, the industrial powers would probably lose their virtual monopoly of violence, retaining only an enormous preponderance. No one could have anticipated the specific way in which the expectations were fulfilled, but they were. For the first time in modern history, Europe and its offshoots were subjected, on home soil, to the kind of atrocity that they routinely have carried out elsewhere. The history should be too familiar to review and though the West may choose to disregard it, the victims do not.
-pp. 119-120


One often hears that we must not consider these matters, because that would be justification for terrorism, a position so foolish and destructive as scarcely to merit comment, but unfortunately common.
-p.81

Often when I've argued that "they hate us for our freedom" is wrong, and that the real reason we're hated is because of our actions in the world, I'm told that I am some kind of terrorist sympathizer, a position quite foolish and destructive indeed. I agree with Chomsky that on any intellectual level that position is unworthy of reply, but I think its unfortunate commonness makes it something that needs to be addressed. So I will address it here.

(Listen up, Rudy and all my authoritarian acquaintances.)

SOMEONE HAVING A GOOD REASON TO BE PISSED OFF DOESN'T MEAN THEY ARE JUSTIFIED IN USING VIOLENCE.

Of course, saying this loudly or in bold capital letters won't change the way their minds work. The only justification they need to attack someone is not liking them. The link is automatic, hence their enthusiasm for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. This is why it is so important for them that "they hate us for our freedoms." If that wasn't true, and America had actually done something wrong that makes people angry, that would justify the use of violence against us, and their lizard brains would explode.

Even if they weren't so wrong, they're still assholes

Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call middle-class.

And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately, this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his sister.

I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.

The whole thing is pretty good.

read this now.

talking myself in circles about healthcare reform

Now having identified the perverse tactics of the right as lightning rods to distract from the main issue, health care for children, I suppose I ought not let them succeed, and spend some time contemplating the main issue. Honestly, I don't know much about it. I see it a small step of the battle for socialized medicine, and I don't know what to think about that either.

It seems to me that other nations are getting better results and spending a lot less money with a more nationalized system. It seems to me that insurance companies are getting fat off a steady flow administrative fees, and siphoning back some of that loot to the politicians to make sure they don't turn off the spigot. So it seems like turning off that flow and moving towards a more efficient system would be the right thing to do. But it also seems to me that more government power and bureaucracy are likely to be quite bad for everyone, given how the government has managed to turn basically everything they touch into a machine to make more money for rich people with utter disregard for the welfare of the population as a whole.

So I think essentially the question is: would a national single-payer healthcare system be a good thing, given that it will be run by this government? Some kind of idealism versus realism question. And of course it is just some incremental change in a system that basically needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Are any of these kinds of incremental changes useful? I don't even know how to evaluate these questions, and I imagine I sound pretty naive and pathetic. As a result I'm pretty ambivalent on the issue.

Ignorance. I guess that's why we'd rather focus on the lightning rods; it is much simpler to figure out what is right and wrong there.

Bill O'Reilly: "I'd rather be assraped than go to school"

On January 15, O'Reilly decided that kidnapping victim Shawn Hornbeck didn't escape from his abuser soon enough, and so he must have "liked his circumstances" and "had a lot more fun" because he could "run around and do whatever he wanted" instead of going to school.

Yesterday, Michael Devlin was sentenced to 3 life terms for attempted murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. Hornbeck talked Devlin out of killing him by promising to do whatever Devlin asked. Further sexual assaults followed. This arrangement continued for four years.

Thanks to Mr. Smiles for the links.

I fell for it

All of this disgusting bullshit was just another right-wing lightning rod.

ps - Rush Limbaugh is such a disgusting liar it makes my eyes bleed.

only in the CHURCH bathrooms?

Why is it some kind of crime to ask for sex in a bathroom? Why are we having undercover cops doing gay bathroom stings all the time? And why aren't Republicans fighting back on this, considering every single one of them has gay bathroom sex?

want healthcare for your kids? WE WILL STALK YOU!!

I don't know why it continues to amaze me, but it does. However low you think the insane shrieking right-wing moonbats will go, they go lower. Congratulations, fucktards, you've blown my mind again!

update: now with even more hypocrisy!

update 2: In the comment section of this fine post at Obsidian Wings, I found a link to this, which appears to be written by someone who can read my mind:

If there were ever any doubt

that the right wing side of the blogosphere is a bunch of worthless pieces of shit, people for whom, as James Carville once said, I wouldn't piss down their throats if their hearts were on fire, let that doubt be erased. If there's a hell, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, the writers of The National Review and the Free Republic will spend major time roasting in it for this. They've taken intellectual dishonesty to new heights with their dissembling on the story of Graeme Frost, and I hope that the party they purport to represent gets the ever-loving shit kicked out of it next year when they have to defend Bush's veto of this bill.

Columbus for President!

Christophorus Columbus wasn't the only Real American Hero to delight in the slaughter of the Native Americans. The Primate Diaries reminds us that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson continued that fine tradition three centuries later.

President Thomas Jefferson, father of American anthropology and "friend to the Indian," came to support and continue the genocidal policies begun by George “Town Destroyer”6 Washington who famously ordered

"the immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more." 7

According to Jefferson,

“[t]his unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.” 8

Furthermore, in a letter to his Secretary of War, Jefferson ordered

“if we are ever constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.” 9

Jefferson later explained that this was “necessary to secure ourselves against the future effects of their savage and ruthless warfare” since all “benevolent” efforts at development had failed. 10

But hey, everyone was racist back then so I guess we'll just pretend it never happened.

Columbus Day is bullshit

It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds. These were signs of land. Then, on October 12, a sailor called Rodrigo saw the early morning moon shining on white sands, and cried out. It was an island in the Bahamas, the Caribbean sea. The first man to sight land was supposed to get a yearly pension of 10,000 maravedis for life, but Rodrigo never got it. Columbus claimed he had seen a light the evening before. He got the reward.

Happy Columbus Day, Rodrigo!

And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down like dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arwaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arwaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

Happy Columbus Day everyone! (By the way if you don't think Columbus Day should be celebrated, keep it to yourself, bitch.)


Quotes from:

true lies

give it to me straight

If I were to say that Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen were the 2 greatest rock artist geniuses in the history of music, would that make me an idiot?

Please state your age when responding.

Food pictures

1 and 2, therefor 3.

1.) Impeachment is a moral imperative.

2.) Impeachment will not happen.

3.) America is an immoral monster.

Duh

Is it at all surprising that Bush used to torture animals as a child?

you are what you eat

How much thought do you give to what you eat?

Where does it come from? Who sold it to you? Who sold it to them? Who sold it to them? What do all those people do with it? What don't they do with it?

You spend thousands of dollars a year on food. Do you think about where that money goes? What it supports? Who gets rich off it?

Is it good for you? Is it good for the environment? Is it good for the economy? Does it matter as long as it tastes good?

I think these questions all are important.

Jordan worship

Sometimes I think that all the Michael Jordan worship that still pervades basketball is a product of overblown media hype. But it isn't. Jordan did anything he wanted to on a basketball court, and nobody could stop him.

My college disaster

I was looking at my college transcript as I prepare to apply to grad schools, and I re-realized what complete train wreck my college academic experience was. The blunders are almost comical, and started my very first semester.

I rode into College Park on a full scholarship - tuition, room, board, books, and a stipend - and brought along 31 credits from high school advanced placement credits. I had four years ahead of me with no concern for money and a full year of college credit already on my record. I didn't know what I wanted to select for a major, but I was considering math, economics, and psychology.

So my first semester I took an advanced math class, Real Analysis, because I had received a letter from the department inviting me to take it. I ended up barely passing with a C, and convinced myself that math wasn't the right field for me. In retrospect it was clear that I wasn't prepared for that material, and that taking a few more courses before that one would have given me a much better chance to succeed. I didn't take another math class until the last semester of my senior year (Linear Algebra, which I enjoyed and would have benefited from taking before Real Analysis).

I took Psyc100 that semester also, and found it kind of boring and very easy. It was a huge lecture with hundreds of students, most of whom sat there doing crossword puzzles. Nobody answered questions when the professor asked them, and exams were scored on a curve. Based on that experience I more or less decided Psychology wasn't the right field for me. In retrospect it was clear that an introductory class wasn't going to cover the interesting stuff, and that the material and my classmates would get more stimulating in upper-level courses. I convinced myself that smart people didn't study psychology and besides, I couldn't get much of a job with a psychology degree.

That semester I also took a seminar through the honors program called Science and Pseudoscience. It was taught by a statistician who is a prominent part of the Skeptics community and I loved the class. I made no effort to further pursue any of the subjects or methodologies that interested me until a few years after I graduated. In retrospect it was clear that class was an early indication of the kind of ideas that I found exciting, and that I should have talked to the professor about how to explore those interests.

And the last class I took that semester was an introduction to music fundamentals. From many years of music training before college, I literally already knew every single thing that was covered in the course. I could have taught it. I knew that would be the case when I signed up, but I just figured taking an easy class that filled some credit I needed was a good idea. This would become a theme of the remaining 7 semesters.

With the tremendous opportunity of a full scholarship and the cushion of a year's worth of credits before I even started, I should have taken a wide variety of classes and explored my interests. I should have uses that experience to narrow down my interests and find a field that was interesting and challenging and that could lead me down a path to a job or graduate study that I would enjoy.

Instead I was tentative about pursuing subjects that interested me, and seized on various flimsy excuses to avoid the slightest bit of challenge. I drifted into the business school because a degree in finance seemed like it would be easy but likely to result in a high-paying job. I rarely went to class, and made the honor roll every semester just by cramming before the exams and forgetting it as soon as they were over. I would say that I didn't learn a thing, but that's not true. I learned to how to make myself look as impressive as possible while putting in as little effort as possible. What a fucking waste.

I feel ashamed at the way I squandered opportunities and derailed myself like this, but I have to wonder what kind of guidance I was getting that let this happen. It is obvious to me sitting here now almost 10 years later what a huge series of blunders I was making, but at the time I didn't really have anyone steering me in the right direction. Or maybe I did and I was ignoring them. It was a huge school and it was easy to slip under the radar if you wanted to. (But I was also actively getting bad advice. Who invited me to that math class? They probably just picked everyone with minimum SAT scores and sent a letter or something. And there was more bad advising in later semesters.)

Seeing the way Kira interacts with her professors here at this tiny school, I'm realizing that for my personality type, a small college would have been so much better for me. She knows all her professors and they know her by name. Faculty and students hang out and arrange trips and extra-curricular projects together. The faculty and administrators all take a personal and active interest in the students' education.

I can think of 2 professors who knew my name. In almost all of my classes I was just a social security number on a scantron sheet at exam time. I'm sure there were opportunities like that at my huge school, but I would have had to actively seek them out, which I never did. Small schools create a feeling of community, where you owe it to everyone else to make the best of yourself. Huge schools create an isolation, where you're just a number and you're on your own.

I think part of my desire to go to grad school is to make right all the mistakes I made as an undergraduate. Maybe having learned all this the hard way will ultimately be better for me.