"This week, we reached a grim milestone in Afghanistan: 1,000 U.S. troops killed since the war began in 2001. It is a sober reminder of the cost of the conflict, and every new military casualty will test the patience and resolve of the American public. But it’s another casualty list – the unknown number of Afghan civilians killed in our operations there – that is much more central to the ultimate outcome of the war. If we want to win – defeating the Taliban and dealing a decisive blow to Al Qaeda in the region – our troops must pursue a new strategy to minimize them. Specifically, we should borrow a page from two unlikely people: a little-known military officer and the world leader nobody today seems to trust, Afghan president Hamid Karzai." -- How to turn the tide in Afghanistan by Eric Blehm (Special Force 2010-05-23).
"We need a much deeper, more pervasive realization that we are radically interdependent, that we are all in this together, not only all human 'allies' and 'enemies,' but also coral reefs and infant fish. It hardly matters whether the momentum of our technological advance is driven by wonder, possibility and the thrill of risk, or by greed and fear, or a mix of all these. Absent a deep ethical reorientation toward what is best for the whole planet, that momentum will - will, not may - end in disaster. When might this realization begin to influence decisions taken by corporate boards, or supreme courts, or adversarial diplomats jockeying for national advantage?" -- Hubris: Techoil, Techweapons by Winslow (truthout 2010-05-28). Also, Case for a Moral Imperative by Eugene Robinson (truthout 2010-05-28).
Musical break: the masterful Billy Joe Shaver does "Black Rose" on Austin City Limits:
On YouTube.
The Maoster had no use for politicians who talk Left as they move Right. -- Is The President The Kind of Leader Chairman Mao Warned Us About? by Danny Schechter (CommonDreams.Org 2010-05-29).
Ron Paul is another kind of leader entirely. Last week, he voted to repeal the Clinton-era Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy (or, more accurately, he voted to allow the Pentagon to repeal it if and when it chooses to) -- while 26 mainstream House Democrats voted to retain that bigoted policy; He changed his mind on DADT because gay constituents of his who were forced out of the military convinced him of the policy's wrongness. In 2003, he vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq, while countless Democrats -- including the current Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Senate Majority Leader, House Majority Leader, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, and many of the progressive pundits who love to scorn him -- supported the monstrous attack on that country. In 2008, he opposed the legalization of Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program and the granting of retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms, while the Democratic Congress -- led by the current U.S. President, his Chief of Staff, the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker of the House, and the House Majority Leader -- overwhelmingly voted it into law. He vehemently condemned America's use of torture from the start, while many leading Democrats were silent (or even supportive). Compare his February, 2010 emphatic condemnation of America's denial of habeas corpus, lawless detentions and presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens to what the current U.S. Government is doing. He also opposes the war in Afghanistan, while the Democratic Congress continues to fund it and even to reject timetables for withdrawal. He is an outspoken opponent of the nation's insane, devastating and oppressive "drug war". What a nutbag. -- Who are the real "crazies" in our political culture? by Glenn Greenwald (Salon 2010-05-28).
Outside the gulag known as "the Industry," rarely has popular music been more original and dynamic than it is presently (I'll argue for the 30s or the 50s, you'll say the 60s or the 80s, somebody will even try to make a case for the 70s, but in the here and now technological changes in the way music is reproduced and distributed have unleashed a maelstrom of creativity). Here's a small example: Mad World Imagine Eleanor Rigby Numb.
(On YouTube)
Because, in contrast to its death grip on film, music and software, copyright law's hold on the fashion industry is nearly non-existent, fashion benefits in both innovation and sales. Johanna Blakley's argument that the creative industries can learn from fashion's free culture deserves to be part of the debate.
(On YouTube.)
Michael L. "Mikey" Weinstein shares his hate mail with both friends and strangers the way elderly people show off photos of their grandkids. He has plenty of it to share. For the past four years, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been doing battle with a Christian subculture that, he believes, is trying to Christianize the U.S. armed forces with the help of a complicit Pentagon brass. He calls it the "fundamentalist Christian parachurch-military-corporate-proselytizing complex," a mouthful by which he means holy warriors in contempt of the constitutional barrier between church and state. Mikey Weinstein's Crusade: Meet the man who's trying to purge evangelical Christianity from the Pentagon by Stephen Glain (Foreign Policy 2010-05-24)
It must be something in the water. Coming in the wake of Carly Fiorina's batty Barbara Boxer As Blimp ad come comes this commercial for one of her rivals, avid lawn mower Chuck DeVore, suggesting that he is Jack Bauer's choice for Senate. Should someone clue him in that Jack Bauer is made up?
Can it be true that the U.S. government abandoned American POWs in Vietnam? "The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men -- those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture -- were eventually executed." -- Vietnam MIAs: Ghosts Return to Haunt McCain by Alexander Cockburn (truthout 2010-05-28).
Must read: Wall Street Journal story on the decisions BP made that led to the eruption at the Deepwater Horizon rig: "It was a difficult drill from the start. API Well No. 60-817-44169 threw up many challenges to its principal owner, BP PLC, swallowing expensive drilling fluid and burping out dangerous gas. Those woes put the Gulf of Mexico project over budget and behind schedule by April 20, the day the well erupted, destroying the Deepwater Horizon rig and killing 11 men." -- BP Decisions Set Stage for Disaster by Ben Casselman and Russell Gold (Wall Street Journal 2010-05-27).
"If you listen to the mainstream media long enough, you just might be tempted to believe that the United States has emerged from the recession and is now in the middle of a full-fledged economic recovery. In fact, according to Obama administration officials, the great American economic machine has roared back to life, stronger and more vibrant than ever before. But is that really the case? Of course not. You would have to be delusional to believe that. What did happen was that all of the stimulus packages and government spending and new debt that Obama and the U.S. Congress pumped into the economy bought us a little bit of time. But they have also made our long-term economic problems far worse. The reality is that the U.S. cannot keep supporting an economy on an ocean of red ink forever. At some point the charade is going to come crashing down." -- 25 Questions To Ask Anyone Who Is Delusional Enough To Believe That This Economic Recovery Is Real by Michael Snyder (BLN 2010-05-25).
Book review: Capitalism isn’t working. Not in the US and not in other parts of the world. In fact, virtually anywhere one goes, suffering is pervasive. Almost half the world’s population - more than three billion people, the equivalent of the population of ten United States - live on less than $2.50 a day. A billion people are undernourished and go to bed hungry each night. Two in five people around the world lack access to clean water, and one in four lacks basic electricity. Here in the US, whole communities are being decimated by evictions and foreclosures, health care is a shambles, and hunger and homelessness are at near-record levels. Twenty percent of children are born into poverty, and illnesses correlating with inadequate nutrition are epidemic. In 2009, the world’s 793 billionaires had a combined worth of $2.4 trillion; this translates into twice the combined gross domestic product of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa: the three billion human beings at the bottom of the economic food chain have fewer resources than the 793 people at the top. -- Alan Maass' The Case for Socialism, reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader (truthout 2010-05-26).
Book review: "In reacting to the economic insecurities of the past forty years, the nation's colleges and universities have adopted corporate practices that degrade undergraduate instruction, marginalize faculty members, and threaten the very mission of the academy as an institution devoted to the common good."-- Ellen Schrecker's The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University, reviewed by Eleanor J. Bader (truthout 2010-05-28).
Finally, why it's so hard to build a Tea Party:
As seen on YouTube. Also, How Dummies Respond to an Oil Spill.
The Long War: Will the international community stop the drones?
A senior United Nations official is expected to call on the United States next week to stop Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes against people suspected of belonging to Al Qaeda, complicating the Obama administration’s growing reliance on that tactic in Pakistan. -- U.N. Official to Ask U.S. to End C.I.A. Drone Strikes by Charlie Savage (New York Times 2010-05-27).
Apps: A homeless person on your iPhone
With charitable donations plummeting because of the state of the economy, the fundraising efforts of nonprofits have needed a creative boost. Just how creative is demonstrated by iHobo, a Tamagotchi-like iTunes application that lets you interact with your very own homeless person, shows just how creative. In just a week, iHobo shot to the top of the iTunes chart, with over 200,000 downloads. Although at first glance it may sound exploitative, the thinking behind it, the app's creators claim, is as serious as it is provocative. Although it's generating significant word of mouth, innovative marketing ploy's success won't ultimately be measured by publicity or even download volumes, but by the uplift in donations it produces. iHobo: No 1 on the street by Meg Carter (Guardian UK 2010-05-24).
Reminder: Fraser & DeBolt documentary airs today
Vancouver writer and photographer Rachel Sanders interviewed me for her documentary tribute to the legendary "lost album" Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther. The show will broadcast Sunday May 23 on the program Inside the Music (CBC Radio 2 at 3 pm, CBC Radio 1 at 9 pm, with five time zones to catch it in). Both stations are streamed online at the CBC Radio website, and the doc will also be posted here a few days later and be available indefinitely, so there'll be time to catch it after it airs. This video is the only performance I could find from back in the Fraser & DeBolt's heyday:
Saturday Catchup 2010-05-22
Nicole Belle on CrooksAndLiars.com: Many people "...didn't think things could get worse than jingoism and dishonesty of the Bush/Cheney years....that more than a year into the Obama presidency that things like the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1968 Fair Housing Act would be considered less than settled matters....that thinking that the world's superpower should be able to offer health care to its citizens would make one a Maoist/Stalinist/Communist, despite the fact that most Americans want it too...Or that suddenly the existence of undocumented workers has become so intolerable that we must address them with huge fences, detention camps, moats and all other matter of law enforcement, despite the fact that there have always been an underclass of undocumented workers and not one person has proposed focusing energy on reducing demand by going after the employers of said workers. What I came away with from all these conversations is that the dialogue in this country is fundamentally dishonest, just as these members of the People's Front of Judea are. I mean, honestly, apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Change PFJ to 'Tea Party' and change Romans to 'government' and you've got an idea of the intellectual dishonesty rampant:
An OA meeting. The setting is a dingy meeting room in a church basement. Seated in a circle on rickety folding chairs are LP Record, VHS Tape, 8-Track, Cassette Tape, Compact Disc, Video Rental Store, SLR Camera, Instant Camera, TV Antenna, Dot Matrix Printer, Copy Machine, Fold-Out Map, Typewriter, others.
Moderator: Welcome to Obsoletes Anonymous! I've gathered you all here to welcome our latest member, the Print Industry.
Print Industry: Hello, everyone. But there's been a mistake. I don't belong here.
(chuckles all around)
Print Industry (continues): I'm serious. I'm not obsolete. I'm relevant. Print books have been around for hundreds of years. They're never going to be replaced.
VHS Tape: Yeah, we all thought like that once.
LP Record: It's called denial. It's tough to deal with at first. -- Is Print Dead? by J.A. Konrath (Huffington Post 2010-05-21).
R.I.P.: Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 (Discover 2010/05/22)
The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.
All of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States. It is a real problem,this rising hatred: "People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. 'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack....Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'" -- Drones and Democracy by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier (truthout 2010-05-20).
WalMart isn't the only American organization to have brought something home from China: With rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and other Bush-era human rights violations continuing and worsening under Obama, the report by Think Progress, Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed, has taken on new relevance and urgency.
Oops!: Arizona seems about to say it's sorry.
Watch on YouTube.
We have a dream, too, and it's nothing like Dr. King's: "To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over America's civil rights consensus, let's review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as 'paleolibertarian,' led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the 'paleoconservatives' behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism." -- The roots of Rand Paul's civil rights resentment by Joe Conason (Salon 2010-05-21). Or as Bill Maher put it the other night: "The shit doesn't fall far from the bat."
Change Watch: "Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism. In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities). Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party's establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government's growing powers. Back then, the Liberal Democrats' Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis' resignation, and to show his support for Davis' positions, Clegg even refused to run a LibDem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues 'go beyond party politics'." Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." -- The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change by Glenn Greenwald (Salon 2010-05-21).
Time saver: Eclectic Method remixes all of Phish’s list of "99 Albums":
Eclectic Method Goes Phish :: 99 Albums in 4:20 from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.
"It's alive!" As a non-believer educated by Jesuits and likeminded cultivators of inquiring minds, I've never understood the objection to "playing god." Why would a higher being be irked by his creatures' clumsy efforts to figure out what he had in mind? So I don't see it as a moral or ethical dilemma that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created a new organism by injecting man-made genetic material into the empty body of a cell. Artificial organisms almost certainly will provide solutions to many serious health and environmental difficulties, from cancer to oil spills. The only real question, just as it is with other scientific developments such as nuclear power and genetically modified food and life-prolonging drugs and technology, is whether "synthetic life" is worth the risks as a matter of public safety.
Constructing artificial creatures "has unimaginable potential risks," naysays Oxford ethics professor Julian Savulescu, since by "engineering organisms that could never naturally exist," we expose ourselves to possible calamities — from bio-weapon terrorism to environmental catastrophes — so destructive they could wipe out life as we know it. Such an outcome is certainly undesired, but, counters Ken MacLeod in the Guardian, worries about blowback from playing god are entirely "misguided:" our "biosphere comes up with natural resistance to entirely new organisms every day;" and while the threat of bio-terrorism "may be great," it's "not in principle greater than those posed by natural organisms" that already exist; besides, the potential upsides are so phenomenal, practical benefits ought to trump whatever squeamishness anyone may have over theoretical disasters. One can more easily imagine a bacterium that sucks carbon from the air than one that leeches poison into our water supply. I'm with David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, that the "almost unimaginable promise" of being able to create life "to our specifications" shouldn't be sacrificed just because we've seen too many movies about Dr. Frankenstein, although his caution is well taken that "far less of that promise will be realized if the people doing this work" treat it, as Venter seems to, simply as a race to fame and fortune, and "fail to recognize and address [the public's concerns] about what they are doing."
Editorial: The debt that the public owes to police officers for taking the risks that they take can never be repaid. -- Growing risk for the police -- Extreme views behind the West Memphis tragedy: Two officers are dead after a shootout with a delusional conspiracy theorist (The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN 2010-05-22).
Resource: The earliest gangs of New York were not criminal groups. Many street gang members were employed, mostly as common laborers. Some were bouncers in saloons and dance halls, as well as longshoremen. A few were apprentice butchers, carpenters, sailmakers, and shipbuilders. “They engaged in violence, but violence was a normal part of their always-contested environment; turf warfare was a condition of the neighborhood." Gangs formed the “basic unit of social life among the young males in New York in the nineteenth century.” More dangerous street gangs than previously seen emerged around 1820 from the persistent disorder that gripped the city slums, tenements, saloons, and dance halls. The Forty Thieves gang was characterized as “the first important and decisively dangerous gang of the quarter century.” It and other new groups of gangs that emerged in this period were centered in criminal enterprises as much as in territorial disputes. “It is axiomatic that the more sophisticated the gangs became, the more violent they grew as well.” -- History of Street Gangs in the United States (pdf) by James C. Howell and John P. Moore (National Gang Center Bulletin 2010-04).
Cartoon Beatles do the Dead Kennedys' California über alles:
The truth is out there: The only way to debunk an enshrined falsehood is with maximum reportorial firepower. Toting big guns and an itchy trigger-finger is American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, whose new book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, flattens established myths that you were brought up to believe were true: that Orson Welles sparked a national panic with his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast; that the New York Times suppressed news of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba at the request of the White House; that Edward R. Murrow destroyed Sen. Joseph McCarthy; that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst told an illustrator, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," before the Spanish-American war started; and more. -- The Master of Debunk: W. Joseph Campbell corrects the record on 10 important misreported stories by Jack Shafer (Slate 2010-05-21).
Here comes the sun: One year ago this Friday, U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched an ambitious website called Data.gov to make the government’s vast stores of data available to the public. The thinking behind the site then, as now, was to give app developers access to these rich, comprehensive datasets on all sorts of topics — health care, education, energy, the environment and so on — in the hope that they would create useful tools for analyzing a range of information, from air quality by county to crime statistics by neighborhood and foreign aid by nation. To make good on incoming president Barack Obama's promise of transparency and open government, Data.gov launched with 47 datasets. By its first anniversary on Friday, Data.gov had ballooned to more than 250,000 datasets and racked up 97.6 million hits — not bad for a website whose main attractions are massive databases and wonky graphs. However, the sailing has not been entirely smooth. Federal Computer Week complained that Data.gov was a demonstration of “how not to do open government” because it didn’t pass “the ‘mom test.’” By that, FCW meant it was too hard for the average person to figure out what to do on the site and where everything was. Kundra’s team redesigned the entire Data.gov with that sort of feedback in mind, and the new homepage is markedly more intuitive and user-friendly. -- Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov by Eliot Van Buskirk (Epicenter 2010-05-19).
This is about all you need to know about Lost:
An OA meeting. The setting is a dingy meeting room in a church basement. Seated in a circle on rickety folding chairs are LP Record, VHS Tape, 8-Track, Cassette Tape, Compact Disc, Video Rental Store, SLR Camera, Instant Camera, TV Antenna, Dot Matrix Printer, Copy Machine, Fold-Out Map, Typewriter, others.
Moderator: Welcome to Obsoletes Anonymous! I've gathered you all here to welcome our latest member, the Print Industry.
Print Industry: Hello, everyone. But there's been a mistake. I don't belong here.
(chuckles all around)
Print Industry (continues): I'm serious. I'm not obsolete. I'm relevant. Print books have been around for hundreds of years. They're never going to be replaced.
VHS Tape: Yeah, we all thought like that once.
LP Record: It's called denial. It's tough to deal with at first. -- Is Print Dead? by J.A. Konrath (Huffington Post 2010-05-21).
R.I.P.: Martin Gardner, 1914-2010 (Discover 2010/05/22)
The Nature of Things / Martin Gardner from Wagner Brenner on Vimeo.
All of the survivors feel hatred toward the United States. It is a real problem,this rising hatred: "People who have seen an air strike live on a monitor described it as both awe-inspiring and horrifying. 'You could see these little figures scurrying, and the explosion going off, and when the smoke cleared there was just rubble and charred stuff,' a former CIA officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th says of one attack....Human beings running for cover are such a common sight that they have inspired a slang term: 'squirters.'" -- Drones and Democracy by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier (truthout 2010-05-20).
WalMart isn't the only American organization to have brought something home from China: With rendition, suspension of habeas corpus, and other Bush-era human rights violations continuing and worsening under Obama, the report by Think Progress, Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed, has taken on new relevance and urgency.
Oops!: Arizona seems about to say it's sorry.
Watch on YouTube.
We have a dream, too, and it's nothing like Dr. King's: "To understand Rand Paul's agonized contortions over America's civil rights consensus, let's review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as 'paleolibertarian,' led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the 'paleoconservatives' behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism." -- The roots of Rand Paul's civil rights resentment by Joe Conason (Salon 2010-05-21). Or as Bill Maher put it the other night: "The shit doesn't fall far from the bat."
Change Watch: "Over the past couple years, I've written numerous times about the serious left-right coalition that had emerged in Britain -- between the Tories and Liberal Democrats -- in opposition to the Labour Government's civil liberties abuses, many (thought not all) of which were justified by Terrorism. In June of 2008, David Davis, a leading Tory MP, resigned from Parliament in protest of the Government's efforts to expand its power of preventive detention to 42 days (and was then overwhelmingly re-elected on a general platform of opposing growing surveillance and detention authorities). Numerous leading figures from both the Right and Left defied their party's establishment to speak out in support of Davis and against the Government's growing powers. Back then, the Liberal Democrats' Leader, Nick Clegg, notably praised the right-wing Davis' resignation, and to show his support for Davis' positions, Clegg even refused to run a LibDem candidate for that seat because, as he put it, "some issues 'go beyond party politics'." Now that this left-right, Tory/Lib-Dem alliance has removed the Labour Party from power and is governing Britain, these commitments to restoring core liberties -- Actual Change -- show no sign of retreating. Rather than cynically tossing these promises of restrained government power onto the trash pile of insincere campaign rhetoric, they are implementing them into actual policy. Clegg, now the Deputy Prime Minister, gave an extraordinary speech last week in which he vowed "the biggest shake-up of our democracy since 1832." -- The Tory/Lib-Dem Government endorses actual change by Glenn Greenwald (Salon 2010-05-21).
Time saver: Eclectic Method remixes all of Phish’s list of "99 Albums":
Eclectic Method Goes Phish :: 99 Albums in 4:20 from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.
"It's alive!" As a non-believer educated by Jesuits and likeminded cultivators of inquiring minds, I've never understood the objection to "playing god." Why would a higher being be irked by his creatures' clumsy efforts to figure out what he had in mind? So I don't see it as a moral or ethical dilemma that researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute have created a new organism by injecting man-made genetic material into the empty body of a cell. Artificial organisms almost certainly will provide solutions to many serious health and environmental difficulties, from cancer to oil spills. The only real question, just as it is with other scientific developments such as nuclear power and genetically modified food and life-prolonging drugs and technology, is whether "synthetic life" is worth the risks as a matter of public safety.
Constructing artificial creatures "has unimaginable potential risks," naysays Oxford ethics professor Julian Savulescu, since by "engineering organisms that could never naturally exist," we expose ourselves to possible calamities — from bio-weapon terrorism to environmental catastrophes — so destructive they could wipe out life as we know it. Such an outcome is certainly undesired, but, counters Ken MacLeod in the Guardian, worries about blowback from playing god are entirely "misguided:" our "biosphere comes up with natural resistance to entirely new organisms every day;" and while the threat of bio-terrorism "may be great," it's "not in principle greater than those posed by natural organisms" that already exist; besides, the potential upsides are so phenomenal, practical benefits ought to trump whatever squeamishness anyone may have over theoretical disasters. One can more easily imagine a bacterium that sucks carbon from the air than one that leeches poison into our water supply. I'm with David Ropeik, author of How Risky Is It, Really?: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, that the "almost unimaginable promise" of being able to create life "to our specifications" shouldn't be sacrificed just because we've seen too many movies about Dr. Frankenstein, although his caution is well taken that "far less of that promise will be realized if the people doing this work" treat it, as Venter seems to, simply as a race to fame and fortune, and "fail to recognize and address [the public's concerns] about what they are doing." Editorial: The debt that the public owes to police officers for taking the risks that they take can never be repaid. -- Growing risk for the police -- Extreme views behind the West Memphis tragedy: Two officers are dead after a shootout with a delusional conspiracy theorist (The Commercial Appeal, Memphis TN 2010-05-22).
Resource: The earliest gangs of New York were not criminal groups. Many street gang members were employed, mostly as common laborers. Some were bouncers in saloons and dance halls, as well as longshoremen. A few were apprentice butchers, carpenters, sailmakers, and shipbuilders. “They engaged in violence, but violence was a normal part of their always-contested environment; turf warfare was a condition of the neighborhood." Gangs formed the “basic unit of social life among the young males in New York in the nineteenth century.” More dangerous street gangs than previously seen emerged around 1820 from the persistent disorder that gripped the city slums, tenements, saloons, and dance halls. The Forty Thieves gang was characterized as “the first important and decisively dangerous gang of the quarter century.” It and other new groups of gangs that emerged in this period were centered in criminal enterprises as much as in territorial disputes. “It is axiomatic that the more sophisticated the gangs became, the more violent they grew as well.” -- History of Street Gangs in the United States (pdf) by James C. Howell and John P. Moore (National Gang Center Bulletin 2010-04).
Cartoon Beatles do the Dead Kennedys' California über alles:
The truth is out there: The only way to debunk an enshrined falsehood is with maximum reportorial firepower. Toting big guns and an itchy trigger-finger is American University professor W. Joseph Campbell, whose new book, Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, flattens established myths that you were brought up to believe were true: that Orson Welles sparked a national panic with his 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast; that the New York Times suppressed news of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba at the request of the White House; that Edward R. Murrow destroyed Sen. Joseph McCarthy; that publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst told an illustrator, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war," before the Spanish-American war started; and more. -- The Master of Debunk: W. Joseph Campbell corrects the record on 10 important misreported stories by Jack Shafer (Slate 2010-05-21).
Here comes the sun: One year ago this Friday, U.S. chief information officer Vivek Kundra launched an ambitious website called Data.gov to make the government’s vast stores of data available to the public. The thinking behind the site then, as now, was to give app developers access to these rich, comprehensive datasets on all sorts of topics — health care, education, energy, the environment and so on — in the hope that they would create useful tools for analyzing a range of information, from air quality by county to crime statistics by neighborhood and foreign aid by nation. To make good on incoming president Barack Obama's promise of transparency and open government, Data.gov launched with 47 datasets. By its first anniversary on Friday, Data.gov had ballooned to more than 250,000 datasets and racked up 97.6 million hits — not bad for a website whose main attractions are massive databases and wonky graphs. However, the sailing has not been entirely smooth. Federal Computer Week complained that Data.gov was a demonstration of “how not to do open government” because it didn’t pass “the ‘mom test.’” By that, FCW meant it was too hard for the average person to figure out what to do on the site and where everything was. Kundra’s team redesigned the entire Data.gov with that sort of feedback in mind, and the new homepage is markedly more intuitive and user-friendly. -- Sneak Peek: Obama Administration’s Redesigned Data.gov by Eliot Van Buskirk (Epicenter 2010-05-19).
This is about all you need to know about Lost:
The Long War: The "War Is Making You Poor" Act
The Republicans are very good at repackaging horseshit as fertilizer. Want to permit power plants to pollute?: Promote the "Clear Skies Initiative." Want to mow down trees?: Pass "Healthy Forests." Think defunding public education is nifty?: Trot out "No Child Left Behind." Planning on eviscerating the Bill of Rights?: Call it "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism," i.e., the "U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act."
Democrats tend to be more forthcoming, if less imaginative. When they're running things we get bills like the “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” and the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." However, at least one Democratic Congressman understands that good ideas are made better by proper marketing:
Today, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced bipartisan legislation called the “War Is Making You Poor Act,” which aims to call attention to a) how much money is being spent to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and b) how budget gimmicks are used to pay for them. Grayson’s legislation would slash the $159 billion request for supplemental war funding and use that money to deliver a tax break for all Americans. Grayson demands the Pentagon use its currently existing $549 billion defense budget to fight the wars. Speaking on the House floor today, Grayson underscored that the point of his legislation is to highlight the costs of the wars:
Grayson’s bill, which is currently being co-sponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), John Conyers (D-MI) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), would also cut the federal deficit by $15.9 billion. “There is no longer any need to go beyond the exorbitant base defense budget,” Grayson said. “It is not necessary. Enough is enough.”
(From Think Progress)
Democrats tend to be more forthcoming, if less imaginative. When they're running things we get bills like the “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” and the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." However, at least one Democratic Congressman understands that good ideas are made better by proper marketing:
Today, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced bipartisan legislation called the “War Is Making You Poor Act,” which aims to call attention to a) how much money is being spent to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and b) how budget gimmicks are used to pay for them. Grayson’s legislation would slash the $159 billion request for supplemental war funding and use that money to deliver a tax break for all Americans. Grayson demands the Pentagon use its currently existing $549 billion defense budget to fight the wars. Speaking on the House floor today, Grayson underscored that the point of his legislation is to highlight the costs of the wars:
GRAYSON: So I believe that the thing we need to do is to take that $159 billion that the President has set aside – we’re not saying he has to stop the war, we’re not giving a cut-off date for the war – we’re simply saying you need to fund that out of the base budget of $549 billion. And we take 90 percent of that and give it back to the American people.Watch it:
And I think most people would be surprised to learn that that is so much money that we’ve been spending on the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq that every single taxpayer in America will be get his first or her first $35,000 of income completely tax free.
Grayson’s bill, which is currently being co-sponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Barbara Lee (D-CA), John Conyers (D-MI) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), would also cut the federal deficit by $15.9 billion. “There is no longer any need to go beyond the exorbitant base defense budget,” Grayson said. “It is not necessary. Enough is enough.”
(From Think Progress)
Obscurities: Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther
A documentary about the phenomenal but little-known Canadian (for-lack-of-a-better-word:) folk-rock duo Fraser & DeBolt is scheduled to air this Sunday evening on CBC Radio. Produced by Vancouver writer and photographer Rachel Sanders, it recounts the history of Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther, a 1971 Columbia album that is beloved 
by the handful of people who remember its original release and the untold numbers since who have found it still shrink-wrapped in used record bins.
"One of the many sad secrets of the popular music business is the way this little gem languished in obscurity," Mark Allan writes in a 4+ star review on allmusic. "It should have been heard by millions, but disappeared at the height of psychedelia. Two years later, The Band found an audience with haunting tales of bygone rustic North American life with their seminal, self-titled second album. Widespread acclaim eluded the earlier outing by this unheralded Canadian trio. The songs, most written independently by Daisy DeBolt or Allan Fraser, are poetic. DeBolt's slowly unfolding, album-opening "All This Paradise" is a marvel, introducing listeners right away to her commanding voice and the sinuous fiddle of Ian Guenther.
The album was out of print for years, scratchy vinyl platters still treasured by a small but fervent number of fans."
At least one cut on ...with Ian Guenther, "Them Dance Hall Girls," has poptential, with only the album's obscurity keeping it from being covered more often (among others, roots singer-songwriter Tom Russell does a great rendition on Songs of the West, and the eclectic Duhks do a version, but in my mind's ear I always hear Willie Nelson, who hasn't gotten around to it yet). A few copies of ...with Ian Guenther can be found on line. Their even more obscure follow-up, With Pleasure, is a lot harder to find and to me not worth the effort. In 1971, they appeared at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.
Both DeBolt and Fraser have continued to make music, mostly up north, although Montrealer Fraser has been seen in New York.
I was interviewed for the documentary because of over-the-top liner notes I did for the original album (this off-the-cuff piece, referred to more than once in print, as "the greatest liner notes ever written" -- I know, I know, but such they were called -- having taken on a life of their own, can be accessed on Grown So Ugly, an essential blog that digs up lost musical treasures). On the sleeve, I called Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther "one of the best pop albums I have ever heard," an assessment I stand by. I still listen to the record frequently. Most of the originals sound as fresh and compelling as they did nearly 40 years ago; the only non-original, Don't Let Me Down, affectingly rethinks the Beatles' approach to the tune. Of course, I also said, this album "will help shape the music of the coming decade," so what did I know.
Sanders' documentary tribute will be broadcast Sunday May 23 on the program Inside the Music (CBC Radio 2 at 3 pm, CBC Radio 1 at 9 pm, with five time zones to catch it in). Both stations are streamed online at the CBC Radio website, and the doc will also be posted there on or around the 23rd and for a few weeks after, so there'll be time to catch it after it airs.
Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther at Amazon.
Update: An Overnight Sensation: Fraser & Debolt on Inside the Music, CBC Radio One and 2 (53:58 MINUTES / 8.1 MB).
by the handful of people who remember its original release and the untold numbers since who have found it still shrink-wrapped in used record bins."One of the many sad secrets of the popular music business is the way this little gem languished in obscurity," Mark Allan writes in a 4+ star review on allmusic. "It should have been heard by millions, but disappeared at the height of psychedelia. Two years later, The Band found an audience with haunting tales of bygone rustic North American life with their seminal, self-titled second album. Widespread acclaim eluded the earlier outing by this unheralded Canadian trio. The songs, most written independently by Daisy DeBolt or Allan Fraser, are poetic. DeBolt's slowly unfolding, album-opening "All This Paradise" is a marvel, introducing listeners right away to her commanding voice and the sinuous fiddle of Ian Guenther.
The album was out of print for years, scratchy vinyl platters still treasured by a small but fervent number of fans."At least one cut on ...with Ian Guenther, "Them Dance Hall Girls," has poptential, with only the album's obscurity keeping it from being covered more often (among others, roots singer-songwriter Tom Russell does a great rendition on Songs of the West, and the eclectic Duhks do a version, but in my mind's ear I always hear Willie Nelson, who hasn't gotten around to it yet). A few copies of ...with Ian Guenther can be found on line. Their even more obscure follow-up, With Pleasure, is a lot harder to find and to me not worth the effort. In 1971, they appeared at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.
Both DeBolt and Fraser have continued to make music, mostly up north, although Montrealer Fraser has been seen in New York.I was interviewed for the documentary because of over-the-top liner notes I did for the original album (this off-the-cuff piece, referred to more than once in print, as "the greatest liner notes ever written" -- I know, I know, but such they were called -- having taken on a life of their own, can be accessed on Grown So Ugly, an essential blog that digs up lost musical treasures). On the sleeve, I called Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther "one of the best pop albums I have ever heard," an assessment I stand by. I still listen to the record frequently. Most of the originals sound as fresh and compelling as they did nearly 40 years ago; the only non-original, Don't Let Me Down, affectingly rethinks the Beatles' approach to the tune. Of course, I also said, this album "will help shape the music of the coming decade," so what did I know.
Sanders' documentary tribute will be broadcast Sunday May 23 on the program Inside the Music (CBC Radio 2 at 3 pm, CBC Radio 1 at 9 pm, with five time zones to catch it in). Both stations are streamed online at the CBC Radio website, and the doc will also be posted there on or around the 23rd and for a few weeks after, so there'll be time to catch it after it airs.
Fraser & DeBolt with Ian Guenther at Amazon.
Update: An Overnight Sensation: Fraser & Debolt on Inside the Music, CBC Radio One and 2 (53:58 MINUTES / 8.1 MB).
War Crimes: No longer possible to blame the Senate for U.S. footdragging on landmine treaty
Senators and Representatives Support Ban on Landmines: Letters Sent to President Obama (United States Campaign to Ban Landmines press release).
A letter signed by 68 senators, asking the administration to join the 1997 Landmine Ban Treaty, was delivered to President Obama on Tuesday. The signers include 10 Republicans and two Independents and constitute more than the two-thirds of the Senate needed to ratify a treaty.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT-D) and Sen. George Voinovich (OH-R) circulated the Senate letter, and a similar letter in support of the Senate initiative, circulated by Rep. James McGovern (MA-D) and Rep. Darrell Issa (CA-R) in the House of Representatives, was also delivered to President Obama. The existence of the letters was made public on May 8, but the final versions, with all signatures, was delivered Tuesday.
In describing the use of antipersonnel landmines, Sen. Patrick Leahy said, “The idea that a modern military like ours would be using indiscriminate, victim-activated weapons today is hard to reconcile with our current military objectives, particularly when you consider that the two countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) where our troops are fighting are parties to the treaty and the members of the coalition that we are leading in Afghanistan are also parties to the treaty."
The Administration launched a review of U.S. landmine policy late last year, and in the letters the legislators say that they are “confident that through a thorough, deliberative review the Administration can identify any obstacles to joining the Convention and develop a plan to overcome them as soon as possible.”
Rep. James McGovern, who circulated the letter in the House, said, "A thorough review will show that the U.S. can play an even greater role in the world on landmines by formally joining the ban. The Senate letter demonstrates the support is there."
The Congressional letters follow a letter sent to President Obama on March 22 by leaders from 65 national nongovernmental organizations that also urge the U.S. to relinquish antipersonnel landmines and join the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty without delay.
“The strong support these letters have received shows that Congress is firmly behind accession to the Mine Ban Treaty,” said Zach Hudson, the coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines (USCBL). "The U.S. has not used these barbaric weapons in 19 years. With these letters, Congress adds its voice to that of the American people in calling on our government to join our NATO allies—and all of the 158 nations that have joined this treaty—and eliminate the use of landmines once and for all.”
Read the Senate Letter
Read the House Letter
Read the NGO Letter
Action: Tell Pres. Obama and Sec. Clinton that you support the treaty.
A letter signed by 68 senators, asking the administration to join the 1997 Landmine Ban Treaty, was delivered to President Obama on Tuesday. The signers include 10 Republicans and two Independents and constitute more than the two-thirds of the Senate needed to ratify a treaty.
Sen. Patrick Leahy (VT-D) and Sen. George Voinovich (OH-R) circulated the Senate letter, and a similar letter in support of the Senate initiative, circulated by Rep. James McGovern (MA-D) and Rep. Darrell Issa (CA-R) in the House of Representatives, was also delivered to President Obama. The existence of the letters was made public on May 8, but the final versions, with all signatures, was delivered Tuesday.
In describing the use of antipersonnel landmines, Sen. Patrick Leahy said, “The idea that a modern military like ours would be using indiscriminate, victim-activated weapons today is hard to reconcile with our current military objectives, particularly when you consider that the two countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) where our troops are fighting are parties to the treaty and the members of the coalition that we are leading in Afghanistan are also parties to the treaty."
The Administration launched a review of U.S. landmine policy late last year, and in the letters the legislators say that they are “confident that through a thorough, deliberative review the Administration can identify any obstacles to joining the Convention and develop a plan to overcome them as soon as possible.”
Rep. James McGovern, who circulated the letter in the House, said, "A thorough review will show that the U.S. can play an even greater role in the world on landmines by formally joining the ban. The Senate letter demonstrates the support is there."
The Congressional letters follow a letter sent to President Obama on March 22 by leaders from 65 national nongovernmental organizations that also urge the U.S. to relinquish antipersonnel landmines and join the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty without delay.
“The strong support these letters have received shows that Congress is firmly behind accession to the Mine Ban Treaty,” said Zach Hudson, the coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines (USCBL). "The U.S. has not used these barbaric weapons in 19 years. With these letters, Congress adds its voice to that of the American people in calling on our government to join our NATO allies—and all of the 158 nations that have joined this treaty—and eliminate the use of landmines once and for all.”
Read the Senate Letter
Read the House Letter
Read the NGO Letter
Action: Tell Pres. Obama and Sec. Clinton that you support the treaty.
Saturday Catchup 2010-05-15
Mad Crowd Disease: "A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets. Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob." -- The Tea Party Jacobins by Mark Lilla (New York Review of Books 2010-05-09).
Alone Together (Naturally): A call for more freedom is really a demand for power, "our power to make real choices, about not only our personal lives but about the forces determining the quality of life in our communities." So many of the factors that affect our opportunity, our freedom to thrive -- general access to quality education and to health care, say, or to public transport and libraries and parks, or to clean air and potable water, to say nothing of police and fire protection -- all require a fair and functioning society. We can’t even achieve the state of being “left alone,” alone. -- Why Freedom Should Be the #1 Issue for Progressives by Frances Moore Lappé (AlterNet 2010-05-13).
The (Tea) Party is over: When trouble comes, those who complain the loudest about big government are the first ones with their hands out for federal help. "Until tea partiers are willing to tear up their Social Security cards and Medicare cards, and reject all help from the FBI, Coast Guard, EPA, FEMA, or any other federal agency, they're nothing but a bunch of phonies." -- The Death of the Tea Party Movement by Bill Press (Baraboo News Republic 2010-06-09).
I'd say Что делать?, but that'd kinda be like raising a red flag: Here's a video from a grass roots campaign that is working to "wrest control of our economy from the big banks, crony capitalists and financial elites:"
( Watch on YouTube.) Action: Go to ForOurEconomy.org, download their 12-point primer on how to seize a measure of control over our economic lives; join; donate; protest.
Change Watch: "There is nothing inherently good about compromise. The ability to form a good compromise, when it is necessary, is an important skill. But you should compromise only when you can’t completely achieve what you want without it. If you have sufficient votes or support for your position and think it is the best choice of action, then you should pursue it. Compromising in that instance is stupid. The problem with Washington is the fake 'compromise fetish' (which is similar to the 'bipartisan fetish') that turned compromise into the desired goal–without regard to policy value or whether there is a need to compromise in the first place. What is the source of this fetish? Compromise destroys accountability. Politicians hate being held accountable and so they have a vested interest to support this fetish and those who share it." -- Compromise Fetishists: How Secret Deals Obscure Accountability, Subvert Democracy by Jon Walker (FireDogLake 2010-05-08).
Or to put it another way, summer's (almost) here and the time is right for fighting in the streets:
Or watch it on YouTube.
Don't want what they're smokin': "Just days after the White House released their inherently flawed 2010 National Drug Control Strategy (Read NORML’s refutation of it on The Huffington Post here and here), and mere hours after Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske told reporters at the National Press Club, 'I have read thoroughly the ballot proposition in California; I think I once got an e-mail that told me I won the Irish sweepstakes and that actually had more truth in it than the ballot proposition,' the Associated Press takes the entire U.S. drug war strategy and rakes it over the coals. It’s about damn time!" -- After 40 Years, $1 Trillion, US Drug War “Has Failed to Meet Any of Its Goals” by Paul Armentano (AlterNet 2010-05-13).
Recycling Rhetoric: "The term has so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. 'Sustainable' has been used variously to mean 'politically feasible,' 'economically feasible,' 'not part of a pyramid or bubble,' 'socially enlightened,' 'consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,' 'consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,' 'morally desirable,' and, at its most diffuse, 'sensibly far-sighted'.” -- Theses on Sustainability: A Primer by Eric Zencey (Orion magazine 2010-5/6).
Following up on Jon Stewart's brilliant impersonation of Glenn Beck a couple of months back, Lewis Black brings on a diagnosis of Beck's Nazi Tourette's Syndrome:
Or go to The Daily Show.
Budget whoas: Underpinning Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s speech last week on Pentagon spending is an understanding of what Spencer Ackerman calls the "mutually distorting relationship between unsustainable defense budgets and political courage" (Gates Claims Eisenhower’s Mantle, Challenging Pentagon Overspending -- Attackerman 2010-06-08).
Someday, won't we just run out of places to invade?: The House is about to vote on a $33 billion bill "war funding," a euphemism for legislation that will pay for the Obama administration's escalation of the war against Afghanistan that must have George Orwell spinning in his grave. The White House is asking the House to treat the expanded war as a fait accompli. In an excellent account of how we got here, David Swanson asks "how much money are we talking about exactly? Well not enough, evidently, for the teabagging enemies of reckless government spending to take notice. Clearly not enough for the labor movement or any other advocates of spending on jobs or healthcare or education or green energy to disturb their slumbers. God forbid! Yet it's still a sizeable number by a certain reckoning. After all, 33 billion miles could take you to the sun 226 times. And $33 billion could radically alter any non-military program in existence. There's a bill in the senate, for instance, that would prevent schools from laying off teachers in all 50 states for a mere $23 billion. Another $9.6 billion would quadruple the Department of Energy's budget for renewable energy. Now, what to do with that extra $0.4 billion?" Victory at all costs in Afghanistan by David Swanson (Asia Times 2010-05-13).
With friends like these...: "The British government has estimated that 70 percent of the terror plots it has uncovered in the past decade can be traced back to Pakistan. Pakistan remains a terrorist hothouse even as jihadism is losing favor elsewhere in the Muslim world. From Egypt to Jordan to Malaysia to Indonesia, radical Islamic groups have been weakened militarily and have lost much of the support they had politically. Why not in Pakistan? The answer is simple: from its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish. It appears to have partially reversed course in recent years, but the rot is deep." -- Terrorism’s Supermarket: Why Pakistan keeps exporting jihad by Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek 2010-05-07).
You think?: "The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy." -- U.S. Approval of Killing of Cleric Causes Unease by Scott Shane (New York Times 2010-05-13).
Be prepared: "In the raw aftermath of a successful attack, it will be very hard for an American president to shift the debate in a more productive and honest direction. Imagine if, after a fatal attack, President Obama responded by proposing greater outreach to Muslim communities domestically and around the world, in an effort to undercut radicalization. That is precisely what we and other nations should be doing, but it would undoubtedly be decried as a weak, starry-eyed reaction by our commander in chief, especially after an attack that revealed deficiencies in our counterterrorism system. But right now, after a near-miss, there is a better opportunity to adjust than in an emotionally charged period when the nation is mourning. Though a good dose of political courage would still be required, it would constitute a major improvement to our debate if leaders could come together now and agree on a few key points about our efforts to battle terrorism." -- The Times Square bomb failed. What will we do when the next bomb works? by Richard A. Clarke (The Washington Post 2010-05-09).
First it was our boys in Afghanistan doing a cover of Lady Gaga. Now, from Iraq, “Watch: Straight Soldiers Show Their Support for Gays in the Military by Dancing to Ke$ha”:
The future's last half century: "Fifty years ago this Sunday, Theodore Maiman and his fellow scientists at Hughes Research Laboratory shined a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod, triggering a beam of coherent light: the first laser.
It wasn’t long before the Pentagon started dreaming up military applications, and futurists were predicting that our soldiers would all get ray guns. Well, not quite. But lasers have revolutionized the U.S. military — changing the way it targets bombs, scares off insurgents, and, yes, blows stuff to bits." Wired's Danger Room remembers some of the greatest hits (and biggest misses) from the first half-century of military lasers. -- 50 Years of Real-Life Ray Guns by Noah Shachtman (Danger Room 2010-05-14).
Not on our airwaves leased from the American people you won't: Faux News refused this ad from the progressive veterans organization Vote Vets:
(also available on YouTube). What's doubly odd is that only a few weeks ago they were running an even stronger spot by same outfit.
Present Shock: A new report from Brookings reveals that our nation now faces five “new realities” that are redefining who we are, where and with whom we live, and how we provide for our own welfare, as well as that of our families and communities. In each of these five areas -- growth and outward expansion, population diversification, aging of the population, uneven higher educational attainment, and income polarization -- the nation reached critical milestones in the 2000s that make those underlying realities too large to ignore any longer. And large metropolitan areas -- the collections of cities, suburbs, and rural areas that house two-thirds of America’s population -- lay squarely at the forefront of these trends. -- State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation (pdf) (The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program 2010).
Burke's Without Peerage: Sometime toward the end of the last millennium, Jerry Wexler and I, spending a happy couple of hours sharing music we liked, discovered that both of thought that, if there was such a thing as the greatest soul singer of all time, it was probably Solomon Burke. Still is.
Or go to YouTube.
Alone Together (Naturally): A call for more freedom is really a demand for power, "our power to make real choices, about not only our personal lives but about the forces determining the quality of life in our communities." So many of the factors that affect our opportunity, our freedom to thrive -- general access to quality education and to health care, say, or to public transport and libraries and parks, or to clean air and potable water, to say nothing of police and fire protection -- all require a fair and functioning society. We can’t even achieve the state of being “left alone,” alone. -- Why Freedom Should Be the #1 Issue for Progressives by Frances Moore Lappé (AlterNet 2010-05-13).
The (Tea) Party is over: When trouble comes, those who complain the loudest about big government are the first ones with their hands out for federal help. "Until tea partiers are willing to tear up their Social Security cards and Medicare cards, and reject all help from the FBI, Coast Guard, EPA, FEMA, or any other federal agency, they're nothing but a bunch of phonies." -- The Death of the Tea Party Movement by Bill Press (Baraboo News Republic 2010-06-09).
I'd say Что делать?, but that'd kinda be like raising a red flag: Here's a video from a grass roots campaign that is working to "wrest control of our economy from the big banks, crony capitalists and financial elites:"
( Watch on YouTube.) Action: Go to ForOurEconomy.org, download their 12-point primer on how to seize a measure of control over our economic lives; join; donate; protest.
Change Watch: "There is nothing inherently good about compromise. The ability to form a good compromise, when it is necessary, is an important skill. But you should compromise only when you can’t completely achieve what you want without it. If you have sufficient votes or support for your position and think it is the best choice of action, then you should pursue it. Compromising in that instance is stupid. The problem with Washington is the fake 'compromise fetish' (which is similar to the 'bipartisan fetish') that turned compromise into the desired goal–without regard to policy value or whether there is a need to compromise in the first place. What is the source of this fetish? Compromise destroys accountability. Politicians hate being held accountable and so they have a vested interest to support this fetish and those who share it." -- Compromise Fetishists: How Secret Deals Obscure Accountability, Subvert Democracy by Jon Walker (FireDogLake 2010-05-08).
Or to put it another way, summer's (almost) here and the time is right for fighting in the streets:
Or watch it on YouTube.
Don't want what they're smokin': "Just days after the White House released their inherently flawed 2010 National Drug Control Strategy (Read NORML’s refutation of it on The Huffington Post here and here), and mere hours after Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske told reporters at the National Press Club, 'I have read thoroughly the ballot proposition in California; I think I once got an e-mail that told me I won the Irish sweepstakes and that actually had more truth in it than the ballot proposition,' the Associated Press takes the entire U.S. drug war strategy and rakes it over the coals. It’s about damn time!" -- After 40 Years, $1 Trillion, US Drug War “Has Failed to Meet Any of Its Goals” by Paul Armentano (AlterNet 2010-05-13).
Recycling Rhetoric: "The term has so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. 'Sustainable' has been used variously to mean 'politically feasible,' 'economically feasible,' 'not part of a pyramid or bubble,' 'socially enlightened,' 'consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,' 'consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,' 'morally desirable,' and, at its most diffuse, 'sensibly far-sighted'.” -- Theses on Sustainability: A Primer by Eric Zencey (Orion magazine 2010-5/6).Following up on Jon Stewart's brilliant impersonation of Glenn Beck a couple of months back, Lewis Black brings on a diagnosis of Beck's Nazi Tourette's Syndrome:
Or go to The Daily Show.
Budget whoas: Underpinning Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s speech last week on Pentagon spending is an understanding of what Spencer Ackerman calls the "mutually distorting relationship between unsustainable defense budgets and political courage" (Gates Claims Eisenhower’s Mantle, Challenging Pentagon Overspending -- Attackerman 2010-06-08).
Someday, won't we just run out of places to invade?: The House is about to vote on a $33 billion bill "war funding," a euphemism for legislation that will pay for the Obama administration's escalation of the war against Afghanistan that must have George Orwell spinning in his grave. The White House is asking the House to treat the expanded war as a fait accompli. In an excellent account of how we got here, David Swanson asks "how much money are we talking about exactly? Well not enough, evidently, for the teabagging enemies of reckless government spending to take notice. Clearly not enough for the labor movement or any other advocates of spending on jobs or healthcare or education or green energy to disturb their slumbers. God forbid! Yet it's still a sizeable number by a certain reckoning. After all, 33 billion miles could take you to the sun 226 times. And $33 billion could radically alter any non-military program in existence. There's a bill in the senate, for instance, that would prevent schools from laying off teachers in all 50 states for a mere $23 billion. Another $9.6 billion would quadruple the Department of Energy's budget for renewable energy. Now, what to do with that extra $0.4 billion?" Victory at all costs in Afghanistan by David Swanson (Asia Times 2010-05-13).
With friends like these...: "The British government has estimated that 70 percent of the terror plots it has uncovered in the past decade can be traced back to Pakistan. Pakistan remains a terrorist hothouse even as jihadism is losing favor elsewhere in the Muslim world. From Egypt to Jordan to Malaysia to Indonesia, radical Islamic groups have been weakened militarily and have lost much of the support they had politically. Why not in Pakistan? The answer is simple: from its founding, the Pakistani government has supported and encouraged jihadi groups, creating an atmosphere that has allowed them to flourish. It appears to have partially reversed course in recent years, but the rot is deep." -- Terrorism’s Supermarket: Why Pakistan keeps exporting jihad by Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek 2010-05-07).
You think?: "The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy." -- U.S. Approval of Killing of Cleric Causes Unease by Scott Shane (New York Times 2010-05-13).
Be prepared: "In the raw aftermath of a successful attack, it will be very hard for an American president to shift the debate in a more productive and honest direction. Imagine if, after a fatal attack, President Obama responded by proposing greater outreach to Muslim communities domestically and around the world, in an effort to undercut radicalization. That is precisely what we and other nations should be doing, but it would undoubtedly be decried as a weak, starry-eyed reaction by our commander in chief, especially after an attack that revealed deficiencies in our counterterrorism system. But right now, after a near-miss, there is a better opportunity to adjust than in an emotionally charged period when the nation is mourning. Though a good dose of political courage would still be required, it would constitute a major improvement to our debate if leaders could come together now and agree on a few key points about our efforts to battle terrorism." -- The Times Square bomb failed. What will we do when the next bomb works? by Richard A. Clarke (The Washington Post 2010-05-09).
First it was our boys in Afghanistan doing a cover of Lady Gaga. Now, from Iraq, “Watch: Straight Soldiers Show Their Support for Gays in the Military by Dancing to Ke$ha”:
The future's last half century: "Fifty years ago this Sunday, Theodore Maiman and his fellow scientists at Hughes Research Laboratory shined a high-power flash lamp on a ruby rod, triggering a beam of coherent light: the first laser.
It wasn’t long before the Pentagon started dreaming up military applications, and futurists were predicting that our soldiers would all get ray guns. Well, not quite. But lasers have revolutionized the U.S. military — changing the way it targets bombs, scares off insurgents, and, yes, blows stuff to bits." Wired's Danger Room remembers some of the greatest hits (and biggest misses) from the first half-century of military lasers. -- 50 Years of Real-Life Ray Guns by Noah Shachtman (Danger Room 2010-05-14).Not on our airwaves leased from the American people you won't: Faux News refused this ad from the progressive veterans organization Vote Vets:
(also available on YouTube). What's doubly odd is that only a few weeks ago they were running an even stronger spot by same outfit.
Present Shock: A new report from Brookings reveals that our nation now faces five “new realities” that are redefining who we are, where and with whom we live, and how we provide for our own welfare, as well as that of our families and communities. In each of these five areas -- growth and outward expansion, population diversification, aging of the population, uneven higher educational attainment, and income polarization -- the nation reached critical milestones in the 2000s that make those underlying realities too large to ignore any longer. And large metropolitan areas -- the collections of cities, suburbs, and rural areas that house two-thirds of America’s population -- lay squarely at the forefront of these trends. -- State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation (pdf) (The Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program 2010).
Burke's Without Peerage: Sometime toward the end of the last millennium, Jerry Wexler and I, spending a happy couple of hours sharing music we liked, discovered that both of thought that, if there was such a thing as the greatest soul singer of all time, it was probably Solomon Burke. Still is.
Or go to YouTube.
H2O is the new oil: Water, water everywhere? Not so much
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. -- W.H.AudenIt is now almost six years since the people of Uruguay voted to make access to fresh water a human right. In the years since, the race to privatize the world's fresh water supply has accelerated, encouraged by the water privatization policies of the World Bank.
By almost two to one, Uruguayans elected to amend their constitution to ensure not only that access to piped water and sanitation is a fundamental human value, available to everyone, but also that in planning and policies affecting water, social rights and needs take precedence over economic considerations. Further, it is now national policy in Uruguay that the “public service of water supply for human consumption will be served exclusively and directly by state legal persons,” i.e., not by for-profit companies.
The referendum in the South American nation, the result of a two-year grassroots fight led by a network of trade unions, human rights groups, and environmental organizations, gave a boost (pdf) to the international civil society water movement that hopes to spread the principles reflected in the amendment to other countries and regions and to enshrine the right to water in international agreements.
The world’s water crisis due to pollution, climate change and a surging population growth is of such magnitude that close to two billion people now live in water-stressed regions of the planet. By the year 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face water scarcity. The global population tripled in the twentieth century, but water consumption went up sevenfold. By 2050, after we add another three billion to the population, humans will need an 80 percent increase in water supplies just to feed ourselves. No one knows where this water is going to come from. -- Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
Action: Join the People's Water Forum in defense of water as a human right, a public good, and a central component of the global commons.
Further reading:
-> Our Water Commons: Towards a new freshwater narrative by Maude Barlow (pdf) (The Council of Canadians, onthecommons.org)
-> Right to Water: From Concept to Implementation by Celine Dubreuil (pdf) (World Water Council 2006).
-> International Conference on the Right to Water and Sanitation in Theory and Practice - Conference Programme and Abstracts (University of Oslo, University of Oxford, United Nations Development Programme - Oslo 2009-11-26/27)
-> Social movements are working hard in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay to put water services that were privatized in the 1990s back in state hands. -- Who Controls the Water? by Marcela Valente (IPS 2006-07-21).
-> Campaign in Colombia Seeks to Make Water a Constitutional Right by Helda MartÃnez (IPS 2007-08-29).
-> Cochabamba, the Water Wars and Climate Change by Amy Goodman (Democracy Now! 2010-04-21)
-> Is access to clean water a basic human right? So far, the U.S. says no by Yigal Schleifer (The Christian Science Monitor 2009-03-19).
-> Historical background on Privatizing U.S. Water (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy 2007)
-> The Business of Water: Privatizing An Essential Resource by Stephen Lendman (Baltimore Chronicle 2010-03-09).
Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water by Maude Barlow (New Press 2008-9 - the paperback edition arrives on Saturday 2010-05-15) is a cool, clear, thorough and authoritative overview of a crisis that stretches from North America -- Barlow predicts that as many as 36 states could reach a water crisis in five years -- to Africa and Asia, where desertification has destroyed once vast water resources such as Lake Chad and the Aral Sea.
Energy: This video begins to capture the full import of BP's calamitous spill
There has been plenty of coverage of the oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, but nothing more impactful than this amateur video shot from a small plane over the spill by Tuscaloosa environmentalist John Wathen. Also deserving your attention are the 40 photographs of the spill gathered on the Boston Globe's website: Disaster unfolds slowly in the Gulf of Mexico (Boston.com 2010-05-12). Meanwhile, the New York Times (2010-05-14) reports the oil spill “could easily be four or five times the government estimate.”
Saturday Catchup 2010-05-08
Perceptions: Let’s start with a game. It's called 'Imagine.' Playing is simple: Take recent happenings in the news, scenes where white people are the main actors and imagine they were black folks or other people of color instead. The object of the game is to predict the public reaction to events or incidents in the news if the persons who are driving the action were of color rather than white. Whoever gains the most insight into the workings of race in America wins. -- Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black by Tim Wise (Ephphatha Poetry 2010-04-22). An effective antidote to the mainstream media's habitual, mindless racism.
Give Arizona back to Mexico: "When conservatives...think of racial profiling, they seem to think of a straw man. The image is something like an evil officer out of the Jim Crow South, full of 'prejudice' (itself a fairly silly and inaccurate way to describe racism), enacting his hatred by stopping black people or Latinos arbitrarily. Although it is arbitrary and unfair in terms of who gets targeted, racial profiling also fits into a set of structures guiding police behavior. If cops want to stop someone, they'll be able to cite some legitimate-sounding suspicion, whether it is actually legitimate or not. Profiling doesn't need to feel like profiling to the police, and they don't need to be secret Klansmen to enforce racial discrimination. It shows up way before you get to that point, among ordinary officers who probably just think they're doing their duty." -- E-mail reveals Arizona law was designed to maximize harassment by Gabriel Winant (Salon 2010-05-03).
Can you say putz?: "Joe Lieberman's latest exercise in demagoguery -- his plan to strip citizenship rights from Americans allegedly involved in terrorism -- has been quickly and incisively condemned (as "madness" by Andrew Sullivan, among others). But like Arizona's dangerous, unconstitutional immigration law, it seems likely to garner support from a majority or substantial minority of Americans who will assume that they won't be victimized by it -- that it will only target other people, namely presumptively guilty terrorists. In fact, Lieberman's proposal, combined with an obscure network of federal laws enabling the executive branch to designate individuals and groups as terrorists, with no due process, would put millions of innocent Americans at risk of arbitrarily losing their citizenship." -- Joe Lieberman Means You by Wendy Kaminer (The Atlantic 2010-05-05).
Coffee break:
Or go to YouTube.
What, me worry?: "The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families. Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics." -- No One Cares by Chris Hedges (truthdig 2010-06-03).
Our fragile polity: The decline in Congressional oversight stems from a complete break from the historical perception within Congress itself that first and foremost it is a separate branch of government. Once upon a time, very powerful Democratic chairmen would have no trouble going after Democratic or Republican administration wrongdoing. And, at least as importantly, they were aggressive at preserving their power in the Congress to access information from the Executive branch. But now they've become so deferential -- both Democrats and Republicans -- to the executive branch, especially when it comes to national security, that it's appalling. The fundamental problem is that Congress doesn't have the same sense of itself that it used to -- certainly not when brash leaders like Lyndon Baines Johnson were in charge. They took their power really seriously and they were not afraid to use it. -- Congressional Oversight Crippled By Institutional Anemia, Reformer Says by Dan Froomkin (Huffington Post 2010-05-05).
What Jed Bartlet would do: How Hollywood Presidents Would Solve America’s Problems by Peter Baker (New York Times 2010-04-30).
"Britain needs change" was the refrain of the hotly contested election in the U.K. this week. But did that mean changing the name of the Isle of Man to "the Isle of Men, Women, Children and Some Animals?" That is just one of the questions posed by the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, a lampoon of the British political scene that has been running for nearly three decades. While the big parties cross swords over deficits and immigration, Loony proposals include knighthood for Ozzy Osbourne, adding the Loch Ness Monster to the endangered-species list and creating a 99-pence coin (to end the nuisance of carrying pennies). -- In the Longest-Running Joke In Politics, Life Imitates Farce -- Britain's Loony Party Feuds Over Bookies And Term Limits; Glue and Chocolate by Paul Sonne and Alistair MacDonald (Wall Street Journal 2010-05-06).
And speaking of jokes, lets hope Paul Campos is right that, if she is nominated to be one of the Supremes, Elena Kagan will be laughed out of town: The Next Harriet Miers? by Paul Campos (DailyBeast 2010-05-01).
Freedom of the press has declined for the eighth year in a row, according to Freedom House’s annual report. And while the media has focused on the lack of media freedoms in such suspect locales as China and Venezuela, they’ve virtually ignored the U.S. position – No. 24 (PDF).
Foxhole humor: Here is a swell video by some U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan doing an affectionate send-up of Lady Gaga:
Or watch it on YouTube.
Time to pack in AfPak: The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday. Well, no wonder. The CIA has been allowed to use drones to attack a broader range of targets, according to the L.A.Times. Previously, drones were only able to fire on enemies on an approved list a few dozen times a year, but now they are able to attack several times a week. Danger Room reminds us that once upon a time, the CIA had to know a militant’s name before putting him up for a robotic targeted killing. Now, if the guy acts like a guerrilla, it’s enough to call in a drone strike; it’s another sign of that a once-limited, once-covert program to off senior terrorist leaders has morphed into a full-scale -- if undeclared -- war in Pakistan. And finally, less well known, but perhaps equally dubious, is the State Department’s counter-narcotics air force, staffed by mercenaries.-- Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says by Nathan Hodge (Danger Room 2010-04-28)
At least "Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces -- amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class -- are an infinitesimal minority. The Pakistan-based Taliban -- subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles -- are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab." Although, wait until we're done with it. -- The myth of Talibanistan by Pepe Escobar (Asia Times 2010-05-01).
Activism: The New York Times reported on a lesser-known Big Apple tradition –- one that has nothing to do with hot dogs, Broadway or spitting obscenities at strangers. For the last 330 Wednesdays, a group of elderly women (and a couple of elderly men) have met on 5th Avenue to protest the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The demonstrations began Jan. 14, 2004 and are still going strong. -- Badass Anti-War Grannies Still At It, After 330 Straight Weeks by Byard Duncan (AlterNet 2010-05-07).
This has been around a while, but despite the poor quality of the picture it's still fun to watch Marty Robbins' reaction to Merle Haggard's impersonation of him:
Or go to YouTube.
Serpico Redux: Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. He recorded precinct roll calls; his precinct commander and other supervisors; street encounters; small talk and stationhouse banter; in all, he surreptitiously recorded hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs. Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes provide an unprecedented portrait of what it's like to work as a cop in New York City. They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don't make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints. -- The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct by Graham Rayman (Village Voice 2010-05-04)
It's reassuring that even in the noughts a mainstream band could still upset the fuzz. Rock and roll!:
Or go to YouTube.
Give Arizona back to Mexico: "When conservatives...think of racial profiling, they seem to think of a straw man. The image is something like an evil officer out of the Jim Crow South, full of 'prejudice' (itself a fairly silly and inaccurate way to describe racism), enacting his hatred by stopping black people or Latinos arbitrarily. Although it is arbitrary and unfair in terms of who gets targeted, racial profiling also fits into a set of structures guiding police behavior. If cops want to stop someone, they'll be able to cite some legitimate-sounding suspicion, whether it is actually legitimate or not. Profiling doesn't need to feel like profiling to the police, and they don't need to be secret Klansmen to enforce racial discrimination. It shows up way before you get to that point, among ordinary officers who probably just think they're doing their duty." -- E-mail reveals Arizona law was designed to maximize harassment by Gabriel Winant (Salon 2010-05-03).
Can you say putz?: "Joe Lieberman's latest exercise in demagoguery -- his plan to strip citizenship rights from Americans allegedly involved in terrorism -- has been quickly and incisively condemned (as "madness" by Andrew Sullivan, among others). But like Arizona's dangerous, unconstitutional immigration law, it seems likely to garner support from a majority or substantial minority of Americans who will assume that they won't be victimized by it -- that it will only target other people, namely presumptively guilty terrorists. In fact, Lieberman's proposal, combined with an obscure network of federal laws enabling the executive branch to designate individuals and groups as terrorists, with no due process, would put millions of innocent Americans at risk of arbitrarily losing their citizenship." -- Joe Lieberman Means You by Wendy Kaminer (The Atlantic 2010-05-05).
Coffee break:
Or go to YouTube.
What, me worry?: "The roots of mass apathy are found in the profound divide between liberals, who are mostly white and well educated, and our disenfranchised working class, whose sons and daughters, because they cannot get decent jobs with benefits, have few options besides the military. Liberals, whose children are more often to be found in elite colleges than the Marine Corps, did not fight the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the dismantling of our manufacturing base. They did nothing when the Democrats gutted welfare two years later and stood by as our banks were turned over to Wall Street speculators. They signed on, by supporting the Clinton and Obama Democrats, for the corporate rape carried out in the name of globalization and endless war, and they ignored the plight of the poor. And for this reason the poor have little interest in the moral protestations of liberals. We have lost all credibility. We are justly hated for our tacit complicity in the corporate assault on workers and their families. Our passivity has resulted, however, in much more than imperial adventurism and a permanent underclass. A slow-motion coup by a corporate state has cemented into place a neofeudalism in which there are only masters and serfs. And the process is one that cannot be reversed through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics." -- No One Cares by Chris Hedges (truthdig 2010-06-03).
Our fragile polity: The decline in Congressional oversight stems from a complete break from the historical perception within Congress itself that first and foremost it is a separate branch of government. Once upon a time, very powerful Democratic chairmen would have no trouble going after Democratic or Republican administration wrongdoing. And, at least as importantly, they were aggressive at preserving their power in the Congress to access information from the Executive branch. But now they've become so deferential -- both Democrats and Republicans -- to the executive branch, especially when it comes to national security, that it's appalling. The fundamental problem is that Congress doesn't have the same sense of itself that it used to -- certainly not when brash leaders like Lyndon Baines Johnson were in charge. They took their power really seriously and they were not afraid to use it. -- Congressional Oversight Crippled By Institutional Anemia, Reformer Says by Dan Froomkin (Huffington Post 2010-05-05).
What Jed Bartlet would do: How Hollywood Presidents Would Solve America’s Problems by Peter Baker (New York Times 2010-04-30).
"Britain needs change" was the refrain of the hotly contested election in the U.K. this week. But did that mean changing the name of the Isle of Man to "the Isle of Men, Women, Children and Some Animals?" That is just one of the questions posed by the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, a lampoon of the British political scene that has been running for nearly three decades. While the big parties cross swords over deficits and immigration, Loony proposals include knighthood for Ozzy Osbourne, adding the Loch Ness Monster to the endangered-species list and creating a 99-pence coin (to end the nuisance of carrying pennies). -- In the Longest-Running Joke In Politics, Life Imitates Farce -- Britain's Loony Party Feuds Over Bookies And Term Limits; Glue and Chocolate by Paul Sonne and Alistair MacDonald (Wall Street Journal 2010-05-06).
And speaking of jokes, lets hope Paul Campos is right that, if she is nominated to be one of the Supremes, Elena Kagan will be laughed out of town: The Next Harriet Miers? by Paul Campos (DailyBeast 2010-05-01).
Freedom of the press has declined for the eighth year in a row, according to Freedom House’s annual report. And while the media has focused on the lack of media freedoms in such suspect locales as China and Venezuela, they’ve virtually ignored the U.S. position – No. 24 (PDF).
Foxhole humor: Here is a swell video by some U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan doing an affectionate send-up of Lady Gaga:
Or watch it on YouTube.
Time to pack in AfPak: The pilots waging America’s undeclared drone war in Pakistan could be liable to criminal prosecution for “war crimes,” a prominent law professor told a Congressional panel Wednesday. Well, no wonder. The CIA has been allowed to use drones to attack a broader range of targets, according to the L.A.Times. Previously, drones were only able to fire on enemies on an approved list a few dozen times a year, but now they are able to attack several times a week. Danger Room reminds us that once upon a time, the CIA had to know a militant’s name before putting him up for a robotic targeted killing. Now, if the guy acts like a guerrilla, it’s enough to call in a drone strike; it’s another sign of that a once-limited, once-covert program to off senior terrorist leaders has morphed into a full-scale -- if undeclared -- war in Pakistan. And finally, less well known, but perhaps equally dubious, is the State Department’s counter-narcotics air force, staffed by mercenaries.-- Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says by Nathan Hodge (Danger Room 2010-04-28)
At least "Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces -- amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class -- are an infinitesimal minority. The Pakistan-based Taliban -- subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles -- are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab." Although, wait until we're done with it. -- The myth of Talibanistan by Pepe Escobar (Asia Times 2010-05-01).
Activism: The New York Times reported on a lesser-known Big Apple tradition –- one that has nothing to do with hot dogs, Broadway or spitting obscenities at strangers. For the last 330 Wednesdays, a group of elderly women (and a couple of elderly men) have met on 5th Avenue to protest the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. The demonstrations began Jan. 14, 2004 and are still going strong. -- Badass Anti-War Grannies Still At It, After 330 Straight Weeks by Byard Duncan (AlterNet 2010-05-07).
This has been around a while, but despite the poor quality of the picture it's still fun to watch Marty Robbins' reaction to Merle Haggard's impersonation of him:
Or go to YouTube.
Serpico Redux: Two years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. He recorded precinct roll calls; his precinct commander and other supervisors; street encounters; small talk and stationhouse banter; in all, he surreptitiously recorded hundreds of hours of cops talking about their jobs. Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes provide an unprecedented portrait of what it's like to work as a cop in New York City. They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don't make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints. -- The NYPD Tapes: Inside Bed-Stuy's 81st Precinct by Graham Rayman (Village Voice 2010-05-04)
It's reassuring that even in the noughts a mainstream band could still upset the fuzz. Rock and roll!:
Or go to YouTube.
Music: The National play out
The National are in London, performing last night at Electric Ballroom and tonight at Royal Albert Hall.
But the big news for us is a show May 15, a benefit for the Red Hot Organization, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Documentary makers D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop and The War Room, among other amazing films) and Chris Hegedus will be piloting a live-to-the-internet simulcast of the concert on YouTube.
Starting today (May 6) at 10am advance tickets for the BAM show will be available through an exclusive pre-sale site (the password is VIOLET - all caps). The general public on-sale begins tomorrow (May 7) at 10AM from BAM's website.
The band's newest album, High Violet, comes out next week. Through May 11 it's being streamed at NPR.org.
But the big news for us is a show May 15, a benefit for the Red Hot Organization, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Documentary makers D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop and The War Room, among other amazing films) and Chris Hegedus will be piloting a live-to-the-internet simulcast of the concert on YouTube.
Starting today (May 6) at 10am advance tickets for the BAM show will be available through an exclusive pre-sale site (the password is VIOLET - all caps). The general public on-sale begins tomorrow (May 7) at 10AM from BAM's website.
The band's newest album, High Violet, comes out next week. Through May 11 it's being streamed at NPR.org.
Democracy: More instant runoffs this November
On November 2, three cities in Alameda County -- Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro -- will join San Francisco in choosing candidates by a method known as ranked-choice voting or, more widely, instant runoff.
San Francisco has used instant runoffs since 2004 (see, Election Reform: Instant Runoffs, Impractical Proposals 2004-12-29). Under the system, voters may, if they wish, rank their top three choices from among the candidates. If no one achieves a majority in the first tally, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, that candidate's voters' next-ranked choices are distributed among the remaining contestants, and the ballots are counted again. Eliminations and recounting continue until a candidate reaches 50 percent, plus one.
Proponents of the instant runoff say that it saves money and resources by eliminating the need for conventional runoffs on another day. With an instant runoff, the eventual winner is guaranteed to have the support of a majority of people casting ballots. It also helps to advance democracy because, as a special election, a traditional runoff ordinarily will have a lower turnout than a general election.
Last December, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen approved a computer system developed by Sequoia Voting Systems for ranked-choice voting. In April, a challenge to San Francisco's instant runoffs was rejected by a Federal judge.
Alameda County has set up a website, Ranked-Choice Voting, to explain the new system to voters in English, Spanish and Chinese, with faqs, a newsletter and soon, inevitably, an iPhone app. Other county efforts to familiarize voters with the new system will go on throughout the summer and fall.
If instant runoffs work as well as predicted this November, other cities, possibly including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, San Jose and Sacramento, can be expected to follow suit. And a successful reform of one kind makes it easier to contemplate others, such as proportional representation, weekend voting, consolidating elections to lower costs and increase turnout, and publicly-funded campaigns, that would also tend to make the system fairer and, in many cases, cheaper both for taxpayers and candidates.
San Francisco has used instant runoffs since 2004 (see, Election Reform: Instant Runoffs, Impractical Proposals 2004-12-29). Under the system, voters may, if they wish, rank their top three choices from among the candidates. If no one achieves a majority in the first tally, the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, that candidate's voters' next-ranked choices are distributed among the remaining contestants, and the ballots are counted again. Eliminations and recounting continue until a candidate reaches 50 percent, plus one.
Proponents of the instant runoff say that it saves money and resources by eliminating the need for conventional runoffs on another day. With an instant runoff, the eventual winner is guaranteed to have the support of a majority of people casting ballots. It also helps to advance democracy because, as a special election, a traditional runoff ordinarily will have a lower turnout than a general election.
Last December, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen approved a computer system developed by Sequoia Voting Systems for ranked-choice voting. In April, a challenge to San Francisco's instant runoffs was rejected by a Federal judge.
Alameda County has set up a website, Ranked-Choice Voting, to explain the new system to voters in English, Spanish and Chinese, with faqs, a newsletter and soon, inevitably, an iPhone app. Other county efforts to familiarize voters with the new system will go on throughout the summer and fall.
If instant runoffs work as well as predicted this November, other cities, possibly including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, San Jose and Sacramento, can be expected to follow suit. And a successful reform of one kind makes it easier to contemplate others, such as proportional representation, weekend voting, consolidating elections to lower costs and increase turnout, and publicly-funded campaigns, that would also tend to make the system fairer and, in many cases, cheaper both for taxpayers and candidates.
Leadership: When Harry Truman threw Jim Crow out of the Army
This comment, from Ed Brayton's blog, needs no gassy annotation by me: President Harry S Truman, Brayton writes,
signed the first executive calling for 'equality of treatment for all persons in the armed services, without regard to race, color, religion or national origin' on July 26, 1948 -- a scant few months before a presidential election, with polls showing 82% opposition to the idea in the country. Can you imagine a president today having the courage to do such a thing under those circumstances? I can't either.Truman certainly made huge mistakes -- deploying of nightmarish weapons of mass destruction against the civilian populations of Hiroshima and, even more, Nagasaki; abandoning Roosevelt's plans to extend the New Deal; among others -- but, like so many politicians of his era, he was unafraid to accept the responsibilities of leadership, in that unlike the moral and political dwarfs who have held power since the early 1970s. -- Truman's Moral Courage by Ed Brayton (Dispatches from the Culture Wars 2010-05-04).
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