a tree grows in brooklyn

legal nuggets

2005-08-10T16:41:00.000-04:00

The LA Times has a piece on the continuing controversy over the insanity defense. In Nevada, a young man who stabbed a friend without warning at a party and was acquitted by reason of insanity has been declared cured by his doctors after only ten months in a mental facility. Under Nevada law, he is now eligible for release.

In North Carolina, a former state Supreme Court justice has filed a lawsuit challenging the policy of granting large incentive packages to corporations so that they will locate in a given state. Justice Robert Orr claims that this practice violates the commerce clause, as it discriminates in favor of in-state activity. His complaint cited the 6th Circuit's ruling last year in Cuno v. DaimlerChrysler, which struck incentives granted to the corporation in 1998 to build a plant in Toledo.

Convicted murderer and Crips gang founder Stanley Williams has received the President's Call to Service award for his good deeds on death row. Williams has been an anti-gang activist during his many years on death row at San Quentin State Prison, where he was sent after being convicted in 1981 for killing four people.

Amnesty International is challenging the ongoing detention of two Yemeni men who were held and interrogated for 18 months without charges or any contact with the outside world. They are now being held in Yemeni prison, where prison officials say they have no reason for holding the men, other than the fact that it was a condition for their release from US detention.

affirmative

2005-08-04T17:49:00.000-04:00

David Gelernter, a computer science prof at Yale, wrote a guest column for the LA Times a few weeks ago calling for an end to affirmative action, and declaring that "[t]here are no more outsiders in American life." He also compared affirmative action to Vietnam, but I will leave that aside as too absurd (and demeaning) for comment. What wowed me about his column was his praise of Bush for nominating Roberts, a "garden-variety white male," which was apparently meant to be a beacon of hope to all those who thought discrimination still exists. The fact that Bush didn't nominate a minority means there is no more need to pay any attention to that, becuase there is no more discrimination! I must confess I have not yet achieved the good professor's lofty heights of logical reasoning.

You will perhaps not be shocked to learn that Gelenter is a white male who attended Yale as an undergrad, where presumeably he felt a little overwhelmed by legions of black and brown students pretty much running the show.

birth control illegal?

2005-08-02T16:33:00.000-04:00

I have heard many friends say over the years that the other side would not have the nerve to go after birth control. Think again.

Republicans around the country are moving full steam ahead on their baby agenda. A bill recently introduced in Wisconsin prohibits University of Wisconsin campuses from prescribing, dispensing and advertising all forms of birth control and emergency contraceptives. That means college women, who are particularly susceptable to sexual assault, will be forced into extremely difficult circumstances.

Furthermore, pharmacists continue to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions.

Oh, and lest you think you are safe in California, New York or Massachusetts, consider this: If the Supreme Court rolls back Roe and/or Griswald, the Federal Congress will be free to render these things illegal across the country (under the strong reading of the commerce clause that we have promoted for so long). That means that this is in your back yard.

why isn't wal-mart cheaper?

2005-08-02T00:49:00.000-04:00

This page offers suggestions to communities that want to organize against Wal-Mart. One thing I was not aware of is that Wal-Mart does not actually have the lowest prices around, and in some cases, far from it. Ever wonder why Wal-Mart doesn't just blow Costco out of the water with its prices? Costco, after all, pays its employees extremely well, whereas Wal-Mart has bravely cut back in that area. Here is an exerpt:

How does the number-one retailer maintain an image of low prices? First, by actually making sure its prices are lower than its competitors, at least on key items. These items are called "price-sensitive" items in the industry, and it is commonly believed that the average consumer knows the "going price" of fewer than 100 items. These tend to be commodities that are purchased frequently.

A mid-size Wal-Mart supercenter may offer for sale 100,000 separate items, or stock-keeping units (skus). Wal-Mart and other major retailers believe that the general public knows the going price of only 1 to 2 percent of these items. Therefore, each Wal-Mart store shops for the prices of only about 1,500 items in their competitors' stores. If it is ever found that a competitor has a lower price on one of these items than Wal-Mart, the store manager will immediately lower his or her price to be the lowest in the area.

Price-sensitive merchandise is displayed in prominent places such as the kiosk at the entrance to the store, as well as on end caps, in dump bins, and in gondolas down the main aisles. Consequently, when Wal-Mart customers see the items of which they know the price, the ones always priced lower in Wal-Mart, they start assuming that everything else is also priced lower than at competing stores. This assumption is simply not true.

My barber has offered me a simple example. He sells a nonbreakable pocket comb for 25 cents that he procures from his vendor for eight cents. Wal-Mart sells a lower-quality comb for 98 cents, and one would assume that Wal-Mart pays less for it than the barber does. People keep buying Wal-Mart combs, however, because the average person does not know the going price of a pocket comb, and it is automatically assumed that the Wal-Mart price is the lowest.

Costco, by the way, has been catching flak for being such a great employer. Wall street is miffed that their iron clad rules of market forces are not playing out. Costco responds to this investor talk by pointing out that it saves tens of millions of dollars by strong employee retention and satisfaction rates - it doesn't have to constaintly retrain new people, employees rarely steal, and everyone is happy and friendly. Sounds good to me...

housing bubble

2005-07-27T16:28:00.000-04:00

I have seen a lot of predictions about the end of the housing bubble, but this one caught my interest, probably because I have recently been doing research on predatory mortgage lending (where banks finance mortgages for very little money down in exchange for very high interest rates). Exerpt:

So, why would banks foolishly loan money to people who can't even scrap together a few thousand dollars for a down payment or who can scarcely meet their "interest-only" obligations?

The reason is simple; because they are not the one's taking the risk. Mortgage loans are acquired by investment banks and chopped up into various securities where they are sold in mutual funds, hedge funds and pension funds etc. To some extent, this takes the lenders off the hook, but it also means that the shock to the system will be much more widespread when the day of reckoning finally arrives. If we encounter a major glitch in the economy the shock-waves will be felt throughout the world. "Investors now hold $4.6 trillion in mortgage backed securities. That's more than the outstanding value of the US Treasuries." (NY Times) Think about it.

unexpected

2005-07-27T15:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I drove out to the small town of Forest, MS to visit a 16 year old client in jail for life for helping his half-sister shoot her abusive boyfriend. We think he is innocent, but we have our work cut out for us as he gave a confession. So that's depressing. However, on the way home I picked up a copy of the Scott County Times, a small county newspaper. In the 'Life' section, I read a really sweet article about a bus of Rainbow family members who stopped in town the week before. If you're reading this post close to July 27th, you can see a picture of the group here. As you may know, Rainbow folks are extremely hippified, dreadlocks, dumpster diving and all. Rather than treating them with suspicion, the town shared food and money so they could repair their broken bus and get back on the road. Who'd a thunk?

things that are frustrating

2005-07-25T23:54:00.000-04:00

For the past week I have been reading cases non stop, gathering precedents for an innocence project appeal. Reading criminal cases for 12 hours a day can take its toll. While it's bad enough reading about horrible murders and attacks and robberies, it is beyond frustrating to see the court pulling BS like this:

Next, the defendant contends he invoked his right to counsel, but the police did not honor his requests. The defendant made two references to getting an attorney: "I think I might need an attorney," and later, "if I'm going to be arrested, I need an attorney." The defendant made the first statement after the polygraph examiner told him he had failed the test. The phrase joined the auxiliary verb "might" to the verb "need" to express possibility. When introduced by "I think," the meaning indicated a thought in process, but not yet concluded. The speaker was still considering or weighing the decision, was still testing alternatives. The statement was not a clear, unambiguous request for counsel.

The second reference to an attorney was also inconclusive. The statement, "if I'm going to be arrested, I need an attorney," is a conditional sentence. The subordinate clause "if I'm going to be arrested," established a condition upon the main clause. The statement told the police that if they were going to arrest the defendant, he wanted an attorney. Such a conditional statement was not a clear, unambiguous request.

Law enforcement officers must immediately cease questioning a suspect who has clearly asserted his right to have counsel present during custodial interrogation. Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477 (1981). However, the defendant must make an unequivocal request. Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452, 458-60 (1994). We hold that the defendant never made an unequivocal request for counsel.

Here you see the court resorting to pedantic grammatical parsing in order to find that no request for an attorney was made. I could understand if the court simply said, "The defendant must use the following words: I request a lawyer. While other statements may indicate a desire for a lawyer, this is the phrase we need to see." But to claim that the defendant did not in fact clearly request a lawyer is just low.

[the quotation above is from Pritchett v. Commonwealth, 2000 Va. App. LEXIS 807, 7-8 (Va. Ct. App. Dec. 12, 2000)]

think globally

2005-07-18T01:19:00.000-04:00

I am a general news hound, but there are a few things that I am oddly obsessed with, namely hurricanes and bird flu, which toggle with the seasons. Lately I've been poring over satellite images of Dennis and Emily and super Typhoon Haitang. However, today the bird flu wiki caught my eye, and it pointed me to a thorough Foreign Affairs article on the topic. The article discusses many aspects of the possibility of a global pandemic, and particularly focuses on its effects on world trade. There was one paragraph in particular that I found interesting. Having pointed out the degree to which SARS threw the world into a panic, he writes:

The pandemic-related collapse of worldwide trade and its ripple effect throughout industrialized and developing countries would represent the first real test of the resiliency of the modern global delivery system. Given the extent to which modern commerce relies on the precise and readily available international trade of goods and services, a shutdown of the global economic system would dramatically harm the world's ability to meet the surging demand for essential commodities such as food and medicine during a crisis. The business community can no longer afford to play a minor role in planning the response to a pandemic. For the world to have critical goods and services during a pandemic, industry heads must stockpile raw materials for production and preplan distribution and transportation support. Every company's senior managers need to be ready to respond rapidly to changes in the availability, production, distribution, and inventory management of their products. There is no model for how to revive the current global economy were it to be devastated.

I am not an anti-globalist, whatever that really means. However, the trend away from maintaining any local sustainable production and consumption seems to be a recipie for disaster. What happens when something goes wrong? Speaking of which, the price of oil is up on fears that hurricanes will disrupt oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. I have a suspicion that the weather is going to get a lot worse.

dissonance

2005-07-07T13:35:00.000-04:00

I have been trying for ages to articulate the paradox of "rationales" offered by war supporters of why we are in Iraq. A commenter on dailyKos has said it beautifully:

Has anyone else noticed this conflict between two of the supposed current goals of the Bush administration in Iraq?

On one hand, the US is supposedly intent upon creating a new democracy out of the ashes of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

On the other hand, Iraq is our "flypaper" for Islamic terrorists, where we are drawing them to fight in order to prevent them from attacking the US on its own soil.

But doesn't it seem as if there's a problem in setting up a stable nation in a war zone? I have a hard time reconciling those two plans. Unless the pool of potential terrorists in the Islamic world is just about empty (something I have a hard time swallowing) it seems like we're going to need active flypaper for some time to come (making the huge assumption that it actually works) either in Iraq or elsewhere. And that means developing a stable government, turning over true power to that government, and leaving Iraq is a long way off (assuming, of course, that it was ever planned).

who's the activist now?

2005-07-06T14:30:00.000-04:00

Great op-ed from the nytimes showing that under a sensible definition "activism", Justice Thomas is the most "activist judge" on the court, as he has voted to strike down more laws of Congress than any other justice on the court. By this measure the more right wing justices are the more activist, as they have voted to strike down a greater percentage of law of Congress than the moderates:

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

via kos.

infierno

2005-07-04T14:34:00.000-04:00

Here is a harrowing letter from Equador, detailing the prison situation there. Thanks to "no tolerance" drug laws, which have been spectacular in their ineffectiveness, women and their children are tortured in prisons. They are held for months and even years without trial in roach and snake infested cells, disease ridden and water deprived. Human waste flows along the floors. There is no medical treatment. There is functionally no recourse. Lest you imagine that this is not your back yard, remember that the US government funds this horror through policies like Plan Columbia.

midwest crack

2005-07-03T00:10:00.000-04:00

The LA times has a great article on Meth in the midwest. I've been hearing about this for a while now, and I'm all kinds of curious as to how middle America can get around this - a cheap, toxic, extremely addictive and destructive drug landing a ton of people in prison and very expensive to combat. I found this to be ironically amusing:

Here in the farm country of eastern Missouri, Cmdr. Gary Higginbotham sometimes longs for the days when a roadside patch of marijuana was considered a major drug threat.

And this number is pretty wild:

About half of those entering the Nebraska state prison have a meth-related conviction.

I wonder at what point people acknowledeg that law enforcement is not going to solve this problem? And once they do that, what next?

desperate straits

2005-07-02T22:00:00.000-04:00

Medicade is in serious trouble. Stunning example: "a single mother of three in Missouri is now ineligible if she makes more than $350 a month." That's $4200 a year. I don't really understand that statistic, and I'm hoping that they meant per week, but then again, to support 3 kids on $350 a week is also insane.

got beef?

2005-07-02T21:54:00.000-04:00

I thought this article from the nytimes about grilling on july 4th was just hilarious. Choice quotes:

In Lewisville, Tex., customers streamed into Old Town Market recently to stock up on hamburger and brisket for the weekend.

"You trust that things are in place to be protective, just like you do with medicine," said one customer, Irene Carey.

Roland Dickey Jr., vice president of Dickey's Barbecue, which is based in Dallas and has 65 restaurants in six states, said that the company did not see any drop in business after the first case of mad cow and that it did not expect a decrease this time either.

"I think that the American public knows that basically the food supply is completely safe," Mr. Dickey said.

I wonder if Ms. Carey also supports decreased regulation and tax cuts, because industry can take care of itself.

how wrong Have they gotten it?

2005-06-29T23:27:00.000-04:00

An Amazon reviewer lambasts Larry Diamond's new book, Squandered Victory : The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq. The book itself is a fierce criticism of the Bush administration's handling of the occupation. This reviewer shows how not even the critics know how wrong the American approach has been.

Larry Diamond's Squandering Victory stands out as the best evidence on why America found itself in an Iraqi quagmire. If this is the best analysis of the Iraqi situation a Stanford professor deployed to Iraq could come up with, then it is perfectly understandable how the United States was never able to grasp what's going on there.
Read the book's description: "America's leading expert on democracy delivers the first insider's account of the U.S. occupation of Iraq." The leading expert on democracy is not an Arabic speaker and his background on the Middle East seems minimal. His knowledge on the Arab world, like his expertise on democracy, comes mainly from Western media and secondary English sources rather than from primary Arabic texts or sources.

As for the "the first insider's account of the U.S. occupation of Iraq," well, the account was of such an insider that during his stay in Baghdad, he spent all of his time inside the heavily fortified Green Zone - according to his own account - save for a single trip that he made to Babylon in an armored SUV.

Put all of this given together and here's what you get: A Stanford professor and fellow at one of Washington's prestigious think tanks, National Endowment for Democracy, received a call from his personal friend, then National Security Advisor and today's Secretary of State Condi Rice, seeking his participation in salvaging America's attempt to establish democracy in Iraq. With no Arabic and minimum knowledge about Iraq and the Arab world that were apparent in the form of factual mistakes in his book, Diamond joined the American-made Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

His interpretation of what went wrong there came through his observation of the head of CPA Paul Bremer instead of trying to understand the behavior of Iraqis.

And if that's not enough, Diamond even came up with some recommendations that he thought could rectify the situation there. Why not send UN envoy Algerian (Arab) Lakhdar brahimi, who is Sunni, to patch things up in Iraq? After all, he succeeded in a similar mission in Afghanistan. For those who don't know, the majority of the population in Iraq is Arab-speaking Iraqi Shiites. The majority in Afghanistan is Urdu-speaking Pashtun Sunnis. Does the cultural and ethnic difference ring any bell? To the majority in Afghanistan, Brahimi was an impartial Arab UN envoy, Sunni like they are. To the majority of Iraqis, this Sunni Arab was an official of the Arab League which Iraqi Shiites abhorr. He had good links with the toppled Saddam Hussein who oppressed these Shiites. He sumpathized with the agenda of the region's Arab Sunnis, which was in conflict with that of the Arab Shiites. Does he look impartial at all to Iraqi Shiites? Of course not. To many Americans, he does.

I cited this one example to illustrate how shallow and superficial the knowledge of this expert on Iraq is... and he still has the guts to criticize the administration for squandering a chance in Iraq. His book is the best example of why America lost an opportunity there in the first place, not a guide on how it could have been avoided.

everybody's watching

2005-06-29T22:00:00.000-04:00

A Korean girl's dog pooped in the subway car and she didn't clean it up (and basically told the old people who chided her to Fuck Off). Someone took digi photos of her and posted them on the internet. A nationwide witchunt ensued. Soon , her personality and past was discovered (based on her bag, dog, and watch, all clear in the photo) and posted. All comments about her privacy were shouted down. A debate has ensued as to whether the original photo blogger should have blurred her face, and whether the frenzied netzien response was over the top. In one discussion, I found some comments that I thought were particularly intriguing:

The previously conjured, sci-fi 'police state'[1] is the current state - where anyone can monitor anyone else - doing thier 'thang (if you care). So if you are makin a public poopie, jaywalking, passing the dutchie, or media|boinkin (just ask Paris) - anyone else can make it a story. The more sensational/emotional the better - as MsM has known for years.

So I think the elephant in the blog-o-media-tele-pod-o-sphere may get larger - who's surveilling who? And what/how many 'longer-tail' segments are 'tuning-in'? What do you care a about? You have a voice now.

And where can the medium take it? As predicticed for years as a leveling of the playing field - is now a pedestrian reality. Now anyone any "any-cast".

The airwaves are open. Its up to humanity to decide.

Who is surveilling who?

Thanks to technology, we are able to build a better society in which citizens are the police, prosecutors, and judges.

Surveillance a la Foucault and Bentham's panopticon, it seems. Here's another comment, a la Matrix:

This is not punishment. This is personality hacking. She is an error in the social program, which happens to be open source. We all contribute. The socially conscious "hacker" that posted the error, is merely attempting to utilize the net to affect a correction for this faulty code. I would say that this error would not occur again. This was an effective patch for the error in the program. I would like to see more patches of this type. In fact, a worldwide error reporting system should be initiated.

And another, noting that increased access to information has a village making effect;

In the old days, people conformed to societal expectations and norms based on the feedback they got from those around them. These days, especially in large urban areas where anonymity prevails, most people seem to be afraid to cricitize anyone for anything. Maybe now technology will provide a way to reinstate that societal feedback. I doubt this epsiode would have occured in a small town where everyone knows everyone and such actions would have resulted in immediate consequences.

However, unlike a physical village, the digital village has a one way gate for quick exchanges of information. Subway girl's explanation of her behavior would be unlikely to get a ton of play;

The problem with some kind of electronic mob descending upon this woman is that they have no idea why she behaved so badly. They just assume that she's a bad person and project the image of all the bad people they'd like to punish but can't onto her.

Maybe she's mentally ill. Maybe she just got the crap kicked out of her by her husband or boyfriend. Maybe she was upset about something and just wanted to go home. Maybe it's her mother's dog and her mother is cruel to her and she hates the dog because of it and didn't even want to take it on the stupid train but had to. Nobody knows.

too republican for republicans

2005-06-29T12:34:00.000-04:00

A long term republican writes about his decision to leave the party. Worth quoting in full:

Guest Viewpoint: The party's over for betrayed Republican
By James Chaney

As of today, after 25 years, I am no longer a Republican.

I take this step with deep regret, and with a deep sense of betrayal.

I still believe in the vast power of markets to inspire ideas, motivate solutions and eliminate waste. I still believe in international vigilance and a strong defense, because this world will always be home to people who will avidly seek to take or destroy what we have built as a nation. I still believe in the protection of individuals and businesses from the influence and expense of an over-involved government. I still believe in the hand-in-hand concepts of separation of church and state and absolute freedom to worship, in the rights of the states to govern themselves without undo federal interference, and in the host of other things that defined me as a Republican.

My problem is this: I believe in principles and ideals which my party has systematically discarded in the last 10 years.

My Republican Party was the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, and George H.W. Bush. It was a party of honesty and accountability. It was a party of tolerance, and practicality and honor. It was a party that faced facts and dealt with reality, and that crafted common-sense solutions to problems based on the facts as they were, not as we wished them to be, or even worse, as we made them up. It was a party that told the truth, even when the truth came hard. And now, it is none of those things.

Fifty years from now, the Republican Party of this era will be judged by how we provided for the nation's future on three core issues: how we led the world on the environment, how we minded the business of running our country in such a way that we didn't go bankrupt, and whether we gracefully accepted our place on the world's stage as its only superpower. Sadly, we have built the foundation for dismal failure on all three counts. And we've done it in such a way that we shouldn't be surprised if neither the American people nor the world ever trusts us again.

My party has repeatedly ignored, discarded and even invented science to suit its needs, most spectacularly as to global warming. We have an opportunity and the responsibility to lead the world on this issue, but instead we've chosen greed, shortsightedness and deliberate ignorance.

We have mortgaged the country's fiscal future in a way that no Democratic Congress or administration ever did, and to justify the tax cuts that brought us here, we've simply changed the rules. I matured as a Republican believing that uncontrolled deficit spending is harmful and irresponsible; I still do. But the party has yet to explain to me why it's a good thing now, other than to say "... because we say so."

Our greatest failure, though, has been in our role as superpower. This world needs justice, democracy and compassion, and as the keystone of those things, it needs one thing above all else: truth.

Republican decisions made in 2002 and 2003 have killed almost 2,000 of the most capable patriots our country has to offer - volunteers, every one. Support for those decisions was gathered through what appeared at the time to be spin and marketing, but which now turns out to have been deliberate planning and falsehood. The Blair government's internal documentation only confirms what has been suspected for years: Americans are dying every day for Republican lies first crafted in 2002, expanded and embellished upon in 2003, and which continue to this day. This calculated deception is now burned into the legacy of the party, every bit as much as Reagan's triumph in the Cold War, or Nixon's disgrace over Watergate.

I could go on and on - about how we have compromised our international integrity by sanctioning torture, about how we are systematically dismantling the civil liberties that it took us two centuries to define and preserve, and about how we have substituted bullying, brinksmanship and "staying on message" for real political discourse - but those three issues are enough.

We're poisoning our planet through gluttony and ignorance.

We're teetering on the brink of self-inflicted insolvency.

We're selfishly and needlessly sacrificing the best of a generation.

And we're lying about it.

While it has compiled this record of failure and deception, the party which I'm leaving today has spent its time, energy and political capital trying to save Terri Schiavo, battling the threat of single-sex unions, fighting medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide, manufacturing political crises over presidential nominees, and selling privatized Social Security to an America that isn't buying. We fiddle while Rome burns.

Enough is enough. I quit.

public space

2005-06-28T14:01:00.000-04:00

This article from the Seattle Times describes how England is working hard to transform and retain public space through a slew of housing, transportation and development initiatives.

I have been thinking a lot lately about transportation, and how poor people are often forced to take the worst jobs because they can't afford transportation to better paying jobs. Here in Jackson, there is an area of town where few people have cars (meaning they are Really poor, as everyone here drives). Since there is virtually no public transportation in this town, the shopping district in that neighborhood jacks the prices *up*, since the people can't drive to lower prices. Another example is in Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Nickle and Dimed, where she lives on minimum wage for a year in four different areas of the country. In Florida, she describes how her job options were severely limited by her lack of transportation.

All of this makes me wonder what a real transportation system would look like, and how it might do a lot to enable poor people in this country to achieve a better living situation. It seems like one of those problems that can be tackled both nationally and locally, where good results could be achieved through focused work in a short time. Now if I only had a few spare busses lying around...

[update] a friend of mine who works in urban planning had this response:

So the sad short answer to a transportation system which improves access and equity is help people buy cars. Guh . . I'm not a fan of this idea myself as I would like to see fewer cars, but studies show that access to a personal vehicle improves one's job prospects and earning potential.

One of my professors, Bob Cervero a huge champion of mass transit, did a study on Welfare to Work particpants in CA and sadly found that access to a car had a siginifcant impact on one's ability to locate and maintain a job. These findings echo those of similar studies and hod enough weight that there are now pilot programs where municipalities help low income families to purchase cars. It seems that the cities are helping families to purchase old beaters
which have lower purchase prices, but high maintenance costs. Grrr . . .?

This is clearly a short run solution both for environmental and economic reasons. In adidition to the increase pollution generated, the need for a parking space adds $20-60K to the purchase price of a house. I don't have the figures for rental, but this trickles downto renters as well. So if our policy is to help people buy into the auto-centric
transportation system we have established in the US, we are ultimately increasing their housing costs as
well as increasing demand for oil.

There is no easy answer, but there is an interesting report on transportation and social exclusion in the
G7 countries. http://www.fiafoundation.com/resources/documents/1061486349__se_high_res.pdf

Sadly, I think that we missed our chance at a "real transportation system" when Eisenhower decieded he
wanted to make a name for himself with the Interstate system and would do that at the cost of losing much of
the existing mass transit infrastructure. These funding decisions prioritized emerging suburbs and
rural areas over urban areas. While people recognize many of the mistakes, no one is quite sure how to
handle it.

---and later the friend continued:-----

as far as public transport vs. cars. there was a big power battle in mid 60's re: transportation funding. the general consensus was that public transportation should be privately funded (originally most street car lines were privately held, usually by real estate speculators who were trying to shuttle people out to the edges of the city wehere they owned land and could make bank when people bought. i.e. the green line in boston) then when cars came around the car/tire/oil companies pusheed for fed. ggovt to fun major roadbuilsing projects. while we poured tons of money into the interstate system, which was cut through cities and neighborhoods, usally poor ones, to the deteriment of transit systems, there was very very little $ given to invest in transit infrastructure. cities like ny, boston, and chicago made a stink and begged for some help because car congestion was killing the cities and transit was dying. bones were thrown, but it was too little to protect the streetcar systems in many smaller cities. they all switched to buses, which most middle class folks associate with 'the poor" and aren't inclined to take. it is very interesting to read perceptions of different types of transit.

anyway, today many people think of buses/ public transit as something for the poor and you know how we
feel about funding things for lower income peoples.

as far as minivan systems [private transportation companies], they are refered to as jitneys, and are not employed n teh US nearly as much as other countries, because we have many layers of hassle regulations on them. in fact, in many cities, informal jitney services are prohibited.

i think the most promising solution on the table these days is car sharing. have you heard of it? zip car or citycarcshare. you end up paying a fraction of cost of owning a car and have the convenience of access when necessary. [i have a feeling that poor people are not really tapped into the zip car market. maybe that could change though]

on a positive note, there is a new trend which is putting child care centers in or around transit stations with the recognition that many parents will be better able to use transit ot go to work if they can drop their children in proximity.

Abortion. Know your facts.

2005-06-21T20:38:00.000-04:00

I have found an excellent article on abortion that answers many longstanding questions of mine, like how abortion relates to socioeconomic status. The article is only available thorugh subscription, so I can only give a citation and quotes. I hope that all of you who care about this topic will take a minute to read this, so that you have a few facts at hand when thinking about what's at stake. I think this data directly contradicts the pernicious view that most women seek abortions after engaging in irresponsible behavior, and that it would be safer for women to carry their pregnancies to term.

The most important pieces of information for me in this article were the following statistics:
- "The risk of death from childbirth is 11 times greater than the risk of death from abortion."
- "The authors concluded that up to 87% of deaths in women having abortions may have been avoided if the pregnancy had been terminated before 8 weeks gestation."

The article is: Harper CC, Henderson JT, Darney PD. Abortion in the United States. Annu Rev Public Health. 2005;26:501-12.

Quotations:

Women who are unmarried (single or cohabitating) are more likely to have abortions than are married women. Low-income women also have more abortions because they have far more unintended pregnancies than do high-income women. Abortion rates in the year 2000 among low-income women were 44 per 1000 compared with 10 per 1000 among high income. Abortion rates fell for high- and middle-income women from the mid-nineties to the year 2000, but they increased among low-income and Medicaid recipients, including low-income teenagers. Black women are more likely to have unintended pregnancies than are women in other racial/ethnic groups, and thus they are more likely to have abortions. The abortion rate is 49 per 1000 for blacks, 33 per 1000 for Hispanics, 31 per 1000 for Asians, and 13 per 1000 for whites.

...

After legalization, deaths and morbidity caused by abortion experienced a steep and rapid decline. Data from the Abortion Mortality Surveillance System of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the risk of death associated with abortion is low, at 0.6 per 100,000 abortions. The risk of death from childbirth is 11 times greater than the risk of death from abortion. The causes of death from abortion are equally distributed among hemorrhage, infection, embolism, and anesthesia complications. The risk of major complications is less than 1%, and there is no evidence of subsequent childbearing problems among women who have had abortions.

Early procedures are extremely safe. Most deaths result from abortion during more advanced gestational periods. Bartlett et al. estimated the relative risk of abortion-related mortality at higher gestations compared with abortions at 8 weeks or less. The relative risk was 14.7 at 13-15 weeks gestation, 29.5 at 16-20 weeks, and 76.6 at 20+ weeks (95% CI 32.5, 180.8). The authors concluded that up to 87% of deaths in women having abortions may have been avoided if the pregnancy had been terminated before 8 weeks gestation. Increased access to abortion services, and particularly early abortion services, may help to decrease abortion-related deaths.

...

Many women in need of an abortion face obstacles to services. For example, women encounter bureaucratic barriers such as state laws requiring waiting periods and parental consent prior to obtaining an abortion. Another barrier to access is the absence of physicians who do abortions. The number of abortion providers has declined substantially since rising to a peak level in 1982 (24). The percentage of counties without an abortion provider has remained high since 1973. Yet more counties than ever lack an abortion provider: 87% of counties had no abortion provider as of the year 2000, and these counties contain over one third of the population of women aged 15-44 (19). Consequently, nearly one quarter (24%) of women seeking an abortion travel 50 miles or more to find a capable physician (24). Long travel distances, along with mandatory wait periods, can delay services (28).

...

A recent nationally representative study of contraceptive use among women obtaining abortions found that more than half of women were using some kind of contraceptive (either consistently or inconsistently) in the month they became pregnant. Low-income women were more likely to report difficulty accessing contraceptive services as one reason for their nonuse or inconsistency. Reductions in Medicaid health insurance coverage and stagnating Title X funding for reproductive health services and supplies are undoubtedly decreasing access to contraceptives in many states. Women and couples need a range of contraceptive options and comprehensive information to help them select and use a method that suits their needs.

Sixteen percent of all women obtaining abortions became pregnant because they were not expecting to have sex. Research suggests that increased emphasis on abstinence as a method of contraception may result in increased demand for abortion; although theoretical effectiveness is high, use effectiveness is low. Emergency contraception use may be responsible for some of the decline in the abortion rate during the nineties.

...

Public health researchers and policy makers are increasingly attentive to social disparities in health and health care access in the United States (43). But little attention is paid to trends in abortion and how they are affecting women differently by race and class. In recent years, the rate of abortion has risen among low-income women (those living below 200% of the federal poverty line) so that these women account for over half of all abortions obtained in the United States, although they comprise only 15% of the population. Abortion rates among black and Hispanic women have risen in recent years, whereas rates fell for white women. Access to information, education, quality health care, and contraceptive methods and services may contribute to the disparity in rates. Policies and programs that help women avoid unintended pregnancy are important public health measures, but maintaining access to abortion services is also critical to the lives of women with limited resources.

Other articles cited:

Bartlett LA, Berg CJ, Shulman HB, Zane SB, Green CA, et al. 2004. Risk factors for legal induced abortion-related mortality in the United States. Obstet. Gynecol. 103:729-37.

Elam-Evans L, Strauss LT, Herndon J, Parker WY, Bowens SV, et al. 2003. Abortion Surveillance, United States, 2000. MMWR 52:1-32

Jones RK, Darroch JE, Henshaw S. 2002. Patterns in the socioeconomic characteristics of women obtaining abortions in 2000-2001. Perspect. Sex. Reprod. Health 34:226-35

Jones RK, Darroch JE, Henshaw SK. 2002. Contraceptive use among U.S. women having abortions in 2000-2001. Perspect. Sex. Reprod. Health 34:294-303

in short

2005-06-21T17:53:00.000-04:00

Junk DNA (supposedly useless) keeps male voles devoted.

A follow up article on the man who was beaten the point of brain damage by five soldiers at Guantanamo during a training exercise, during which he wore a prisoner's jumpsuit. The soldiers were told he was a detainee who was misbehaving. No soldiers have been disciplined.

privacy shmivacy

2005-06-21T17:47:00.000-04:00

The AP has discovered that, *shockingly*, TSA has been gathering data on passengers after Congress expressly told it not to. And when I say shockingly, I mean, in an entirely unshocking fashion.

The federal agency in charge of aviation security collected extensive personal information about airline passengers even though Congress forbade it and officials said they wouldn't do it, according to documents obtained Monday by The Associated Press...

The Privacy Act of 1974 prohibits the government from keeping a secret database. It also requires agencies to make official statements on the impact of their record keeping on privacy.

The TSA revealed its use of commercial data in a revised Privacy Act statement to be published Wednesday in the Federal Register.

"This is like creating an FBI file, not just some simple check, and then they're storing the data," said Sparapani, the ACLU attorney.

TSA spokesman Mark Hatfield said the program was being developed with a commitment to privacy, and that it was routine to change Privacy Act statements during testing.

napalm in iraq

2005-06-17T14:55:00.000-04:00

The US lied to Britain about its use of Napalm in Iraq.

Despite persistent rumours of injuries among Iraqis consistent with the use of incendiary weapons such as napalm, Adam Ingram, the Defence minister, assured Labour MPs in January that US forces had not used a new generation of incendiary weapons, codenamed MK77, in Iraq.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. "The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you," he told Mr Cohen. "I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position."

I have no words to describe my shame and disgust.

a moderate Christian speaks out

2005-06-17T12:10:00.000-04:00

This op-ed from John Danforth (former Republican senator from Missouri) is worth printing in full:

Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers

It would be an oversimplification to say that America's culture wars are now between people of faith and nonbelievers. People of faith are not of one mind, whether on specific issues like stem cell research and government intervention in the case of Terri Schiavo, or the more general issue of how religion relates to politics. In recent years, conservative Christians have presented themselves as representing the one authentic Christian perspective on politics. With due respect for our conservative friends, equally devout Christians come to very different conclusions.

It is important for those of us who are sometimes called moderates to make the case that we, too, have strongly held Christian convictions, that we speak from the depths of our beliefs, and that our approach to politics is at least as faithful as that of those who are more conservative. Our difference concerns the extent to which government should, or even can, translate religious beliefs into the laws of the state.

People of faith have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to bring their values to bear in politics. Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.

Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.

When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.

When we see an opportunity to save our neighbors' lives through stem cell research, we believe that it is our duty to pursue that research, and to oppose legislation that would impede us from doing so.

We think that efforts to haul references of God into the public square, into schools and courthouses, are far more apt to divide Americans than to advance faith.

Following a Lord who reached out in compassion to all human beings, we oppose amending the Constitution in a way that would humiliate homosexuals.

For us, living the Love Commandment may be at odds with efforts to encapsulate Christianity in a political agenda. We strongly support the separation of church and state, both because that principle is essential to holding together a diverse country, and because the policies of the state always fall short of the demands of faith. Aware that even our most passionate ventures into politics are efforts to carry the treasure of religion in the earthen vessel of government, we proceed in a spirit of humility lacking in our conservative colleagues.

In the decade since I left the Senate, American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. I do not think it is a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two. To assert that I am on God's side and you are not, that I know God's will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God's kingdom is certain to produce hostility.

By contrast, moderate Christians see ourselves, literally, as moderators. Far from claiming to possess God's truth, we claim only to be imperfect seekers of the truth. We reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. We believe it is God's work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today's politics.

For us, religion should be inclusive, and it should seek to bridge the differences that separate people. We do not exclude from worship those whose opinions differ from ours. Following a Lord who sat at the table with tax collectors and sinners, we welcome to the Lord's table all who would come. Following a Lord who cited love of God and love of neighbor as encompassing all the commandments, we reject a political agenda that displaces that love. Christians who hold these convictions ought to add their clear voice of moderation to the debate on religion in politics.

in short

2005-06-16T20:05:00.000-04:00

The junk food lobby is going strong in Connecticut, where the governor has blocked a law that would have limited the availability of soda and junk food in schools. For context, we note that child violence has been linked to malnutrition. You may also remember from Super Size Me that a school for 'bad kids' in Oregon that switched to nutritious foods only (no junk food or foods prepared off site allowed) experienced a huge improvement in student behavior.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, has written an very thorough and damning Salon article on mercury based vaccines and their link to autism (whih now appears strong).

Adrian Lomax has a gripping piece on torture by withholding medical treatment in American prisons. I have preivously I have previously read disturbing accounts about this in the abstract, but this article's accounts sharpen the horror.

question time

2005-06-16T17:43:00.000-04:00

Witness Terry Moran's dogged but unsuccessful attempt to get an answer out of Scott McClellan:

Q Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its 'last throes'?

McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free and democratic and peaceful future. And that's why we're doing everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi people as they move forward....

Q But the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day -- you have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions.

Q But they're killing more Americans, they're killing more Iraqis. That's the last throes?

McCLELLAN: Innocent -- I say innocent civilians. And it doesn't take a lot of people to cause mass damage when you're willing to strap a bomb onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians. That's the kind of people that we're dealing with. That's what I say when we're talking about a determined enemy.

Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.

Q What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?

McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You're seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They're working side by side with our coalition forces. They're working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.

Q Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.

McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President's remarks. I think he talked about it.

Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a 'last throe' lasts for?

McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve....

tables turned

2005-06-15T18:17:00.000-04:00

It's a dog eat dog world in Iraq, where 17 contractors (including at least two former marines) were taken captive by the marines for supposedly firing on civilians and the marines, according to the LA Times. The contractors claimed that they were stripped naked and threatened with weapons and dogs while the marines took pictures. Their lawyer also claims that the families of the contractors were called and threatened to kill the contractors if they talked to the media. The marines deny the story, and claim that the contractors were treated humanely, just like everyone else. Choice quotes:

"I never in my career have treated anybody so inhumane," one of the contractors, Rick Blanchard, a former Florida state trooper, wrote in an e-mail message. "They treated us like insurgents, roughed us up, took photos, hazed us, called us names."

"How does it feel to be a big, rich contractor now?" the Marines shouted at the men, Schopper said, in an apparent reference to the large salaries security contractors can make in Iraq.

"Two years into the [Iraq war], and there's still a hole when it comes to a legal structure," said Peter W. Singer, a Brookings Institution scholar who has written extensively on private military contractors.

Something tells me the contractors aren't going to let this story go... unless they get paid off of course. It should be amusing to watch these two bullies fighting.

in brief

2005-06-14T16:54:00.000-04:00

Der Spiegel ("the Mirror") has a trenchant article on the billions being wasted on useless gadgets on in the name of Homeland Security.

Anthiny Shahid, the only fluent speaker of Arabic in the mainstream press, has written a great article detailing the serious problems surrounding US training of Iraqi police forces. via common dreams.

Monbiot at the Guardian writes a scathing column on "debt relief", otherwise known as extortion, where poor countries are told their debts will be forgiven if they remove all impediments to private corporations ravaging their countries.

raped and silenced

2005-06-14T16:42:00.000-04:00

Kristof writes in the times today that Mukhtaran Bibi, the Pakistani woman who was sentenced to be gang raped in her village for an infraction committed by her brother, and who instead of committing suicide after the atrocity became a voice for women in her community, is now under house arrest and being prevented from speaking to anyone. She was on her way to the US to come to speak about her experiences when she was kidnapped and detained by the police. Airports are forbidden to allow her to leave the country. The group that invited her has a site with updates.

equity

2005-06-07T01:26:00.000-04:00

Bill Moyers gave an excellent speech on the state of America at a conference in Washington over the weekend. He quoted the Economist as saying that "The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." He went on to say,

It wasn't supposed to be this way. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a decent equilibrium in how democracy works so that it didn't just work for the powerful and privileged (If you don't believe me, I'll send you my copy of The Federalist Papers). The economist Jeffrey Madrick put it well: Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, Americans made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors - especially the relative poor - were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all (white) comers, rather than held for elites. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land and even supported squatters' rights. The old hope for equal access to opportunity became a reality for millions. Including yours truly.

Unfortunately, most people seem to have bought Milton Friedman and his ilk's line that there is no free lunch. People seem to think that it is just impossible to live in an economically equitable society (wilfully ignoring our neighbors across the Atlantic). It seems that the possibility of equity (not equality mind you, just Equity), is just too horrifying to people, because that would mean that we are Choosing to live like this, with a shameful healthcare system, single mothers slaving away at sweatshops to support their children who don't learn to read in schools, and huge corporations riding their enormous subsidies to the bank. And so cognitive dissonance comes to the rescue -- it is Freedom that requires that we ignore the suffering of the poor and middle class, Freedom that says companies can mercilessly enforce contracts and kill people to meet the bottom line, Freedom that says people should not be able to sue for their harm. The American dream has always been somewhat of an illusion it seems, but it is now being actually redefined to mean its opposite. Everything that makes us a backwards country compared to Europe (lack of education and social services) is suddenly that which makes us American -- because the American dream is now the right to struggle and struggle until you drop dead. That is your right as an American.

It is difficult for me to see how the vast majority of this country is going to survive economically through this generation -- no bankruptcy, predatory lending, exorberant credit rates, slashed welfare, massive medical bills, huge gas prices, funding a war -- I am at a loss to understand how people are even doing it now.

So things look bleak. On one hopeful note, however, I am writing this post from Jackson, Mississippi, which I expected to be a horror, and which has proven to be a pretty nice town. I haven't seen too much of it, but I have seen a black judge presiding in court. Fifty years ago that probably would have been inconceivable -- so maybe things can turn around economically in this country... or maybe we all are just going to have to adapt to being a third world economy.

children see better

2005-06-07T01:04:00.000-04:00

There's a guy who turns children's drawings into paintings. I think he does a pretty great job (and I'm not a ginormous fan of representational art).
(via boing boing)

strait talker?

2005-06-04T18:00:00.000-04:00

According to a close advisor, Governor Romney of Massachusetts has been lying his whole political career about being pro-choice. Apparently, he's preparing himself for a presidential bid, where being anti-choice, anti-women and anti-truth is becoming a requirement.

in brief

2005-06-03T17:32:00.000-04:00

In Kansas, a state senator who once said that the 19th amendment was a bad idea now wants to be Kansas' top election official. The insipid Kay O'Connor:

"I think the 19th Amendment, while it's not an evil in and of itself, is a symptom of something I don't approve of," she said at the time. "The 19th Amendment is around because men weren't doing their jobs, and I think that's sad. I believe the man should be the head of the family. The woman should be the heart of the family."

The military has delayed the release of its recruiting data for May.

immigrant myths

2005-05-26T03:36:00.000-04:00

The American Immigration Lawers Association has a great page explaining five immigration myths, complete with many footnotes. Exerpt:

The report by the National Academy of Sciences also found that immigrants benefit the U.S. economy overall, have little negative effect on the income and job opportunities of most native-born Americans, and may add as much as $10 billion to the economy each year. As a result, the report concluded, most Americans enjoy a healthier economy because of the increased supply of labor and lower prices resulting from immigration.

via swarm the minutemen, a group dedicated to opposing the "minutemen", an anti-immigrant citizen group that has recently been patroling the boarder with guns to protest what it sees as the lack of proper surveillance of illegal crossings. For more information, go here (story about the group) and here (op-ed criticizing the group).

in short

2005-05-25T23:02:00.000-04:00

Howard Zinn gave a great commencement address called "Against Discouragement" at Spelman college, from which he was fired in 1963 for his civil rights activities. A quote: "The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies."

A sign in front of Danieltown Baptist Church, located at 2361 U.S. 221 south reads "The Koran needs to be flushed," and the Rev. Creighton Lovelace, pastor of the church, is not apologizing for the display.

The US has upped arms sales to some of the world's most repressive and undemocratic regimes in a misguided attempt to bolster counter-terrorism efforts 2001, says a new report from leading arms trade researchers.

Go to Senseless Acts of Beauty for some good graffiti

A white buffalo was born in Canada. The white buffalo is seen as a portent of peace in many Native American traditions.

Apartment Therapy is running a contest for the smallest, coolest appartment in New York.

jedi tricks

2005-05-25T15:55:00.000-04:00

Are you perhaps wondering how news about military recruiters' desperation got out? A 15 year old kid in Colerado decided to do an undercover story, posing as a high school dropout and drug addict. He got everything on tape by pretending to be forgetful and having the recruiters repeat everything on the phone. Strong work, young journalist.

surreal medicine

2005-05-23T13:22:00.000-04:00

Iraqis are selling their organs in increasing numbers, due to 60% unemployment and the extreme danger of being a taxi driver or policeman (the big jobmarkets). The donors often meet donees on the hospital steps. The going rate for a kidney is about $1000.

Worlds apart, a Dartmouth MBA candidtate has founded Hufu, "The Healthy Human Flesh Alternative".

in a nutshell

2005-05-23T02:51:00.000-04:00

Frank Rich puts newsweek in context, and jabs the administration several times in a roundly satisfying fashion. exerpt:

About the Newsweek matter Donald Rumsfeld had a moral to bequeath the land. "People need to be careful what they say," he said, channeling Ari Fleischer, and added, "just as people need to be careful what they do." How true. If one of his right-hand men, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, hadn't been barnstorming American churches making internationally publicized pronouncements that his own Christian God is "a real God" and Islam's God is "an idol," maybe anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, at record highs even before the Newsweek incident, would have been a shade less lethal. If higher-ups had been called to account for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, maybe Newsweek might have had as little traction in the Arab world as The Onion.

Got mutant kidneys?

2005-05-22T22:45:00.000-04:00

The Sunday Independent writes that a secret study conducted by Monsanto found that rats fed on a diet rich in genetically modified corn developed abnormalities to internal organs and changes to their blood. This disclosure comes on the eve of a European vote on whether they should open up to GM foods. According to the aricle, Monsanto "dismissed the abnormalities in rats as meaningless and due to chance, reflecting normal variations between rats."

This comes as a vindication to British environmentalists: seven years ago, British researcher Dr. Arpad Pusztai, was forced from his job after revealing that rats fed GM potatos suffered health defects. You can read more about that story in Trust Us We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, famed authors of Toxic Sludge is Good for You!: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry.

While I try to eat organic as much as I can, it's expensive and sometimes difficult to locate. I'm hoping that some kind of regulations kick into gear before we all die of cancer. Speaking of which, researchers have found that women who stick to a low-fat diet are significantly less likely to suffer a recurrence than those who eat regular fatty diets. The women in the study who stuck to the diet were 24% less likely to relapse. I have read that cancer feeds on sugar, which may be what is at the root of this study, but I can't find a reliable source at the moment. Anyway the funny thing about the study was that it hasn't been done sooner. It always amazes me the degree to which doctors fail to consult nutritionists before acting; foods are chemicals too! And of course, with Monsanto's help, they will be even more so.

luck or labor?

2005-05-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

A good column by Matt Miller on luck. Lest the nytimes put up their opinion section firewall anytime soon, I post it for you below.

Test your political philosophy with one simple question: which matters most in determining where people end up in life?

You've got two choices. The first is "luck" - by which I mean the pre-birth lottery, that inherited package of wealth, health, genes, looks, brains, talents and family. "Luck" is all those gifts or curses for which we can neither take credit nor be blamed.

Choice No. 2 is individual effort, hard work and personal character.

Obviously this is a false choice; every life is a blend of both. We're born with certain endowments, and make the most of them (or don't) based on personal traits. But if you had to say which one matters most in shaping where people end up, how many of you would join me in answering "luck"?

In a poll I commissioned a few years ago, people who call themselves liberals or Democrats overwhelmingly said luck; most conservatives or Republicans said individual effort.

But if you're hoping to shake up today's gridlocked politics, what's interesting is that independent voters - now the nation's biggest bloc - viewed luck the way Democrats do.

Luck isn't a bad proxy for what the current Times series labels "class." It's a theme U.S. politics conspicuously avoids. Yet if we approached it right - if we took luck seriously - we'd be on the way to the commonsense consensus needed to make progress on our fixable injustices.

What should luck's influence mean for public policy? Conservatives, worried that an honest admission of luck's role would sanction economy-killing egalitarianism, always end up playing down luck. Liberals, while deeply concerned with luck, have often been unwilling to ease the burden of bad luck in ways that preserve the best of capitalist innovation and the virtues of individual responsibility.

Try too hard to wipe out the inequities spawned by luck, and you banish luck's societal benefits and go down the road of communism. But harness a healthy awe for luck, and you expand the bounds of empathy in ways that make a living wage for poor workers and great schools for poor children national imperatives. What we're led to is the public agenda missing today, built around passionate commitments - by both liberals and conservatives - to (1) equal opportunity and (2) a minimally decent life, achieved in ways that harness market forces for public purposes.

Don't take my word for it. The surprising truth is that conservative icon Milton Friedman and liberal philosopher John Rawls agree that luck's ubiquity compels these commitments. Friedman once told me his concern for luck's reach had inspired his call for a decent minimum for the unlucky. He fathered what became the earned-income tax credit, which delivers $35 billion a year in wage subsidies to the working poor. Rawls, apostle of the just society, cheered this.

Friedman added that there is no principled way to decide what the decent minimum should be; it's a political question that depends on what taxes we're willing to pay. Rawls basically said "make it good" - but not so generous that taxes hurt growth.

But this debate isn't being framed explicitly today by either side.

So the conservative view of the decent minimum comes to this: "You're lucky to be in America; you're lucky to have a job; you're lucky to have the emergency room." A better idea would be "basic health coverage and $9 to $10 an hour, without putting the full burden of this on employers." Turns out we can have such a society for a penny on the national dollar (1% of G.D.P.), and still leave government smaller (21% of G.D.P.) than it was under President Ronald Reagan.

Can't we shake hands and call it a deal?

The anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist won't debate what luck means for policy; he says luck is irrelevant (though he seems like a lucky guy).

By contrast, most Hollywood stars don't gripe about taxes the way many wealthy Americans do. My theory is that these supertalents are more sensitive to the portion of their wealth that's attributable to luck. Yes, there's hard work and persistence and making your own breaks, but the voice, the presence, the body (well, minus certain modern upgrades) clearly come from God.

As polling shows, average Americans agree luck is central. And religious conservatives say that responding to luck's dominion is a way to honor the divine mystery that put us here. With a little luck, that means Democrats may find they can make America more just while grounding their agenda in values that can win.

of interest

2005-05-21T02:01:00.000-04:00

A hundred faculty members at a Calvinist University set to receive President Bush as its commencement speaker have signed an open letter critiquing his policies from the Christian standpoint.

Pressure is growing on the US to answer for kidnapping suspects in Europe and taking them to the middle east to be tortured.

Asian Bird Flu may be evolving to transmit from person to person, with lower virulency for more wide spread transmission.

Enough low income grandparents are raising children in new york that a new housing complex has been built for them in the South Bronx.

The president of the 35,000 member Newspaper Guild has spoken out against the US military killing journalists in Iraq. Remember that for this, Eason Jordan of CNN was forced to resign. Feathers have become ruffled.

sharing is caring

2005-05-20T10:57:00.000-04:00

Foolish purveyors of piracy protection are fixing to equip DVDs with RFID tags so that they are linked to one purchaser. The idea is that you can't view the disk unless you have the password or some biometric data like a fingerprint. Why it's dumb:
- people forget passwords
- you can tell your friends the password
- who wants to give their fingerprint every time they see a movie?
- who would buy a new DVD player if they knew it would prohibit them from seeing loaned movies?
- presumeably, Netflix will still exist

I'm waiting for the genius that figures out how to use peoples' obsession with copying to their profit. Those saucy brits over at the BBC may be close.

In related news, a lecturer at a Spanish university was fired for giving a talk on the benefits of P2P and some of its legal uses. In fact, not only was he fired, but the dean then denied that he had ever taught at the university. The death throes of a pathetic monster, this is.

On a different note, researchers have found that there is an inverse relationship between the ability to categorize and the ability to remember details.

tales of the unexpected

2005-05-20T00:43:00.000-04:00

lion mutilates 42 midgets in Cambodian ring fight. see for yourself.

Fristing

2005-05-18T21:08:00.000-04:00

An interesting comment from dailyKos in the midst of a discussion on how Frist is pushing the nuclear option in a bargain with religious right extremist James Dobson, who may be promising to deliver his base for a Frist presidential run. There was skepticism in the previous comments about Frist's ability to get any play in an election. Below, an interesting response; I was not aware of this angle.

The Frist family could potenially spend 50-100 million of their Hospital Corporation founder earned dollars getting Frist elected President.

The Frist Family's Hospital Corporation of America has already been fined billions for medicare fraud. Spending $100 million getting Frist elected President would be a drop in the bucket compared to the potential fines Hospital Corporation of America is facing in their next round of investigations.

Let's not forget that Hospital Corporation of America IS what the whole Terry Schiavo mess was about to begin with. The Frist family stands to make billions and billions of dollars if they can get Living Wills banned and force those with insurance onto hideously expensive life support equipment until their insurance runs out. 1 patient on life support can run up bills of hundreds of thousands of dallars a year.

tell it like it is.

2005-05-18T20:12:00.000-04:00

out of the woods with exams, i am resolving to recommense blogging. I post for an exerpt of remarks from British MP George Galloway, delivered today before a Senage committe on the oil for food program. Via the Engish Times.

"Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.

"Now I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors. Then I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me you assert that I have had 'many meetings' with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

"I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August of 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

"As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.

"I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and Americans governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.

"You will see from the official parliamentary record, Hansard, from the 15th March 1990 onwards, voluminous evidence that I have a rather better record of opposition to Saddam Hussein than you do and than any other member of the British or American governments do.

"Now you say in this document, you quote a source, you have the gall to quote a source, without ever having asked me whether the allegation from the source is true, that I am 'the owner of a company which has made substantial profits from trading in Iraqi oil'.

"Senator, I do not own any companies, beyond a small company whose entire purpose, whose sole purpose, is to receive the income from my journalistic earnings from my employer, Associated Newspapers, in London. I do not own a company that's been trading in Iraqi oil. And you have no business to carry a quotation, utterly unsubstantiated and false, implying otherwise.

"Now you have nothing on me, Senator, except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad. If you had any of the letters against me that you had against Zhirinovsky, and even Pasqua, they would have been up there in your slideshow for the members of your committee today.

"You have my name on lists provided to you by the Duelfer inquiry, provided to him by the convicted bank robber, and fraudster and conman Ahmed Chalabi who many people to their credit in your country now realise played a decisive role in leading your country into the disaster in Iraq.

"There were 270 names on that list originally. That's somehow been filleted down to the names you chose to deal with in this committee. Some of the names on that committee included the former secretary to his Holiness Pope John Paul II, the former head of the African National Congress Presidential office and many others who had one defining characteristic in common: they all stood against the policy of sanctions and war which you vociferously prosecuted and which has led us to this disaster.

"You quote Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Well, you have something on me, I've never met Mr Dahar Yassein Ramadan. Your sub-committee apparently has. But I do know that he's your prisoner, I believe he's in Abu Ghraib prison. I believe he is facing war crimes charges, punishable by death. In these circumstances, knowing what the world knows about how you treat prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison, in Bagram Airbase, in Guantanamo Bay, including I may say, British citizens being held in those places.

"I'm not sure how much credibility anyone would put on anything you manage to get from a prisoner in those circumstances. But you quote 13 words from Dahar Yassein Ramadan whom I have never met. If he said what he said, then he is wrong.

"And if you had any evidence that I had ever engaged in any actual oil transaction, if you had any evidence that anybody ever gave me any money, it would be before the public and before this committee today because I agreed with your Mr Greenblatt [Mark Greenblatt, legal counsel on the committee].

"Your Mr Greenblatt was absolutely correct. What counts is not the names on the paper, what counts is where's the money. Senator? Who paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars of money? The answer to that is nobody. And if you had anybody who ever paid me a penny, you would have produced them today.

"Now you refer at length to a company names in these documents as Aredio Petroleum. I say to you under oath here today: I have never heard of this company, I have never met anyone from this company. This company has never paid a penny to me and I'll tell you something else: I can assure you that Aredio Petroleum has never paid a single penny to the Mariam Appeal Campaign. Not a thin dime. I don't know who Aredio Petroleum are, but I daresay if you were to ask them they would confirm that they have never met me or ever paid me a penny.

"Whilst I'm on that subject, who is this senior former regime official that you spoke to yesterday? Don't you think I have a right to know? Don't you think the Committee and the public have a right to know who this senior former regime official you were quoting against me interviewed yesterday actually is?

"Now, one of the most serious of the mistakes you have made in this set of documents is, to be frank, such a schoolboy howler as to make a fool of the efforts that you have made. You assert on page 19, not once but twice, that the documents that you are referring to cover a different period in time from the documents covered by The Daily Telegraph which were a subject of a libel action won by me in the High Court in England late last year.

"You state that The Daily Telegraph article cited documents from 1992 and 1993 whilst you are dealing with documents dating from 2001. Senator, The Daily Telegraph's documents date identically to the documents that you were dealing with in your report here. None of The Daily Telegraph's documents dealt with a period of 1992, 1993. I had never set foot in Iraq until late in 1993 - never in my life. There could possibly be no documents relating to Oil-for-Food matters in 1992, 1993, for the Oil-for-Food scheme did not exist at that time.

"And yet you've allocated a full section of this document to claiming that your documents are from a different era to the Daily Telegraph documents when the opposite is true. Your documents and the Daily Telegraph documents deal with exactly the same period.

"But perhaps you were confusing the Daily Telegraph action with the Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor did indeed publish on its front pages a set of allegations against me very similar to the ones that your committee have made. They did indeed rely on documents which started in 1992, 1993. These documents were unmasked by the Christian Science Monitor themselves as forgeries.

"Now, the neo-con websites and newspapers in which you're such a hero, senator, were all absolutely cock-a-hoop at the publication of the Christian Science Monitor documents, they were all absolutely convinced of their authenticity. They were all absolutely convinced that these documents showed me receiving $10 million from the Saddam regime. And they were all lies.

"In the same week as the Daily Telegraph published their documents against me, the Christian Science Monitor published theirs which turned out to be forgeries and the British newspaper, Mail on Sunday, purchased a third set of documents which also upon forensic examination turned out to be forgeries. So there's nothing fanciful about this. Nothing at all fanciful about it.

"The existence of forged documents implicating me in commercial activities with the Iraqi regime is a proven fact. It's a proven fact that these forged documents existed and were being circulated amongst right-wing newspapers in Baghdad and around the world in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Iraqi regime.

"Now, Senator, I gave my heart and soul to oppose the policy that you promoted. I gave my political life's blood to try to stop the mass killing of Iraqis by the sanctions on Iraq which killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to born at that time. I gave my heart and soul to stop you committing the disaster that you did commit in invading Iraq. And I told the world that your case for the war was a pack of lies.

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.

"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq's wealth.

"Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq's wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Haliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq's money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

"Have a look at the oil that you didn't even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

"Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government."

right to rhetoric

2005-03-21T04:19:00.000-05:00

This post from Digbysblog deserves to be reprinted in its entirity: (thanks to kos)

Tom DeLay of Texas says:

"Mrs. Schiavo's life is not slipping away - it is being violently wrenched from her body in an act of medical terrorism," DeLay said. "Mr. Schiavo's attorney's characterization of the premeditated starvation and dehydration of a helpless woman as 'her dying process' is as disturbing as it is unacceptable. What is happening to her is not compassion - it is homicide. She doesn't need to die, and as long as Terri Schiavo can breathe and her supporters can pray, we will not rest."

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

This is why we cannot trust the mainstream media. Most people get their news from television. And television is presenting this issue as a round the clock one dimensional soap opera pitting the "family", the congress and the church against this woman's husband and the judicial system that upheld Terry Schiavo's right and explicit request that she be allowed to die if extraordinary means were required to keep her alive. The ghoulish infotainment industry is making a killing by acceding once again to trumped up right wing sensationalism.

This issue gets to the essence of the culture war. Shall the state be allowed to interfere in the most delicate, complicated personal matters of life, death and health because a particular religious constituency holds that their belief system should override each individual's right to make these personal decisions for him or herself. And it isn't the allegedly statist/communist/socialist left that is agitating for the government to tell Americans how they must live and how they must die.

One of the things that we need to help America understand is that there is a big difference between the way the two parties perceive the role of government in its citizens personal lives. Democrats want the government to collect money from all its citizens in order to deliver services to the people. The Republicans want the government to collect money from working people in order to dictate individual citizen's personal decisions. You tell me which is the bigger intrusion into the average American's liberty?

homeopathy, not just for hippies

2005-03-18T18:57:00.000-05:00

apologies for the lapse of writing - i've been suckered into doing more of my law reading than usual. but now it's friday, which means it's time to read about Science and other exicting things. New Scientist is a great place to start, with a very cool piece called 13 things that do not make sense. I found this one particularly interesting:

MADELEINE Ennis, a pharmacologist at Queen's University, Belfast, was the scourge of homeopathy. She railed against its claims that a chemical remedy could be diluted to the point where a sample was unlikely to contain a single molecule of anything but water, and yet still have a healing effect. Until, that is, she set out to prove once and for all that homeopathy was bunkum.

In her most recent paper, Ennis describes how her team looked at the effects of ultra-dilute solutions of histamine on human white blood cells involved in inflammation. These "basophils" release histamine when the cells are under attack. Once released, the histamine stops them releasing any more. The study, replicated in four different labs, found that homeopathic solutions - so dilute that they probably didn't contain a single histamine molecule - worked just like histamine. Ennis might not be happy with the homeopaths' claims, but she admits that an effect cannot be ruled out.

So how could it happen? Homeopaths prepare their remedies by dissolving things like charcoal, deadly nightshade or spider venom in ethanol, and then diluting this "mother tincture" in water again and again. No matter what the level of dilution, homeopaths claim, the original remedy leaves some kind of imprint on the water molecules. Thus, however dilute the solution becomes, it is still imbued with the properties of the remedy.

You can understand why Ennis remains sceptical. And it remains true that no homeopathic remedy has ever been shown to work in a large randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial. But the Belfast study (Inflammation Research, vol 53, p 181) suggests that something is going on. "We are," Ennis says in her paper, "unable to explain our findings and are reporting them to encourage others to investigate this phenomenon." If the results turn out to be real, she says, the implications are profound: we may have to rewrite physics and chemistry.

useful items:
specs of the experiment here
article about homeopathy controversy here
another article here
The favored explanation seems to be that homeopathy works by "structuring water", such that the dearth of actual molecules from the original solution are irrelevant. Put another way, water has a memory. If that's the case, how do you erase the memory? Are certain kinds of compounds more likely to impose a structure than others? Could you store information in water this way? Hmm.

check points

2005-03-08T13:16:00.000-05:00

A journalist from the Christian Science Monitor has written about what a check point in Iraq is really like. Apparently, the set up is very confusing, so people don't understand when they are supposed to stop. Also, under Saddam, going slowly meant that you would get arrested for suspicious behavior. People are also afraid of opposition fighters on the road. Overall, a very bad scene.

sticks and stones

2005-03-04T00:20:00.000-05:00

The good denziens at dailyKos have gotten their mitts on what we may affectionately call the Luntz Playbook (zip PDF). Frank Luntz is a top republican strategist. His research includes testing certain policy frames on audiences and keeping the methods that work best. He then publishes the results of his research in a book that is distributed to all Republican operatives. I highly, highly recommend taking a look at this item. Time to take the words out of their mouths...

arrrrrrr

2005-03-03T23:37:00.000-05:00

Our nordic friends across the pond have established The Pirate Bay which they claim is the world's largest bit torrent tracker. I would like to draw your attention in particular to their Legal Threats page. The page contains many humerous and irreverent responses to the cease and desist letters that have been coming in. On the more serious end, here is an exerpt from their lawyer's reply to one angry movie studio:

We understand that you are familiar with Bit Torrent technology. Then you may, or may not, understand that none of the data that you hold the copyright to reside on thepiratebay.org's servers.

This raises the question of the reach of Swedish and European copyright law. It is the opinion of us, and the Swedish Supreme Court, that information about WHERE to obtain copyrighted material, which is the case with Bit Torrent, is not illegal. The '.torrent' files that are offered for download at the site in question contain nothing more than hash and checksum information. How this information could, in itself, possibly be an infrigement of your copyright is beyond us and apparently
the Swedish legal system agrees.
...
Our guess, since you did not provide us with adequate information on which laws and regulations that you feel are violated, is that you are referring to 'Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society'. Whether or not this act does indeed state that the information contained in '.torrent' files is a violation of the authors' intellectual rights or not is of little importance in the case at hand. The act does not have direct effect and calls upon the member states to take appropriate action in order to protect the rights refered to in the directive. Obiously the Swedish government, to this date, considers that it has done so and that all rights are protected under the current Swedish legalizlation. And as stated above our activity on the site in question and on our servers are not in violation of Swedish law. As law-abiding good upstanding citizens we do not question our wise government's policy.

I know nothing on the subject of the international reach of American copyright laws. It's my understanding though that right now, torrent links don't even violate American law, as they depend on p2p networks, but that could change when the Supreme Court rules on the Grockster case. When that happens, I would assume that nothing would change in Sweden, unless the US pushes some kind of intellectual property treaty. Either way, I am interested to see how the corporate entites go about responding to the increasing threats to their hegemony.

currency crisis

2005-03-02T09:42:00.000-05:00

dailyKos has a good post about the bind that asian financial institutions are in right now; their US bonds are rapidly decreasing in value. if they sell, the whole thing rashes. if they don't sell, they're left with empty dollars. they are getting worried...

predictions?

get those kids some guns

2005-02-24T22:20:00.000-05:00

The New York Amsterdam News writes today that "The military spends about $3 billion each year to convince young people that enlistment will give them college money, job training and an alternative to working at McDonald's." They usually get what they pay for. However, the military is having a bit more trouble than usual finding young fodder in New York of late, since a student led group called Youth Activists-Youth Allies (YaYas) has begun educating students at recruiting meetings and around schools about the realities of signing up for the military. Many students have reconsidered theri initial excitement about signing up after hearing some of the facts:

* Two-thirds of recruits don't get any college money, according to the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.
* Most people in the military do not have time to attend college while in the service.
* To qualify for college money recruits have to pay $100 per month for a year.
* The unemployment rate for veterans is three times higher than the national average.
* People who sign up with the Delayed Entry Program are told they can't change their minds, but getting out is as simple as writing a letter.
* The enlistment contract is for eight years.
* There are other ways to finance college, like federal financial aid, private scholarships, going to community college or joining AmeriCorps.

The aritcle continues, "Often, the recruiters' sales pitches, brochures and posters go unchallenged. Many educators fear principals will retaliate if they speak out... Some schools are reticent to limit the military's presence because they think they will lose federal funding... No Child Left Behind, the educational policy touted by the Bush administration, requires that recruiters and college representatives have equal access to students. This is often misinterpreted as unlimited access."

The YaYa's are members of the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), a group formed last year to combat the militarization of young people around the country.

torture train

2005-02-24T20:57:00.000-05:00

Newsweek has got its paws on the flight log of a Boeing 737, which has been used over the past few yeas to pick up suspects and deliver them to be tortured by the CIA. This is good news for Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who was snatched off of a bus in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. For five months he was tortured in Afghanistan, before being returned to Macedonia where the boarder guards laughed at his story. Kafka's nightmares are alive, but hopefully it's going to be possible to wake up.

back to the kitchen!

2005-02-18T11:02:00.000-05:00

Harvard president larry summers finally released a a transcript of his incindiary remarks yesterday. i've pasted the most important passage below, though it's worth skimming through the whole thing. in case it reads like garbage to you, what he's saying is that the paucity of women in top science places is due to three factors: (1) women being unwilling to spend a lot time in the work place, (2) women not being as likely to vary from the statistical norm of dumb average population (this analysis based on a self-avowedly bad calculation of a study of twelfth graders), and (3) some small amount of discrimination.

summer claimed that such discrimination was much less responsible for the result than the first two factors. he proved this by arguing that if everyone was discriminating against talented people, a few people could assemble the best departments by choosing not to discriminate. since we don't see such departments, they clearly aren't discriminating. the problem with this argument is that people dont pursue incredibly advanced degrees and top positions for their health; it it is understood that women are barred from the top, and it gets more and more difficult to achieve each stage (college, graduate programs, post doc, early teaching positions), then a large number of potentially brilliant women will not seek this path, and then remainnig few who duke it out won't be enough to create the skewed department that summers mentioned in his example.

ok, here is the paragraph on factor Two on natural aptitude:

"The second thing that I think one has to recognize is present is what I would call the combination of, and here, I'm focusing on something that would seek to answer the question of why is the pattern different in science and engineering, and why is the representation even lower and more problematic in science and engineering than it is in other fields. And here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis. It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability-there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means-which can be debated-there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined. If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out. I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways. I looked at the Xie and Shauman paper-looked at the book, rather-looked at the evidence on the sex ratios in the top 5% of twelfth graders. If you look at those-they're all over the map, depends on which test, whether it's math, or science, and so forth-but 50% women, one woman for every two men, would be a high-end estimate from their estimates. From that, you can back out a difference in the implied standard deviations that works out to be about 20%. And from that, you can work out the difference out several standard deviations. If you do that calculation-and I have no reason to think that it couldn't be refined in a hundred ways-you get five to one, at the high end. Now, it's pointed out by one of the papers at this conference that these tests are not a very good measure and are not highly predictive with respect to people's ability to do that. And that's absolutely right. But I don't think that resolves the issue at all. Because if my reading of the data is right-it's something people can argue about-that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well. So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true-is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem."

another cute way to summarize would be: Women don't want to do it, and they can't do it, so it doesn't really matter if we won't let them do it.

flimsy analysis there, summers.

mind over time

2005-02-15T16:39:00.000-05:00

RedNova has an intriguing article about the Global Consciousness Project, located at Princeton University. The piece has a high fruit factor, but is worth reading all the way through. In short: random number generators apparently respond to strong emotional states in people. They have no only reacted to large global events, but have done so several hours before the events themselves. The article calls this "predicting the future". I would think that to even conveive of this phenomenon, you would have to do away with the concept of "future", that which is inaccessible and distinct from the present, altogether. I'll let you know when I have it all figured out.

responsible people don't get sick

2005-02-12T18:49:00.000-05:00

Professor Elizabeth Warren writes in the Miami Herald that three quarters of those who went bankrupt due to medical bills in the year of her study (2001, I'm pretty sure) had health insurance. Why? Because when they got sick, they lost their jobs, and with the jobs went the health insurance. Tying insurance to jobs makes little sense. Warran eloquently protests the credit lobby's attempts to make bankruptcy even more difficult to declare, arguing that "this tired approach is no different than a congressional demand to close hospitals in response to a flu epidemic." I wonder if she can put her sizeable brain towards suggesting a comprehensive plan to fix the problem. That should be Congress's job, but they don't seem to be up to it.

stealing vs. stealing

2005-02-12T11:56:00.000-05:00

off the shelf has an illuminating post on the penalties for stealing objects vs. stealing copyrighted material online. The latter is about 30 times more expensive. Proportion?

lethal stun guns

2005-02-12T10:38:00.000-05:00

The nytimes reports that Chicago is rethinking its use of Tasers, after one man is dead and one 14 year old boy in the hospital after a cardiac arrest. More than 100,000 police officers around the country carry tasers. They are supposed to have been the non-lethal alternative to hand guns. This is problemmatic, since an officer is much more likely to use a "non-lethal" weapon than a lethal one, and Tasers have proven lethal of late. About 100 people have died after being shocked with Tasers. However,

Taser has said the deaths are unrelated to the gun and would have occurred in any event because of other factors like drug overdoses. But scientists who have examined the company's research say it is spotty and inconclusive. The company's primary safety studies on its most powerful weapon consist of shocks administered to one pig and five dogs.

One pig and five dogs? Excuse me? How is it that makers of dangerous drugs and products can get away with such flimsy safety testing? Don't answer that, we already know why.

no fly

2005-02-08T17:02:00.000-05:00

Slate as a nice little comment on how the no-fly lists are easily evaded and thus completely useless. Is the TSA really unaware of this hack? Or is the no-fly list geared more towards harassment than terrorism control?

a bit of a muddle

2005-02-08T16:28:00.000-05:00

It looks like we are not the only ones confused about how the fuzzy math of Bush's new socical security program is supposed to work. In a White House press conference, Bush struggled to answer the question of how the new plan is going to fix the problem:

THE PRESIDENT: Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.

Thanks to kos for keeping me informed.

your tax dollars at work

2005-02-08T01:45:00.000-05:00

The Observer has an account by a British man who was tortured in Guantanamo for 33 months and finally released after it was determined that he had no connections to Al Qaeda.

class action bonanza

2005-02-06T17:03:00.000-05:00

The Senate Judiciary Committee has just voted to approve the "Class Action Fairness Act", which mandates that most class actions be heard in federal courts. This bill failed to pass by one vote in 2003, but will almost certainly make it through this time. The new law would seem to have several consequences:

- federal courts, already overburdened, will be absolutely swamped.
- long waits for a court date will discourage many suits, throwing out the good with the bad.
- federally appointed judges will now have even more power over the states (federalists, you should be cringing)
- the lingering questions of opt out and notice will have to be addressed fairly quickly
- either class actions are now made a federal question, or complete diversity is no longer required for cases in federal court.

The bill is supported by industry leaders and the Chamber of Commerce. A concise criticism of the bill can be found here.

trust us, we're experts

2005-02-06T13:49:00.000-05:00

Jesselyn Radack, a legal ethics advisor, attests that the Justice Department lied when it claimed that John Walked Lindh had not chosen to have a lawyer present during interrogation. She was the advisor on the phone when a criminal division attorney called to ask whether they could interrogate Lindh without a lawyer. Radack said no, but the FBI went forward anyways. Radack then said that the interrogation should be kept under seal, but that also was disregarded. Emails that she wrote regarding this situation were deleted by the FBI, and a prosecutor lied to the judge about their existence. The person in charge of this operation was Michael Chertoff, nominee for head of Homeland Security, who spoke recently about the need to remain within the bounds of the law. The New York Times has confirmed Radack's claims.

elephant in a china shop

2005-02-06T01:41:00.000-05:00

Talking Points Memo has an very good post about what exacly president Bush is proposing to do with social security. As Marshall describes it, social security is currently a "defined benefit", whereas the new 'privatized' plan amounts to a 401k style "defined contribution" system. The essence of social security is its guarantee of some income in retirement; by eliminating this guarantee, Bush is not reforming the system, he is ending it. This topic has been circling for a while, but has been somewhat buried in verbiage. Read talking points for a bit of clarity.

medical bankruptcy

2005-02-02T14:02:00.000-05:00

Forbes writes, "Illness and medical bills contributed to roughly half the personal bankruptcy filings in 2001, affecting as many as 2.2 million Americans, a new Harvard study says." So would it perhaps be cheaper for this country to institute national health insurance rather than bearing the cost of billions of dollars in forgiven debt? Wondering whether this information will stick to those who argue that failures of personal responsibility are responsible for most bankruptcies. See professor Elizabeth Warren on this subject.

liability, libel and speech

2005-02-02T13:17:00.000-05:00

Jon Weiner, history professor at UC Irvine, writes in the Nation that twenty of the biggest chemical companies in the US have teamed up to discredit two historians who have investigated the industry's tango with cancer:

Attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five academics who recommended that the University of California Press publish the book Deceit and Denial - The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The companies have also recruited their own historian to argue that Markowitz and Rosner have engaged in unethical conduct... The reasons for the companies' actions are not hard to find: They face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for publishers of controversial books, and for historians who write them, because when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to information about cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products.

The question about the chemical companies and the health risks of vinyl chloride is the classic one: What did they know, and when did they know it? Rosner and Markowitz used the Baggett materials to show that in 1973 the industry learned that vinyl chloride monomer caused cancer in animals--even at low levels of exposure. Since vinyl chloride was the basis for hairspray, Saran Wrap, car upholstery, shower curtains, floor coverings and hundreds of other consumer products, the implications for public health were massive. Yet the companies failed to disclose that information about cancer to the public and to the federal regulatory agencies...

At issue now in US district court in Jackson, Mississippi, is the claim by another former chemical worker that Airco and other companies are liable for his liver cancer because he was exposed to vinyl chloride monomer on the job. Markowitz is a key expert witness for the plaintiffs, because of the research he and Rosner published in Deceit and Denial. But the judge is being told that Rosner and Markowitz's research is "not valid," that the publisher's review process was "subverted" and that Rosner and Markowitz have "frequently and flagrantly violated" the American Historical Association's code of ethics.

To review: chemical companies have paid someone to testify at trial that this research on their activities is bunk, making inexpert and unsupported reference to standards of ethics in the profession (everyone the writer talked to found the research to be top rate.) Furthermore, they have subpoenaed and deposed the peer reviewers who recommended that the university publish the book. One person deposed called the process "harassment" with "a chilling effect on folks who tell the truth." It is unclear how much this unprecedented tactic will sway the jury to find the research untrustworthy.

This failure to disclose and sham academics business reminds me of the Vioxx situation - I am very curious to see what path this liability train takes, whether any of it will stick, whether the public will press the government to take action, and what claim the historians might have against the chemical companies (for slander perhaps?). While the public currently seems unsympathetic to large tort settlements (thanks to some forceful PR on the part of 'tort reformers'), the intentional concealment of damning studies may strike a chord.

helping kids make heavy choices

2005-02-02T13:09:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the "top three advertisers of packaged-foods to children," General Mills, Kellogg and Kraft Foods, along with the Grocery Manufacturers of America and several advertising associations, "have created a lobbying group to defend the right to advertise to kids." The new group, the Alliance for American Advertising, states, "There is not a correlation between advertising trends and recent childhood obesity trends."

(methinks the food industry doth protest too much...)

If you can't access the WSJ, here is a Reuters Article about it.

neo-cons calling for a draft?

2005-02-02T02:42:00.000-05:00

This from the Project for a New American Century,

Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces
January 28, 2005

Dear Senator Frist, Senator Reid, Speaker Hastert, and Representative Pelosi:

The United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume. Those responsibilities are real and important. They are not going away. The United States will not and should not become less engaged in the world in the years to come. But our national security, global peace and stability, and the defense and promotion of freedom in the post-9/11 world require a larger military force than we have today. The administration has unfortunately resisted increasing our ground forces to the size needed to meet today's (and tomorrow's) missions and challenges.

So we write to ask you and your colleagues in the legislative branch to take the steps necessary to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps. While estimates vary about just how large an increase is required, and Congress will make its own determination as to size and structure, it is our judgment that we should aim for an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.

There is abundant evidence that the demands of the ongoing missions in the greater Middle East, along with our continuing defense and alliance commitments elsewhere in the world, are close to exhausting current U.S. ground forces. For example, just late last month, Lieutenant General James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, reported that "overuse" in Iraq and Afghanistan could be leading to a "broken force." Yet after almost two years in Iraq and almost three years in Afghanistan, it should be evident that our engagement in the greater Middle East is truly, in Condoleezza Rice's term, a "generational commitment." The only way to fulfill the military aspect of this commitment is by increasing the size of the force available to our civilian leadership.

The administration has been reluctant to adapt to this new reality. We understand the dangers of continued federal deficits, and the fiscal difficulty of increasing the number of troops. But the defense of the United States is the first priority of the government. This nation can afford a robust defense posture along with a strong fiscal posture. And we can afford both the necessary number of ground troops and what is needed for transformation of the military.

In sum: We can afford the military we need. As a nation, we are spending a smaller percentage of our GDP on the military than at any time during the Cold War. We do not propose returning to a Cold War-size or shape force structure. We do insist that we act responsibly to create the military we need to fight the war on terror and fulfill our other responsibilities around the world.

The men and women of our military have performed magnificently over the last few years. We are more proud of them than we can say. But many of them would be the first to say that the armed forces are too small. And we would say that surely we should be doing more to honor the contract between America and those who serve her in war. Reserves were meant to be reserves, not regulars. Our regulars and reserves are not only proving themselves as warriors, but as humanitarians and builders of emerging democracies. Our armed forces, active and reserve, are once again proving their value to the nation. We can honor their sacrifices by giving them the manpower and the materiel they need.

Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution places the power and the duty to raise and support the military forces of the United States in the hands of the Congress. That is why we, the undersigned, a bipartisan group with diverse policy views, have come together to call upon you to act. You will be serving your country well if you insist on providing the military manpower we need to meet America's obligations, and to help ensure success in carrying out our foreign policy objectives in a dangerous, but also hopeful, world.

Respectfully,

Peter Beinart, Jeffrey Bergner, Daniel Blumenthal, Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Ivo H. Daalder, Thomas Donnelly, Michele Flournoy, Frank F. Gaffney, Jr., Reuel Marc Gerecht, Lt. Gen. Buster C. Glosson (USAF, retired), Bruce P. Jackson, Frederick Kagan, Robert Kagan, Craig Kennedy, Paul Kennedy, Col. Robert Killebrew (USA, retired), William Kristol, Will Marshall, Clifford May, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey (USA, retired), Daniel McKivergan, Joshua Muravchik, Steven J. Nider, Michael O'Hanlon, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Ralph Peters, Danielle Pletka, Stephen P. Rosen, Major Gen. Robert H. Scales (USA, retired), Randy Scheunemann, Gary Schmitt, Walter Slocombe, James B. Steinberg

revival

2005-02-01T14:26:00.000-05:00

school has managed to come between me and blogging, but i'm going to give it another go. my posts may start taking a distinctively legal turn - hopefully someone will be interested. at least it will allow me to digest. cheers all...

handbasket, anyone?

2004-11-19T14:19:00.000-05:00

In the face of the war against Iran, it's always nice to have a little comic relief.

debating a neocon

2004-11-11T02:59:00.000-05:00

i was fully inspired today by Stan Goff of CounterPunch fame. below are his opening remarks for a debate against neocon Patrick Clawson, where he refuses to be baited by the dead horses, and instead unfolds the heart of the problem. these remarks are absolutely worth reading all the way through, but if you're short on time, read the last six paragraphs or so (his good news and bad news). enjoy.

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I'm sure some of you have heard the story of the frog and the scorpion, but for those who haven't, I'll tell it again.

There was a frog about to swim across a river, when suddenly he was confronted with a scorpion in his path. The frog fell back in fright, but the scorpion was quick to reassure him, "I'm not going to sting you. I just have a favor to ask."

The frog, still startled but hoping the scorpion meant him no harm, said, "But you are a scorpion. What favor could you ask of me?"

The scorpion replied, "I just need a ride across the river. I can't swim, but you can. If I sting you and you die, how would I get across? Can't you please give me a ride?"

The frog thought for a moment, and in his relief that the scorpion had not stung him, he consented. The scorpion climbed on the frog's back, and off they went across the river. As the frog reached the riverbank and pulled himself out of the water, the scorpion stung him and stepped onto land.

The dying frog cried out to the scorpion, "You told me you wouldn't sting me."

The scorpion replied, "I can't help it. It's my nature," and walked away.

In most of the debates we have heard about the war in Iraq during the election campaign, debates that are now thankfully past, we heard the usual point/counterpoint about weapons of mass destruction, about who could more competently carry out the military occupation of Iraq, about who could convince what allies to help carry this burden, about what has or hasn't been done about Osama bin Laden, or about who was more competent to carry out the War on Terrorism.

I will depart from these formulae. I think these arguments are red herrings, that is, the fallacious method of introducing irrelevant topics to divert attention away from the real one.

I don't believe the war is the exclusive product of the delusional thinking of the islamophobic clique that surrounds our current presidential mediocrity, as many liberals suggest. I don't believe the war ever had anything at all to do with weapons of mass destruction. I don't believe the very people who call this a War on Terrorism believe it for one minute, and moreover I believe they know perfectly well that the term "war on terrorism" is oxymoronic inasmuch as one cannot prosecute a war against a tactic. I don't believe it is a war to steal anyone's oil, though it has everything to do with oil and more. The fact that half the people in the United States believed at some point that a shattered nation like Iraq constituted a threat to the United States does not compel me for a moment to refrain from pointing out that this is a proposition that was and is idiotic on its face and it is not at all unusual for half of a national population to believe something that is patently idiotic. I am not a conservative, and I am not a liberal, and I am not a politician, and I am not a pacifist, and I am not religious, so I am not in the least compelled or constrained to prop up the polemical foundations of any of the agendas that might be associated with these kinds of affiliations.

I believe that the war in Iraq is symptomatic of a much deeper global crisis, and that it foreshadows a period in which that crisis ˇ a crisis of global capitalism ˇ will manifest itself not only in war but in rapidly widening social destabilization, the further militarization of the world system, and simultaneous economic and environmental collapse.

Just in case there is a temptation to resort to red-baiting to avoid responding to the content of my arguments, let me save you the trouble. I am on record as a severe critic of capitalism as an inherently destructive system built on genocide and slavery, sustained by misogyny, racism, poverty, and war, and bound to undermine its own material basis through ecocide. I do not, however, believe as some leftists seem to, that a more sensible system will inevitably replace it. If progressives continue to whine and wring their hands instead of fighting back, we could very well end up with a century or so of anarchy and warlords in the context of a mass human die-off on a ruined and toxified planet.

Present-day imperialism is a real system, and it is currently directed by the American state. The war in Iraq was probably the inevitable action of this state in response to an impending and inexorable erosion of the very basis of American global power. The war in Iraq, while deeply morally repugnant, is not a failure of morality, but the action of a system that can't help it, because like the scorpion, it is that system's nature.

Republicans and Democrats can't tell you this. Pacifists and most true religious believers won't tell you this. Politicians, who will tell you only what you want to hear, won't tell you this. But I believe that it is irresponsible to delay telling the patient who will die of gangrene the unpleasant fact that the leg must be amputated.

Global capitalism runs on fossil energy, but the United States does not have to take oil from anyone. Every oil producing nation, including Iraq, has been perfectly willing to sell oil to the United States. It is cheaper to buy oil that it is to steal it with military action. The issue of oil is an issue not of production but of increasing demand between competitors in a period when we have nearly reached the peak of production output.

Global demand now is at 79.5 million barrels of oil a day. The International Energy Agency and the Department of Energy predict global demand of 115 mbd by 2020, but that is based on demand rising at 1-1.25% per year. In fact, demand is rising at twice that rate. Yet industry experts who are not spinning figures to reassure stockholders tell us that with massive improvements in infrastructure and perfect political stability, the highest output achievable is around 85 mbd. This year, China passed Japan as the world's second largest importer of crude oil.

If anyone believes that Dick Cheney's energy task force, on which Dr. Clawson served, did not review these figures as part of their long-term strategic energy assessment and how it related to the continued possibilities for the accumulation of capital, I have a mountaintop retreat to sell you in Miami.

So the question of oil is not a question of taking it. It's the question of the mathematics of it when global capitalist competition continues to trend toward 100 mbd by the end of the decade, when there's not adequate flow pressure to meet that demand. Someone gets cut. And someone decides who gets cut. Establishing permanent military bases in the very region where over half the remaining easily accessible reserves exist goes a long way toward putting the power that controls those bases in the driver's seat. As a friend of mine once said, "Oil is not a normal commodity. No other commodity has five US Navy battle groups patrolling the sea lanes to secure it."

Iraq's pre-invasion production was around 2.5 mbd, but even with heroic effort to restore it, production has not risen above 1.8 mbd today ˇ a net loss of 700,000 barrels a day ˇ and the US military effort alone is calculated to have an energetic cost of 350,000 barrels a day.

This is not business math. This is geopolitical and military math. What is being sought is a new foundation, a military one, upon which to base US global supremacy as the current one is beginning to crumble. And reliance on direct military violence to achieve one's national aims is not a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness ˇ a sign that there is a fundamental failure of hegemony. Hegemony is not direct control, but internalization of control by those who are dominated.

In 1968, Richard Nixon inherited the hair-raising collapse of the US Treasury's gold pool and the un-winnable occupation of Vietnam that had caused it. Within the next four years, Nixon would abandon fixed currency exchange rates and the gold standard, then allow a 20% devaluation of the dollar that wiped out billions of dollars in US debts to Western Europe and Japan. Since oil payments were denominated in dollars, the consequent jump in the price of oil was a harsh blow for Europe, Japan, Africa, and Latin America.

The US, on the other hand, owned the dollar printing press, and it was able to recycle the crisis, via petrodollars, through these regions. US puppet governments in Iran and Saudi Arabia helped underwrite this system with their ability to swing oil production.

This game of economic chicken by Nixon set the stage for a new method to assure US supremacy, since the post World War II industrial boom had run aground on the rocks of the Marshall Plan nations' export capacity and on Vietnam.

The currency speculation that this abandonment of the gold standard and fixed exchange rates stimulated led inevitably to currency crises in weaker nations, whereupon the Reagan administration in response to the Mexican currency crisis of 1982 gave the US its first crack at loan-sharking through the International Monetary Fund, in which it held controlling plurality and exclusive veto power. This loan-sharking is called "structural adjustment," and it not only bleeds 70 different nations white with an un-payable external debt, paid in dollars by the way, these loans are contingent on allowing US investors to penetrate national economies to take over key economic sectors. This system is now referred to as neoliberalism but I just call it debt-leverage imperialism. [I later found out that Dr. Clawson once worked for the IMF.]

It is augmented by a Treasury Bill standard by which the US is able to force its key capitalist competitors ˇ who have the lion's share of their central bank reserve currencies in dollar-denominated T-Bills, loans to the United States that they know and the US knows it can never pay back ˇ to continue to accept the dollar at its over-printed, overvalued current levels out of fear that they will wipe out the value of their own central banks.

This continually growing glut of fiat dollars created the conditions for the precarious Asian meltdown of 1998, for the dotcom bust of 2000, and for the real estate bubble that will burst next. US private and public debts are at record levels, and if ˇ or should I say when ˇ there is a deflationary crisis around a falling dollar, the US middle class will sink to the bottom like the Titanic.

At the same time, the external debts of underdeveloped countries imposed upon them by IMF loan-sharking are creating increasing anger and unrest around the world that is already translating into political upheavals.

Just as the post World War II US-dominated global architecture began to crumble toward the end of the Vietnam invasion, the neoliberalism that underwrote the bacchanalia of the 90's is reaching its endgame. This is the deeper reason that something has to be done, and what we are witnessing right now is the particular neocon version of how that global architecture will be rebuilt ˇ by dint of arms actually ˇ and it's faltering badly in Southwest Asia, where its ignorant and racist Orientalism, its overwhelming hubris, and its devotion to and trust of the Apartheid state of Israel, have led it into a deep and increasingly hostile labyrinth.

The region is now a hot cauldron of competing and contradictory interests: the aspirations of Kurdistan opposed to the interests of Iran, Syria, Turkey, and the thug Allawi; the continuing expansionary aims of the settler state of Israel tied irrevocably to the aims of the US who desperately needs some street cred in a region where US prestige is the lowest in living history; the connections being forged between Iran, Russia, and China; the internal destabilization of Pakistan by its alliance with the United States; the refusal of the Iraqi resistance to conform to the US script; and the potential destabilization of the Saudi regime, the ultimate goal of bin Laden all along, where living standards have gone into steep decline, aquifers are being depleted to squeeze out more oil, and where the masses become more restive each day.

None of us can predict exactly how and when this pot will boil over, only that it will.

So in closing, I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is that the results of this election may not have been as terrible as thought by those who allowed their revulsion to George W. Bush and his coterie to cloud their view of the larger global conjuncture. But the reality is that this crew is proving much more likely to run the locomotive of imperialism off the tracks than their Hamiltonian realist counterparts.

The specific crisis in Iraq is not the crisis of military defeat, which is not, at any rate, ultimately determined by tactical outcomes, but by political outcomes.

The US crisis in Iraq is that one goal of that occupation was to demonstrate a fictional US military invincibility, to shock and awe the world. The crisis is not simply the very real tactical crisis that we can smell emanating from the podium of every Pollyanna briefing from Rumsfeld's War Department. The deeper crisis is that the shock-and-awe bluff is being successfully called, and the rest of the world is now alive to the fact that the great power bleeds.

So we see now, for example, the continental drift of Latin America, from the Chavista popular democracy in Venezuela, to the current Haitian intifada, to the popular rebellions in Bolivia and Ecuador, to the recent election of a leftist government in Uruguay a development that is accelerated by the fact that the US state has gotten itself bogged down in a swamp of military and political contradictions in Southwest Asia. The collapse of imperialism was going to be difficult in any case, but I have to say that it is a good thing in the larger scheme of things, and we should welcome it. That's the good news.

The bad news is that we have not reconstituted a vital, militant left that is clear on its responsibility to seek political power in this country yet. And I'm not talking about Howard Dean, folks. Anyone who considers the Democratic Party as a left party needs to pull their face away from that bottle of spot remover. We need to refound the left in this country that has a fighting spirit and that does not limit its activities to the fetish of elections ˇ andone that can forge a program that does not shy away from the difficult but necessary work of incorporating not just class, but gender, oppressed nationality, and environmental justice into that program.

That's the bad news, but that can be corrected, starting now, and starting with the sisters and brothers right here in this room. We cannot afford the luxury of crying about an election. We are in a struggle for the soul of our own society, a struggle against black-shirted reaction on every front, and there can be no rest, no retreat, no compromise, and no surrender. We cannot back down in the face of either their patriot-baiting or their Patriot Act. As Irish revolutionary James Connolly said, "The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Stand up."

Now is our time to stand up.

on a lighter note,

2004-11-10T13:32:00.000-05:00

The Sweater Project made me laugh today.

framing

2004-11-09T01:29:00.000-05:00

i am currenlty in the midst of compiling a ton of new frames i've gleaned from various comments pages (dailykos, etc). some of the gems include:

credit card conservatives
borrow and spend
cheap talk conservative
bush conservative (i.e. authoritarian, separate his brand from others).
theocon
cut and gut conservatives (vs. tax and spend)

and a post worth repeating:

- "We care for you" reads as condescending & elitist. It should read "take care of each other."
- "safety net" implies that those we are reaching out to are weak. It should read "risk management."
- stop talking about "blame" in the Party and stress "accountability."
- Calling Bush incompetant sounds like name-calling. He has "failed to execute."
- Bush did not mislead us into war. He "deceived America and her allies."

"What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?" "Bush had a plan to get out of Vietnam."

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while i have not had a look at it yet, i have heard that applied memetics for disillusioned dems is well worth reading.

other links i've noted of late:
rockridge institute
sojourners
american progress action

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i assume this blog is just for me now, since i failed to post for several months. if there are any of you still out there, thanks for checking back - i will be working through a lot of ideas on the blog in the near future. hope you enjoy.

Letter to the Red States

2004-11-08T13:56:00.000-05:00

Written by a woman in New York. Think it echoes what most of us in New
York think and feel about the state of our country. After the letter
was published, the woman started receiving death threats.

Letter To The Red States

**

Sorry, I try not to deluge people with my ramblings. But I had to write
this and, having written it, had to send it. Even though I don't know
anyone I can send it to (without alienating my Republican in-laws, who
are the only "middle country" people I know.)

I am writing this letter to the people in the red states in the middle
of the country -- the people who voted for George W. Bush. I am writing
this letter because I don't think we know each other.

So I'll make an introduction. I am a New Yorker who voted for John
Kerry. I used to live in California, and if I still lived there, I
would vote for Kerry. I used to live in Washington, DC, and if I still lived
there, I would vote for Kerry. Kerry won in all three of those regions.

Maybe you want to know more about me. Or maybe not; maybe you think you
know me already. You think I am some anti-American anarchist because I
dislike George W. Bush. You think that I am immoral and anti-family,
because I support women's reproductive freedom and gay rights. You
think that I am dangerous, and even evil, because I do not abide by your
religious beliefs.

Maybe you are content to think that, to write me off as a "liberal" --
the dreaded "L" word -- and rejoice that your candidate has triumphed
over evil, immoral, anti-American, anti-family people like me. But
maybe you are still curious. So here goes: this is who I am.

I am a New Yorker. I was here, in my apartment downtown, on September
11th. I watched the Towers burn from the roof of my building. I went
inside so that I couldn't see them when they fell. I had friends who
were inside. I have a friend who still has nightmares about watching
people jump and fall from the Towers. He will never be the same. How
many people like him do you know? People that can't sit in a restaurant
without plotting an escape route, in case it blows up?

I am a worker. I work across the street from the Citigroup Center,
which the government told us is a "target" of terrorism. Later, we found out
they were relaying very old information, but it was already too late.
They had given me bad dreams again. The subway stop near my office was
crowded with bomb-sniffing dogs, policemen in heavy protective gear,
soldiers. Now, every time I enter or exit my office, all of my
possessions are X-rayed to make sure I don't have any weapons. How
often are you stopped by a soldier with a bomb-sniffing dog outside your
office?

I am a neighbor. I have a neighbor who is a 9/11 widow. She has two
children. My husband does odd jobs for her now, like building
bookshelves. Things her husband should do. He uses her husband's tools,
and the two little girls tell him, "Those are our daddy's tools." How
many 9/11 widows and orphans do you know? How often do you fill in for
their dead loved ones?

I am a taxpayer. I worked my butt off to get where I did, and so did my
parents. My parents saved and borrowed and sent me to college. I worked
my way through graduate school. I won a full tuition scholarship to law
school. All for the privilege of working 2,600 hours last year. That
works out to a 50 hour week, every week, without any vacation days at
all. I get to work by 9 am and rarely leave before 9 pm. I eat dinner
at my office much more often than I eat dinner at home. My husband and I
paid over $70,000 in federal income tax last year. At some point in the
future, we will have to pay much more -- once this country faces its
deficit and the impossible burden of Social Security. In fact, the
areas of the country that supported Kerry -- New York, California, Illinois,
Massachusetts -- they are the financial centers of the nation. They are
the tax base of this country. How much did you pay, Kansas? How much
did you contribute to this government you support, Alabama? How much of
this war in Iraq did you pay for?

I am a liberal. The funny part is, liberals have this reputation for
living in Never-Neverland, being idealists, not being sensible. But let
me tell you how I see the world: I see America as one nation in a world
of nations. Therefore, I think we should try to get along with other
nations. I see that gay people exist. Therefore, I think they should be
allowed to exist, and be treated the same as other people. I see ways
in which women are not allowed to control their own bodies. Therefore, I
think we should give women more control over their bodies. I see that
people have awful diseases. Therefore, I think we should enable
scientists to try to cure them. I see that we have a Constitution.
Therefore, I think it should be upheld. I see that there were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Therefore, I think that Iraq was not an
imminent danger to me. It seems so pragmatic to me. How do you see the
world? Do you really think voting against gay marriage will keep people
from being gay? Would you really prefer that people continue to die
from Parkinson's disease? Do you really not care about the Constitutional
rights of political detainees? Would you really have supported the war
if you knew the truth, or would you have wanted to spend more of our
money on health care, job training, terrorism preparedness?

I am an American. I have an American flag flying outside my home. I
love my home more than anything. I love that I grew up right outside New
York City. I first went to the Statue of Liberty with my 5th grade class,
and my mom and dad took me to the Empire State Building when I was 8. I
love taking the subway to Yankee Stadium. I loved living in Washington DC
and going on dates to the Lincoln Memorial. It is because I love this
country so much that I argue with my political opponents as much I do.

I am not safe. I never feel safe. My in-laws live in a small town in
Ohio, and that town has received more federal funding, per capita, for
terrorism preparedness than New York City has. I take subways and buses
every day. I work in a skyscraper across the street from a "target." I
have emergency supplies and a spare pair of sneakers in my desk, in
case somethng happens while I'm at work. Do you? How many times a month do
you worry that your subway is going to blow up? When you hear sirens on
the street, do you run to the window to make sure everything is okay?
When you hear an airplane, do you flinch? Do you dread beautiful,
blue-skied September days? I don't know a single New Yorker who doesn't
spend the month of September on tip-toes, superstitiously praying for
rain so we don't have to relive that beautiful, blue-skied day.

I am lonely. I feel that we, as a nation, have alienated all our
friends and further provoked our enemies. I feel unprotected. Most of all I
feel alienated from my fellow citizens, because I don't understand what you
are thinking. You voted for a man who started a war in Iraq for no
reason, against the wishes of the entire world. You voted for a man
whose lack of foresight and inability to plan has led to massive
insurgencies in Iraq, where weapons are disappearing into the hands of
terrorists. You voted for a man who let Osama Bin Laden escape into the
hills of Afghanistan so that he could start that war in Iraq. You voted
for a man who doesn't want to let people love who they want to love;
doesn't want to let doctors cure their patients; doesn't want to let
women rule their destinies. I don't understand why you voted for this
man. For me, it is not enough that he is personable; it is not enough
that he seems like one of the guys. Why did you vote for him? Why did
you elect a man that lied to us in order to convince us to go to war?
(Ten years ago you were incensed when our president lied about his sex
life; you thought it was an impeachable offense.) Why did you elect a
leader who thinks that strength cannot include diplomacy or
international cooperaton? Why did you elect a man who did nothing
except run away and hide on September 11?

Most of all, I am terrified. I mean daily, I am afraid that I will not
survive this. I am afraid that I will lose my husband, that I will
never have children, that I will never grow old and watch the sunset in a
backyard of my own. I am afraid that my career -- which should end with
a triumphant and good-natured roast at a retirement party in 2035 --
will be cut short by an attack on me and my colleagues, as we sit
sending emails and making phone calls one ordinary afternoon. Is your
life at stake? Are you terrified?

I don't think you are. I don't think you realize what you have done.
And if anything happens to me or the people I love, I blame you. I wanted
you to know that.

america is purple

2004-11-04T16:03:00.000-05:00

in these times

2004-10-13T14:37:00.000-04:00

Cold Turkey
by Kurt Vonnegut
::link::

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

-------------------------

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, which is 81, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged, what life is all about. I have seven kids, four of them adopted.

Many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

I put my big question about life to my biological son Mark. Mark is a pediatrician, and author of a memoir, The Eden Express. It is about his crackup, straightjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” So I pass that on to you. Write it down, and put it in your computer, so you can forget it.

I have to say that’s a pretty good sound bite, almost as good as, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, 500 years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ.

The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one.

But back to people, like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, who’ve said how we could behave more humanely, and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favorites is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of this:

Eugene Debs, who died back in 1926, when I was only 4, ran 5 times as the Socialist Party candidate for president, winning 900,000 votes, 6 percent of the popular vote, in 1912, if you can imagine such a ballot. He had this to say while campaigning:

As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.
As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it.
As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Doesn’t anything socialistic make you want to throw up? Like great public schools or health insurance for all?

How about Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. …

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

-------------------------

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don’t know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

But, when you stop to think about it, only a nut case would want to be a human being, if he or she had a choice. Such treacherous, untrustworthy, lying and greedy animals we are!

I was born a human being in 1922 A.D. What does “A.D.” signify? That commemorates an inmate of this lunatic asylum we call Earth who was nailed to a wooden cross by a bunch of other inmates. With him still conscious, they hammered spikes through his wrists and insteps, and into the wood. Then they set the cross upright, so he dangled up there where even the shortest person in the crowd could see him writhing this way and that.

Can you imagine people doing such a thing to a person?

No problem. That’s entertainment. Ask the devout Roman Catholic Mel Gibson, who, as an act of piety, has just made a fortune with a movie about how Jesus was tortured. Never mind what Jesus said.

During the reign of King Henry the Eighth, founder of the Church of England, he had a counterfeiter boiled alive in public. Show biz again.

Mel Gibson’s next movie should be The Counterfeiter. Box office records will again be broken.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

-------------------------

And what did the great British historian Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 A.D., have to say about the human record so far? He said, “History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”

The same can be said about this morning’s edition of the New York Times.

The French-Algerian writer Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

So there’s another barrel of laughs from literature. Camus died in an automobile accident. His dates? 1913-1960 A.D.

Listen. All great literature is about what a bummer it is to be a human being: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

But I have to say this in defense of humankind: No matter in what era in history, including the Garden of Eden, everybody just got there. And, except for the Garden of Eden, there were already all these crazy games going on, which could make you act crazy, even if you weren’t crazy to begin with. Some of the games that were already going on when you got here were love and hate, liberalism and conservatism, automobiles and credit cards, golf and girls’ basketball.

Even crazier than golf, though, is modern American politics, where, thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.

Actually, this same sort of thing happened to the people of England generations ago, and Sir William Gilbert, of the radical team of Gilbert and Sullivan, wrote these words for a song about it back then:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative.

Which one are you in this country? It’s practically a law of life that you have to be one or the other? If you aren’t one or the other, you might as well be a doughnut.

If some of you still haven’t decided, I’ll make it easy for you.

If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal.

If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative.

What could be simpler?

-------------------------

My government’s got a war on drugs. But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W. Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed or tiddley-poo or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 41. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

And do you know why I think he is so pissed off at Arabs? They invented algebra. Arabs also invented the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which nobody else had ever had before. You think Arabs are dumb? Try doing long division with Roman numerals.

We’re spreading democracy, are we? Same way European explorers brought Christianity to the Indians, what we now call “Native Americans.”

How ungrateful they were! How ungrateful are the people of Baghdad today.

So let’s give another big tax cut to the super-rich. That’ll teach bin Laden a lesson he won’t soon forget. Hail to the Chief.

That chief and his cohorts have as little to do with Democracy as the Europeans had to do with Christianity. We the people have absolutely no say in whatever they choose to do next. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve already cleaned out the treasury, passing it out to pals in the war and national security rackets, leaving your generation and the next one with a perfectly enormous debt that you’ll be asked to repay.

Nobody let out a peep when they did that to you, because they have disconnected every burglar alarm in the Constitution: The House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the FBI, the free press (which, having been embedded, has forsaken the First Amendment) and We the People.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse. I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine and LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me, one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then, and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am of course notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s license! Look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut.

And my car back then, a Studebaker, as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused and addictive and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialized world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any more of those. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

world vote

2004-09-08T01:15:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wondered whether the world should be able to vote in this next election? Well, this site is taking a tally. I would be excited to see it gain momentum so we could look at some large numbers... not that there would be any doubt as to the outcome, but I have no doubt that interesting things lurk in the data.

no democracy for you!

2004-09-07T13:06:00.000-04:00

The Christian Science Monitor has an Iraq status report article worth looking at (compiling reports from various papers), which contains this tasty tidbit:

The Los Angeles Times reports that Lt. Gen. Metz feels fair elections could be held without cities like Fallujah being included.

'We'd have elections before we let one place like Fallujah stop [national] elections,' said Metz, the number two US military official in Iraq. 'The rest of the country can go on about a process that heads right for an election.'

The Times says Metz's statements are the clearest indication yet by any US official of just how "perilious" the security situation in Iraq has become. Officials could stick to their timetables for an election if it bypassed cities like Fallujah and others, but it could "detract from the election's credibility, foment discontent in Iraq, and leave other countries reluctant to acknowledge any government chosen in the vote."

I can see the well received speeches now; "Iraq is not yet safe for democracy... This process takes time.... Insurgents insurgents insurgents!" I wonder if Metz will be upbraided for making this a hot news issue. Come to think of it though, I saw nothing in the nytimes about this.

dulce et decorum

2004-09-06T04:40:00.001-04:00

The monthly combat toll in Iraq hit a high of 1,100 soldiers wounded in August, reports the Washington Post. Units are fighting the populace in Najaf, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi and Sammara, often at close quarters in small streets. The end of the articfle is particularly telling:

More and more often, children are lobbing the grenades, Ford said. Insurgents offer boys of 10 or 12 years old $150 to toss a grenade at a U.S. patrol, the captain said.

"For the longest time, we've had a good relationship with the children," Ford said. "Now this. Who enjoys putting a bead on a kid?

"Nobody. That's why they paid them."

the kicker

2004-09-06T04:31:00.000-04:00

TalkLeft has a post about a young republican kicking a female protester on the floor of the Garden. Have you seen this boy?

in the news

2004-09-05T21:43:00.000-04:00

I was thrilled to read about the gay community using the internet to go on the offensive against bigoted congressmen. The nytimes writes today about the recent Schrock outing:

Representative Edward Schrock, Republican of Virginia, abandoned his bid for re-election, after a Web log claimed he had sought sex with other men through a phone service. Mr. Schrock, who is married, has co-sponsored a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and has advocated barring homosexuals from military service. (Mr. Schrock is a retired Navy officer.) The Web log, Blogactive.com, has vowed to reveal the identities of lawmakers who are gay and support anti-homosexual legislation. An aide said Mr. Schrock was not gay, but that he wouldn't run because the accusations had called into question his ability to represent his constituents.

Speaking of shaking things up, Bob Graham's new book may give Bushco some headaches. Reuters reports:

U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, intelligence committee chairman in the run-up to the Iraq war, said on Sunday the Bush administration had "taken every step" to shield Saudi Arabia from links to the Sept. 11 attacks...

The Florida Democrat in 2002 helped launch a joint inquiry with the House Intelligence Committee that produced a report on intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11 attacks...

He told NBC's "Meet the Press" that his new book, "Intelligence Matters," makes the case on "the extent to which Saudi Arabia was a key part of making 9/11 happen."...

Excerpts from Graham's book, which goes on sale on Tuesday, showed that at least two of the hijackers had support from Omar al-Bayoumi, whom the senator called a Saudi government spy and said was a "ghost employee" of a Saudi contracting firm, Erean. The owner of the firm, Graham said, was thought to be a supporter of Osama bin Laden.

The Bushies say that Graham is making baseless claims. I wonder how far the mainstream media will go after this one.

quick thoughts

2004-09-04T21:21:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the silence. I bolted strait from jail support in new york to law school in boston, and have had a hectic three days of orientation.

Things on my mind....

- Out of 550 people in my first year class at Harvard, I have met only three who were in New York to protest the convention. Since a large marjority of Harvard law students call themselves politically active democrats, this seems strange to me.

- I've been closely watching the progress of hurricane Frances. I find it interesting that it's following so closely on the heels of Charley, which caused a lot of damage. A symptom of increasing global erratic weather patterns?

- The New York Post published a shocking article piece of nonsense regarding the school hostage crisis in Russia. The article asserted that terrorists kill children in order to please 'their god', that western militaries have committed no such atrocities, and that RNC protesters excuse killings by everyone but America. Here are some choice exerpts:

Those Muslims who preach Jihad against the West decided years ago that killing Jewish or Christian children is not only acceptable, but pleasing to their god when done by "martyrs."

imaginary atrocities supposedly committed by Western militaries.

A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.

The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America.

The butchery in Russia was a crime against humanity. In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or just than the War on Terror?

I am at a loss to rationally confront these accusations. What scares me is that they may well have been made in good faith; the lack of communcation between different sections of the political spectrum is staggering.

republican platform fantasy

2004-08-31T02:20:00.000-04:00

The nytimes brought us some of the highlights of the Republican platform today, which contained such absurdities as:

"There is no negotiation with terrorists. No form of therapy or coercion will turn them from their murderous ways. Only total and compete destruction of terrorism will allow freedom to flourish.''

and

"Iraq, which once had the worst government in the Middle East, is now becoming an example of reform to the region".

Perhaps the framers of the Republican platform will put their lives where their mouths are and hold their breath until the impending "destruction of terrorism", while sitting on the peaceful streets of any one of Iraq's reformed towns. Oh well, at least they struck home when they denounced those namby pampy terrorist therapists and soft hearted coercers. Next stop, rapture!

virtual sit in

2004-08-31T00:47:00.000-04:00

If you would like to participate in a Virtual Sit In to protest the RNC in New York, please load this page and keep it open. The page simply loads and reloads pictures from the RNC website, hence using up some of its bandwidth.

new york report

2004-08-30T21:18:00.000-04:00

Here is a photo weblogger's account of one stage of Sunday's protest that didn't make it onto the news:

After taking some pictures of Critical Mass riders getting arrested, I turned to walk away and suddenly was in cuffs, one of the 264 cyclists and random passers-by arrested Friday night. Rather than writing us summonses for the offenses we were charged with, which were violations (on par with a traffic ticket or an open container), not even misdemeanors, the cops decided to teach us a lesson by hauling us over to a bus depot-turned-holding cell where we got to sleep in cages on diesel-sludge-covered concrete. (Many people reported chemical burns from contact with the floor.)

The writer spent 30 hours in jail under terrible conditions. Three of my friends were also arrested. I will relate their stories as soon as they get out of jail. Not surprisingly, the police seem to be keeping people for as long as possible.

While Times Square was a sketchy place to be yesterday evening, everything seemed to return to normal today. I walked from Union Square up to 42nd st. along Broadway, then down to Madison Square Garden along 7th ave. I saw a few signs, some press and a Lot of cops, but nary a protest. There was one guy standing on a milk crate in Union Square talking about the history of oppression in America, with a crowd of a few dozen interested people, but that was about it.

I did not intersect with the Poor People's March, which may develop into something interesting.

quick glance

2004-08-26T12:04:00.000-04:00

I am extremely curious to know how middle America receives these two stories:

On page A23 today, the nytimes printed an AP story about a man who lit a van and himself ablaze after hearing that his son had been killed in Najaf;

Arredondo climbed into the Marine Corps van parked outside his home and set it ablaze, suffering severe burns.
``This is his scream that his child is dead. The war needs to stop,'' Melida Arredondo, who had rushed home from work when she heard the news, said Thursday on ABC's ``Good Morning America.''

On a more prosaic, but deeply resounding note, the poor are getting poorer at a fast clip:

The number of Americans living in poverty jumped by 1.3 million last year as household incomes held steady, the Census Bureau said Wednesday. The percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose to 12.5 percent from 12.1 percent.

Poverty and immolation, a potent mix.

rnc not welcome

2004-08-25T13:12:00.000-04:00

The Village Voice has published a succinct and powerful article that should convince every single New Yorker to take to the streets next week during the convention. It brings home the bitter irony of a fiercely democratic city being forced to pay (and pay and pay...) for the administration's foreign policy failures, and then being told that it would be 'disrespectful' to voice an opinion during the convention. All I can say is, Bush may be shielded from the fury in the streets, but his delegates won't be. Let the games begin?

death in virginia

2004-08-24T17:08:00.000-04:00

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court lifted a stay of execution for James Reid, a Virginia man convicted of stabbing an 87 year old woman to death in her house. Lawyers for Reid argued that Virginia's method of imposing the death penalty contituted a cruel and unusual punnishment, forbidden by the sixth amendment. The Washington Post wrote:

Reid's attorneys asserted that the combination of chemicals Virginia uses to carry out executions could cause the inmate to "consciously suffer an excruciatingly painful and protracted death."

In a 5-4 decision, the Court denied the appeal without comment, depriving us of a platform for discussion on what constitutes unacceptable cruelty in the modern age.

The spokesman for attorney general Kilgore, who had asked the Court to lift the stay, had no qualms about the requirements of justice:

Murtaugh also noted that Lester was stabbed 22 times. "If anyone had grounds to complain about undue pain, we believe it should be she," he said.

This brings up some interesting questions.

How does a just and civilized society address crimes of violence? Will a violent and painful punnishment deter violent crimes? What if that punnishment is in conflict with many people's conception of the requirements of the constitution? Can an inconsistent threat from the government hope to achieve consistent goals in crime prevention? Do we seek retribution, or peace?

Furthermore, what constitutes 'cruel and unusual punnishment' in our time? Where should that discussion take place, and how do we know when we have achieved consensus?

ongoing.

you are what you speak

2004-08-22T23:33:00.000-04:00

Check out this absolutely fascinating article about a linguistics paper appearing in Science this month. Apparently, there is a tribe in the Amazon which has had contact with outsiders for 200 years, and yet still has no words for numbers, and also seems unable to count. Despite months of instruction, tribe members could not grasp the most basic concepts of counting, implying that their language has limited their ability to form new concepts.

Since falling in love with Wittgenstein in college, I have steadfastly defended the idea that the language you speak determines the conceptual framework within which you can operate. While fun to argue, this point of view has been difficult to substantiate, perhaps until now. I look forward to witnessing the fray as linguistics professors jump to explain the findings.

The Piraha people are fascinating for more reasons than one, reports the article:

Besides living a numberless life, he reports in a separate study prepared for publication, the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day.

Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.

They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.

They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are.

They do not believe that outsiders understand their language even after they have just carried on conversations with them.

They have no creation myths, tell no fictional stories and have no art. All of their pronouns appear to be borrowed from a neighbouring language.

So I suppose we have to broaden our ideas about what constitutes the basics of human culture. I wonder if anyone's asked them about their dreams...

spending time

2004-08-17T23:24:00.000-04:00

New York mayor Bloomberg has made the surreal announcement that various businesses, museums and attractions will offer discounts to RNC protesters wearing a "Peaceful Political Activists" pin, says the nytimes today. "It's no fun to protest on an empty stomach," said the mayor as he made the announcement, explaining how businesses and protesters could get along swell. However, the article reveals a crucial flaw in the program;

But Mr. Bloomberg conceded yesterday that not everyone who wore a button would be strictly vetted for his or her peacefulness. "Unfortunately, we can't stop an anarchist from getting a button," he said, though he doubted any of them would want to wear one.

Damn those peace hating anarchists! Perhaps they should require an resistance to authority test before giving out the pins.

armchair journalism

2004-08-13T20:33:00.000-04:00

Something tells me that the authors of today's nytimes article on the situation in Najaf wrote their story based on military reports rather than any eyewitnessing. The writing is painfully dry and full of technical terms, somehow missing the fact that we are bombing the Iraqi equivalent of the Vatican. Here is a mind numbing example:

The Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry pulled back from 1920 Revolution Square, away from the holy Shrine of Imam Ali, which is roughly in the center of the cordoned area set up around the old city by American forces on Thursday.
The cordon has been loosened, so it is now possible to enter by way of the square, to the far east of the perimeter.

If you want another version of events, checkout today's CounterPunch, with an article more appropriately titled: "Slaughter in Najaf." It's tough going, keeping up with the blood trails, but the alternative is complicity. Happy reading.

nelson mandela, terrorist

2004-08-07T19:59:00.000-04:00

This week, Max Blumenthal points to a crucial article on Dick Cheny's 1986 vote against a resolution for Nelson Mandela's release and US recognition of the ANC. Twenty years later, he stands by his decision to thwart a "terrorist organization."

Perhaps the Kerry campaign should give that one a little play.

convention ka ching

2004-08-07T19:16:00.000-04:00

An article in the nytimes today highlighted the real commitment republican national convention goers are going to have to make this august, as attendees will be expected to foot their own bills. Even the seriously invested rangers and pioneers will be coughing up, causing some to complain. This quote stuck out of the crowd:

"The price of playing the game has risen dramatically,'' said Fred Zeidman, a Texas fund-raiser who has brought in at least $200,000. "I don't think anybody is happy about writing the check. But it's a cost of doing business.''

Doing business? At least the man is candid.

return of the tree

2004-08-07T19:08:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the long silence. While Ireland's recent economic boom is due laregely to the computer age, some villages have been left out of the high speed internet loop. And who wants to stare at the glowing screen while there are green hills and cliffs and singing fishermen right out the window? After a month of that, however, the internet beckons. So, back to blogging I go.

O'Reilly: Throwback or Throwup?

2004-06-24T14:47:00.000-04:00

More fair and balanced commentary from the ever wise and insightful Bill O'Reilly:

Bill O'Reilly referred to his Radio Factor co-host, Lis Wiehl -- an author, law professor, and FOX News Channel legal analyst -- as "eye candy ... for me" on the June 21 radio program, telling Wiehl that she is on the show "because you're good-looking, so I got somebody to look over" while he's on the air.

O'Reilly, who earlier in the program claimed that Wiehl would like to "date" former President Bill Clinton, responded to her comment that Clinton's lip-biting during his appearance on 60 Minutes was "cute" by stating, "That's the in-depth analysis from a Harvard Law grad, ladies and gentlemen." Later, in a discussion about Michael Moore's new film Fahrenheit 9/11, O'Reilly referred to Wiehl as actress Drew Barrymore, remarking, "I loved you in Poison Ivy. Was that the one [movie] she was naked in?"

regan-gate

2004-06-17T16:58:00.000-04:00

For those of you who, like me, turned away in disgust from massive portraits of Regan on the cover of every newspaper last week, Norm Dixon has written a great article on Regan's work to arm Saddam with chemical weapens in the 80's. Note that a good chunk of the current administration was calling the shots then too.

Damage Control

2004-06-14T20:28:00.000-04:00

Kurt Nimmo writes in CounterPunch today:

So desperate are Bush Republicans to kill Michael Moore's latest film, Fahrenheit 9/11, they have hired a public relations firm to set up a web site attacking Moore. The site, MoveAmericaForward.com, claims to be "non-partisan," but a glance at the "About" page of the site reveals the director and staff of Move America Forward are all diehard Republicans, anti-tax activists, and former legislative staffers. The PR firm is Russo Marsh & Rogers.

This meshes nicely with a book I've just finished, 'Coercion', by Douglas Rushkoff, which highlights some of the ways that governments and corporations use coercive techniques to influence citizens and consumers. It's a good read, and recommended for those who consider themselves media savvy, and yet are unaware of many of the techniques used to sway their opinion.

Rushkoff discusses one particularly infamous case in which the Kuwaiti government hired the PR firm Hill & Knowlton to convince Congress and the American public to push for the Gulf War. They fabricated an atrocity, produced a 15 year old girl who gave false testimony to Congress, and were of course successful. For those of you who (like me) were unaware of this, here is a quick summary of the deception, and here is a more in depth discussion.

In light of this, I found Hill & Knowlton's mission statement to be intriguing:

We believe that communication has the power to create change and that real change only occurs with effective, powerful communication. Communication is the heart of what makes us human, what makes the world go round, and what we at Hill & Knowlton do day in and day out in 70 offices in 37 countries around the globe. Powerful communications that make a difference, that go beyond the ordinary, that can transform, inspire, move and educate is why we exist. This power can be accessed by our clients wherever and whenever they need it; in specialist arenas and in global campaigns; in the corridors of government; in the financial centers and in the minds of consumers everywhere.

This leads me to some questions: What is the dividing line between communication and manipulation? If I am an effective communicator, does that mean that you understand me, or that you agree with me? If 'straitforward' methods of communication are proving ineffective, when is it acceptable to use more oblique forms? What is the effective response to the Hill $ Knowlton's of the world? Can information beat decption? What if the deception has already wrought an emotional state change, such that information has little effect? These are the questions of the hour for the tree...

the wall

2004-06-14T17:47:00.000-04:00

A trenchant piece here on some of the nasty particulars of the wall going up in Israel. Perhaps the most incredible aspect of this construction project from hell is that apparently very few Israelis are aware of its scope. Presumably they will not be prepared for the rage to come.

wal-mart is hungry

2004-06-07T19:38:00.000-04:00

I am a staunch disparager of Wal-Mart, but have been challenged in my portrayal of the mega shopping store as a pestilence that should be stricken from the earth. Wal-Mart's supporters maintain that the store creates jobs and offers products at unbeatable prices, and thus is fundamentally good for society. However, the corporate giant may actually be consuming more resources than it delivers, as reports of employees on public assistance and decimated local businesses attest. But wait, there's more; an article in the Elizabethan Star of Tennessee discusses the huge subsidies doled out to the company:

Wal-Mart Stores have enjoyed more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments across the United States, according to a new study released by a Washington, D.C.-based research group.

...snip...

The types of subsidies reportedly given to Wal-Mart projects included access roads and utility lines, tax increment financing, sales tax rebates or exemptions, property tax abatements and tax-exempt bond financing.
In addition to documenting subsidies actually awarded to Wal-Mart projects, the study describes those situations in which local citizen groups successfully opposed plans for public assistance to the company. "The fact that Wal-Mart often proceeded with such projects without subsidies suggests that the company did not seek the assistance out of financial need," Mattera said.

This reminds me of the system that logging companies use to relieve timber rich countries of their resources; they come in promising jobs and growth, demand huge tax breaks, and walk away with the money and resouces, leaving behind economic and environmental ruin.

Why is it that counties and countries continue to hand out funds to these destructive corporations? I suppose the systems are complex enough that true self interest is obscured, which is also the case in our current political system.

draft

2004-06-01T18:57:00.000-04:00

Jacob Levich of CounterPunch reminds us that discussion of reinstating the draft is going strong in congress these days. I noticed the following bills several months ago, but thought that nothing was going to come of it. Apparently they are still up for discussion. The two bills are S. 89 and H.R. 163. They both contain the identical text:

Universal National Service Act of 2003 - Declares that it is the obligation of every U.S. citizen, and every other person residing in the United States, between the ages of 18 and 26 to perform a two-year period of national service, unless exempted, either as a member of an active or reserve component of the armed forces or in a civilian capacity that promotes national defense. Requires induction into national service by the President. Sets forth provisions governing: (1) induction deferments, postponements, and exemptions, including exemption of a conscientious objector from military service that includes combatant training; and (2) discharge following national service.

Amends the Military Selective Service Act to authorize the military registration of females.

Note that "every other person residing in the United States" will also be required to sign up. I wonder who in particular they have in mind.

Note also that this bill is heavily sponsored by Democrats. Why? I'm working on that one... Some argue that it's a ploy to generate opposition to the war, as a draft would be incredibly unpopular. I could definitely see that being the case. On the other hand, it seems absurd to rush to war with an all volunteer army that is ill-equipped to deal with the resistance on the ground. Perhaps those democrats actually want a shot at 'winning' the conflict.

Bill Broyles has a trenchant piece on why either the draft should come back, or the war should not be fought at all.

spam poetry

2004-05-31T16:45:00.000-04:00

i love this stuff. anyone know how they generate it?

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~ ~ ~

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