blarg? blort? brap?

My old friend, S. Hunter, has some questions for me about my blogging:

Okay, explain this to me if you would. Are these essays of yours? Is this a page on a larger site? (I presume so...) Do you really stay up that late? How did you get hip to this and how many of the Waynetouched are involved?

Fascinating, though.

ON THE ACT OF BLOGGING

Much of the writing here is, of course, my own. Much of it, however, usually italicized, consists of quotes and passages from other people's writings. Generally I try to give a bit of a tease from whatever article I'm posting in order to get people to follow the link and read the whole story. Typically, the regular font represents my own voice and thoughts. So the basic formula here (that I pretty much ripped off from the Eschaton and This Modern World blogs) is some sort of headline that I either cut and paste from somewhere else or make up on my own, a tease from an article or essay, then a comment or two from me, then a link to the article, then the dollar signs. Every week or two, I tend to post a longer essay that's mostly my own stuff. Lately, I've been hybridizing the approaches to a small extent.

Some of the music, by the way, is mine, and some is not.

WHO'S DOMAIN IS IT ANYWAY?

Real Art is part of Blogger and you can go there by following the link posted in the upper right corner of this page. But this blog and its archives are really pretty much on their own, as far as I can tell. Maybe I'll get my own domain some day, but not today. Or for a while.

UP ALL NIGHT

Sometimes, weekends mostly, I am up very late. It's my way. I probably stay up later on week nights than most people who get up at six in the morning because I tend to take afternoon naps after my hectic days of teaching America's young. So, yes, I really am up that late.

GENESIS OF REAL ART

How did I get hip to this? A cool student I had this past year, Lance, noticed that I was reading a blog on my computer at school and we started talking. He showed me his blog and I was impressed; I told him I'd like to blog myself, someday and he immediately set me up on Blogger. The next thing I knew, I was ranting and raving in cyberspace. For free.

ON THE WAYNETOUCHED

Waynetouched? I'll have to write about the enigmatic Wayne (dis)organization here on Real Art someday for everybody who doesn't know the truth about Wayne (although I will tell you now that my official Wayne title is "Supreme Advocate, Judge of Everything"). But I will say this: two of the waynetouched have already made statements on this blog, Kevin (a.k.a. "FATNOISE"), and Brian (you'll have to scroll down to my May 18th post to read his). Rick may know, but I'm not sure. Lex also reads it sometimes.

But, by all means, S. Hunter, spread the word to Wayne.

IN CLOSING

Thanks for the vote of "fascinating."

(S. Hunter is an even bigger Star Trek fan than I am--"fascinating" is quite the compliment.)

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MORE ON IRAQ LOOTING

Tom Tomorrow makes some really good points regarding the fact that the looting of Iraq's ancient treasures was not as bad as first reported. Click here.

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EVIDENCE OF WMDs FOUND
By Marvel Comics Super Hero

In a recent issue of Marvel's Thunderbolts, sometimes hero, sometimes villian, Techno, finds and steals a canister of Pym particles (a chemical discovered by founding Avenger, Dr. Henry Pym, a.k.a. Ant-Man, Giant-Man, Goliath, and Yellow Jacket) from an Iraqi chemical weapons stash.

WOW!!!

(Oh yeah, I forget. Comics are fiction, and not particularly sophisticated fiction, at that. Sometimes I get reality and comic books a bit confused. Sorry if I mislead you--the whole "war on terrorism" is so comic-like, it's an easy mistake for me to make.)

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WOLFOWITZ'S BIG MOUTH
Downplay of WMDs Infuriates Europe

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz cited bureaucratic reasons for focusing on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and said a "huge" result of the war was to enable Washington to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.

"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair.

Click here (and deal with an annoying, but brief registration procedure--damned NY Times).

One of the few things these days that keeps me from becoming infuriated, myself, is keeping my mind occupied wondering how Americans are able to take in stride these gradual revelations of Bush's Iraq war lies. No Iraqi links to al-Qaeda have been found. No WMDs have been found. The Private Lynch rescue was staged. There was no bunker where U.S. planes targeted Saddam at the beginning of the war. Dick Cheney's company, Halliburton, has raked in the reconstruction cash from no-bid sweetheart deals with the Pentagon. The oil companies have earned massive windfall profits due to war jitters driving up the price of oil. All of these facts have made it onto the front pages of most US newspapers. Yet, the American people collectively yawn. No outrage (except from a few Democratic politicians; bully for them). No calls for investigations of the White House. Nothing.

I'm really starting to believe what I've been saying about television and air conditioning induced mass hypnosis. What else can explain it?

One of these links came from J. Orlin Grabbe.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY BOB HOPE

Hope has topped the bills of five major showbiz mediums -- vaudeville, stage, movies, radio, TV. He's done all that. And so much more.

It's a big day in the large, comfortable house in Toluca Lake, Calif., that he and wife Dolores, who turned 94 just two days ago, have called home for 66 years. They've been married 69.

This morning, the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine becomes Bob Hope Square. This afternoon, Hope's office staff is throwing him a party. Tonight's the family celebration and birthday cake. "One hundred candles, and a fireman standing by," says Dolores.

Click here.

What can I say about Bob Hope? He's the first comedian that held my interest as a child--I think the movie Paleface, or one of his TV specials in the early 1970s is the first time I saw him. Hope made me want to be funny, too. Years later, I developed a taste for the more sophisticated (but still silly) comedy of Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and others, but I never stopped loving Bob Hope. What has made him so funny for so long? How could he be both the buffoon and the straight man, sometimes in rapid succession? I suppose I could pull out some of my old acting school vocabulary and provide a comedic analysis, but analyzing humor always takes some of the funny away. Instead, here is a little photo gallery I've assembled that might get the idea across visually (but make no mistake, Hope is also a master of the one-liner; in fact, here's an audio download of a Bob Hope radio show from the 1930s to listen to while you look at the pics):

Bob, Nixon, and Ah-nald.

Hope sips champagne from a glass held by Argonne's master-slave manipulators, on display at the 1957 Paris Fair.

Looking silly in Vietnam.

Hope for President!

Silly with babes at an airforce base.

Bob with a pith helmet at a US airbase in the south Pacific during WWII.

Bob with the Suntones.

Bob giving the eye to evil General Westmoreland in Vietnam.

Bob with a ghost.

Bob in a baseball uniform harassing Superman.

Bob Hope with the Wright Brothers Band.

Bob Hope at Mardi Gras, early 1970s.

Bob ogles a babe in Vietnam at a USO show.

Silly face on radio.

Darth Bob.

Bob Hope golf cart.

Simpsons Bob (not Sideshow).

Girly Bob.

And finally, my favorite Bob Hope picture.

I know that this has been said by probably everybody saying something about Bob Hope's birthday, but after looking at all these pictures, I've gotta say it, too: Bob Hope has made himself not only fit into every era of the last eighty years or so, he has made himself an important part every time. Bob Hope is a huge part of twentieth century America; if you don't like him, you're evil.

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BARD GOES BLING-BLING
400 Years Later, Play Goes Hip-Hop

A group of rap artists, break-dancers, an underground disk jockey and a grand-opera director have transformed that 1938 toe-tapping Broadway show into a thumping jive British version that brings the musical tradition of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart bracingly into the 21st century.

This updating of "The Boys from Syracuse," itself a bawdy reworking of Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors," is at the Theater Royal, Stratford East in the London borough with the highest number of young people and the greatest ethnic diversity of any in Britain.

A pioneering theater, the Stratford East has had a penchant for stirring up the London stage with productions like Joan Littlewood's 1963 satire "Oh, What a Lovely War!," a vaudeville-style treatment of World War I. Now it is doing so again with this ethnic overhaul. A booming sound system and two large video screens have been installed onstage, the strutting singers all carry hand microphones, the doors stay open to let people wander and the seats have been removed from the ground floor level so the audience can do some swaying of its own to the insistent rhythms of rap.

This could be great; it could be terrible. That it is British gives me hope.

I still have a really bad taste in my mouth from that gang-banger Romeo and Juliet film a few years ago...

Click here.

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STUDY REVEALS WHAT ANYBODY
WITH HALF A BRAIN ALREADY KNOWS
Condoms Don't Increase Teen Sex

Teenagers at high schools where condoms were available were no more likely to have sex than other teens, a study says.

The study published Wednesday backs earlier research on the programs developed in the 1990s to stem the spread of HIV and reduce teen pregnancy. It says that students in high schools with condom programs were more likely to use condoms, while students in other high schools were more likely to use other forms of birth control.

Click here.

The notion that making condoms available to teens influences them to have more sex is absurd. The steady tidal wave of sexual images, sounds, and irresponsibility rammed down America's throat by the mass media on a daily basis surely has more to do with teen promiscuity than school sex education and health programs: to imagine that, somehow, the quiet, subtle, whisper of sexuality implied by high school condom availability is able to cut through the cacophonous din of hoochy TV, film, and music polluting the airwaves is truly irrational.

Why do we need a study to tell us that?

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Blogeur

I got listed on Blogeur! According to this site, I had one of the more interesting blogs on May 27th (probably for my economics essay; scroll down and read it if you haven't already). So, thank you Blogeur.

What's Blogeur? Read:

Ladies, Gentlemen, distinguished guests, bemused perusers of all shapes and sizes... it is my pleasure to be your host at my website, le Blogeur. But I forget myself-- my name is Relton DuPiniot, and I am a blogeur. I enjoy spending all of my time spying on various weblogs and seeing what they're up to-- o, the pleasure I get from viewing well-formed HTML surrounding interesting, pithy commentary related to the finest, freshest links imaginable!

The weblog is today's highest form of writing, as it connects our world to the metaworld, and back again one-thousand fold. To the left are the best weblogs in the world, for that particular day at least. If you would like your weblog to be noticed, please place a link to my site from yours, and I shall visit and hopefully, one day, I shall link your weblog, completing the circle of life. Don't forget to browse the archives below, they contain the best of the weblogs for the past few years. Your Humble Servant, Relton...

Interesting, huh? Go check it out. Click here.

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CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST LUNACY
Bush, the Bible, and Iraq

In foreign lands, it's a short leap from such thinking to the conclusion that Bush is the religion-crazed bad guy in the Iraq crisis. If you accept that view, the determination of Israel's Likud Party to expand Israeli settlements means the Jews are returning to Judea and Samaria, the territory God promised Abraham. And now, with the U.N. balking at Bush's wishes, even some among America's allies worry that the Christian right -- and maybe even the President himself -- see the U.N. as the vehicle for the Antichrist's world order.

The only thing remaining to complete John Darby's prophecy is the war. It's no surprise that in a Feb. 26 debate in the British Parliament, George Galloway, a Labor Party backbencher from Scotland, declared that "that born-again, right-wing, Bible-belting, fundamentalist Republican Administration in the United States want war."

That sentiment is no doubt a reaction to the words created for Bush by his chief speech writer, Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian. Historian Boyer notes that when Bush said in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein could unleash "a day of horror like none we have ever known," the President not only played on memories of September 11 but also invoked "a powerful and ancient apocalyptic vocabulary that for millions of [Christian] prophecy believers conveys a specific and thrilling message of an approaching end -- not just of Saddam, but of human history as we know it" -- complete with the return of Jesus to lead a much-expanded flock.

Remember, I come from fundamentalist roots, so I know: fundamentalist Christians, as a political force, are dangerous. During the brief Afghanistan war, I liked to joke that the conflict was actually the Islamic fundamentalists versus the Christian fundamentalists. Laughing wild amid severest woe. Sadly, this is no joke. I disagree with this article's author's assertion that "few of Bush's aides share his particular brand of faith," and that the White House is not as insane as it might seem (Rumsfeld and his staff have daily prayer meetings, for god's sake). In addition to the oil imperative and the empire imperative, millennialist philosophy is clearly a factor in Oval Office decision making--it is self-evident in the irrationality of Bush's Israel policy, at the very least. It is clear, however, that one way or the other, whether deeply religious or not, the Bush administration behaves in a fundamentalist way that is scaring the hell out of the rest of the world.

For an update on the Bush administration's fundamentalist lunacy, click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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TEXAS HOUSE WALKOUT UPDATE
Malfunction blamed for gap on DPS tape

As part of the probe, Bailey had asked DPS to turn over Capitol security tapes for the hallway outside of House Speaker Tom Craddick's office. A DPS command post was set up May 12 in Craddick's reception room, and Bailey said he wants to know who went in and out of that room.

Bailey said the DPS provided his staff with copies of the security tapes late Friday. As the staff watched them over the weekend, the entire week was available except for the afternoon of May 12. He said the tape stopped at 12:47 p.m. and did not begin again until 6 p.m.

"It's odd that it was the day and time that we wanted," Bailey said. "It's fine all week, except for that one period."

Malfunction? Tape gap? I'm beginning to think that my recent evoking of Watergate (scroll down to the REAL POWER post below) while musing about this DPS/Republican scandal wasn't just hyperbole. It is worth noting that even though this is, as Atrios says, "a somewhat below the radar developing story," so, too, was Watergate before it broke into the headlines. I'm not holding my breath, though. The missing WMDs and conspicous lack of any Iraq/al-Qaeda link ought to have broken into the headlines by now, but haven't.

There is that pissed-off-capitalist wild card still in the deck that has yet to be played, however...

Click here.

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ECONOMICS: PSEUDO-SCIENCE YOU’D BETTER UNDERSTAND

My senior year in high school, I was a hot shot extemporaneous speaker on the Houston high school speech tournament circuit. If you’re not in the know, extemporaneous speaking is a major National Forensic League speaking event (“forensic” meaning competitive public speaking, not dead bodies): students draw a topic dealing with either domestic or foreign issues, then write and memorize a speech on that topic in thirty minutes; the speeches are delivered in front of a judge. My area of expertise was cold war diplomacy, history, and strategy. By the time I was a senior, however, I was becoming increasingly interested in economics, specifically “Reaganomics,” also known as “supply-side economics,” or just plain “voodoo economics” (a term coined by our current President’s father back in saner days).

Reaganomics was all the intellectual rage in conservative circles. Most people didn’t seem to understand yet—it just didn’t make sense to most Americans; how could Reagan massively raise the defense budget and then claim to be able to cut taxes in order to gain more tax revenue? But I just knew that there had to be something to it. If you trusted the Gipper, as I then did, Reaganomics had the allure of forbidden knowledge: as the 1980s conservative bumper sticker said, “vote Democrat; it’s easier than thinking.” I became as expert on the topic as a high school kid could. My knowledge of supply-side economics made me feel superior to liberals. An extemporaneous speech I gave at a tournament on the topic got me a first place trophy and launched me to the national speech tournament where I eventually ranked fifteenth in the nation. Those were the days…

Of course, Reaganomics, now known as neo-liberalism, is complete bullshit.

Even then, conservative as I was, I was starting to realize it. That same year, my buddy, Matt and I had been invited to attend a weekend seminar that we understood was to help us prepare for winning scholarship money in a speaking contest hosted by the Rotarians over what they called “The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom,” which is something of an ideologically loaded document to begin with. It turned out that this was no public speaking seminar. It was practically a cult-like indoctrination into the fundamentalism of the free market, a weekend of neo-liberalism, complete with real, live, right wing economists spouting their cruel nonsense.

At first, I loved associating myself with the grownup supply-siders—that made me cool like them. After a while, however, some warning bells started ringing in the back of my head that were increasingly difficult to ignore. The first, quiet ding-dings happened during a conversation with one of the right wing economists: he advocated doing away with the minimum wage in order to make the labor force more like a labor market, a “market” of people. I wanted to believe him. After all, he was a cool supply-sider who knew about such things, and sharing his beliefs would make me more like him, more Reagan-cool. But I just couldn’t. I didn’t have enough of an intellect at the time to explain why. I only had my feelings. Doing away with the minimum wage seemed heartless—of course, it is heartless; in fact, it needs to be raised today by two or three bucks.

Sixteen years later, I think that I now have the intellect to explain just what was so alarming about this “market” of people concept. Economics, as an academic field, obscures the difference between its theories and real life. Americans who think they know a thing or two about the field tend to forget or minimize the real world consequences of the conventional economic wisdom. Economics reduces people’s lives to ideas and numbers; compassion and justice are not the concerns of economics: this “science” is not only morally bankrupt, but also wildly inaccurate oftentimes.

Indeed, economics is rife with biases and unfounded assumptions. Most economists now days have a fierce belief in the correctness of the “free market”: the reality is that there can NEVER be a free market as long as government exists as a powerful entity and as long as wealth is allowed to accumulate so much that it can monopolize and interfere with the market. (Neo-lib guru Milton Friedman’s solution is to reduce government to a bare minimum, but to also have government police against monopoly. A weak government cannot affect powerful economic forces; Friedman’s goals are contradictory, and, therefore, impossible.) Most economists now days assert that all nations should embrace “free trade” in order to share in the bounty that has blessed America: the reality is that free trade does nothing but hurt developing economies; US industries didn’t develop without protective tariffs—this is universal: no economy will develop without protective tariffs. Most economists now days use the Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of our nation’s economic health: in reality, GDP, due to bias and gross omission inherent in its calculation, gives a wildly distorted view of the economy.

One of the biggest biases of the pseudo-science known as economics is that economists serve everyone. This is simply not true. Economics serves the powerful—it serves the government, business, and the wealthy. Economics rarely considers the little guy, people like you and me, except as labor or as consumers.

These biases and faulty assumptions are replicated at high schools and colleges throughout the land. Students who are not so bored that they don’t even care (which is how most people react) accept and embrace what they are taught, based on “scientific” authority alone, not really understanding, not really questioning the numerous holes in economic reasoning. These students ultimately become voters and then transmute their faulty views into faulty political reality at the ballot box.

The confusion, the authority of “science,” the dogma all make economics very useful as a tool of political propaganda. In other words, economics has status as a virtual religion, the more contemplative brother to Mammon. As Harvard law professor, Allen Dershowitz, has said, “the Bible can be used to prove almost anything,” so, too, with economics in the American political landscape. Politicians cite economic studies with almost religious authority. Politicians always clamor about the need to help the economy, to worship our god. Greenspan and others are the priests, shamans, and oracles, dispensing predictions, warnings, and wisdom. Even though economics, as an academic field, has it uses, the idea of “economics” is taken at face value, on faith, as a factual description of reality by people who don’t really understand it or the consequences of its prescriptions.

All in all, this is a pretty sad state of affairs. Economics, beyond the quasi-religious dimension, is extremely important: it is about power; it is about who wins and loses.

EXAMPLE: Neo-liberalism requires huge numbers of losers in order to properly function. Full employment creates a very tight labor market that causes an upward pressure on wages. In order to have big profits, labor must be cheap. Otherwise, there is less incentive to be a capitalist.

EXAMPLE: Socialized medicine could really be no worse than HMOs, but, at least, the government would have some responsibility to it citizens under a socialized system. HMOs are beholden only to quarterly profits. Under HMOs, the capitalists are the winners; most Americans are the losers.

EXAMPLE: (And this is probably the biggest one.) People cannot be elected to public office without the blessings of moneyed interests via campaign financing. Before the political primaries, presidential candidates must first pass through the “wealth primary.” Along with the millions spent on political lobbying by corporations and the wealthy, dirty campaign money makes US politics the realm of extraordinary corruption. Economic might, not the American people, rules the United States.

Winners, losers, and power: that is what economics is ultimately about.

Unfortunately, most secondary students are required to take only a single semester of the subject. Most college students don’t take it at all. Unfortunately, most economic news is confined to the business pages that most people don’t read, and journalists do an awful job of connecting the dots to show how economics and politics are hopelessly intertwined. Unfortunately, both the press and the schools disseminate a dry and boring understanding of the subject, almost as though they want people to be disinterested. Unfortunately, even if an American can wade through the morass of impediment to economic understanding, there are still the biases and faulty assumptions inherent in the discipline—rarely do people develop a critical view of economics.

The economic wizards of Wall Street command us not to look at the man behind the curtain, and we obey.

We must not obey. That’s why I’ve been making more of an effort lately to link to and comment on economic news stories. They’ve always been in the background here at Real Art, because economics really does affect almost every aspect of life, but I think I need to be more upfront and straightforward just because it really is a big, huge deal.

Besides, I think I need to make up for championing the cause of neo-liberalism in my youth. This is my penance. Every time Real Art gets a hit, I’ll think of it as a ritual flogging.

Aren’t I clever?

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BACK IN THE USSR
McCartney Plays Red Square

Fans paid up to $2400 for tickets to the concert - an event that would never have happened when Back in the USSR was released in 1968. Then President Leonid Brezhnev made it near-impossible to hear Beatles' music, which was considered "the belch of Western culture". But yesterday Mr Putin told Sir Paul his work was "very popular, more than popular".

Click here.

I might as well post this, too:

Flew in from Miami Beach BOAC
Didn't get to bed last night
On the way the paper bag was on my knee
Man I had a dreadful flight
I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Been away so long I hardly knew the place
Gee it's good to be back home
Leave it till tomorrow to unpack my case
Honey disconnect the phone
I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the U.S., back in the U.S.
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out
They leave the West behind
And Moscow girls make me sing and shout
That Georgia's always on my mind
I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Show me round your snow peaked mountains way down
south
Take me to your daddy's farm
Let me hear your balalaika's ringing out
Come and keep your comrade warm
I'm back in the U.S.S.R.
You don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the U.S., back in the U.S.
Back in the U.S.S.R.

And thanks to FARK, by the way.

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DIVERSION TRUMPS PROPAGANDA

Never mind that the U.S. economy is in a shambles; the Bush regime is gearing up for possible war with North Korea, Cuba, Iran, and Syria; that U.S.-European relations have never been so bad since the GOP walked away from the League of Nations after World War I; that relations with Canada and Mexico, our closest neighbors, are in a state of chill; and that Americans are fretting over possible attacks from Al Qaeda on their own soil. No, millions of Americans wanted to know if Ruben Studdard or Clay Aiken were going to become the new American Idol.

Click here.

I've written several times about how the US news media, by and large, tends to serve a propaganda role favoring the government and corporations, rather than an objective informational role benefitting American citizens. Of course, one piece of missing information here is that most Americans simply pay no attention to the news. Most Americans don't even vote, for that matter. This majority of Americans does not need to be propagandized: they need to be distracted. The prices of televisions, DVD players, and video game systems are at an all time low. We have an ever increasing number of cable channels to watch, and Americans are still parked in front of their sets for hours a day.

Politics? Don't bother me; "Friends" is about to come on...

The United States is literally amusing itself to death. The comfortable, air-conditioned complacency of American citizens has allowed all manner of injustice to take place. At the same time, this pleasant, overconsuming existence is fed by both the corporate rape of the Earth and its peoples, and by the violent military aggression that makes that raping possible. While we're watching "Anna Nicole" or "Ex-treme Dating" everything is just fine.

Hey, let's order a pizza...

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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A THIRD PROMINENT BUSH GUY SAYS BYE
General Tommy Franks to Retire

Franks made no announcement, but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld issued a brief statement Thursday saying that Franks had informed him "of his desire to step down as the commander of the U.S. Central Command in the weeks immediately ahead" and that Franks plans to retire from the Army this summer.

Franks, along with press secretary Ari Fleischer, and EPA chief Christie Whitman, completes a trio of high profile government officials under Bush who are all bugging out to "spend more time with family." Again, I ask, what's going on here? Franks' disagreements with Rumsfeld are fairly well known at this point. I cautiously speculate that some members of the Bush junta are starting to get sick of the bullshit. Is Powell next?

The sad thing is that Bush and his handlers, no doubt, will easily find replacements who are totally eager to deal with the endless stream of awkward lies and absurdities that are continually soaking the White House lawn: Fleischer's, Whitman's, and Franks' departures may indicate that they have some sense of conscience; the new guys probably won't be so enlightened.

Click here.

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WHO WAS R T RANKIN?

And why did they sing about diseases?

Click here for the song "Dizeaze."

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ECONOMICS SATURDAY

Dangers of Deflation

Though talk of deflation fills the air, most of that talk is subtly but significantly off point. The immediate danger isn't deflation per se; it's the risk that the world's major economies will find themselves trapped in an economic quagmire. Deflation can be both a symptom of an economy sinking into the muck, and a reason why it sinks even deeper, but it's usually a lagging indicator. The crucial question is whether we'll stumble into the swamp in the first place — and the risks look uncomfortably high.

The particular type of quagmire to worry about has a name: liquidity trap. As the I.M.F. report explains, the most important reason to fear deflation is that it can push an economy into a liquidity trap, or deepen the distress of an economy already caught in the trap.

Here's how it works, in theory. Ordinarily, deflation — a general fall in the level of prices — is easy to fight. All the central bank (in our case, the Federal Reserve) has to do is print more money, and put it in the hands of banks. With more cash in hand, banks make more loans, interest rates fall, the economy perks up and the price level stops falling.

But what if the economy is in such a deep malaise that pushing interest rates all the way to zero isn't enough to get the economy back to full employment? Then you're in a liquidity trap: additional cash pumped into the economy — added liquidity — sits idle, because there's no point in lending money out if you don't receive any reward. And monetary policy loses its effectiveness.

For New York Times Paul Krugman essay on Bush's ecomomy, click here (includes a harmless, but annoying registration procedure).

Thanks to Eschaton.

George W. Bush has the worst economic record of any president since Herbert Hoover

Likewise, no one holds Bush accountable for the dot-com bust or the shock of September 11. His problems are that he's enacted and proposed nothing that would arrest the current slide, and that his policies have actually worsened it.

More precisely, his policy has actually worsened it. For it is the distinctive feature of the Bush presidency that there is but one economic policy come boom or bust, fire or flood. That, of course, is tax cuts, preponderantly for the rich. As a candidate in 2000, Bush argued for tax cuts because the government was actually running a surplus, and it was a more productive use of funds to return that money to taxpayers. Then the bubble burst, the surplus turned to deficit and those same tax cuts were repackaged as an economic stimulus. The $1.6 trillion tax cut of 2001 was so advertised, though it didn't really kick in for the better part of the decade, and most of it was targeted to the wealthy—the class of Americans least likely to spend it. Since it was enacted, it has stimulated the economy to the tune of 1.7 million jobs lost.

Click here.

Thanks to This Modern World.

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BILL O'REILLY IS A BIG BUTTHOLE

On April 22 Bill said
"if weapons of mass destruction aren't found,... I will have to apologize because I bought into it... All right, a month from today, we'll do this story again"

On March 18 Bill said
"if the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again"

Of course, May 22 came and went without an apology from the butthole or even a mention that he owed one. Is anyone surprised?

Click here.

Thanks to Eschaton.

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THIS SHOULD BE FRONT PAGE NEWS
But it's not...

Cheered on by the Bush Administration and powerful media conglomerates, Federal Communications Commission chair Michael Powell is pushing ahead with a June 2 vote to gut longstanding rules designed to prevent the growth of media monopolies. If successful, Powell's push could, in the words of dissident commissioner Michael Copps, "dramatically [alter] our nation's media landscape without the kind of debate and analysis that these issues clearly merit."

Click here.

Even though I have a degree in communications, I've really kind of avoided writing about this topic because all I seem to be able to do is shake my head. Dumbfounded. As anti-deregulation media mogul Ted Turner puts it in the above linked Nation article, "There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy." Indeed. That's the current situation (a situation that Ted Turner helped to create) before this new round of FCC deregulation. Things are absolutely awful right now. It's just about to get worse and I have great difficulty imaging anything worse than now. The media is little more than diversion for the overworked masses and propaganda for everybody else. How can things be getting worse?

But I will force myself to say these brief words and post these couple of links. After all, the failure of the US news media is one of the reasons that I've become so vocal and opinionated in my old age. The failure of the media is a major motivation for my blogging. Media consolidation and corporatization have been the silent but powerful partner to the rise of American conservativism. Even if media monopoly is a preordained conclusion, protest must be made.

Who knows? The movement against deregulation has grown quickly and gained some powerful players. Maybe deregulation will be halted, but what is really needed is a government enforced breakup of the current media oligopoly. Alas, I don't see that brewing.

One last thought. Eschaton points out that Bob Harris over at This Modern World has shown that conservative views about media deregulation prove that there is no such thing as a liberal media. Or something to that effect.

Click here.

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Pentagon insulted by claims about Lynch rescue

Pentagon spokesman Marine Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said it was "ludicrous and insulting" for the BBC to suggest the rescue was staged and hyped up.

"The thing that is most insulting is the suggestion that we would put U.S. service members at risk to stage such an event. This was a real rescue under a combat situation," Lapan told Reuters. "In addition, the war was not going badly."

Click here.

This is interesting not because the Pentagon is refuting the story (this was to be expected), but for a couple of other reasons.

First, it is surprising that the Pentagon is finally responding more than a week after the story first broke. Given the high level of propaganda and media manipulation coming from Washington these days, I would have bet that the Pentagon could have been able to put some pro-America spin on the story immediately--this is not unreasonable to expect; the Clinton administration turned rapid-response spin into a high art, and the Bush administration has emulated many of their tricks. The Pentagon's delay in responding suggests confusion. Maybe they were waiting to see if the story would simply die off by itself--it didn't. Perhaps they're being honest when they deny the story: this is out of character, however; the military has been quite effective for the last decade or so at presenting a cool, professional appearance to the media. I think what happened is that the story, in fact, is true, and the Pentagon simply thought that they weren't going to get caught. They're getting cocky.

Second, it's pretty amazing that the Lynch show story has broken into the headlines of the US press at all. The media have been routinely ignoring most anti-Bush stories for months now. That the looting tales, the Rumsfeld/Pentagon schism, and the Lynch show have all made it through the gatekeepers is news in and of itself. What's going on here? Perhaps the media have finally started getting bored with Bush the warrior king. Perhaps it's a bit more sinister: maybe the capitalists really are angry with Bush (see the REAL POWER post, below), and they have allowed the press more freedom to report news that could discredit the White House.

The truly maddening thing about all this is that Americans are left to speculate about the motivations of two extremely powerful American institutions, the Pentagon and the press. If we were living in anything even remotely resembling a democracy, there would be little need for this.

In a democracy, powerful institutions are transparent.

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REAL POWER

Noam Chomsky, in the collection of interviews with him, Understanding Power, asserts that the Watergate impeachment hearings that forced President Richard Nixon to resign were but a show. That is, when seen relative to Nixon's more horrifying crimes (with which he got away scott free) such as the secret bombings of Cambodia, or the assasination of Black Panther members, the petty botched burglary coverup scandal known as Watergate is a very unlikely catalyst for the downfall of the leader of the free world. The true cause of his downfall, says Chomsky, was his abandonment of the Bretton Woods global banking and finance agreement. Even though Nixon did this as a strategy to deal with the runaway inflation caused by LBJ's Great Society programs and the Vietnam War, the world finance community was furious--lots of powerful people were screwed. Suddenly, Nixon lost a lot of political protection and boom: the House is drawing up impeachment papers for a relatively minor crime. For Chomsky, this is a good illustration of how real power actually works.

Keep this in mind while reading the next two links:

Empire and the Capitalists

The world has been in a "great disinflation [marvelous euphemism] from 1982 to 2002" - a salutary appraisal so different from the usual crowing about the strength of the U.S. economic position in the world-economy. "And now the unwinding of a new disequilibrium is at hand - the rebalancing of a U.S.-centric world." Why? First of all because of the "ever-widening disparities in the world's external accounts." He says that "as the United States squanders its already depleted national saving" and "as the rest of the world remains on a subpar consumption path," the situation can only get worse.

Finally, the conclusion: "Can a saving-short US economy continue to finance an ever-widening expansion of its military superiority? My answer is a resounding 'no.'" What will therefore happen? The "prices of dollar-denominated assets compared to those of non-dollar-denominated assets" must fall, and fall drastically soon

And

But doesn't the Bush regime give these capitalists everything they want - for example, enormous tax rebates? But do they really want them? Not Warren Buffett, not George Soros, not Bill Gates (speaking through his father). They want a stable capitalist system, and Bush is not giving them that. Sooner or later, they will translate their discontent into action. They may already be doing this.

Click here.

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Ridge says Texas search under 'potentially criminal investigation'

WASHINGTON - Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said today that a "potentially criminal investigation" is under way into efforts to involve his agency in last week's search for Democrats who shut down the state House of Representatives.

And

The three commissioners who oversee the DPS were appointed by Bush when he was governor and have other political connections to Bush and his family.

Commissioner Bobby Holt of Midland was political finance chairman for Bush's father, the former president. Commissioner Jim Francis was chairman of the Bush Pioneers, individuals who raised more than $100,000 for the current president's 2000 election campaign. Francis also has close ties to senior presidential adviser Karl Rove.

Click here.

I'm sure that nothing will come of it.

But, given Chomsky's analysis of real power relationships, the conditions are ripe for Bush's downfall. Bush may very well be pissing off a sizable number of capitalists. Furthermore, there are, no doubt, hundreds of crimes routinely committed by the Bush administration (one could have said this of Clinton, too) that could easily serve as pretext for a scandal. Bush's enemies could use such a scandal to either force his outright removal via impeachment or simply force an election defeat in 2004 via ruined reputation. Capitalists could then return to business as usual: slowly and stably squeezing the blood out of the people of the world.

Or not.

It could get worse; the Bush wars could continue.

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ONE THOUSAND HITS

Well, I passed the thousand mark early yesterday. Hooray!

And thank you to everybody who's making my crazed ravings seem like they actually amount to something. Please keep on reading and try to force others to read Real Art, as well. It is very important that you force them. So force 'em good.

I'll celebrate again at 2,500 hits. That should take a bit.

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RONFACE

It's a fun, new game!

Silly me.

Hint: run the cursor over the ronfaces for levity. Move it faster for even more levity.

Thanks to Kevin.

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INSIDE THE BRAIN OF ARI FLEISCHER

The Houston Chronicle's Craig Hines speculates on how outgoing press secretary and amusing comedian, Ari Fleischer, develops his material for presidential press conferences and nightclub performances (as if there was a difference):

Fleischer liked to picture himself as a free-roaming agent who wandered in the Oval Office as needed to determine presidential thinking on any topic. But he more often has appeared to be an automaton wound up every morning and sent forth to spew out whatever line of the day had been decided on by a hidden information apparatchik. For instance, in late March, as the attack on Iraq progressed, Fleischer repeatedly attempted to sell the president's tax cut on the dubious basis that it was needed to create jobs for returning service personnel. If he thought it up by himself, why didn't someone else in the administration stop him?

For more insight into a very funny brain, click here.

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES: POLITICAL BIGTIME
A Texas Legislature Walkout Update

While under heavy criticism for the way troopers were conducting their hunt for House Democrats on the lam, the Texas Department of Public Safety ordered all records related to the search destroyed.

The state police today defended its actions as being required under federal privacy laws.

But

By May 13, Democrats involved in the walkout were complaining that DPS' investigation involved the harassment of their families.

Congressional Democrats also raised questions May 14 about whether the DPS misused a federal Homeland Security Department agency in searching for former Speaker Pete Laney's airplane the day of the walkout.

A DPS officer had called the Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center asking for help locating Laney's aircraft.

Click here.

So, privacy laws or no, the DPS already knew that they may have broken laws in their "investigation" and that such records would probably, at some point, constitute evidence. Destroying evidence is a crime. So is obstruction of justice.

Just another day at work for our state police force.

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EPA chief Whitman resigns

With Whitman's departure as EPA administrator, Bush loses one of the most prominent women in his Cabinet -- a moderate former New Jersey governor selected by the president to help soften his image as a political conservative, particularly on environmental issues.

Whitman had a history of clashing with the White House, starting with the president's abrupt decision to withdraw from the Kyoto global warming treaty.

But in an interview on CNN today, she said, "I'm not leaving because of clashes with the administration. In fact, I haven't had any. He's (Bush) always asked me to give him my best unadultered advice and I have done that."

But

Critics said that in the name of attracting businesses, she compromised water pollution protections and cut spending for state offices that prosecute environmental abuses by industry. Whitman, an avid mountain biker and skier, insisted she retained needed protections while eliminating red tape.

When the Bush administration took office, Whitman had only the briefest honeymoon. Within the first three months, she had upset industry executives and conservationists, disappointed moderates who like her and angered conservatives who don't.

"Christie Whitman must feel like her own long national nightmare is over," said Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, an advocacy group. "No EPA administrator has ever been so consistently and publicly humiliated by the White House."

Click here.

Yet another member of the Bush administration charged with making the irrational seem rational bails out to "spend more time with the family." Is there something going on here? Probably not, but this possible trend is worth seriously thinking about, especially because the British press secretary also announced his resignation on Monday within hours of ours, America's favorite standup comedian, Ari Fleischer.

I wonder if Bush is going to try to replace Whitman as EPA chief with another soft conservative, a Republican who doesn't seem so anti-Earth, or if his long string of high profile presidential successes will make him confident enough to replace her with someone like this.

I sure hope not.

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REAL MUSIC

Well, I heard Madonna's new album, American Life, over the weekend, and, as the reviews suggest, it sucks. It is appropriate that it was my old buddy, Lex, who brought the album over and played it for me. Lex and I have been both friends and Madonna fans since we were in high school together back in the early and mid 1980s. We've seen two Madonna concerts togther, the "Who's That Girl?" show, and the "Blonde Ambition" show. It was Lex's father's copy of Madonna's failed work of "erotic" photo-literature crap, Sex, that kicked off my current period of Madonna skepticism. Lex described the new album perfectly: it sounds like it was recorded by a high school girl with buttloads of money. Indeed. American Life's simple yet uncatchy melodies backed with utterly predictable, stripped down arrangements (by lack of vision rather than artistry) are clearly the product of Madonna's increased dominance of both the songwriting and producing responsibilities on her albums. She's a performer, not an idea man.

Here's a brief, forgettable example of her latest belching fit entitled, appropriately enough, "I'm So Stupid."

Thanks to Lex for both bringing the album over for me to hear, and for his "high school girl" criticism. Isn't he great? Lex really does know about these things, and he should. He's spent a lot of time living in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood--in Chelsea, I imagine, Madonna is high culture.

This calls for a song.

Here is my ode to Lex, "Alexis from Texas."

Unlike Madonna, I don't have buttloads of money--I barely have any money, in fact, and that's probably for the best. I do hope, however, that I am able to outdo Madonna in the realm of sincerity.

Who am I kidding?

At this point, sincerity, like creativity, is something that Madonna seems to be sorely lacking. Outdoing her sincerity ought to be pretty easy.

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DISPELLING FUNDAMENTALIST SEX ED MYTHS

Still, the Kaiser survey spotlights areas of concern: Four in 10 sexually active teenagers have taken a pregnancy test or had a partner who did so. A significant minority of young people -- about one in six -- say having sex without a condom occasionally is not a big deal. And one in five say they have had unprotected sex after drinking or using drugs.

Other surveys have found that nearly two in three teens will have had sex by the time they graduate from high school. The Kaiser survey shows that many have intimate relationships before that, with more than half of 15-to-17-year-olds saying they have been with someone in a sexual way. Among teens who have not yet had sex, nearly a third say they have been "intimate" with a partner.

Click here.

"Abstinence based" sex education aims to keep teenagers from having sex until they are married. Of course, this goal is completely doomed to failure: "two in three teens will have had sex by the time they graduate from high school." Attempting to get teens to abstain is simply wishful thinking. The genie is out of the bottle. We live in a sexualized society--most Americans now have no problem behaving and speaking in an openly sexual way when they desire; psychologists understand that this is completely healthy. Furthermore, mass media corporations are making too much money to ever give up the exploitation of sexual imagery. The abstinence crowd is up against impossible odds; they seek to re-engineer society from the classroom, but don't seem to realize that they can't. Caught in the dangerous crossfire are America's youth, who want to have sex, and will have sex, but have no idea how to approach it intelligently, ethically, or safely. This hopeless ideological battle waged by the Christian right cannot achieve its goals, but it does cause teen pregnancy and STDs to be far more likely among teens.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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WRITER'S BLOCK
Woody Allen Writes and Directs for the Stage

On the one hand, this is a little disappointing. After all, you'd hope that directing in a new medium would tap something new in his artistry. On the other hand, that artistry is pretty considerable, so why kick up a fuss?

All of which is to say that connoisseurs of, and happy wallowers in, Allen's movies will be comforted by all the familiar signals emanating from the stage at the Atlantic Theater Company, where Writer's Block opened Thursday night. The projected title of each playlet, Riverside Drive and Old Saybrook, is in the white-on-black typeface that Allen always uses for his film credits.

And

In other words, Writer's Block sits dead center in the Woody Allen universe, a New York City-centric place where beautiful young women are unaccountably attracted to much older men, and where relatively affluent people grapple comically and paranoiacally with serious questions of love and lust, artistic and financial achievement, and the possibility of happiness given the inevitability of death.

Well, I'd like to see it. Click here for review.

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AMERICA'S FAVORITE STANDUP
COMEDIAN LOOKS FOR A NEW GIG

The 42-year-old Fleischer, who was recently married, cited the desire to spend more time with his wife and to work outside the public sector for the first time in more than two decades.

"I want to do something more relaxing, like dismantle live nuclear weapons," Fleischer joked as he discussed his surprise announcement with reporters at his morning briefing.

The stress of the White House job in an era of 24-hour cable television and proliferating political Web sites clearly has shortened the tenure of the press secretary. More than a decade ago, Marlin Fitzwater served six years through the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.

Ah, yes. The good old "spend more time" with the family routine. It served Jeff Skilling well for a few weeks, if I recall correctly. In all seriousness, I would say that, while round the clock news TV has probably done a lot over the years to up the stress level of press secretaries, President Bush's wild and weird statements and actions are the bigger stressor. In fact, trying to make sense out of White House antics is what has made old Ari America's favorite standup comedian. I wonder if the next guy will be as entertaining.

Click here.

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CONSERVATIVE CLARITY
My favorite conservative,
William F. Buckley,
on William J. Bennett

Click here.

Buckley, ever conservative, ever wise, pronounces Bill Bennett politically dead. WFB does it sadly, but well, better articulating arguments I've already heard elsewhere. For the most part, I agree with his analysis, even of Bennett's critics. There is one section, though, that I want to comment on:

At root is a protest against the very credentials of virtue. And that isn't something being done by libertarians, it is the creeping vine of philosophical libertinism. There are people out there who don't want to say they are opposed to virtues, but who don't really want other people around to postulate the need for virtue. John Adams said 200 years ago that the American experiment would not succeed unless the people cultivated virtue. To say such a thing in modern times is privately disdained as officious piety. To have engaged in the practice of praising virtue and to have profited from the commercial returns of doing so is deemed doubly offensive.

I think that Buckley is right (no pun intended, of course) about "the creeping vine of philosophical libertinism." That is, I think that outside religion, in US mainstream culture, the concept of aspiring to a greater morality or greater justice is often scoffed at cynically; inside religion, virtue is often only paid lip service. The decades of materialistic, consumeristic, me-first philosophy propagandized toward the American people by massive corporations has left its indelible mark on the US psyche. Today, many, if not most, Americans, religious and secular alike, see morality as something that stands in the way of getting what they want, as inconvenient rules--"How can I invade Iraq and make it look justified?" or "How can I lay off all these workers and still sleep at night?" or "How can I humiliate my rival without looking bad?" It seems that much philosophical energy in America these days is directed at making the immoral become somehow moral. I stand with Buckley in support of virtue.

I also agree that there is probably a strain of this "philosophical libertinism" directed at Bennett. There has been some glee at his destruction. It is unfair and incorrect, however, to simply dismiss all of Bennett's critics in this way. Many who have criticized Bennett, including myself, do so from a position that supports and seeks a greater morality for America. Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, for example, is clearly driven by a passion for justice and good. Katha Pollitt's devotion to justice goes back many years. Uber-blogger, Atrios, over at Eschaton pounded away at the Bennett story, but I know from Atrios' writings that his attacks are from a principled, righteous point of view. (By the way, I now know that Atrios is a "he;" he has referred, in passing, to a "Mrs. Atrios"--that's one mystery down...) Libertinism and morality exist side by side on both the left and the right. Buckley does himself a disservice by forgetting that devotion to that which is good knows no ideological boundaries.

I think that the problem is that the left and the right often tend to disagree on exactly what a virtue is--this disagreement is usually recast as an accusation that the other side is somehow amoral. It's okay to disagree: it's wrong to hurl unfounded accusations. I think that the entire political spectrum in the US needs to figure that out.

Link via Eschaton via The Rittenhouse Review.

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9/11 QUESTIONS AREN'T GOING AWAY

Just two days after the catastrophe, on Sept. 13, Gen. Myers was confirmed as the new chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On that day, he told the Senate Armed Forces Committee that no Air Force jets got into the air until after the attack on the Pentagon.

On Sept. 15, The Boston Globe reported on a strange contradiction. The Globe quoted NORAD spokesman Snyder, who insisted that "the command did not immediately scramble any fighters even though it was alerted to a hijacking 10 minutes before the first plane ... slammed into the World Trade Center." He said the fighters remained on the ground until after the Pentagon was hit at 9:40 a.m. But The Globe also expressed puzzlement over the new official story that had just emerged. Now Americans were being told that fighter jets roared up from Cape Cod and from Virginia, but just didn't make it in time.

Furthermore, no explanation was ever offered for the bizarre fact that Andrews Air Force base, whose job it is to defend the U.S. capital just 19 kilometres away, had no fighter jets ready to go into action — despite the months of serious warnings of impending terrorist attacks.

So, why didn't the Air Force intercept the hijacked planes? This is a reasonable question to which we have not been given an answer. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, I'm just saying that the Bush administration isn't talking. Why? There are many more questions. Why have they moved to reclassify documents that are already part of the Congressional record? Why have they moved to classify the now famous "Phoenix Memo?" Why were the many warnings ignored? What's with the secrecy? Americans deserve answers.

Click here.

Repeat loudly and continually: George Bush is not the President.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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U.N. watchdog fears nuclear contamination in Iraq

He said he was especially worried "about the potential radiological safety and security implications of nuclear and radiological materials that may no longer be under control."

He said the reports the IAEA has received described uranium being emptied on the ground from containers then taken for domestic use and radioactive sources being stolen and removed from their shielding.

"We have a moral responsibility to establish the facts without delay and take urgent remedial action," ElBaradei said.

The U.N. agency has warned that stolen radioactive material could wind up in the hands of terrorists who could use it to make dirty bombs.

So...our war to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of terrorists seems to have created a situation where it is very likely that nuclear materials have fallen into the hands of terrorists...

Click here.

Repeat loudly and continually: George Bush is not the President.

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REAL ART GUEST BLOGGER:
On Looting and the Occupation

My old friend, Brian, emails from L.A.:

So you know, I do keep up with your blog and enjoy reading it. I've got a minor challenge for you on the site, at least in regards to the Baghdad museum looting. There have been a good half dozen stories in the past 10 days that (thankfully) the looting from the Iraqi Museum wasn't nearly as bad as had been recently reported. I saw the first report when I accidentally caught some of Scarborough Country on MSNBC (ever catch that Muppet Head? A sorry, poor man's version of Brian Mitchell who ain't that hot himself although he grows on me). He was railing on the liberal media (so he lost me right away) but had some BBC guy stationed in Baghdad who was saying that the AP reporter responsible for the story exaggerated the loss for the story's drama. Now, in 2 articles in 2 days afterwards the LA Times (a toe-the-country-line paper that strays occasionally) has reported that, in fact, the musuem wasn't hit as hard as originally thought.....

http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2Dwar%2Dmuseum17may17§ion=/printstory

http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2D051603museum%5Flat§ion=/printstory

So, since you always cite fairness, etc. I think it only fair that you run the update in the same way you ran the original story. Don't bury the Page 1 story fix on page 12 ala the NY Times....... :)

Fair enough, Brian. Consider your comments and links a Real Art update on the looting situation. The truth about not yet commenting myself is laziness. I just hadn't gotten round to it...

Brian further writes:

I saw another piece on the news the other night, and the situation over there is finally becoming clear, at least why everything has turned into a farce. The unreported story that no one wants to print is this: Rumsfeld's plan of lighter, leaner forces doesn't win the war. It wins the battles, but leaves insufficient strength to win the peace. With 300,000 troops over there how can you police the country? If you figure every troop works a 12 hour shift, that leaves only 150,000 over the entire country. The numbers are there, but no one wants to call out Rumsfeld, or they'll never get called on again at his sessions. Pathetic.

Resources are finite, and if they don't make good decisions, they're f*cked. And it looks like we really are....

I ask myself, how do we go into there, and then allow nuclear sites to be looted? Thus, eliminating the most cogent element of any pro-war stance: control of the bad stuff, wherever it is. We're short handed and bloated in military bureaucracy: the piece I saw last night followed a squad of soldiers as they received their orders for the day: a stolen electric generator is sitting in a part of Baghdad. Proof of it being stolen? A letter from some official in Kurdistan. Good enough for the US military. They arrive to confiscate it, but the neighborhood shows up and says 'this generator's been here for 5 years, it isn't stolen.' Orders being orders, the GIs argue with the residents (Iraqi cops are there too) but take it anyways, leaving a neighborhood in Baghdad in the dark...So. We're short handed and making bone headed decisions on the street. Maybe the generator was stolen 10 years ago? Who knows, but even after it all went down the captain said it best 'We certainly didn't need to go and do that.' But - he still followed orders. Wish I could remember which of the stations I saw it on, cuz I'd like to send you a link on that. I think it was CBS, but they got nothing on their site.

Sadly, five minutes of Googling didn't turn up anything--I don't think everything that runs on air is always posted, anyway. It does sound believable, though, and I've read about similar events. Anybody out there have a link to this story? Send it in.

Anyway, thanks for your comments, Brian. You're always welcome at Real Art (unless you become a neo-Nazi or something, which isn't likely).

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THE NEW JIM CROW: FLORIDA ELECTION DEBACLE 2000
Racism and Election Fraud Go High Tech
OR
The Year That Democracy Died

For the two or so years since the Supreme Court's incomprehensible decision that gave Bush the Oval Office, I've tried to keep an open mind. After all, I voted for Nader, and really kind of liked the fact that the Democrats received a well-deserved kick in the crotch for ignoring their left base. Don't get me wrong; I think that Bush is a clueles idiot, a puppet controlled by some very evil thugs, the worst president ever (as said by Helen Thomas), but the whole Florida affair was, I must admit, very confusing and not at all well covered by the US news media. I am still not entirely clear on how the whole thing happened or exactly why.

However, I am now entirely convinced of one thing about the 2000 election: George W. Bush knowingly and illegally stole it--because of that, he is a criminal of the highest order and should be removed from office immediately.

Why? My reading list. I just read the first chapter of Greg Palast's book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (you, too, can read that chapter, online, in pdf format; click here) which deals with the election. I have also recently read Eric Alterman's study of how the media covered the election in his book What Liberal Media, and Michael Moore's comments in Stupid White Men, too.

The long and the short of my newfound certainty of election rigging in Florida is like this. Forget the chads. Forget the recounts. Forget Nader. Forget overvotes and undervotes. Forget the Supreme Court. Forget absentee ballots. Forget military ballots. Forget Gore losing Tennessee. Forget it all (for now, at least).

Remember this: it is now (as far as I can tell) undisputed fact that tens of thousands of African-American voters in Florida who wanted to vote, and had every right to vote were flagrantly and knowingly denied their right to do so. Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, has even admitted that it happened in an email to Greg Palast (even though she refuses to take the blame). The private firm that purged the Florida voter rolls of "felons" also has admitted it (they won't take the blame either, but I suspect that they were just doing as they were told).

I had been hearing about this, black voters in Florida being wrongly branded as felons without voting rights, in 2000, for a while. Both Alterman and Moore piqued my curiosity about this issue, but didn't provide many details. Fortunately, my next purchase was the Palast book. Palast is a pretty interesting guy. Here is a passage from the "about the author" section of his book:

An internationally recognized expert on the control of corporate power, before picking up pen and camera Palast worked with labor unions and consumer groups in the United States, South America and Europe investigating corporate corruption. In America, among his more noted cases, he directed government investigations and prosecution of racketeering by nuclear plant builders and, for the Chugach natives of Alaska, probed charges of fraud by oil companies in the grounding of the Exxon Valdez.

In other words, Palast, an American from Los Angeles, doesn't come from the field of news, and approaches investigative journalism more like a combination of an academic researcher and a private eye--he seems to be free of most of the biases that are inherent in journalism as a discipline, free of the herd mentality. Unfortunately, this makes him unemployable at American newspapers, despite his well-deserved reputation as an expert. Palast works out of London; mainstream US politicians and reporters absolutely hate him. Gore could have used his help (Palast was reporting about the disenfranchisement even during the recounts, before the US Supreme Court intervened), but wouldn't touch Palast's reports with a ten foot pole. Too bad for Prince Albert; too bad for America. Too bad for the world.

Here's what happened.

In 1998, the Florida governor's office contracted out to a private firm (against Florida state law) the responsibility to find and verify the existence of felons who had lost their voting rights, but were still registered. This seemed to be a sweetheart deal: the contract went to the highest bidder, a company called ChoicePoint DBT, for millions of dollars more than the next highest bidder. DBT was then ordered by the governer's office to cast as wide of a net as possible in their search--for instance, a known convicted felon named, say, John J. Smith who is black, could get John Q. Smith who is also black named to the purge list, even though John Q. Smith has no criminal record and still has the right to vote. This wide-net directive resulted in tens of thousands of innocent black voters being named to this purge list of felons without voting rights. Even though the contract with DBT called for verification of the list in addition to compiling it, the governor's office ordered DBT to not verify the list.

Palast is dubious of the existence of conspiracy when the project began. However, he speculates that when Katharine Harris and the rest of the Jeb Bush gang in Florida saw the first, unverified purge list, and saw that the vast majority of these "felons" were black and probably Democrats, the temptation to meddle with the process became overwhelming--suddenly, these Republicans realized that they had the ability to strongly tip the Florida voter balance in their own direction if they simply used the first draft purge list. This is, of course, only speculation, but it is now documented fact that Republican state officials meddled with the purge process for whatever reasons. Even though it might have been some "accident" or "oversight," the faulty purge list resulted in the "election" of George W. Bush. It also resulted in a massive and racist miscarriage of justice.

George Bush, the thief in chief.

Don't take my word for it.

from Salon on December 4, 2000:

Florida's flawed "voter-cleansing" program - Salon.com's politics story of the year

If Vice President Al Gore is wondering where his Florida votes went, rather than sift through a pile of chad, he might want to look at a "scrub list" of 173,000 names targeted to be knocked off the Florida voter registry by a division of the office of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. A close examination suggests thousands of voters may have lost their right to vote based on a flaw-ridden list that included purported "felons" provided by a private firm with tight Republican ties.

Click here.

from the Observer on December 10, 2000:

A Blacklist Burning For Bush

Hey, Al, take a look at this. Every time I cut open another alligator, I find the bones of more Gore voters. This week, I was hacking my way through the Florida swampland known as the Office of Secretary of State Katherine Harris and found a couple thousand more names of voters electronically 'disappeared' from the vote rolls. About half of those named are African-Americans. They had the right to vote, but they never made it to the balloting booths.

Click here.

from the Nation February 5, 2001:

Florida's 'Disappeared Voters': Disfranchised by the GOP

In Latin America they might have called them votantes desaparecidos, "disappeared voters." On November 7 tens of thousands of eligible Florida voters were wrongly prevented from casting their ballots--some purged from the voter registries and others blocked from registering in the first instance. Nearly all were Democrats, nearly half of them African-American. The systematic program that disfranchised these legal voters, directed by the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, was so quiet, subtle and intricate that if not for George W. Bush's 500-vote eyelash margin of victory, certified by Harris, the chance of the purge's discovery would have been vanishingly small.

Click here. (By the way, the three articles just linked are also printed, in full, in Palast's first chapter, which is linked above.)

Finally, here's some streaming BBC video of a Palast report on the overall debacle for those with short attention spans; it's in the style of, but better than, 60 Minutes.

So here's the situation. An absolutely unbelievable, but completely true criminal enterprise literally stole the 2000 US Presidential election in Florida, and therefore, the nation, for George W. Bush. Given his familial and professional relationships with the agents of subversion who engineered the theft, Bush was, in all probability, aware of their actions. That makes George W. Bush is a criminal. Under this criminal's leadership, the US has suffered greater pollution, greater corporate influence over government, greater lack of access to health care, greater unemployment, greater poverty, greater riches for the wealthy, greater influence of fundamentalist Christians over government, greater intolerance of dissident views and of other ethnicities, loss of civil rights, loss of international respect and trust, and loss of international sympathy for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (which Bush may have known about and been able to prevent). The US has invaded and occupied two countries. The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people. The US public is unaware of the massive deception and eagerly supports the "President's" actions. The world is afraid of America; America is afraid of the world. This is probably the worst crisis our nation has ever faced, our darkest hour.

America the surreal.

George W. Bush is not the president.

Repeat it loudly and continually to anyone and everyone who won't punch you in the face.

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Willie Nelson sends runaway lawmakers bandanas, whiskey

It's just a blurb, really, but click here, anyway. Thanks to FARK.

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BLOGGER'S BEING WEIRD TODAY

Blogger's being really weird today. Real Art just doesn't seem to want to display itself in an appropriate manner. Hopefully, they'll clear up the problem soon.

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REAL MUSIC (about politics and culture):
"Midnight Confessions of Emperor G. W. Bush"

Houston blogger Dominion has put together a very amusing flash animation to accompany a song by the band called the Compassionate Conservatives. I laughed out loud...

Click here for his intro and link.

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SUPER-BITCH: ALL ABOUT ANN COULTER

Sharing a table at a New York bar with Coulter, watching the heads turn, you're seized by the urge to test her. Is she for real? Is she making this stuff up, like a comedian doing a shtick? How far will she go? "What if the free market offered Muslim-free air travel?" I venture, by way of bait. Would that be a smart move? "This is my idea," she says brightly, competitive as a child. "I'm way ahead of you. I think airlines ought to start advertising: 'We have the most civil rights lawsuits brought against us by Arabs.' "

And how would Muslims travel? "They could use flying carpets," she says, a grinning picture of charm. But worry not: lots of other swarthy ethnic groups would be subject to the Coulter plan for selective security. "You'd be searching a lot of Italians, Greeks and Jews." Intensively frisking just 20% of travellers would make flying quicker for everyone, she says. "Have you seen these lines for getting through? Everyone suffers equally. Which presumably is the dream of the Guardian: modelled after their beloved Soviet Union."

This is what talking to Ann Coulter is like: she flits from one rightwing prejudice to another, taking not so much as a gasp for oxygen. In a couple of sentences, she can play with overt racism, soften it with a line so provocative she could only be kidding, then round off the performance with a sweeping smear of the liberal enemy. Coulter has turned riffs like that into an art form.

And

Even if you can't bring yourself to be an enthusiast, Coulter is worth noticing. For she represents something rather larger than herself and her skill in carving out a starred career. She is the culmination of a trend that has been building on the American right for several years: the sense that they are somehow a beleaguered minority battling a state controlled and run by the left. That will sound like science fiction to non-Americans, who see the US as a land in the grip of corporations, tobacco giants, arms manufacturers and Christian fundamentalists. But the airwaves of talk radio have long crackled with the buzz of a group that sees itself not as America's governing majority but as a besieged, underground movement of dissent - with the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Watergate felon-turned-broadcaster G Gordon Liddy raging against the powers that be. Coulter's book shared its perch on the bestsellers' lists with another by ex-CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg called simply Bias. Both set out to prove that the US is dominated by a liberal elite that shuts out mainstream, regular, conservative Americans like them.

Click here.

For years now the concept known as "politically correct" has been under fire by conservatives--at first glance, this makes partisan, sour-grapes sense; conservative views are among the most politically incorrect (apologies to Bill Maher) on college campuses. These conservative critics, however, have raised some very good points. Right-wing views among university professors are rare (excluding, of course, business schools and economics departments). Some universities, indeed, are hotbeds of liberal activism and identity politics. I have personally seen at least one conservative speaker shouted down at a college lecture, and have read about many other such instances. I remember when I was in college hearing about a friend of a friend who an anti-apartheid protester called a racist because he disagreed with some point about university divesture. There have also been some celebrated campus drives to supress right-wing extremist speech--Holocaust deniers come to mind here. It really does appear that, in some cases, left-leaning dogma and rigid ideology have much more power and influence on campus than in mainstream society. Many of these college activists need to settle down and try to get some victories via fair and honest debate--this could only enhance the left's credibility among the general public.

Even though conservatives raise good points about p.c. supression, it is clear that they care about the issue only in so much as it supresses conservative views. Supression of liberal views in this way, however, is another matter, entirely.

Ann Coulter embodies the new wave of high-tech, right-wing, mass media "politically correct" ideologues. She is utterly self-righteous. She shouts down her opponents. She characterizes any opposing view as either stupid or evil. She has stolen the tactics of the zealous left and gone Hollywood with them, beating snotty liberals at their own game, but on a much larger playing field. Coulter takes reverse p.c. to the big time.

She is very attractive, though.

And she has a gun.

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IMPEACH THE PRESIDENT

Then Convict Him

Then Jail Him

For a Long, Long Time

President Bush's resume. Do we really need any more evidence?

Thanks to Tom Tommorow.

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IRAQ WAR TURNS SURREAL

The truth about Jessica Lynch

From the Guardian:

The doctors told us that the day before the special forces swooped on the hospital the Iraqi military had fled. Hassam Hamoud, a waiter at a local restaurant, said he saw the American advance party land in the town. He said the team's Arabic interpreter asked him where the hospital was. "He asked: 'Are there any Fedayeen over there?' and I said, 'No'." All the same, the next day "America's finest warriors" descended on the building.

"We heard the noise of helicopters," says Dr Anmar Uday. He says that they must have known there would be no resistance. "We were surprised. Why do this? There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital.

"It was like a Hollywood film. They cried, 'Go, go, go', with guns and blanks and the sound of explosions. They made a show - an action movie like Sylvester Stallone or Jackie Chan, with jumping and shouting, breaking down doors." All the time with the camera rolling. The Americans took no chances, restraining doctors and a patient who was handcuffed to a bed frame.

And

Back in 2001, the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer, had visited the Pentagon to pitch an idea. Bruckheimer and fellow producer Bertram van Munster, who masterminded the reality show Cops, suggested Profiles from the Front Line, a primetime television series following US forces in Afghanistan. They were after human stories told through the eyes of the soldiers. Van Munster's aim was to get close and personal. He said: "You can only get accepted by these people through chemistry. You have to have a bond with somebody. Only then will they let you in. What these guys are doing out there, these men and women, is just extraordinary. If you're a cheerleader of our point of view - that we deserve peace and that we deal with human dignity - then these guys are really going out on a limb and risking their own lives."

It was perfect reality TV, made with the active cooperation of Donald Rumsfeld and aired just before the Iraqi war. The Pentagon liked what it saw. "What Profiles does is given another in depth look at what forces are doing from the ground," says Whitman. "It provides a very human look at challenges that are presented when you are dealing in these very difficult situations." That approached was taken on and developed on the field of battle in Iraq.

Just when I'm starting to feel like the Bush administration can no longer shock me, out comes this. It appears that the daring rescue of Jessica Lynch was, by and large, staged. Amazing. That Rumsfeld and Bush are fond of cheap propaganda is already well known. After all, they brought us the whiz-bang aircraft carrier show only a short time ago. That they would stoop to such extraordinarily trashy lows with their cheap propaganda is simply overkill. If I understand this correctly, the whole thing was like an episode of Cops--virtually the entire event was simply a television show. What amazes me is that they even felt like they needed to do it. Were they worried that the peace movement was going to put an end to the war? God, c'mon! It's maddening!

(To add insult to injury, they chose to emulate a Fox show. Too bad they didn't pick Married with Children.)

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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HOUSE WALKOUT SUCCEEDS
Texas House adjourns early, letting redestricting die

AUSTIN -- Speaker Tom Craddick adjourned the Texas House today until 9 a.m. Friday, allowing a group of errant Democrats to defeat a Republican proposal to redraw congressional district boundaries.

The redistricting bill will automatically die at midnight. The 50-plus Democrats, most whom have spent four days in Ardmore, Okla., to break a House quorum, planned to return to the Capitol on Friday.

Yay!

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WHY I'M NOT WRITING
ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES
JAYSON BLAIR AFFAIR

Ho hum.

Here are the details of the New York Times Jayson Blair affair. That is, if you really feel like wading through all ten pages of it. I only read the first page before I decided that the story just isn't worth my time.

Explaining why it's not worth my time, however, is worth my time.

Every now and then I have a moment of realization. One of those moments was when I was watching the movie Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. The movie is both a sort of biography of Noam Chomsky and a good explanation of his and Edward Hermann's propaganda model of the US news media. In order to visually represent the New York Times' imbalance of coverage between genocide in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge (official US enemies) versus genocide in East Timor by Indonesia (official US allies), two rolls of toilet paper, each symbolizing inches of newspaper column space devoted to each story are unrolled side by side: the Indonesia toilet paper runs out after a couple of feet; the Khmer Rouge toilet paper seemingly unrolls into infinity. That's when I realized that the New York Times is full of shit.

The Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting site, in fact, has an entire page full of links to reports of inaccuracy, bias, and outright lies and propaganda found in the Times. Story titles are "New York Times on Iraq Sanctions: A case of journalistic malpractice," "Only 'Elegant' Victims Need Apply," "Doublethink on the Editorial Page: Editorials Preach Compassion, Push Austerity," "Sweatshops are the Workers' Friend: And Labor Activists Their Enemies--According to the New York Times," "Holes in Ozone Coverage," and the like. The New York Times blows it seemingly every day.

That's why their editorial board's hemorrhaging about the multiple misdeeds of a lowly cub reporter is about as absurd as President Bush calling Ariel Sharon a "man of peace." I am reminded of the one-bad-apple understanding of the wave of corporate accounting scandals last year that criticized the corporate felons who were caught, but not the system that allowed them to get away with it. The Times' reaction to the misdeeds of Jayson Blair is truly Orwellian, truly weird "doublethink." Certainly, Blair has no business practicing journalism, but then neither do his bosses, and their crimes are far, far worse.

Firing Blair is a big show, designed to make the New York Times look like it actually has integrity. Blair is not the real story; he's simply a diversion. The consistency of the lies, distortions, and pro-government, pro-corporate propaganda vomited out by the Times on a daily basis is the real story.

I'm not expecting to see that headline anytime soon.

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WHO IS R T RANKIN?

Were they the among the worst and most offensive thrash metal bands of the mid 1980s?

You decide.

Click here for MP3 download of their anthem, "Luv and Leather."

Thanks to my buddy, Kevin, for hooking us all up.

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"BLOWBACK" PART TWO
Arabs see more attacks

As after the September 11 attacks, most Arabs said they were appalled by the bloodshed, but urged Washington to rethink the policies they felt were creating the anger and despair which spawned the bombings.

Palestinian columnist Adli Sadek wrote in the al-Hayat al-Jadida daily that the United States could not uproot terror unless it "adopted clean and just policies, quit its greedy ambitions in Iraq, ended its bias towards the killers in the occupied Palestinian land and stopped threatening others".

Others said the United States failed to understand and address the genuine roots of radicalism, such as widespread political and economic malaise.

"As long as the real causes of terrorism are not understood, the Americans will be fighting what they brand as terrorism for a long time to come," the English-language daily Iran News wrote.

Most Americans, taking the President's lead, think that terrorism is the work of "evil doers." Of course, that's a rather cartoonish outlook that reduces al-Qaeda to the level of the the "hordes of Hydra," the single-minded supervillian organization found in Marvel comics, or SPECTRE of the James Bond movies. The reality is that al-Qaeda and their supporters are real live human beings with complicated motivations and sophisticated understandings of the world and the people in it. They certainly do evil things; indeed, they are ruthless killers, a threat to countless lives. That is why we must understand them, rather than simply attacking them. Violence, by itself, will not end terrorism.

The United States (or, more accurately, the US government and US corporations) have screwed over millions of people for decades now. Until the American people realize that terrorism is in response to our government's many misdeeds, we will be doomed to suffer these attacks. US support of Israel's repressive policies toward the Palestinians must end. US support of the corporate raping of the third world and its peoples must end. US support of repressive regimes such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia must end. The US must shift its billions of defense dollars to the business of saving lives and helping people--we must hammer our swords into plowshares and feed the Earth.

Like that's gonna happen anytime soon.

Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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MORE ON IRAQ'S NONEXISTENT WMD'S:
Enron-Like Unreality

And that was the problem with the CIA and DIA: They were a bunch of vulgar empiricists. What the Bush administration wanted, it turns out, was faith-based intelligence. Thus the operation in the Office of Special Plans, headed by neocon Abram Shulsky, was born. Shulsky's shop didn't have agents in the field; indeed, it had just a handful of analysts. But what set them apart from the intelligence agencies was that they relied heavily on information from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) -- an organization of Iraqi exiles whose raison d'etre was to promote the overthrow of Hussein. As both Hersh and Dreyfuss document, a lot of the INC's information on weapons programs and other matters was considered patently absurd by veteran intelligence analysts. But that was the information that served as the basis of the administration's case for war.

Additionally, the New York Times now reports that the administration was told many months before Powell's Security Council speech that the documents purportedly demonstrating Iraq's purchase of uranium from Niger were forgeries.

Apparently, Bush administration intelligence is to intelligence as Fox news is to news. Facts are fine so long as they bolster the president's case. When they don't, they will be suppressed or forgotten, and other, more congenial facts will be found.

As at Enron, there are leading figures in this administration who think that when the real facts don't look so good, it's fine to substitute your own.

I made this Enron comparison, myself, about six weeks ago in my comment under the heading The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. It's nice to have an idea validated by a more mainstream writer.

I think it's pretty clear now that even though George W. Bush may claim the title "President," he seems to have as much understanding about what's happening in the White House and the world as Kenny-boy Lay claims to have had about Enron operations and its balance sheets. Rumsfeld and others whisper, Wormtongue-like, into Bush's ear, telling him what is happening and what he needs to do. Bush, tired, wanting to take his afternoon nap, agrees with his advisors, and issues their orders. Maybe Bush really is innocent of war crimes. Maybe he's only guilty of being stupid and weak-willed.

Unless, of course, Bush is more like the alternatively dottering for the cameras, then hard boiled behind the scenes fictional Ronald Reagan, as played by Phil Hartman in the old Saturday Night Live sketch. Are the mispronunciations a brilliant ruse? Is his complete ignorance of numerous important issues feigned? Is Bush the most brilliant statesman and strategist the world has ever seen?

Nah.

Click here to see why.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe for the link.

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Army Ants Have Defied Evolution For 100 Million Years

The common scientific belief has been that army ants originated separately on several continents over millions of years. Now it is found there was no evolution. Using fossil data and the tools of a genetics detective, a Cornell University entomologist has discovered that these ants come from the same point of origin, because since the reign of the dinosaurs, about 100 million years ago, army ants in essence have not changed a bit.

"Biologists have wondered why army ants, whose queens can't fly or get caught up by the wind, are yet so similar around the world. Army ants have evolved only once and that was in the mid-Cretaceous period," says Sean Brady, a Cornell postdoctoral researcher in entomology, whose study was conducted while he was doctoral candidate at the University of California-Davis.

Click here.

I would say that rather than defying evolution, the army ant has simply reached evolutionary perfection. Like the roach.

Damned bugs.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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"BLOWBACK"

Saudi bombing kills at least 7 Americans
Al-Qaida prime suspect, Powell says

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Attackers shot their way into three housing compounds in synchronized strikes in the Saudi capital and then set off multiple suicide car bombs, killing 20 people, including seven Americans, officials reported today.

Authorities also found nine charred bodies believed to be those of the attackers, a Saudi Interior Ministry official said.

The bombings, which took place about 11:30 p.m. Monday, constituted one of the deadliest terror attacks on Americans since Sept. 11, 2001. Secretary of State Colin Powell said the coordinated strike had "the fingerprints of al-Qaida," the group that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"Terrorism strikes anywhere, everyone," Powell said. "It is a threat to the entire civilized world."

President Bush vowed to hunt down the attackers.

Click here.

A while back I finally got around to watching the movie Brazil. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) for me, I got around to watching it only a few weeks after the infamous terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I actually first saw the film back when I was in college, but it was in a dorm room crammed with talking people on drugs, so I really didn't even get the gist of it. So, after wanting a better and undistracted viewing of Brazil for many years, I finally took a break from watching round the clock TV news coverage of the new "War on Terrorism," and put on the DVD.

It's a great film, of course, but watching it at the time that I did made the experience both frightening and depressing. Brazil depicts ordinary people trying to live their mundane lives in a world of repression and violence. Terrorists are constantly blowing things up which is either in response to, or justifies the police state in which the film takes place--I'm still not sure whether the terrorism or the repression comes first. Perhaps the distinction is unimportant as far as film analysis is concerned: the terrorism and the violent government response to it are, in the film, a never ending cycle. Terrorism causes state violence. State violence causes terrorism. Neither side achieves its goals (whatever they are), but both continue down their paths of destruction.

We are living in Brazil.

The anti-terrorism measures undertaken by the Bush administration have repressed, jailed, and killed hundreds of thousands of people while turning the world against the US. Despite all the carnage, Bush's "War on Terrorism" has seemingly not even dented Al-Qaeda abilities. I am beginning to wonder if the White House even cares. After all, terrorism offers a handy political justification for empire-building wars. Osama bin Laden is far more valuable to the warmongers alive and free, an ever present threat, than in jail or dead.

And as I've written on Real Art many times, Bush's wars are causing more terrorism.

That's right. MORE terrorism. This kind of terrorist attack in Riyadh was predicted by the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and the FBI. They call it "blowback. That is, this attack is in retribution for US government actions. Bush knew that this would happen, but he continued to take America down the path of self-destruction. He could have taken some common sense steps that would have lessened the likelihood of more "homicide bombers." That is to say, the way out of this cycle is to conduct foreign policy in terms of economic justice, democracy, cultural respect, and human rights rather than in terms of business interests. Bush chose business interests over the cherished ideals of the American people. More importantly, he chose money and power over human lives. The White House did not plan or carry out these bombings, but it shares some of the responsibility: Bush knowingly fanned the fires of justified Islamic anger toward the US; this both emboldens and strengthens Al-Qaeda.

More attacks are coming.

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HOUSE WALKOUT CONTINUES

Texas blogger, Charles Kuffner at Off the Kuff, provides an Editorial roundup of major Texas newspapers about the Democrat House walkout. The verdict is mostly pro-Democrat which means that Texans' sympathies may very well be with the donkey butts for the first time in my admittedly short memory.

One thing that I realized while reading an email alert that the Texas State Teachers' Association sent me about the walkout is that this political move helps me personally. Republicans are no friends to Texas teachers. They've recently been trying to ram all kinds of anti-teacher bills down the throat of the Texas lege: they already want to cut teacher pay, cut health insurance benefits, lower certification standards, take away personal leave time, and allow principals to fire teachers without reason. So the Democrats are actually helping Texas teachers. That means that the Democrats are actually helping me.

So, to the courageous Neo Killer Bees, I say thanks, guys.

I'm still voting Green whenever I can, however. Maybe if ya'll did something about corporate control, political corruption, polution, civil rights, labor rights, and encroaching religion in the political sphere, I'd try to vote for more of you guys. Until then, my hands are tied. But bravo, anyway!

Anyway, on to the editorial roundup.

Thanks to the all-seeing eye of the mysterious Atrios.

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WOW
Walkout by angry Democrats
halts work at Texas House

Click here.

AUSTIN -- Outnumbered by House Republicans determined to pass a congressional redistricting bill, all but a few Democrats went into hiding today to keep the House from meeting. The House's GOP leader responded by ordering state troopers to find and arrest the missing lawmakers.

The House walkout not only blocked the redistricting bill but also action on all other bills on the calendar. The House cannot convene without at least two-thirds of the membership, or 100 members, present on the House floor under legislative rules.

Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick locked down the House chamber so that lawmakers already present could not leave, then he expressed his disgust with the Democrats.

"It is a disgrace to run and hide," Craddick said. After the roll call, he ordered that missing lawmakers be arrested and brought back to the chamber.

House Democrats said they were taking a stand for fair treatment of the minority party. They blamed U.S. House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-Sugar Land, for pushing the Texas House to take up redistricting against the wishes of Democrats and some GOP state lawmakers.

I'm utterly amazed.

Texas Democrats are starting to remember the hardball politics of their spiritual leader, Lyndon Johnson. This is hardball politics. Even though this tactic has been used by Texas Democrats once before, this time, it is on a much larger scale. Redistricting for US Congressional seats is always a hotly contested issue, but it's gotten pretty intense as US House majority whip, Tom DeLay, former bug exterminator from Sugarland, Texas, once again reaches out his scaly tendrils from Washington to interfere in local affairs (he jumped into local politics as recently as a couple of years ago when he personally acted to withhold federal transportation funds from the city of Houston, joining the anti-rail side in the fierce political battle over light rail). Showing the typical Republican contempt for its own pro-local government style of federalism (Republicans always ignore their usual pro-local stance whenever states and municipalities choose to do things that Republicans don't like: medicinal marijuanna, electing Al Gore for president, right to die, etc.), Tom DeLay has intensely lobbied the Texas House of Representatives to redraw districts in such a way that Republicans would gain more seats and expand their slim majority in the US House. At least one hardball Texas Democrat, Austin's Lloyd Doggett, stands to lose his seat.

This is not a terribly difficult issue to understand, but it can get a bit slippery. The long and the short of it is that Republicans want to change district boundaries in order to lump Democrat voters together in fewer districts, rather than spread out among many districts as they are now. In the new Democrat-heavy districts, Democrats would, of course, always win. Overall, however, Republicans have a much better shot at winning more seats--there would be fewer Democratic voters in most of the new districts to vote against Republicans. Republicans are betting that this might heavily alter the 17 to 15 seat advantage that Texas Democrats now enjoy over Texas Republicans in the US House. DeLay says that redistricting in this way would more accurately reflect the will of Texas voters. Democrats say that Republicans are trying to amass more power on the cheap.

Guess who's side I'm on.

Hearing about this highly theatrical, highly effective move by Texas Democratic Representatives has both excited me and put me in a good mood all day long. I try to not be too terribly optimistic, but this walkout gives me some hope. Along with the recent Democratic filibuster in the US Senate, I'm starting to feel like there may be a tidal shift in the works. Will the Democrats now fight back? Has anger replaced paralyzing desperation and fear? ARE THE DEMOCRATS GOING TO GET US SOME DEMOCRACY?

I've got lots of reasons to be skeptical, but I'm going to enjoy this in-your-face victory for at least a day or two longer.

Here are some related story links from the Houston Chronicle:

Some rebel Texas lawmakers surface in Oklahoma town.

Plan took cunning, secrecy and overnight bags.

Walkout in Texas reverberates in Washington.

What they're saying about Democrats' walkout.

List of House Democrats who've walked out

Pick and choose.

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MERCE CUNNINGHAM'S AVANT GARDE DANCE TROUPE

For any viewer, one of the greatest things about Cunningham's dances is that you don't have to "get" anything. Devoid of narrative and emotional trappings, they're about possibility, exploring movement for its own sake. The dancers don't even hear the music when they're learning the steps -- not that it would matter, since the scores are famously uncountable. And when it all comes together, you're free to free associate: even the backdrops encourage your mind to wander. If you can resist the urge to impose meaning onto the movement, the effect is liberating -- especially in an era when so much dance is either a rant, a tragedy or a soul-searching journey.

In the late 80s when I was a student in the University of Texas' Department of Drama, I missed Merce Cunningham because I, in my ignorance, scoffed at dance as an artform and did not realize how cool his avant garde choreography actually is. I missed him this time around in Houston because I had no idea he was going to be here.

Damn.

Read the review. It sounded like a great show. Click here.

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UPDATE: STILL NO WMDs
Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons

Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the task force next month, said he took seriously U.S. intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons. "We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he said. But if Iraq thought of using such weapons, "there had to have been something to use. And we haven't found it. . . . Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

So, according to this article, either there were no weapons of mass destruction from the beginning, OR invading Iraq caused them to fall into the hands of unknown "looters"--that is, if the weapons existed, the US may very well have caused the situation it wanted to avoid, terrorists posessing WMDs. I don't really think that Saddam had WMDs to begin with, myself. That's not really my point here, though: the Pentagon is cutting way back on it's efforts to find evidence of Iraqi nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. That's basically it. It's really starting to look like the Bush administration has absolutely no interest in validating its war. No WMDs. No al-Qaeda link. Only "liberation" and victory. The whole thing was based on lies and most of the American public militantly supported it.

But there can really be no doubt now. The war against Iraq was about oil and empire. The President and his lieutenants should be tried for war crimes.

Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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MORE FROM FATNOISE
Demented Old Hillbilly Robert Byrd
Shows He's Still Got Some Piss and Vinegar
(at first, it was mostly vinegar...)

My friend, Kevin writes:

Thank god we're nearing an election year. Now people are expected to be "un-patriotic" when it comes to Bush's antics. Here's Sen. Byrd's response to Dubya's Mighty Military Man show...

Here is a sample provided by Kevin:

I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw.

What I heard the president say also disturbed me. It may make for grand theater to describe Saddam Hussein as an ally of al-Qaida or to characterize the fall of Baghdad as a victory in the war on terror, but stirring rhetoric does not necessarily reflect sobering reality. Not one of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers was an Iraqi. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to link the Sept. 11 attack on the United States to Iraq. There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam was an evil despot who brought great suffering to the Iraqi people, and there is no doubt in my mind that he encouraged and rewarded acts of terrorism against Israel. But his crimes are not those of Osama bin Laden, and bringing Saddam to justice will not bring justice to the victims of 9-11.

And

War is not theater, and victory is not a campaign slogan. I join with the president and all Americans in expressing heartfelt thanks and gratitude to our men and women in uniform for their service to our country, and for the sacrifices that they have made on our behalf. But on this point I differ with the president: I believe that our military forces deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and not used as stage props to embellish a presidential speech.

Here is a link provided by Kevin.

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FROM FATNOISE

White House press secretary shows little regard for truth

My pal, Kevin, writes:

As a long time student of media manipulation, I found the warmonger-in-chief's recent spectacle/speech to be both disgusting and hilarious. With so many others lambasting him about it this week, it is moving more towards the ridiculous.

ha ha hee hee ho ho.
k

"White House officials advised the press and television networks, falsely, that the carrier was about 100 miles offshore. The officials knew the truth, because they manipulated the television camera angles for fear the coastline might be visible."

Personally, I like to think of it as creating material not for Letterman or Leno, but for the real favorite standup comedian of America, Ari Fleischer. Click here.

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HYPOCRITES

1. Conservative gay moralist, Andrew Sullivan, likes to have promiscuous, unprotected sex:

Beyond the sensationalism of the “bareback” sex revelation, what was most jarring to people who’d received this information was the sheer incongruity between the public persona that many rightly or wrong perceive as Sullivan’s—conservative, moral, devoutly Catholic, marriage-minded, judgmental toward the sexual behavior of politicians and other public figures, and arrogant toward the ghettoized gay scene—and the person depicted on the sites, a gay stereotype more extreme than any of the Village People, someone very much in the gay sexual fast lane, all pumped up and describing his “power glutes,” ravenously eager to hook up but letting prospective partners know that “no fats, no fems” need apply.

This is quite a good article that not only indicts Sullivan as the evil hypocrite that he is, but also manages to give the lowdown on the state of AIDS in the gay community in 2003. BEWARE. This essay contains some rather graphic, but necessary language and ideas. Click here.

Thanks to Eschaton.

2. Conservative straight moralist, William Bennett, likes to gamble so much that he's lost $8 million dollars:

I have always considered Bennett a pompous fraud. I don't even like his looks. He is a reckless moralizer who has forgotten (if indeed he ever knew) the saying about taking the log out of his own eye before worrying about the speck in someone else's. Since Mr. Bennett cannot bear his own imperfections, and cannot change himself, he has decided he should change everyone else. He apparently never learned one of the first rules of a civilized man: mind your own business.

This gloating essay does a pretty good job of explaining how Bennett's fall from grace is about much more than any single individual. Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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CLEVER LIMEYS
Fox News Could Be Booted from Britain

In England, the Independent Television Commission mandates that all television networks follow a standard of "due impartiality." Distributed throughout the U.K. via the Sky Digital satellite service (which, like FNC is owned by Rupert Murdoch), FNC has been the subject of numerous complaints from subscribers troubled by its biased stances.

So does that mean that big butthole Bill O'Reilly will be pushing for "freedom muffins" instead of English muffins? Should we put a little "freedom" on the cue ball instead of "english?" Ban that unAmerican bastard bard, Shakespeare? THE REDCOATS ARE COMING! THE REDCOATS ARE COMING! Click here.

Thanks to my buddy, Michael, for the link.

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Qapla'! Hospital seeks Klingon speaker

This is not April Fool's Day, obviously. So this has to be real, right? Click here.

And just in case you miss the link, click here for info on the glorious Klingon language.

Click here for a picture of my favorite Klingon, Kang from the Star Trek episode "Day of the Dove."

Thanks to fellow geek Atrios.

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UNCHARTED TERRITORY
Fed shifts to rooting for a little inflation

"Deflation is like quicksand. It is very difficult to get out of. So the Fed doesn't want that to happen," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo.

With deflation, prices fall and consumers stop spending because they think better deals are on the way. That hurts businesses, which are forced to cut prices to woo shoppers. Earnings then tumble. A vicious cycle ensues.

The last time Americans saw deflation was during the Great Depression. Since then, Fed policy-makers have largely focused on fighting inflation.

Of course, the Great Depression was preceded by an economic bubble spurred on by the period of unregulated business, banking, and finance known as the Roaring Twenties. Coincidence: our current recession was preceded by a period of increasing deregulation of business and finance that seemed to heavily contribute to the now burst economic bubble during the Roaring Nineties.

Perhaps this is only a coincidence, but, personally, I think not. Looming deflation is not good news, and that's a major understatement. We're in a fine mess and the blame must fall squarely on the shoulders of the free market fundamentalist cheerleaders at newspapers, in Congress, and in economics departments at colleges and universities throughout the land. Wealth cannot be trusted to police itself--left to its own devices, it will always turn cannibalistic and eat the nation.

I say eat the rich.

Click here to learn more about potential deflation.

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WHITEWATER REVISITED

Stewart was soon followed by Susan Schmidt, the Washington Post reporter who gained notoriety as one of Starr's most pliant outlets. In a question-and-answer session on the Post's Web site, Schmidt spun furiously about the "significant criminal convictions" won by Starr and the issues of "character and honesty" raised by Whitewater. But one question put to Schmidt by a reader encapsulated the confusion and frustration that must be felt by any citizens still paying attention to this story: "Can you tell me precisely what the Clintons are supposed to have done and what the key evidence was?" Schmidt took a pass and quickly logged off. But that plaintive query deserves a candid answer, as do the many other inquiries that seem to have been left unaddressed by the mainstream media -- most of which seems eager to abandon Whitewater as the embarrassment it has been.

The short, accurate reply to the above question is that the supposed offenses of the Clintons kept changing to suit the desire of prosecutors (and some reporters) to keep the scandal alive.

Just in case anybody's forgotten, the Whitewater scandal (you remember, the one that ended up with the bullshit impeachment of President Clinton for lying about a lousy blowjob) was a totally concocted pretext for a multi-million dollar, publicly funded, partisan witch hunt against the Clinton administration. This witch hunt was cheered on and enabled by some of the very same people who are currently ruining our economy, turning the world against us, and helping the Bush administration get away with amazing and evil feats that would have brought down Clinton in a heartbeat.

Here is a well written recap of the maddening affair.

Thanks to Eschaton.

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ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM
CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM
it's all the same...

...Islamic fundamentalism's hatred is driven by a deep fear of modernity. Western modernity, with its scientific world view, stresses secularism and the rights of individuals to choose their own values and life style. This is believed to undermine Islamic authority. It does.

Americans should be able to understand this view. We have a number of Christian fundamentalists fighting modernity.

And some of those Christian fundamentalists are running the White House.

I've been meaning to write some kind essay on this topic, myself, for a while, but Don Post articulates it well and beat me to it. In reality, the clash between religious fundamentalism and modernity is the same thing as the "culture war" that Pat Buchanan spoke on at the Republican National Convention back in 1992. Casting the wars against terrorism and evil dictators in terms of the US versus Islamic extremists simply confuses the overall issue. The entire world, including America, is in a gigantic cultural spasm. Science and reason are under attack around the globe. Dogma, superstition, and rigid fundamentalisms, both secular and religious are on the rise. Whether it's at the end of a gun barrel and under an iron boot, or in a television induced state of hypnotized, air conditioned comfort, it's free thought against mind control. That's the planet Earth in the twenty first century.

It makes me so angry when I think about it. The twentieth century was so damned promising. The most marvelous ideas, concepts birthed in the Renaissance, were coming to fruition, despite all the death and destruction. As the Cold War ended, the 1990s offered the potential for an idyllic Star Trek like future. Justice and freedom from fear. Love and peace. I really do fear that we've totally blown it.

Click here.

While I'm at it, here's some related depressing news about the worldwide strife expected to occur soon when oil supplies are depleted.

Finally, because this is all very much a downer, here's some refreshing Vivaldi to both ease the mind and evoke the Age of Reason.

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BREAKING FROM THE HERD
More on Behavioral Economics

What are the implications of these ideas for policy? According to Mr Marglin, they are profound. What if people cannot even calculate the amount they are willing to pay for a pound of butter or a haircut, or have any idea what prices will be in the future? In such a world, such basic constructs as demand and supply curves—which show the quantities that people and firms would be willing to demand or supply at given prices—lose their meaning. The normal economic calculations of costs and benefits—for example, of the costs created by a tax increase or the imposition of a tariff—depend on estimates of these curves. These calculations, and the policy conclusions that follow from them, may therefore be threatened by the behavioural approach.

This helps unorthodox economists in a range of debates with those in the mainstream. Support for school vouchers, for example, relies crucially on the notion that people know what is best for them, or at any rate for their children. Free trade relies on the benefits that occur to many from lower import duties, set against the costs suffered in the form of lost jobs in industries competing with imports. But if these things cannot be measured, or even theorised about sensibly, the rationale seems to melt away. Mr Marglin would have students read about the travails of unemployed textile workers in the American South who have lost their jobs thanks to NAFTA, rather than wade though econometric studies of the net benefits of the trade agreement to the American and Mexican economies.

Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
A few thoughts

Increasingly, I am hearing white liberal friends of mine speak out against affirmative action. This is disturbing. It means that Americans to the left of the ditch are slowly starting to buy into the conservative mythology. This isn’t surprising due to many factors, chiefly, the mainstream media’s embrace of conservative philosophy as truth.

As far as I can tell, the conservative line of thought (if you want to call it that) goes something like this. Affirmative action had its time and place in American history, but that time has passed. Racism is no longer the problem that it was in this country some thirty years ago, and now affirmative action causes far more problems than it solves. Furthermore, affirmative action is discriminatory toward white people and that’s simply not the American way. America is about equality for all races and it is time to end this blatant discrimination toward whites.

(For those of you who are falling out laughing at this conservative “argument,” I’d be laughing with you if not for the fact that so many otherwise rational individuals buy this point of view lock, stock, and barrel.)

Of course, this conservative point of view is so extraordinarily naïve, I am somewhat amazed that anybody, liberal or conservative, could even consider that it is possibly true. For starters, I will admit straight up that affirmative action is, in fact, discrimination. However, it is a form of discrimination that exists in order to redress longstanding inequities in American society. That is, affirmative action is a “hand up, not a hand out.”

In order to believe that the time for affirmative action has passed, one must also believe that the time of racism has passed in the United States. It has not. I don’t even really think that I need to prove this point because the evidence is as plain as the nose on your (white) face. But just in case you don’t believe me, consider this. African-Americans are wildly over represented in prisons. There are no black CEOs (that I know of) running any Fortune 500 companies. We have never had a black president or vice president. Disenfranchisement of African-Americans is still a reality (there is now a massive amount of evidence about this happening in Florida during the 2000 elections). Black high school graduation rates are still much lower than white graduation rates. Black college diplomas still lag way behind the number of white diplomas. Weird, negative racial stereotypes of African-Americans still dominate television and cinema (find and read Wynton Marsalis’ comments about hip-hop stereotyping or watch Spike Lee’s film, Bamboozled). “Driving while black” is still an offense that will get you pulled over in many states. Killing a white person usually gets a death sentence. Killing a black person does not. Security “officers” often follow around perfectly innocent African-Americans in upscale department stores. Racial hate groups are still active and seemingly growing in number. There is a massive disparity in pay rates between blacks and whites. Whites possess far more wealth than blacks. Redlining is still widely practiced by the banking industry in covert forms.

There is much, much more to ending racism than avoiding the “n-word” or being able to ogle Halle Berry or having a black friend or two. Sadly, most white people, still being segregated from the black reality of America, reduce the ending of racism to this superficial (but nice) threshold of racial equality. Racism still exists. Racism is a big problem. Racism is aided and abetted by federal, state, and local governments. Racism hurts blacks and helps whites.

Affirmative action is discrimination, yes, but it is as nothing compared to the discrimination that African-Americans face every day. I would be perfectly willing to consider some other solutions to longstanding racial disparities in America that do not discriminate on the basis of race, but nobody seems to be offering any.

Are there any?

Yes, but such solutions are simply not feasible in our capitalist, wealth-dominated nation. Public schools need a massive overhaul—I’m talking on the scale of the Pentagon budget. Class sizes need to be lowered to less than ten students; this would mandate building tons of new schools and hiring hundreds of thousands of new teachers (and raising teacher pay would attract much better teachers than the bland bunch of nerds populating faculties now). No child that is in poverty can learn as well or as much as a child that does not have to worry about his next meal or where to live: poverty and the social ills with which it is associated must be eliminated, at least for children. Perhaps overhauling the public schools would make the need for affirmative action at colleges and universities a thing of the past, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Furthermore, the African-American community should have a much-deserved infusion of wealth. That is, blacks throughout the twentieth century have been systematically excluded from the system that has allowed most whites to accrue their own capital assets: home mortgage loans. Redlining has lessened over the years (even though it does still exist), but America also owes a debt to descendent families of the menial labor that helped to build this country. Federal and state governments should pay reparations to blacks, or, at the very least, back wages for slave labor. Spent wisely, this could go a long way toward ending the economic white superiority that is still a part of America and its politics.

To be honest, I would personally prefer the two above-mentioned solutions over affirmative action—they would probably work better and no whiney whites could moan about how they’ve been “discriminated against.” But like I said, I’m not going to hold my breath.

To any white liberals or moderates that buy the conservative mythology about affirmative action, I say this. I will join you in you opposition to affirmative action if you join me in supporting a real fight against poverty, a massive influx of cash to public schools, greatly lowering class sizes, and reparations to the African-American community.

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Affirmative action is clearly an imperfect solution to a vast and complicated injustice in America. But for now, it’s the only solution we’ve got.

Don’t buy the racist, conservative bullshit.

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QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES

HPD crime lab takes another hit:
Shoddy handling, storing of DNA
raise doubts about rape conviction

The unprecedented retesting of DNA evidence processed by HPD began late last year after the audit found widespread problems at the crime lab including a leaky roof, sloppy science and questions about the veracity of the testimony by some lab workers. Police officials are reviewing close to 1,300 completed cases for possible retesting. So far retesting has been ordered in 170 convictions, plus dozens of pending cases.

Of the 16 cases that have been retested so far, Cantrell's and Sutton's results are the second to have contradicted the original findings of the police lab.

Click here.

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YET ANOTHER REASON TO DISTRUST
CONVENTIONAL ECONOMIC WISDOM

Economics is both called and treated as a science when, in fact, it is not. Economics, I must admit, does approach both theory and data gathering in a way that could easily be called "scientific," but the field of study is not science. Why? Economists use tons of assumptions that go virtually unquestioned by most other economists--these "scientists" posess a herd mentality. One of those assumptions is the intellectual construct called the "rational consumer:" people will generally behave in ways that they perceive as being in their best interests. Anybody that has a friend who has run up sky high credit card debt buying lots of stupid crap can tell you that many, perhaps a majority of consumers often behave in quite irrational ways.

It appears that some economists are breaking from the herd:

As the Economist reports, behavioral economics in on the rise. After almost a century of mathematical obsession, economists have finally started to accept their emotional roots. Last year, Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith received the Nobel Prize in economics for revealing that emotions drive most decisions made under conditions of risk or uncertainty.

I hope this new line of thinking has some payoff. Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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SAN FRANCISCO:
Liberal Oasis

We are indeed anti-gunlicking and pro-organic and avidly orgasmic. We are more flagrantly enthusiastically balls-out do-it-now feel-good suck-me hell-yes tolerant than Austin and Chicago and Seattle put together.

We are a danger to the status quo, a nipple-twisted threat to the "nukular" family, a pantheistic whip on the ass of the Bible Belt, a pox on the house that oil built. Or at least we try to be. Sometimes. Depends on how much Peet's we've imbibed.

Sounds like my kind of town. Why the hell aren't I there? Click here.

Thanks to Eschaton.

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FREAKY GROOVY
INTERIOR DESIGN PHOTOS FROM THE SEVENTIES

If you hate these retroCRUSH pics, you'll really hate them! If you love these pics, you'll love me for linking you! There is no in between!

Trust me.

Click here!

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HOW BUSH'S TAX CUT SCREWS THE POOR
Shown in Black and White, in Clear, Easy to Read Chart Form

This chart was recently released by Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow's new Dean Martin: Bob Harris at This Modern World. (That is, Tom Tomorrow is Jerry Lewis for purposes of metaphor.)

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STILL MORE REAL MUSIC (about politics and culture)

It is interesting to note that, given the anti-baby boomer rhetoric ending my last post, my buddy, Matt, years ago, handed me a photocopy of this article from the Atlantic, called "The New Generation Gap." The article clearly affected both my and Matt's thinking on how the so called X Generation (we have mutant powers...) relates to the Baby Boomers. For a while in the early 90s, spurred on by the success of Douglas Coupland's novel, Generation X, this new intergenerational animosity was played to the hilt by the media. I think that Time and Newspeak both did features on the subject; television news magazines, always hungry for content, also hit the story.

Years later, after developing friendships and good working relationships with many Boomers, and also after marrying a Boomer, I now think that much of the hype about this back in the early 90s was simply hype. However, I still think that there is a lot of truth in the analysis that there are, indeed, some patterns of difference between the two generations. I also believe that, as far as value judgments are concerned, both generations have upsides and downsides.

I do still have this resentment: Boomers, as a group, have waaaay more than their fair share of self-righteousness, hypocricy, and shallow materialism.

This calls for a song. Here are the lyrics to another mid 90s composition of my very own:

BOOMER

I always hear their rock songs on the radio and in movies.
I used to watch the reruns of their TV shows.
I've always heard their talk; they've taught me in the schools.
Everyone knows about the Boomers.

Yeah, yeah. Boomer news. Boomer views.
Boomer lectures. Yeah, Boomers paid their dues.
Boomer principles. Boomer pride.
They were once a bunch of hippies; now they're capitalists that lie.

Ever hear about the 60s? Only sixty billion times.
We learned that war was bad and love was good and rock would never die.
They've got a lot of righteousness. They've proclaimed it thirty years.
A nation's moral conscience, all those Boomers.

Yeah, yeah. Boomer need. Boomer greed.
Boomer values. Yeah, Boomers take the lead.
Boomer conformity. Boomer cash.
They got money in the 80s; they feel bad they once smoked hash.

Boomer stars. Big Boomer cars.
Boomer affluence. Yeah, Boomers work real hard.
Boomer hypocricy. Boomer high.
They were once a bunch of hippies; now they're capitalists that lie.

I don't wanna be talkin' bout your generation NO MORE!

Wanna hear it? For MP3 download, click here.

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REAL MUSIC (about politics and culture)

My buddy, Matt, writes:

Ron,

Have you ever heard the old Chicago song Dialogue (Parts 1& 2)? I'm listening to it at work and it reminded me of you. It reminds you that these guys started out as a political band, calling themselves the Chicago Transit Authority in reference to the '68 Democratic convention until forced to remove the "TA" part.

I find it particularly ironic that Peter Cetera plays the part he does as I've always felt that after Robert Lamm died, Cetera led the charge to mediocrity. Typecasting?

Matt

Matt also included the lyrics to "Dialogue:"

Dialogue
Chicago
(Robert Lamm)

Part I

Terry
Are you optimistic
'bout the way things are going?

Peter
No, I never ever think of it at all

Terry
Don't you ever worry
When you see what's going down?

Peter
No, I try to mind my business,
that is, no business at all

Terry
When it's time to function
as a feeling human being, will your
Bachelor of Arts help you get by?

Peter
I hope to study further,
a few more years or so. I also hope
to keep a steady high

Terry
Will you try to change
things, use the power that you have,
the power of a million new ideas?

Peter
What is this power you
speak of and this need for things to
change? I always thought
that everything was fine

Terry
Don't you feel repression just
closing in around?

Peter
No, the campus here is very, very free

Terry
Does it make you angry
the way war is dragging on?

Peter
Well, I hope the President
knows what he's into, I don't know

Terry
Don't you ever see the starvation
in the city where you live, all the
needless hunger all the
needless pain?

Peter
I haven't been there lately,
the country is so fine, but my
neighbors don't seem hungry 'cause
they haven't got the time

Terry
Thank you for the talk,
you know you really eased my mind
I was troubled by the shapes
of things to come.

Peter
Well, if you had my
outlook your feelings would be
numb, you'd always think
that everything was fine

Part II

Group
We can make it happen
We can change the world now
We can save the children
We can make it better
We can make it happen
We can save the children
We can make it happen

Here is my response:

Dear Matt,

I've known this song for many years, but, thanks to you, I'm hearing it anew. That is, I have a really bad habit of not paying much attention to lyrics for the first fifty or hundred times I hear a song. I think it's probably because most lyrics suck as far as meaningful content is concerned: this has made me miss out on some really great messages over the years--it's also kept me liking some songs longer than I should; Genesis' "Blood on the Rooftops" was eventually ruined for me when I realized it's about watching television in a sort of bored, politically neutral way.

I already really liked the song "Dialogue" and pretty much all of CTA and Chicago II. Now it's more than a cool song with great guitar solos: it is a song criticizing apathy and the comfort that breeds it. Very cool.

It's funny that there is a sort of career parallel between Phil Collins and Peter Cetera. Both were important members of "serious" rock bands and both later led their respective groups into crass commercialism. I think that, while I still judge their career moves as bad, I am more forgiving of their pop motivations than I used to be. That is, as an actor, I have seen lots of artists over the years that I know and that I read about who are caught between art and stardom or art and paying the bills. Both the recording industry and Hollywood have moved in a very bland, non-controversial, heavily commercialized direction over the last three decades or so. On the one hand, pure art is great, but laboring away in obscurity can be very demoralizing, not to mention financially impossible in many cases. Collins and Cetera aren't the only ones who have (been forced?) to sell out. Steve Winwood did it. One can reasonably argue that even Peter Gabriel has flirted with selling out. Al Pacino did "Devil's Advocate" and some other crappy movies. Jessica Lange announced that she was quitting show business a few years ago because of the state of Hollywood. Paul McCartney has selling out in his blood. And who can really ever tell what the hell is going on with the Rolling Stones?

Thanks for sending the lyrics my way.

Ron

Matt emailed a couple of responses:

Yes, I've also noted those folks who manage to sit on that fence. I have a little stable of them that I like to think are doing their "commercial" work with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but shrewdly doing commercial work to fund non-commercial work. John Cusack & Tim Robbins are great examples.

And:

Two more thoughts, given a night's sleep.

First, Cetera and Collins are also similar in that they started out as secondary players in their respective bands but took on progressively larger roles as the original "spiritual" leaders of the band moved on or passed on. To me it's a metaphor of the baby boomers in general: a few highly principled idealists surrounded by a large group of people who affected the stances only because they were hip, eventually moving on to 3 bedroom houses in the suburbs. Of course, that gets me on a rant about our two boomer presidents and how both are prototypical middle aged boomers, one a selfish, self-centered opportunist posing as a high-minded idealist, the other a guilt-ridden former hedonist turned to Jesus to help provide some meaning for his life. Whew!

Talk to you soon!

Matt

NOTE: these emails have been slightly edited.

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SEX EDUCATORS UNDER FIRE

The state of Texas, where I live, is an abstinence-only sex education state. That is, by law, all public schools in Texas must teach sex education from a perspective that regards refraining from sex until marriage as the highest of sexual values. Apart from the obvious fact that this approach leaves gay and lesbian students quite literally out in the cold (gay marriages in Texas, like in many other states, are against the law), the "abstinence based" approach takes practical sexuality education into the realm of religious morality. This is clearly incompatible with the first amendment's establishment clause. This also leads to some downright dangerous practices: emphasis on condom failures tends to make students less likely to use them; abortion is not an option. Texas sex ed is increasing HIV infection and teenage pregnancy rates, not reducing them.

Sadly, this seems to be a national trend. The religious right long ago infiltrated numerous local school boards; the fundamentalists have made vast gains in favorable representation in the corporate media. Weird, blind puritanism is on the rise throughout the land.

Here is a good article from the Nation originally appearing about a year ago that details the recent Judith Levine controversy and gives a lot of background info:

Still, I think Levine would be pilloried by Dr. Laura and her ilk even without the priest scandal and even if she had ignored the subject of sex across the age divide. For the pleasure principle she enunciates challenges the twenty-five-year-old organizing strategy of the right. Ever since Anita Bryant first demonstrated that a power base could be built by attacking homosexuals, the right has exploited real anxieties about sex, love and family to constrain the liberatory spirit, whether expressed by sexual preference, divorce, abortion, contraception, women's freedom or teen sex. This has not managed to send queers back to the closet, lower divorce rates or "protect the children." American teenagers have about four times the pregnancy rate of teens in Western Europe. Those in a program of "abstinence only" education still have sex and are about half as likely to protect themselves than kids who've received broad sex information. Even with abortion rights severely curtailed, US teenagers have abortions at about the rate they did just after Roe v. Wade. One in four has had a sexually transmitted disease; one an hour is infected with HIV; and, not incidentally, among American children one in six is poor. That notwithstanding, the sex panic strategy has succeeded in the only way it had to: creating a movement, with all the institutions, political power, lawmaking capability, grassroots presence and funding that implies, to advance an agenda for everything from global dominance to bedroom snooping. Levine's critics are all part of that project, and since she butts against it almost from the opening pages of her book, they are striking back.

Here is an article about a university sex educator being both honored by colleagues and reviled by politicians:

State Sen. Susan Wagle, R-Wichita, has accused Dailey of showing videos that are obscene under Kansas law. She also has accused him of obscenity and of mistreating students in the undergraduate class on sexuality.

It's ironic: despite the ever increasing pornogrification of MTV pop stars and reality television, America is suffering an old fashioned puritanical repression. The post-modern era is so contradictory...

UPDATE
Parents group protests author's speaking event

I just read this in the Houston Chronicle:

"Practically every page is an obscene attack on the innocence of my daughter and all other children," said Bailey, a Cypress-Fairbanks district resident.

The books show frontal nudity in drawings and mention homosexuality.

"Teen suicide and murders against gays are high, yet gay people are in our workplace, churches, basically everywhere," Harris said. "There's no way to write a book on sexuality without talking about homosexuality."

Click here.

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America's weapons evidence flawed, say spies

Present and former CIA officials, quoted in The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, claimed that a small number of powerful neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon were so determined to prove the existence of a banned weapons programme and links to al-Qaeda that they manipulated intelligence.

Still more proof that the Iraq war was totally unjustified, that the Bush administration LIED continually to the American people about a huge, major political issue, and that the American people can easily be sold swamp land in Florida (or false election results, for that matter). Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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VE HAFF VAYS OF MAKING YOU TALK:
Envoy dubs US a police state

The comments of Jürgen Chrobog, the State Secretary, reported in the German Focus magazine, threatened to disrupt intense diplomatic efforts to repair the relationship between Gerhard Schröder, the Chancellor, and President Bush.

Herr Chrobog is said to have given a blistering critique of the US-German relationship during the annual meeting of German ambassadors, complaining that America was “restricting more and more its civic liberties at home”.

After suffering both the Nazis and the Communists, who can spot a police state better than the Germans? Click here.

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe for the link.




"A Kraut by any other name..."
--General Buck Turgidson

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MOLLY IVINS
GOP in the heart of Texas:
Texas Ledge gets wacky
while top donors look on from 'owner's box'

Don't worry about a thing! The Texas Legislature is riding to the rescue. Oh, sure, we still have a $10 billion deficit, but the House just outlawed gay marriage. At last, we're safe from the hideous threat of gay marriage, which would have directly ruined our entire lives.
Meanwhile, the House has:

Eliminated 10,810 state jobs;

Cut 250,000 poor children off the Children's Health Insurance Program and about 365,000 from health insurance through Medicaid;

Cut prenatal care and delivery for 17,000 pregnant women and services for 366 women with breast and cervical cancer;

Closed one state school for the mentally retarded and one state mental hospital;

(This one's my favorite) Cut $22 million from a criminal justice program that provides medication and treatment for mentally impaired offenders who are out on probation or parole. (Isn't that nice? They'll be wandering around the state without their meds.)

"...laughing wild, Amid severest woe."
Shakespeare—Measure for Measure, Act V. Scene 1

I do love Molly. Click here.

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Caped Crusader Saves the Day in English Town

The Kent and Sussex Courier said Friday it had received letters from "stunned residents" of the town of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of London, who saw the man in a brown mask and cape scare off hooligans and return a woman's dropped purse.

My buddy, Dave, who sent me the link, writes:

"Admit it. You wish YOU'd'a done it.

...I know I do. *sob*"

...he's right...I do wish I'd'a done it...*sniff*

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MORE BLACKLISTING
Station suspends DJs for playing Dixie Chicks

"We pulled their music two months ago, and it's been a difficult decision because how can you ignore the hottest group in country music," said station manager Jerry Grant.

He said there has been discussion about whether to reinstate the music, but the DJs, Dave Moore and Jeff Singer became impatient.

"They made it very clear that they support wholeheartedly the president of the United States. They support wholeheartedly the troops, the military. But they also support the right of free speech," said Grant.

The station has received a couple of hundred calls and 75 percent favored playing the music.

Grand said Moore and Singer will be out for a couple of days.

"I gave them an alternative: stop it now and they'll be on suspension, or they can continue playing them and when they come out of the studio they won't have a job."

So now it is not simply opposing war or opposing the Bush administration that will throw you in the doghouse, supporting free speech gets a newspaper on the nose, too.

It's a dog's life.

Click here.

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Pledges and silence added to Texas school rules

Here.

Rep. Suzanna Gratia Hupp, R-Lampasas, argued that the legislation reduces local control and offered a failed floor amendment that would leave the decision up to each school district.

"It's not an argument about whether moment of silence is a good thing, it's not an argument about whether the Pledge of Allegiance is a good thing. I think it's a great thing," Hupp argued. "But I campaigned on local control and this is just one more thing we're jamming onto our schools."

So, on top of everything else, as a teacher, I am now required to lead my class in a god-oriented pledge (which I really don't mind doing as a cultural tradition, but I hate to be compelled to do so in order to show my loyalty), and a moment of silence (meaning "prayer" in the Bible-thumping community where I work). This is bound to make me at least as uncomfortable as I feel during the Christian prayer that always opens district wide faculty meetings. I fear that loyalty oaths may loom on the horizon:

All teachers were forced to take the oath or lose their jobs. Many were accused of having unpopular political opinions and found themselves unemployed and blacklisted. Hundreds of the best and most courageous teachers were lost to the schools, and, of course, to the students. But many fought back. For example, a number of professors at the University of Washington brought suit against the loyalty oath, and after a long court battle, won their case, thus making an important contribution to civil liberties in this country.

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MORE TALES OF CAPITALISM'S DEPRAVITIES

THE CREDIT CARD HUSTLE

Earlier this evening I was watching C-Span for a few moments and I caught a bit of an interview with Robert Manning who wrote the book Credit Card Nation which is now apparently out in paperback; Manning's book, it seems, is not very flattering to the credit and banking industry, to say the least. Being curious, I did a Google search and managed to find a very interesting, very damning two part excerpt from the book dealing with small business, loans, and credit cards:

In contrast to the generous offer of easy money to unemployed students, the growing use of credit cards by small businesses is often the result of increasingly restrictive lending policies by commercial banks. In the same way the withdrawal of first-tier banks from low-income communities has sharply increased the demand for costly second-tier loans, banks are profiting handsomely from the commercial credit crunch by issuing credit cards rather than approving small business loans. The problem is that credit-card applications do not ask questions about long-term business plans and how the loans will be repaid. As a result, rather than paying 6% to 8% on profit-enhancing small-business loans, eager entrepreneurs soon find themselves burdened with 14% to 24% APR consumer loans that they often cannot repay.

Manning's words illustrate one of the countless ways that capitalism unleashed both contradicts the conventional economic wisdom and is dangerous to our nation. Capitalism's apologists take pride in the fair play and competition of their economic philosophy. The reality, however, is that those who have the most wealth continually rig the game in their own favor: there is no fair play; there is no competition. In the real world, capitalism unleashed cannot help but morph into a grand pyramid scheme ultimately benefitting only those at the top at the expense of those on the bottom. Free market fundamentalists also assert the virtues of the small business: "Wall Street is Main Street" and all that nonsense. Yet, in the name of free markets, banking regulations have been so weakened that small businesses are being totally exploited--this is a drag on the economy that takes money directly away from Main Street and redeposits it on Wall Street. These excerpts from Credit Card Nation show how wealth tends to feast upon itself.

In fact, if you combine the red-lining of small businesses which forces them to use credit cards, with other events such as Wall Street broker and accountant scheming against small investors, the energy companys' manipulation of California markets for great profits, political and corporate cronyism, the blatant pro-corporate propaganda ruling the airwaves, and a host of other capitalistic travesties, it's pretty hard not to conclude that the corporations have declared an all out, but quiet assault against the people of the United States.

For part one of the excerpt from Credit Card Nation, click here.
For part two, click here.

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IMPEACH BUSH
US: 'Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction'

Senior officials in the Bush administration have admitted that they would be 'amazed' if weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq.

According to administration sources, Saddam shut down and destroyed large parts of his WMD programmes before the invasion of Iraq.

Ironically, the claims came as US President George Bush yesterday repeatedly justified the war as necessary to remove Iraq's chemical and biological arms which posed a direct threat to America

Click here.

Remember how this war was justified? That's right, the White House continually pounded away at this lie, and despite extremely flimsy "evidence," and despite the exposure of some downright fraudulent information, both the corporate media, totally failing to do its job, and the American public, totally abdicating its responsibility of citizenship, believed the lie. WMD is the Gulf of Tonkin for the new millenium. Why is there no outrage? Why aren't impeachment papers being written?

And where is the evidence of an Al-Qaeda link?

People are dying for lies.

UPDATE:
Weapons of Mass Destruction Were a Fantasy From the Start

The rest of the world never really believed the White House's justification for war anyway. As U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said in late April, Washington and London built their case for going to war on "very, very shaky" evidence, including documents that subsequently turned out to have been faked -- and with the war now over, Washington isn't even bothering to insist that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the United States any more. "We were not lying," a Bush administration official told ABC News on 28 April. "But it was just a matter of emphasis."

I repeat: people are dying for lies.

Thanks, again, to J. Orlin Grabbe.

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THANKS

Thanks to J. Orlin Grabbe for the last three links!

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QUARTERLY EARNINGS OBSESSION
LED TO WALL STREET AND WASHINGTON CORRUPTION

From a Boston Globe book review of Alex Berenson's The Number:

The ''number'' of the title is earnings per share. Berenson documents how a ludicrous obsession with this one facet of corporate existence drove some executives to cook the books and inflate their quarterly earnings. Companies shouldn't ignore the number. Berenson cites Japan, once a model for its patient philosophy of investing for the long haul. Yet the Japanese economy has been in a coma for 10 years. ''Japanese companies don't have to worry about profits,'' he writes, ''so they avoid making difficult decisions to fire workers or close stores and factories.''

But in the 1990s, US markets went to the other extreme, not only demanding that short-term earnings always rise, rise, rise, but that the rise beat the predictions of Wall Street analysts. The analysts, unfortunately, dispensed harebrained advice that bore little resemblance to market reality. And they are not the most culpable in the depressingly expansive rogues' gallery in ''The Number.'' Jousting for that distinction are crooked executives, enablers in the accounting profession, and the politicians who neutered the Securities and Exchange Commission, starving the agency for resources it needed to keep the markets honest.

For more tales of capitalism's depravity, click here.

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HOW LONG WILL WE BE IN AFGHANISTAN?
How Many American Soldiers Will Die?

The number of American service personnel who have died in Afghanistan since operation Enduring Freedom began in October 2001 is now 30. But not a single soldier was killed as the result of hostile action in the first three months of the main offensive. Recently the frequency of casualties has risen ominously, and in April alone four soldiers were killed.

In private, US special forces officers are now saying that Afghanistan is in danger of developing into another Vietnam. They see ominous parallels between the heavy-handed attempts at "pacification" which are alienating Afghan villagers and similar ham-fisted actions that turned the Vietnamese against the Americans.

I'm just going to keep on pounding away at this. The only realistic strategy that anybody can use against the world's last superpower is a mix of guerrilla warfare and terrorism. This was totally predictable. Furthermore, the government and the media are now using the phrase "win their hearts and minds" without any recognition of how the US miserably failed to do exactly that in Vietnam.

We cannot win their hearts and minds while we have guns aimed at them. This is absolutely insane.

Click here.

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BUSINESS AS USUAL
For US Foreign Policy

America now has a vise grip on the region, with 14 new post-9/11 bases, from eastern Europe through Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the two Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

The singular feature of all those new allies is that they are weak states. Most are undemocratic, if not repressive.

So, America is replicating its failed model of using unrepresentative regimes to suppress the people, but doing it on new turf.

This short-term gain, therefore, may come at the expense of long-term pain. And even that will depend on how well America does with its "road map" for peace in the Middle East, so inextricably linked are Muslims to the plight of Palestinians.

Within Iraq itself, the dawn of a democratic era is not unfolding as advertised.

We've all been had. Of course, I already knew that. Click here for the "real American agenda."

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PART OF THE COMMUNITY

This past year, I've outlived two of my students. One of them, Kim, died quietly near the end of last year's summer vacation. The other one, Tim, died this past week. When a teenager that I know dies, it is always a time of reflection for me: I am thirty five years old; for some cosmic reason, I get to live twice as many years--it doesn't seem right or fair. It is also a time of sadness.

Shared grief is a strange thing. It is as though there are always ripples, like from a pebble thrown into a pond, of mourning emanating out from the departed. Those hit the hardest are the family and loved ones who experience that bleak, stark, overwhelming first realization that they will no longer have the company of the person they loved. The next tier is composed of good friends who are also hit pretty hard. Then, acquaintances and colleagues are hit with a ripple of grief that is not so driven by the loss the departed as it is driven by a forced contemplation of the mortality of self and others--this ripple causes the memory of past losses to be felt anew.

These ripples of mourning continue to recede in intensity until they dissipate into the realm that the Butthole Surfers refer to with the song title "Strangers Die Every Day" (or to make it more political, "Iraqis die every day"). People die constantly, all the time, but we are rarely troubled by it. It is only when we are within a particular emotional radius that we are troubled by death.

Twice this year has student death put me in the third tier of grief.

Kim was a gothy, black-wearing, heavy eye-liner applying, tough chick. She was smart. She had good taste in music. She had a pretty sharp wit. I admired her rebel outlook and independence. We sometimes struggled for dominance in the classroom, but I had respect for her. Fortunately, I guess, she died during the summer break: the loss wasn't so sudden; most of her friends and I had not seen her for a couple of months. Her death was sad, but it seemed easier to digest for me and the school community. Her passing, however, was still a time of reflection and sadness.

Tim's death, on the other hand, was both sudden and high profile; it was very present, very now. Here is a local newspaper account of his passing. Last Monday, numerous students whith whom I am close were crying. The sadness has lingered all week. I was not very close to Tim at all. When he was my student two years ago, he was actually pretty annoying. I think I gave him more d-halls than any other student in that class. But he was a nice guy--his annoyances were usually goofing around to entertain his friends; it's ultimately hard to hold a guy responsible for just wanting to make his friends smile. He made me smile on many occasions, too. His loss is a drag. The thing that's really gotten me this week, however, is seeing so many of his and my mutual friends experiencing such great pain. It's brought up my own memories of loss. I find that, unintentionally, I am grieving, too. Whether or not I like this god-forsaken, superstitious, hostile-to-outsiders town where I work, I am a part of the community, for better or worse. I share its sadness.

This past week has been tough.

Here is a link to a student site with some pics of Tim and an obituary of sorts. The memorial stuff should be up for a while, I think.

Finally, I dedicate this song to Tim and his loved ones and everybody else in the world experiencing grief and sadness.

(On a related depressing note, fellow blogger, Meris, has also been experiencing loss and grief this past week. Check out her post over at Auguries of Innocence*.)

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A PROGRESSIVE VIEW OF CASTRO'S RECENT STALINIZATION

First, let's set the mood.

Critics on the left do not question Cuba's right to protect itself from the US monster. Most of the leftist signatories to the protest letters would agree that the United States has all but shredded international law and the UN in its latest criminal capers in Iraq.

But the Cuban government didn't adequately explain its rationale; indeed, it practically shouted at its critical friends and enemies alike with shrillness, as if everyone should understand what no one explained.

In so behaving, it handed its enemies the public relations chance of a decade: Cuba imprisons its dissenters and summarily executes people. As Galeano wrote "freedom and justice march together or they don't march."

Leftist supporters of Cuba's socialist revolution are disturbed and worried about Castro's swift execution of two hijackers and his crackdown on dissidents. Many American leftists hold up Cuba as a successful example of both an economically just society and a defier of US imperialism. I must say that I'm not really sure where I stand. I really want to see it the way the pro-Castro leftists do. It's a very compelling image: the daring young revolutionaries fighting a just war against the evil forces of capitalism, and then growing old while shepherding the continuance of the revolution. I think that Americans like revolutions. We like underdogs, too. If you can get away from the Cold War mindset of communism=bad and capitalism=good, Castro's freedom fighters, as legend, have a very seductive allure. But this Saul Landau essay for Counterpunch comes off, at times, sounding like some of the more moderate mainstream newspaper pundits wringing their hands about Israel's misdeeds against the Palestinians.

I guess both the left and the right have their crosses to carry.

I am sure of two things. First, the ideological construction in the American psychology that is called "Cuba" surely bears little resemblance to the real life nation. I know that decades of Cold War propaganda and right-wing Cuban exile rantings about Castro are the intellectual foundation upon which the tiny island nation is understood by most Americans today. I know that Castro is a human rights abusing dictator, but is he really as bad as Saddam? Because of the right-wing propaganda, because of some of the left's near idolization of Fidel, I'm very skeptical of almost anything I read or hear about Cuba from both the mainstream news media and other sources. It seems that everyone that I hear saying something about Cuba has an agenda. Ultimately, I just don't really know about Castro and his regime.

Second, I am sure that the US has waged a war of terrorism on Cuba since Castro came to power. Noam Chomsky gives some plain talk on America's state-sponsored terrorism and several other issues regarding Cuba here.

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THE BEST MUSIC REVIEW I'VE EVER READ

And it's not just because I've been disenchanted with Madonna since I decided in the early 1990s that an average copy of Swank magazine is way better than her high falutin' work of "erotica," the coffee table book, Sex. This is in the tradition of George Bernard Shaw. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but it's quite a fun read:

We've been here before, of course: Music was the worst single release by an established singer since Paul McCartney's Mary Had A Little Lamb, and as Bond themes go, Die Another Day made Lulu sound like Satchmo. Yet the intellectual investment by the Popbitching classes in Madonna the Icon is such that to state the obvious, that Madonna the Singer is grade-A garbage, would bring tumbling down the whole house of cards that is modern pop theory.

With the crap single come the "exclusive" interviews awarded to selected media monkeys with a track record of genuflection beyond the call of duty. Yet no matter how soft the ride Mrs Ritchie is given, she inevitably ends up saying something gloriously stupid and self-deceiving, such is the level of professional flattery that has cocooned her for 20 years. After the atrocity that was The Next Best Thing, she famously rated herself a 10 as wife, lover, singer and - gulp - actress; a score with which I'd have no quarrel if it were out of 100, rather than 10.

And

She is, in fact, a novelty act who happened to have the shrewdest marketing moves; it's as if the Smurfs had been masterminded by Machiavelli.

Click here for scathing attack at Madonna.

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A SKEPTICAL BLOG

Houston blogger, Dominion, has angry words for the new, even sleazier, and now possibly racist morning men at the venerated FM radio station, KLOL. He also blasts the station's owner, the omnipresent Clear Channel (like anybody needs an excuse to do that). Go read "An Open Letter to Walton and Johnson: How Clear Channel Communications Ruined A Historic Radio Station by Hiring Two Idiots." And read the comment I posted.

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HOW BIG ARE CORPORATE BALLS?

Enormous, apparently:

Houston-based Enron Corp., WorldCom, Qwest Communications and HealthSouth are either pursuing or considering filing for federal tax refunds or credits for payments made on billions of dollars falsely claimed as earnings.

Click here.

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LAZY SEC WATCHDOG GROWLS
AT WALL STREET FAT CAT BROKERS
then goes back to sleep...

"First, your statements reflect a disturbing and misguided perspective on Morgan Stanley's alleged misconduct," Donaldson wrote. "The allegations in the commission's complaint against Morgan Stanley are extremely serious. They include charges that Morgan Stanley paid other firms to provide research coverage, compensated its research analysts, in part, based on the degree to which they helped generate investment banking business, offered research coverage by its analysts as a marketing tool to gain investment banking business and failed to establish adequate procedures to protect research analysts from conflicts of interests.

"In light of these charges," Donaldson continued, "your reported comments evidence a troubling lack of contrition and lead me to wonder about Morgan Stanley's commitment" to complying with the law.

I feel safer already.

Not.

Click here for more woeful tales of capitalism (the real American religion).

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Republicans vow revenge for Democratic filibuster

Texas Republicans Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay vowed to make them pay for thwarting President Bush's nominee.

Hutchison said Senate leaders will force Democrats into all-night sessions if necessary until Owen is confirmed.

And DeLay, of Sugar Land, said the House will do its part to make Democrats miserable. "I'm not sure we want to give you what we intend to do, but you will see our fingerprints and our footprint in this fight."

Bring it on, assholes. It looks like the Democrats are becoming less timid, and it's pissing off the Republicans. Good sign. Mix it up!

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MY COMMUNIST PARTY PIN
given to me by the school where I teach

Okay, it's not really a Communist Party pin.

The mascot for the school where I teach is the "Ranger," but for all intents and purposes, it is actually a cowboy, as in the Dallas Cowboys. The football uniforms are similar and the school icon is a silver star. Yesterday, I and the entire faculty, I think, received small silver star lapel pins (presumably as a thank you gift for the eye-glazing, zombifying managing of the great Texas standardized tests we've been administering this week) that were attached to a fancy business card that said in fancy writing:

"Thank you for always doing more,
doing it better and always
exceeding expectations

(signed by the principal)"

Nice, huh? However, yesterday was May Day, so my Ranger pin became my Communist Party pin once I painted it with red fingernail polish.

Aren't I so subversive and ironic?

Eat the rich!

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COMPARATIVE FILM THEORY 101

This video of tonight's spectacular airplane arrival of our AWOL leader kind of reminds me of the extended airplane arrival of Adolph Hitler during the opening scene of Triumph of the Will--here is a short Quicktime clip (it may take a moment to load).

For some reason, I just can't stop thinking about this campaign ad from 1988, but in reverse, if you get my drift.

Now, students, what conclusions can we draw from a comparison of these three films?

Thanks to Eschaton for the AWOL link.

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TODAY IS ALSO "LOYALTY DAY"

These values must be imparted to each new generation. Our children need to know that our Nation is a force for good in the world, extending hope and freedom to others. By learning about America's history, achievements, ideas, and heroes, our young citizens will come to understand even more why freedom is worth protecting.

I bet he means the "Andrew Jackson: Indian Lover" version of American history.

This Loyalty Day, as we express allegiance to our Nation and its founding ideals, we resolve to ensure that the blessings of liberty endure and extend for generations to come.

The Congress, by Public Law 85-529, as amended, has designated May 1 of each year as "Loyalty Day," and I ask all Americans to join me in this day of celebration and in reaffirming our allegiance to our Nation.

So...am I breaking the law if I celebrate May Day instead? Does Bush even get the irony? Click here for creepy Presidential proclamation.

Thanks to Eschaton.

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AROUND THE WORLD ON MAY DAY

Hundreds of thousands of workers and protesters took part in largely peaceful May Day rallies around the world, though scuffles were reported and some demonstrations on the public holiday included criticism of the U.S.-led war on Iraq.

Can you believe it? This sort of thing happens every year!!! America is seemingly the only country in the world where the concept of economic class is not understood in any meaningful way. Most American workers spend Labor Day grilling meat (if they can afford it) and hanging out. Not that I have a problem with grilling meat and hanging out. But what the hell is our deal? Why aren't the millions of Americans who are deeply in debt, overworked, afraid of losing their crappy jobs, without health insurance, and without retirement benefits raging like the Hulk? Are cable television and video games really that anesthetizing?

The more I think I've got it figured out, the more questions I have...

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MAY DAY

Today is May Day, the greatest holiday that you've probably never heard of. Commemorating the Haymarket Riot of 1886, it is observed worldwide as a sort of holiday of worker solidarity, the real labor day, if you will, which is just as well because the actual Labor Day is now nothing more than another three-day weekend. (In fact, I seem to remember reading something to the effect that one of the reasons that Labor Day was created by Congress was to assure that American workers would not celebrate May Day--capitalists feared the international unity concept built into the holiday and wanted to avert the worldwide revolution from ever making it to the good, old US of A.)

From the moment I heard of this left-leaning remembrance of an American labor history event that is celebrated by nearly everybody but Americans, I had to embrace May Day. My own personal observances have been very low key--maybe I remember to wear red, like I've done today, to represent the "blood of the revolution," or maybe I listen to John Lennon's "Power to the People," or maybe I watch Doctor Zhivago. I've made a point for the last six or seven years to leave a telephone message for my anarcho/commie friend, Vince, who told me about May Day in the first place, but he's now in Japan teaching English, and I'm still pissed at him for leaving a play I was in at intermission last summer without an explanation or apology, so he gets no call this year (that'll learn him). Instead, I'll observe May Day here on Real Art by providing some appropriate links:

May Day (scroll down a bit for this one)
Labor Day
The Communist Manifesto
Strike (rent this film!)
Emma Goldman
The Socialist Party (one of many)

This ought to make for some interesting reading. Enjoy. And find a way to stick it to the man today.

Workers of the world, unite!

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