KOOP'S "SUMMER SUN"
From Quango:
Cited by legendary radio jazzman Gilles Peterson as one of the two songs that really make him happy (the other was a tune by someone called Stevie Wonder). "Summer Sun" is the brightest, most euphoric thing we've heard in years. The vocal is a story in itself. Hijacked from Gothenburg's Octagon Session, the then 15-year-old Yukimi Nagano was spotted by the Koop-boys at a jazz talent contest where, while rows of 5-stringed bass-broilers did their university fusion-thing, some real raw emotion suddenly bursted from the stage. Yukimi was eventually enlisted by Koop for the album. She lays down two impressive vocal performances on this album. Definitely a talent to watch.
Click here for the rest Quango's review of Koop's second album Waltz for Koop.
I don't recall if I've ever gushed about the Sweedish jazz-house DJ duo known as Koop here at Real Art in the past, but if I already have forgive me for doing so again. It's just that they're so cool. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much out on the internet just yet about Koop, not even a homepage, or else I would have led off with something from Wikipedia about them instead of a review by a guy I've never heard of, but as far as I can tell, they're part of what appears to be a sort of wave of European DJs-as-artists who all got sick of techno-disco grooves in the late 90s and ran toward the jazz idiom. Hard to go wrong there, if you ask me, but Koop, unlike genre-mate Dimitri from Paris, who I like greatly, takes the approach well beyond what I ever could have imagined was possible.
Their first album, Sons of Koop, while pretty good, suffers a bit from a residual techno sound, which also infects and mediocritizes the aforementioned Dimitri, but by their second album, Waltz released in 2002, it's like they're redefining jazz for the 21st century. It's definitely still house music, but it has a real late 50s/early 60s sensibility about it, almost walking a thin line between Duke Ellington and Audrey Hepburn. This album is transcendental, but in a thoroughly modern way. I'll never forget the first time I heard this stuff: my old buddy Kevin and I were driving around Houston for some reason a few years back and NPR's All Songs Considered was on the radio; they were featuring Koop that day, and, let me tell ya, it was like slowly sliding into the most perfect warm bath you've ever experienced, or walking into a restaurant refrigerator for a moment to cool off during a busy wait shift.
Anyway, to come to the point here, I found on YouTube a cool Koop video for their song "Summer Sun." Like the music, the visuals harken to the mid 20th century, abstract expressionism and all that, but are still very contemporary. It also features the very beautiful and talented sometimes Koop member Japanese-Swede Yukimi Nagano on vocals. Go check it out; it's very much a part of my own personal aesthetic these days.
Yukimi Nagano
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Friday, June 30, 2006
FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING
Paz
Phil
Frankie
Sammy
Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for links to more cat blogging posts!
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Thursday, June 29, 2006
The High Price of American Gullibility
From CounterPunch, conservative Paul Craig Roberts on the continuing erosion of civil liberties:
If "national security" is a justification for elevating the power of the executive, where is his incentive to find peaceful solutions?
Emotional appeals to fear and to patriotism have led close to half of the population to accept unaccountable government in the name of "the war on terrorism." What a contradiction it is that so many Americans have been convinced that safety lies in their sacrifice of their civil liberties and accountable government.
If so many Americans cannot discern that they have acquiesced to conditions from which tyranny can arise, how can they understand that it is statistically impossible for the NSA's mass surveillance of Americans to detect terrorists?
Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, writing in CounterPunch (May 24, 2006) applies the mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes' Theorem, to demonstrate that the NSA's surveillance cannot successfully detect terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the population and the accuracy rate of their identification are far higher than they are. He correctly concludes that "NSA's surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists."
The surveillance is, however, useful for monitoring political opposition and stymieing the activities of those who do not believe the government's propaganda.
Click here for the rest.
Some observations.
First, and this kind of thinking is why I love Roberts, we have a huge Constitutional problem: American Presidents have a massive incentive to go to war and keep it going indefinitely whether it's good for the country or not--"national security" means more Presidential power; power hungry Presidents want to go to war, just to have more control at home, and that's obviously what's happening right now. Some Constitutional scholars really need to put their heads together and work this problem out like right now. The Founding Fathers, I'm sure, never envisioned an America with enough military power and economic backing for the creation of endless wars which exist simply to expand executive power, thereby utterly obliterating their carefully crafted balance of power between federal branches. This is a serious defect in the Constitution; it stands to completely undo everything for which this country stands.
Second, the willingness of so many Americans, by accepting continual downgrades of the civil liberties that make our nation unique, to undo everything for which this country stands continues to amaze me. I'm not sure which Founding Father said it, because the quote seems to be attributed to either Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry, depending on who's doing the quoting, but it's worth repeating again and again: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." That is, all this domestic spying bullshit is so unAmerican. How the hell can anyone support it?
Finally, go read the statistics article linked in the excerpt above. If the calculations are correct, the NSA "data mining" simply cannot do what Bush claims it does. Personally, I got a bit lost somewhere in all the number crunching, but, overall, it appears to be a compelling argument. Perhaps somebody who's better with math can give the essay a review for me, just to make sure. But, wow, the conclusion about NSA data mining being way more effective at spying on Americans than on terrorists is, indeed, frightening.
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Guard to miss border mission deadline
From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet
The Bush administration has been unable to muster even half of the 2,500 National Guardsmen it planned to have on the Mexican border by the end of June.
As of Thursday, the next-to-last day of the month, fewer than 1,000 troops were in place, according to military officials in the four border states of Texas, California, New Mexico and Arizona.
President Bush's plan called for all 50 states to send troops. But only 10 states — including the four border states — have signed commitments.
Some state officials have argued that they cannot free up Guardsmen because of flooding in the East, wildfires in the West or the prospect of hurricanes in the South.
Click here for the rest.
This was such a stupid idea from the get-go that I strongly doubt Bush was ever serious about it. I mean, why not dramatically increase enforcement budgets and get the right people on the job? I suppose the whole Guard stunt was to show the GOP xenophobes that he supports their point of view and wouldn't tolerate the lag time it would take to get some real border patrol action going. But the thing is that Bush doesn't really support the xenophobes; as a longtime Texas businessman, he's firmly entrenched with the GOP illegal labor exploiters faction--as Molly Ivins once wryly observed when contrasting California attitudes about illegals with attitudes in Texas, "down here we like our Meskins." Yeah, Texan businessmen understand that illegal laborers will put up with brutally low wages and working conditions and never complain about it for fear of deportation, the perfect workers from the capitalist perspective.
So this whole National Guard thing was just a political gesture. Bush, who could easily claim "national security" and federalize the needed troops, simply isn't interested in truly helping out the xenophobes. He never really meant it, which is just fine by me.
Besides, the only effective way of reducing the flow of illegals across the border is to go after the employers. Obviously, Bush is never going to do that.
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Wednesday, June 28, 2006
"Where’s the voice of protest? It’s in MTV’s trash can."
From the Progressive:
Even Neil and his team posted it front and center on his blog for the entire week.
What prompted my letter and the outpouring was Young’s comment about why he felt compelled to write his new anti-Bush album, Living with War. “I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer eighteen-to-twenty-two years old, to write these songs and stand up,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the ’60s generation. We’re still here.”
As the first protest singer to rise from the streets of anti-war and WTO protests and get a major worldwide distribution deal, I felt compelled to explain that today’s Dylans, Ochses, and Neil Youngs are here, but they’re being silenced by an industry that has for years derived its profits from kiddy porn and dreamy boys.
Just two days after my article came out, MTV, which has refused to play anti-war videos even by the biggest stars, published an article addressing the need for political consciousness in mainstream music. In a flourish of Bush-like hubris, one of the country’s chief purveyors of military recruitment ads to youth posted the article, “Where Is the Voice of Protest in Today’s Music?” The webpage boasted an Army video game in the bottom right corner. (MTV, by the way, refuses to air anti-war ads produced by organizations like Not In Our Name and Win Without War.)
Click here for more.
Of course, as the article makes clear, it's not simply MTV: it's the entire recording industry. There are no popular anti-war or protest songs because that's the way they want it--the 60s were something of an historic aberration. So, if there's money to be made, why is the business so dead set on burying protest music? In addition to the industry's conventional wisdom that controversy is bad for sales, which is strange when you factor in gangster rap and all those quasi-pornographic female "singers," the vast majority of opposition culture's venom is aimed at the corporate world. Needless to say, since bigass corporations started buying up all the smaller heavies back in the late 70s, "corporate" defines the recorded music business extremely well. That is, why would the recording industry produce and promote a product that stands a chance, granted a small one, of altering public attitudes about the way they do business?
Over a decade ago, when I realized that my own songwriting was steadily drifting in a political direction, and that I didn't really feel good about writing bland love songs, I decided that it would be foolish to ever think seriously about trying to go professional. I might be able to pull off some club gigs, maybe an idie record deal if I played my cards right, but I would never, ever, ever be signed to a major label. It was obvious that they wouldn't like my stuff.
So, yeah, Neil Young, although I love him to death, was extraordinarily wrong about younger artists not stepping up. They can't step up. They've been blackballed.
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SOME INSURGENTS OFFER CEASE FIRE FOR TIMETABLE
From the AP via Yahoo courtesy of AlterNet:
Eleven Sunni insurgent groups have offered to halt attacks on the U.S.-led military if the Iraqi government and President Bush set a two-year timetable for withdrawing all foreign troops from the country, insurgent and government officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
The demand is part of a broad offer from the groups, who operate north of Baghdad in the heavily Sunni Arab provinces of Salahuddin and Diyala. Although much of the fighting has been to the west, those provinces have become increasingly violent and the attacks there have regularly crippled oil and commerce routes.
Click here for the rest.
Just to be clear, this is only a portion of the insurgency, not the whole shebang. Nonetheless, this is a significant offer, and it strongly bolsters the point of view that much of the insurgency is about resentment of the US occupation, rather than about a bunch of Ba'athists with a grudge. Coupled with Iraqi government members' similar pleas, it becomes clear as day that the people of Iraq want us out, and that they blame America for all the turmoil over there. Bush could greatly lessen the chaos he instigated by instituting a timetable for withdrawal. He doesn't even have to leave yet, just draw up a document with goals and dates. Unfortunately, he's been pretty open about the fact that we're not leaving until their government can provide stability, which, I might add, is highly unlikely while we still have troops there. Frankly, I think Bush is well aware of the destabilizing influence of the US presence, and is counting on it to give him rhetorical cover for continuing the occupation indefinitely. In other words, the stability-before-withdrawal concept is a bullshit paradigm because Bush has always intended to stay in Iraq forever.
What really kills me is that I'm quite certain that future Presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, are going to continue Bush's policy of permanent occupation. Iraq is now a vassal state, and the US is its imperial overlord.
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Tuesday, June 27, 2006
SPYING ON THE BANKS ISN'T THE REAL SCANDAL
From the Nation, national affairs correspondent William Grieder, like me confused about why bank-spying is a problem given that the feds already said they were doing it right after 9/11, finds a real scandal:
Dirty Money
The scandal here is not government over-reach, he tells me. The scandal is the pitiful reluctance of this administration (and others before it) to get serious about the problem.
Bankers, Blum explained, "have fended off every conceivable rule that would really be effective. Why are we pandering to them if we say we are in such a desperate situation?"
The political influence of bankers tops all other sectors, I learned as a young reporter. Regardless of party or ideology, politicians seek their friendship. So the United States has created a truly bizarre banking code that legalizes--and keeps secret--vast flows of ill-gotten gains. For what purpose? Terrorist financing, yes, but that business is dwarfed by the drug trade profits, insider looting of corporations, offshore tax evasion, securities fraud, plain-vanilla fraud and other uses.
Click here for the rest.
In other words, despite the amazingly business-friendly climate in the US, an opaque banking system is absolutely necessary for businesses, who want to violate what remaining laws continue to restrain them, to go about their dirty deeds. Corporate fraud and offshore tax havens have been in the press on and off for the last five years or so, but do not underestimate how deeply intertwined the international drug trade is with legitimate businesses. After all, drugs are a $400 billion dollar industry. That's an enormous amount of money, and, believe it or not, corporate America is up to their ears in it, which is probably why the government will never win the drug war: the elites, who are making money off of both sides in the fight, don't want it to end. At any rate, as Greider handily observes, the real scandal here is not that the feds are looking at world financial transactions; it's that they aren't doing nearly enough, and, clearly, that's by design.
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Glacier expert says Earth's climate is changing abruptly
From the Washington Post via the Houston Chronicle:
Earth's climate is undergoing an abrupt change, ending a cooler period that began with a swift "cold snap" in the tropics 5,200 years ago that coincided with the start of cities, the beginning of calendars and the biblical great flood, a leading expert on glaciers has concluded.
The warming around Earth's tropical belt is a signal suggesting that the "climate system has exceeded a critical threshold," which has sent tropical-zone glaciers in full retreat and will melt them completely "in the near future," said Lonnie G. hompson, a scientist who for 23 years has been taking core samples from the ancient ice of glaciers.
Thompson, writing with eight other researchers in an article published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the ice samples show that the climate can and did cool quickly, and that a similarly abrupt warming change started about 50 years ago. Humans may not have the luxury of adapting to slow changes, he suggests.
Click here for the rest.
It may just be my own well-tended paranoia, but it seems now like reports such as this are coming out every other week, and each new one is usually worse than the one before it. All of this leaves me with the notion that not only is global warming man-made and really happening, but it's probably even worse than we think, and I already think it's pretty dire as it is. I understand why uber-polluting corporations would push a disinformation campaign about the issue on the country; unlike real people, corporations have no souls, existing for the sole purpose of maximizing profit--cutting greenhouse gas emissions probably would cut into that profit imperative heavily. Individual Americans, however, do have souls. How the hell can anybody not take this unimaginable threat seriously?
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Monday, June 26, 2006
Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says
From the Washington Post courtesy of AlterNet:
Whereas nearly three-quarters of people in 1985 reported they had a friend in whom they could confide, only half in 2004 said they could count on such support. The number of people who said they counted a neighbor as a confidant dropped by more than half, from about 19 percent to about 8 percent.
The results, being published today in the American Sociological Review, took researchers by surprise because they had not expected to see such a steep decline in close social ties.
Smith-Lovin said increased professional responsibilities, including working two or more jobs to make ends meet, and long commutes leave many people too exhausted to seek social -- as well as family -- connections: "Maybe sitting around watching 'Desperate Housewives' . . . is what counts for family interaction."
Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of "Bowling Alone," a book about increasing social isolation in the United States, said the new study supports what he has been saying for years to skeptical audiences in the academy.
"For most of the 20th century, Americans were becoming more connected with family and friends, and there was more giving of blood and money, and all of those trend lines turn sharply in the middle '60s and have gone in the other direction ever since," he said.
Americans go on 60 percent fewer picnics today and families eat dinner together 40 percent less often compared with 1965, he said. They are less likely to meet at clubs or go bowling in groups. Putnam has estimated that every 10-minute increase in commutes makes it 10 percent less likely that people will establish and maintain close social ties.
Television is a big part of the problem, he contends. Whereas 5 percent of U.S. households in 1950 owned television sets, 95 percent did a decade later.
Click here for the rest.
Well, I'd agree that television and the internet, new technology in general, have, at least, something to do with this. But why the hell are people so willing to let their electronic devices crowd out much needed human interaction? And that's not even what this study is about, really; people are interacting with each other. The problem appears to be that people don't trust each other enough to make real emotional bonds among themselves.
While "experts" continue to offer deficient analysis about this depressing trend, the above noted television explanation being one example, I think the true instigator of American social isolation is right-wing philosophy. That is, for over a quarter of a century, the right wing has pushed every-man-for-himself economic policies, which are now, by and large, the law of the land. Meanwhile, corporations have outsourced the bulk of security providing jobs, and the healthcare crisis rages unabated. The mass-produced corporate popular culture has only reinforced these phenomena, labeling American culture as competitive, asserting that if you're not number one, you're nothing; this is now the conventional wisdom. No really, I'm not making this shit up. Conservative policy and philosophy, now triumphant, have scared the hell out of everyone, making people think that they are utterly on their own. Is it any wonder that people are feeling isolated?
What conservatives refuse to realize or admit is that there are profound real-world cultural consequences to their actions. You simply cannot have a society based on the principle of individual competition without people coming to see everybody as potential competition. Christ, throw in another conservative favorite, "zero tolerance" or "get tough on" policies, and the philosophical attack is utterly devastating: black-and-white and all-or-nothing thinking is the spirit of our era. Ever seen an episode of Cheaters? Once upon a time there was a sense of "we're all in this together" in this country--granted, I'm talking about white people in the 50s, but you get my drift. Today, we're all against each other.
And that's a pretty damned lonely place to be.
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WATCHMEN MOVIE RUMORS
From NEWSARAMA courtesy of Mike over at This is not a compliment:
ZACH SNYDER TO DIRECT WATCHMEN FOR WARNERS
It’s a story that clearly seems to be a challenge to adapt to film, but now, according to The Hollywood Reproter, that’s what director Zach Snyder’s job is, as the young director was named by Warner Bros. as the helmer of the movie version of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons classic graphic novel.
Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin are producing with Alex Tse writing a script based on the comic. According to the trade, Warner Bros. executives were impressed with Snyder’s handling of the adaptation for film of Frank Miller’s 300, and that landed him the job.
Click here for the rest.
Mike, the above mentioned blogger who dug up this little tidbit of info, is dubious of this: the project has been bouncing around Hollywood for over a decade, with Terry Gilliam slated to direct at one point, but nothing has ever come of it; furthermore, given the utterly sophisticated and nuanced story they're trying to trim into the standard Hollywood two-hour/three-act structure, it is very likely that any Watchmen film will just suck. The point is well taken. As for me, I've kind of gotten used to the cinema industry regularly mangling great comic books, and I'm pretty much of the opinion that a shitty Watchmen movie is better than none at all.
After all, every now and then, like with Hellboy for instance, they get it right. Maybe they'll pull it off this time.
But, you may ask, what is this Watchmen comic about which I speak so lovingly?
From Wikipedia:
Watchmen
Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Originally published by DC Comics as a monthly limited series from 1986 to 1987,[1] it was later republished as a trade paperback.[2] It was one of the first superhero comic books to present itself as serious literature, and it also popularized the more adult-oriented "graphic novel" format. Watchmen is the only graphic novel to have won a Hugo Award,[3] and is also the only graphic novel to appear on Time magazine's list of "100 best novels from 1923 to present."[1]
Watchmen is set in 1985 in an alternative history United States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. It tells the story of the last remaining superheroes and the events surrounding the mysterious murder of one of their own. In Watchmen, superheroes are presented as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who have neuroses and failings, and who are largely lacking in superpowers. Watchmen's deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism and multi-layered dialogue, have had a profound effect on later comics.
Click here for more.
My buddy Jim once describe Watchmen as the greatest comic book ever produced, which is strange given that he hadn't read many comics when he made this assertion. But I think he may have gotten it right. Watchmen first appeared when I was seventeen, but I didn't get around to reading it until a couple of years later, in 1987. It was perfect for me at that point. I had been reading comics for as long as I could remember, but I was growing up, and much of what had delighted me only a few years earlier was at that point starting to get old and pedantic. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' complex and ambiguous treatment of the superhero concept was exactly what I needed to breathe some fresh air into my old romance with the medium. In short, because of the Watchmen series itself, and the influence that it had on the entire field, comics entered adulthood at around the same time I did. And that's what Watchmen is essentially: comics for adults, but not just any adults; it's for intelligent, questioning people who cannot be satisfied with the black and white philosophy of human existence offered by most popular entertainment. Watchmen is, without a doubt, true literature, timeless even, in that the issues it raises, but very consciously does not resolve, are just as pertinent today as they were twenty years ago. More so, perhaps.
Anyway, that probably explains in a nutshell why my buddy Mike is so worried that they won't get it right. But I can hope, can't I?
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CONGRESSIONAL LOBBYING
SCANDAL HITS WHITE HOUSE
From the AP via Yahoo, courtesy of the Daily Kos:
E-mails reveal Abramoff requests, contacts
Wanted: Face time with President Bush or top adviser Karl Rove. Suggested donation: $100,000. The middleman: lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Blunt e-mails that connect money and access in Washington show that prominent Republican activist Grover Norquist facilitated some administration contacts for Abramoff's clients while the lobbyist simultaneously solicited those clients for large donations to Norquist's tax-exempt group.
Those who were solicited or landed administration introductions included foreign figures and American Indian tribes, according to e-mails gathered by Senate investigators and federal prosecutors or obtained independently by The Associated Press.
And
The e-mails show Abramoff delivered on his original promise to get tribal money for the event that included the Bush visit, sending one check from the Mississippi Choctaw tribe in October and one in November from the Saginaw Chippewa of Michigan. Kartch said Abramoff didn't deliver on PAC contributions.
Norquist and Abramoff were longtime associates who went back decades to their days in the Young Republicans movement. Norquist founded ATR to advocate lower taxes and less government. He built it into a major force in the Republican Party as the GOP seized control of Congress and the White House.
Abramoff became one of Washington's rainmaker lobbyists before allegations that he defrauded Indian tribes led to his downfall and a prison sentence. He is cooperating with prosecutors.
Click here for the rest.
So, I guess a partisan Republican could argue that this doesn't really have anything to do with Bush, that these expensive meetings took place in the context of Norquist's PAC, rather than the standard bribery-for-legislation procedure that's recently lit a fire under numerous right-wing Congressional butts. But you've got to admit, it all sounds pretty fishy, almost as though the PAC context was about giving the President and his staff the "plausible deniability" needed for the appearance of uninvolvement. I mean, it's not as though the President didn't have a motive: a lot of Norquist's work is about making campaign contributions to Republicans who will further his anti-tax crusade. By using a PAC as a front, this essentially amounts to money-laundering on a grand scale, and, whether he likes it or not, Bush and his staffers are knee-deep in it.
But then, Bush claims to not even know Abramoff. Sure, just like he doesn't know Kenny-Boy Lay.
But wait, there's more. Wicked lobbying isn't all about Abramoff, you know.
From Newsweek courtesy of AlterNet:
White House: Washington's Frequent (Freebie) Fliers
As Congress debatees a crackdown on members' and their staffs' accepting travel paid for by outside interests, newly filed records show Capitol Hill lawmakers aren't Washington's only frequent fliers. According to filings with the Office of Government Ethics, White House staffers have accepted nearly $135,000 in free trips since November 2004. Among those picking up the tab: some of the president's top business supporters, including the National Association of Manufacturers, and dozens of conservative and religious groups, among them the Southern Baptist Convention, Focus on the Family and the Federalist Society.
Click here for the rest.
In order to understand the gravity of this, you have to bear in mind that "White House staffers" aren't simply a bunch of clerks and secretaries. No, these are people who oversee regulatory agencies, people who make decisions that affect billions of dollars and millions of lives. These are people with power, just like Congressmen. Taking freebies from corporations and special interest groups is pretty hard to see as anything other than what it is, bribery.
You know, this kind of corruption is going to continue until some very simple steps are taken: ban all lobbying; ban all campaign contributions and replace them with public financing; ban all gifts and contributions of any sort. If government officials need the (strongly biased) information continually fed them by lobbyists, too fucking bad. They've got vast resources; they can do the research themselves. There's just no need for lobbying, and the practice has a heavily corruptive influence. Really, the end goal here should be to get as much money out of politics as possible. Democracy should be about the will of the voters, and it is quite obvious now that money tends to subvert that.
Why do you think I end every post with a bunch of dollar signs?
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Saturday, June 24, 2006
PBS'S FRONTLINE PRESENTS THE DARK SIDE
From the Frontline website:
"A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies," Cheney told Americans just after 9/11. He warned the public that the government would have to operate on the "dark side."
In "The Dark Side," FRONTLINE tells the story of the vice president's role as the chief architect of the war on terror, and his battle with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet for control of the "dark side." Drawing on more than 40 interviews and thousands of documents, the film provides a step-by-step examination of what happened inside the councils of war.
Early in the Bush administration, Cheney placed a group of allies throughout the government who advocated a robust and pre-emptive foreign policy, especially regarding Iraq. But a potential obstacle was Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration who had survived the transition by bypassing Cheney and creating a personal bond with the president.
After the attacks on 9/11, Cheney seized the initiative and pushed for expanding presidential power, transforming America's intelligence agencies and bringing the war on terror to Iraq. Cheney's primary ally in this effort was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"You have this wiring diagram that we all know of about national security, but now there's a new line on it. There's a line from the vice president directly to the secretary of defense, and it's as though there's a private line, private communication between those two," former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke tells FRONTLINE.
Click here for the rest, and to watch the entire documentary.
Even though much of this was known at the time of the invasion or shortly thereafter, it is well worth it to go over this nightmarish tale once again. Frontline does an incredible job of taking numerous disparate pieces of information and weaving them together into a coherent and compelling narrative: that there were no WMDs found in Iraq was clearly not an "intelligence failure." Rather, at the behest of Cheney and Rumsfeld, decades old procedures and standards regarding the analysis of intelligence data were utterly ignored. That is, even though the conventional wisdom inside both the agency and the White House before the invasion was that Saddam had WMDs, the CIA was totally unable, again and again, to verify such a belief; what few tidbits of existing intelligence suggesting the possibility of Iraqi WMDs were massaged, manipulated, and grossly exaggerated to create a bogus case for invasion. CIA chief George Tenet, fearing for his job, was caught in the crossfire. Knowing that the case for invasion was slim to none, but also knowing that war policy detractors were being purged from the administration, Tenet sided with the devil, and told the seemingly clueless President that what intelligence they had constituted a "slam dunk," a careerist lie. Ultimately, when no WMDs were found, Tenet became the scapegoat, and was purged anyway. Meanwhile, the real bad guys are still running the show, and the CIA, now restaffed with White House loyalists, is greatly diminished in influence.
A chilling tale, I know. Go check it out.
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Gay pride
It's that time of year again.
From Wikipedia:
In June 1969, a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people rioted following a police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City. The late Miss Sylvia Rivera a transgender rights activist and founding member of both the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance is credited by many as the first to actually strike back at the police and in doing so, spark the rebellion.
The Stonewall riots are generally considered to be the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, as it was the first time in modern history that a significant body of LGBT people resisted arrest.
Activist L. Craig Schoonmaker claims to have coined the term "gay pride" in description of the 1969 Stonewall riots. [1]
Brenda Howard known as the "Mother of Pride" an early leader of the Gay Liberation Front and Gay Activists Alliance in the early post-Stonewall era coordinated the first month anniversary rally and then the "Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March" on June 28, 1970 to commemorate the first year anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion.[2][3]
First year anniversary marches organized by other groups were also held in San Francisco and Los Angeles in 1970.
Howard also originated the idea for a week-long series of events around what is now known as Pride Day; this became the first of the extended annual LGBT Pride celebrations that are now held around the world.
Click here for the rest.
Longtime Real Art readers know that I believe that gay rights are about much more than simply the freedom to get it on with someone of the same gender. Rather, in our simultaneously sexually exploitative yet repressively fundamentalist culture, the GLBT community is essentially the last man standing in terms of sexual sanity. That is, by default, and whether they like it or not, homosexuals in America represent sexual freedom and possibility as well as physical and psychological sexual health. Sure, there are some organizations and individuals outside of the gay world such as Planned Parenthood or Judith Levine doing their part, but gay people are everywhere.
Consequently, gay pride is for anyone and everyone in the United States who values sexual freedom, health, and ethics. Happy gay pride week!
The rainbow flag flying above Castro Street
in San Francisco. Photo by Justin J.W. Powell
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Dan Rather's Raw Deal
From AlterNet, America's greatest reporter, Greg Palast, on what's happened to one of America's most celebrated reporters:
They finally put Dan Rather out of his misery at CBS. CEO Leslie Moonves put on his best mourning face, offering upon Rather's departure, "He had a very distinguished career. I'm sorry he's leaving us." However sorry Moonves may be, he still sent Rather to the glue factory -- all for reporting the truth. But not all of it.
Rather's "unsubstantiated story of Bush's military service" (says USA Today) got him canned. Yet, all the poor man did was repeat a story the Brits put on BBC Television a year earlier -- that Poppy Bush put in the fix to get his son out of 'Nam and into the Texas Air Guard, spending his war years guarding Houston from Viet Cong attack.
But Dan never reported this: the documentation from inside the US Department of Justice detailing the fix. Why not? Because it opened up a far more serious charge: that those who kept Little George out of war's way ended up very well rewarded. The BBC, the world's biggest network, ran that full story -- from the evidence of the fix to the evidence of the lucrative pay-backs -- and the BBC never retracted a comma of it. Nor, by the way, has the White House denied our accusations despite our repeated offers to respond.
Click here for the rest.
Bigtime corporate news media face Dan Rather is as big of an asshole as they come, and very much a symbol of everything that's wrong with his field--he is, after all, the man who said on David Letterman in the weeks after 9/11, "He's my commander-in-chief. All he has to do is tell me where to line up and I'll do it;" people who actually remember the bland facts they learned in high school government class know that the term "commander-in-chief" only refers to a President's role as head of the military, and has nothing to do with the civilian population, which makes Rather's comment patriotically stupid at best. Despite all that, however, Rather is no idiot, seems to understand what's been going on with the corporate news media, and somewhere, deep inside his black soul, still has the journalistic ethics he learned back in more civilized days. That is, the man obviously still sees himself as a real reporter, and has clearly been trying to navigate ethically the treacherous career-waters of bigtime corporate news.
For all the good it did him.
Since Christmas, I've been slowly working my way through the book about "Rathergate" written by one of the two 60 Minutes producers who were fired over the scandal. I say "slowly" because its writer, Mary Mapes, is almost as big of a self-important asshole as Rather, whom she idolizes. In between all the self-congratulatory acts of blowhardism, however, lie some fascinating tidbits of knowledge: probably the most important of which is the lowdown on the allegedly forged smoking-gun memo which supposedly illustrates beyond a doubt that Bush went AWOL when he was in the Guard. If Mapes isn't simply making shit up, she constructs a very compelling argument that there is very little chance that the document is forged--in addition to detailing CBS's exhaustive authentication process, utterly ignored by the network's internal review board during the cover-up process in the wake of the controversy, she also easily dismisses the right-wing typewriter font arguments (yes, there were superscript typewriters back then), and shows how the conservative bloggers essentially weren't even analyzing the same memo (they were using a photocopy of a fax of the memo, which heavily distorted it beyond any reasonable analysis).
In short, the story that got Rather canned was absolutely accurate. That's what you get for trying to be an ethical journalist in today's political climate.
Look, as much as I hate Dan Rather, this is not only unjust, it's part of the biggest unreported story in US history, how the big news companies are in cahoots with corporate and government power. Rather and his crew reported the truth, which offended powerful people, so, instead of weathering the storm, CBS simply tried to make it all go away. That's why Dan Rather is now going away. In the end, his long and distinguished career just didn't matter. He, like everybody else who stands in the way of corporate will, is expendable. And that's a damned shame.
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Friday, June 23, 2006
Thursday, June 22, 2006
NO SENATOR SANTORUM WE
DID NOT FIND WMDs IN IRAQ
From Think Progress courtesy of Eschaton:
Santorum: We Found the WMD
The Bush administration commissioned the Iraq Survey Group to determine whether in fact any WMD existed in Iraq. After a year and half of meticulously combing through the country, here’s what the administration’s own inspectors reported:
"While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that
Click here for the rest.
Man, this is amazing, and it should tell us something about the delusional depths to which Republicans are willing to go. It's obvious at this point that, at the time we invaded in 2003, there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Christ, how long are we going to let these inmates run the asylum?
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MORE KRUGMAN ON THE WEALTHY ELITE'S
CLASS WAR AGAINST EVERYBODY ELSE
From Democracy Now, a speech on the class war from Princeton economist and New York Times editorialist Paul Krugman:
Now, what I can say for sure, and actually some of my colleagues at Princeton in the politics department work on, have done very interesting work on politics, and what they show is that the polarization of politics, which you can measure, and, I would say, the nastiness, which is very -- you can't exactly measure, but it's very closely correlated, is very much -- it rises and falls with income inequality.
Periods, the Gilded Age, the ‘20s, were periods of grotesque abuse of cultural issues, anything to smear people who might suggest things like, you know, progressive taxation. And times when those kinds of views, when everyone had more or less accepted the existence of the New Deal institutions, were quite calm. So that same Time magazine article in 1953 is saying Republicans and Democrats have a surprising sameness of outlook and political thinking, and that makes a big point about how Eisenhower had made it clear that he was not going to try to roll back the New Deal. Well, that's why we -- that's a consequence of being a relatively equal society. And the ugliness and the viciousness of our political scene right now, I think, are in fact largely a consequence of the gross inequalities that have emerged.
Click here to read, watch, or listen to the rest.
If you've already read his column on the same subject posted below, don't think that this speech isn't worth checking out. Krugman expands on the history of the class war and goes further into its effects today--it's well worth the twenty minutes or so it takes to watch the video. What really got me, however, is this notion about income inequality and political polarization. If his poli-sci buddies at Princeton are able to convincingly demonstrate this, that when the rich become vastly richer political discourse descends into the sewers, then it means that economic justice isn't simply about fairness: when the wealthy are too wealthy, political stability itself is in grave danger. If that's the case, and at the moment I don't see any good reason why it's not, the Republicans are playing with fire. Their coddling of the wealthy and corporate sectors stands to literally destroy America with infighting--the GOP may very well be flirting with mass betrayal of our great nation.
I bet this never occurred to Ann Coulter when she was writing her anti-liberal pulp novel Treason.
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Wednesday, June 21, 2006
KRUGMAN: Class War Politics
From the New York Times courtesy of the Progressive American:
Before the 1940's, the Republican Party relied financially on the support of a wealthy elite, and most Republican politicians firmly defended that elite's privileges. But the rich became a lot poorer during and after World War II, while the middle class prospered. And many Republicans accommodated themselves to the new situation, accepting the legitimacy and desirability of institutions that helped limit economic inequality, such as a strongly progressive tax system. (The top rate during the Eisenhower years was 91 percent.)
When the elite once again pulled away from the middle class, however, Republicans turned their back on the legacy of Dwight Eisenhower and returned to a focus on the interests of the wealthy. Tax cuts at the top — including repeal of the estate tax — became the party's highest priority.
But if the real source of today's bitter partisanship is a Republican move to the right on economic issues, why have the last three elections been dominated by talk of terrorism, with a bit of religion on the side? Because a party whose economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus the public's attention elsewhere. And there's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless.
Click here for the rest.
This approach, trumping up fears of foreign enemies while asserting that only Republicans can protect Americans from the boogyman, was created during the Reagan era. Back in those days, the enemy was a then declining and crumbling Soviet Union, successfully painted by the Gipper as an impossibly powerful and globally pervasive "evil empire." Today it's Islamic terrorists in the closet or under the bed who are out to get us, but the principle is still the same: scare the hell out of just enough people to get them to vote against their own economic interests, and the GOP is in business.
The reality, of course, is that the Democrats, who are far more serious about actually governing the country because, you know, their core principles aren't about abolishing government, are far better positioned philosophically to protect the nation from terrorists. It's just that they seem so touchy-feely...well, let us never forget that the ancient Spartan warriors, the most badass fighters in the Mediterranean back in the day, were bigtime gay-boys.
But I digress. The point is that, while this fear-distraction political ploy is relatively new in US politics, the class war is not. Indeed, it is always extraordinarily ironic whenever a conservative screams "class warfare" as some sort of admonishment toward liberals, when the truth is that the wealthy class has been waging class warfare against pretty much everybody else since the founding of the republic. Indeed, there are some very good arguments out there that the US Constitution is far more about, as Founding Father James Madison said, "protecting the minority of the opulent against the majority," than it is about "liberty and justice for all."
The rich know what they're up to, but most of the rest of the country takes some stock, at least, in the bogus notion taught in public schools of the "classless" America. It is only when the wealthy overplay their hand, and their relentless diversionary propaganda collapses, that their war-waging is noticed, as happened during the Great Depression. It is my belief that we are rapidly approaching once again one of those moments in history of overplay. In other words, I think the conservatives' days are numbered.
And I'm not just talking about the Republicans, either.
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U.S. Back at Full War Footing in Afghanistan
From the Brian Ross ABC News blog the Blotter, courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe:
The United States military is quietly carrying out the largest military offensive in Afghanistan since U.S. troops invaded the country in 2001.
"The Taliban has made a comeback, and we have the next 90 days to crush them," said a senior U.S. military official.
Click here for the rest.
Oh my gosh. I thought we'd already won that one. What's up with this?
Okay, obviously, I'm being heavily sarcastic: we never won in Afghanistan; the White House simply declared it so, just as it did with jet flights and "Mission Accomplished" banners for Iraq, but, unlike Iraq, the press essentially bought the phony declaration and stopped covering this other war for the most part. As far as I can tell, we're failing there for many of the same reasons we're failing in Iraq, not enough reconstruction money making it into the right hands, a thinly disguised puppet-government lacking true support from the people, corruption, and too many civilian deaths at the hands of US service personnel. And, oh yeah, I can't forget to mention the fact that there are simply not enough US troops in Afghanistan to create the stability needed for the actual nation-building that Bush campaigned against back in 2000, thank you very much Mr. Modernize the Military Donald Rumsfeld.
Anyway, this is bad news, another quagmire apparently, with no end in sight. Christ, this country is so fucked up right now.
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Tuesday, June 20, 2006
DOBBS DEVOTEE FUCKOVER
Perversion of Judgement
From the Cleveland Free Times:
Soon after meeting at X-day, Steve and Rachel were a couple, enthusiastically taking part in the mockery that is the heart and soul of the SubGenius faith.
Poking fun at religion throughout history has led to people wearing funny costumes or taking off their clothes. And if you're performing and not shy about it, there are likely to be pictures — which the members of the Church of the SubGenius gleefully post at their Web site. So when Jeff Jary decided he wanted to play hardball over custody of his and Rachel's son, it wasn't hard for him to find and download a dozen photos of Rachel taken at X-day.
Once the boy was in upstate New York for a holiday visit, Jary and his lawyer filed for sole custody in Orleans County Court. In support of the request, they showed the judge a picture of Rachel as Mary Magdelen, in the nude and getting a tattoo. They showed a picture of Steve — known among the SubGenius as Lord Jesus Christ — wearing a clown suit in a mock passion play with a crucifix festooned with pool-noodle dollar signs, while a crowd of partially clothed people, including a woman holding a dildo, look on. There's a picture of Rachel in a costume parade called the Deity Ball, in which she's wearing a black mesh bondage suit with a papier-maché goat's head mask perched atop her trim shoulders.
Jary also claimed that Rachel was homeless. But at a subsequent hearing, it became clear that Judge James Punch had been far more concerned with the photos when he awarded custody to Jary. Punch spent a lot of time on those photos, and he didn't get the joke.
Click here for the rest.
I've been a non-affiliated silent supporter of the Church of the SubGenius for many years--I've even had them linked to Real Art from the moment I figured out how deal with links. Their entire organization's existence, their absurdist events all geared around ruthless satire of religion, politics, and power, the whole thing adds up to one gigantic piece of ongoing performance art. Real Art, that is, in that the net effect is to attack the people in our sick society who need attacking the most. But like the high school art teacher who lost her job recently because topless art photos of her were discovered online by employers, it doesn't matter, morally, that this SubGenius woman's art is the reason she's lost custody of her child: if she wants to run around naked while making fun of religion, she can do that, whether it's art or just a weird fetish. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with how she raises her child, and this, as with what's happening to the art teacher, is an intolerable outrage. There is no good argument based on her SubGenius activities that can make this woman into a bad mother. It's completely clear that the judge in the case is using his own variety of Christian morality to substitute for the law. And that's not just wrong; it's illegal. The son of a bitch should be thrown off the bench right now and ordered to pay damages for the way he's used his authority to fuck over an innocent woman.
Fortunately, she's retained new legal representation, the same heavyweights who have defended Larry Flynt for obscenity, and in half an hour they convinced Fuckover Judge to recuse himself--they also got a change of venue. The sad thing is that she's now going to be out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees all because of a bogus child custody dispute presided over by a judge who simply shouldn't be on the bench. Anywhere.
Wanna donate to her legal fund? Click here.
You know, maybe it's time I finally coughed up the thirty bucks it takes to become an ordained minister for the Church. Maybe I will...
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Nation's ERs at 'breaking point,' study finds
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
At the root of the crisis: Demand for emergency care is surging, even as the capacity for hospitals, ambulance services and other emergency workers to provide it is dropping.
There were almost 114 million emergency room visits in 2003, up from 90 million a decade earlier. Only about half were true medical emergencies. When the poor and uninsured can't get health care anywhere else, they come to emergency rooms, which must treat them regardless of ability to pay.
"It is the only medical care to which Americans have a legal right," noted Kellerman, adding that what constitutes an emergency is different to a doctor than to a desperate patient. Last week, he treated a woman who wound up in the ER after running out of some crucial medication and being turned away by four different clinics.
Yet lack of reimbursement for ER care is one reason some emergency departments go out of business. During the past decade, the total number of U.S. hospitals decreased by 703, and the number of ERs by 425. And the total number of hospital beds dropped nationwide by 198,000, due also to the trend toward cheaper outpatient care.
That in turn means long waits in crowded ERs for hospital rooms to open up. Once stabilized, patients can lie on gurneys in the ER hallway not just for hours but for two days. The new report found that on a typical Monday evening, three-quarters of hospitals reported at least two patients boarded in the halls.
Click here for the rest.
So, obviously, this isn't really an ER crisis: it's just a symptom of the much wider overall healthcare crisis currently facing the United States. I've written about this subject previously numerous times, so there's no need to go down that road again right now, but, suffice it to say, healthcare is a right, not a consumer product. Furthermore, compounding matters is the fact that healthcare and health insurance don't even conform to the economic principles that guide lawmakers in making their policy decisions in this area. It's just one big clusterfuck, and it's getting much worse as each year goes by. In short, they system is collapsing in on itself, and sometime in the future the federal government will have to do something about it. The question is whether that's going to be sooner or later, and how many Americans are going to needlessly die or suffer from easily cured sicknesses before then.
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'Star Trek' Fans, Deprived of a Show,
Recreate the Franchise on Digital Video
This is not a drill; repeat, this is not a drill. From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:
From these Virginia woods to the Scottish Highlands, "Star Trek" fans are filling the void left by a galaxy that has lost "Star Trek." For the first time in nearly two decades, television spinoffs from the original 1960's "Star Trek" series have ended, so fans are banding together to make their own episodes.
Fan films have been around for years, particularly those related to the "Star Wars" movies. But now they can be downloaded from the Web, and modern computer graphics technology has lent them surprising special effects. And as long as no one is profiting from the work, Paramount, which owns the rights to "Star Trek," has been tolerant. (Its executives declined to comment.)
And
And viewers are responding. One series, at www.newvoyages.com, and based in Ticonderoga, N.Y., boasts of 30 million downloads. It has become so popular that Walter Koenig, the actor who played Chekov in the original "Star Trek," is guest starring in an episode, and George Takei, who played Sulu, is slated to shoot another one later this year. D. C. Fontana, a writer from the original "Star Trek" series, has written a script.
Click here for the rest.
Oh my god, this is nuts!!! So, of course, I've checked some of this out, and it's exactly as the article describes. If you discount the piss-poor acting, this stuff is good. These people have done a marvelous job recreating the look and feel of 1960s Star Trek--I'll be checking out the later-era groups tomorrow, but nothing does it for me like the original approach. There's even one group shooting 60s style episodes in Austin. I hope my Austinite pal and fellow Trekkie Shane is reading this: he needs to hook up with these people like right now; he'd make a kickass Vulcan. Hell, I'm tempted to move to Austin for a few months after I finish grad school next year myself. Maybe I can help them develop some talent once I've become a MASTER of fine arts.
At any rate, I don't have much more to say about this. Actually, I'm close to speechless. This is the stuff of childhood fantasies for me. Wow.
Go check this shit out:
Star Trek: New Voyages
Star Trek: Intrepid
Star Trek: Hidden Frontier
Starship Exeter
Starship Farragut
Photo by Bill Crandall
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Teacher fights for job over topless photos online
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
The school district said the photos were inappropriate and violate the "higher moral standard" expected of public school teachers. As a result, she's become an ineffective teacher, she was told as she was escorted out of class last month.
The photos came to light as a result of a feud over ceramics equipment with another art teacher, according to sworn affidavits. Students who had seen the pictures showed the teacher, who then notified school officials.
Colleagues and students dispute the district's characterizations of Hoover.
And
Hoover said Friday the photos are art and makes no apologies.
"I'm an artist and I'm going to participate in the arts," Hoover said. "If that's not something they want me to do then I want to be told that. I don't feel as if I was doing anything that was beyond expectations."
Click here for the rest.
This could have been the same dilemma I might have faced the first year I was teaching if the show I was rehearsing hadn't been cancelled. The project had nothing to do with work at all; I was acting in a play slated to be performed well outside Baytown which required me to be naked for a short scene. The show met all my criteria for onstage nudity: it was non-exploitative, absolutely needed for the story, and it was for a good script. I had no reason, artistic or otherwise, not to do it. Of course, I was slightly worried that it might be an issue for my new job, but, I thought, that's none of their damned business.
But, fortunately for me, I guess, it never came to that.
This is an absolute outrage. Never mind, for a moment, that this is an art teacher, and that she describes the photos as art. It simply doesn't matter if a teacher wants to put topless photos online. She can do that. Parents, administrators, other teachers, and any other would-be moral policemen who have a problem with that should just shut their damned mouths.
This whole "higher moral standard" sophistry is pure bullshit. Let's cut the crap and call this what it is. It's not about "higher" morals; it's about Christian morals, as interpreted by some Christians. Face it: if you interpret the Bible literally, the human body is obscene. Once Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge, the first thing they understood is that they were naked, and that nakedness is bad--they were falling all over themselves to cover their privates with fig leaves. So, okay, a certain strain of Christian morality straight-up asserts that nudity is immoral. But who the hell is the school board to impose such religious views on their employees on their own time? Maybe they'd have a point if she was pasting nude pics of herself up on the classroom wall, but this is entirely different. And so what if they were on the internet? Big fucking deal; welcome to the Global Village.
There is absolutely no good argument that can justify any retaliation at all from this woman's bosses. It's just none of their fucking business. This really pisses me off.
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Sunday, June 18, 2006
THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF POLITICS
From the Daily Kos:
Debating Political Philosophy
I commented yesterday on the mounting discussion among Democrats about the need for a political philosophy for our party. Primarily, the discussion has centered on distinguishing between policy and ideas. Democrats have sound and popular policies--such as raising the minimum wage--but as a party, we lack a fundamental and agreed-upon philosophy to support those policies (and, in practical terms, to sell them to the American people).
Frank Rich, in the (subscription-restricted) New York Times, touches on the need for a party narrative:
What's most impressive about Mr. Rove, however, is not his ruthlessness, it's his unshakable faith in the power of a story. The story he's stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won't lose at the polls if there's no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won't tell their own. And they don't - whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans'.Click here for the rest.
This is the intersection of the two major interests that drive my life: politics, obviously, is one, and film, television, and theater make up the other--storytelling, in short. The Times' cultural critic, Frank Rich, once known as the "Butcher of Broadway" when he was that paper's main theater critic, clearly sees the connection himself. Politics, in many ways, is a story, an ongoing serial telling the tale of what it means to be an American. Political battles, then, are waged in terms of manipulating that story in a preferred direction. And the stakes are high. Power and billions of dollars are on the line, and whoever's story manages to capture the media and electorate's collective imaginations wins big. The Republicans are currently extraordinarily good storytellers. The Democrats, who, with their New Deals and New Frontiers, were once masters of political storytelling themselves, are now awful at it. That is, they're not even trying, and no attempts appear to be in the works, which is why, when coupled with the effect of years of gerrymandering which have created countless "safe seats" in Congress, there is great potential for the GOP to retain Congress this fall in spite of their abysmal approval ratings. The Democrats desperately need to craft an inspiring narrative about what it means to be an American, right now, or they will continue to languish in a cesspool of political irrelevancy.
This notion, the political narrative, cannot be undersold. I know that the idea seems intuitively obvious, but there is some hardcore psychological research to support the notion that people literally think in terms of stories.
From Wikipedia:
The Narrative Construction of Reality
In 1991, Bruner published an article in Critical Inquiry entitled "The Narrative Construction of Reality." In this article, he argued that the mind structures its sense of reality through mediation through "cultural products, like language and other symbolic systems" (3). He specifically focuses on the idea of narrative as one of these cultural products. He defines narrative in terms of ten things:
1. Narrative diachronicity: The notion that narratives take place over some sense of time
2. Particularity: The idea that narratives deal with particular events, although some events may be left vague and general.
3. Intentional state entailment: The concept that characters within a narrative have "beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on" (7).
4. Hermeneutic composability: The theory that narratives are that which can be interpreted in terms of their role as a selected series of events that constitute a "story." See also Hermeneutics
5. Canonicity and breach: The claim that stories are about something unusual happening that "breaches" the canonical (i.e. normal) state.
6. Referentiality: The principle that a story in some way references reality, although not in a direct way that offers verisimilitude.
7. Genericness: The flipside particularity, this is the characteristic of narrative whereby the story can be classified as a genre.
8. Normativeness: The observation that narrative in some way supposes a claim about how one ought to act. This follows from canonicity and breach.
9. Context sensitivity and negotiability: Related hermeneutic composability, this is the characteristic whereby narrative requires a negotiated role between author or text and reader, including the assigning of a context to the narrative, and ideas like suspension of disbelief.
10. Narrative accrual: Finally, the idea that stories are cumulative, that is, that new stories follow from older ones.
Bruner observes that these ten characteristics at once describe narrative and the reality constructed and posited by narrative, which in turn teaches us about the nature of reality as constructed by the human mind via narrative.
Click here to read more about psychologist Jerome Bruner.
In other words, stories are one of the two or three significant ways that human beings make sense out of reality. Sure, everybody knows that stories are either fictional or about other people, but they have inestimable influence over us despite such knowledge--that's why corporations spend billions on advertising even though we all know what they're trying to do; ads, especially the mini-narratives of television commercials, work. We now live in an era where the mainstream news media and much of the electorate have constructed reality for themselves in terms of conservative narrative. Consequently, it is wildly difficult to for liberals to find any opening for advancement of policy. It's like suggesting that the prince simply use a ladder to get to Rapunzel instead of climbing up her hair--the idea just doesn't fit the story. What they desperately need is a good counter-narrative, a storyline that puts people above profits, that makes such an idea far more American than cutthroat capitalism appears to be now.
This is probably a pretty easy thing to do. If only the Democrats would do it.
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HAPPY JUNETEENTH
From Wikipedia:
Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, is an annual holiday, celebrated on June 19 in the United States, commemorating the end of slavery. The holiday originated in Galveston, Texas; for more than a century, the state of Texas was the primary home of Juneteenth celebrations. More recently, however, its observance has spread across the nation.
Click here for the rest.
Juneteenth is essentially observed only by African-Americans, which absolutely amazes me: getting rid of the barbaric practice of owning human beings and stealing the fruits of their labor is as significant to the history and development of the United States as passing the Bill of Rights was. That is, ending slavery was likely the most moral action ever undertaken by our nation. Juneteenth should be celebrated by all Americans; the holiday represents our collective desire for truth and justice--in that respect, Juneteenth is as American as the Fourth of July.
Keeping that in mind, I wish you all a happy Juneteenth.
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Saturday, June 17, 2006
HARD TIMES ON HOUSTON'S SHITTY EAST SIDE
Despite a few bright spots, like the Astros and Rockets, or its thriving eclectic underground live music scene, H-Town is pretty shitty, a textbook example of what the country would look like if ruled strictly by business interests, all sprawl and strip malls, soulless for the most part, except for grass-roots patches of culture that necessarily arise here and there, but usually without institutional support--in short, people, by and large, are regarded and treated by the powers that be as consumers and workers only.
It's no wonder that Houston is the place that the patriarch of the Bush family calls home. It's exactly the way old George wants it to be.
Of course, once you get outside of Loop 610, which encircles the innermost part of the city, it's even shittier. To the southwest lies the bland bedroom community, which occupies land once farmed by prisoners growing sugar cane, known as Sugarland. Sugarland gave us Tom DeLay. 'Nuff said. To the west lies the once down-home town of Katy, which has also gone the way of the bland suburb, but which gave us country singer Clint Black, actress Renee Zellweger, pitching great Roger Clemens, and, one of my favorites, comedian and political dilettante Janeane Garofalo, all of whom got the hell out, with good reason I might add. To the northwest and north lie Klein and Spring, still kind of countrified, but also going the way of cookie-cutter and corporate chain suburbia--Lyle Lovett came from Klein, but that was before it started to gentrify so disgustingly; he, too, got the hell out. To the northeast lies the former lumber and oil producing land now known as Kingwood, yet another gargantuan suburb, utterly devoid of meaning, and with a culture of sterility. Kingwood produced me. I, too, got the hell out.
But head due east on I-10 and you will encounter the shittiest of the shitty. Once you hit Beltway 8, which encircles Loop 610, and pass the yeasty smell of the Budweiser brewery, the petrochemical plants start to dominate the landscape. Head a couple of miles further east and you start to both see and smell the noxious emissions coming from these plants. The rent is cheap here because the gasses in the air are so annoying and dangerous. That's why the area is a diverse mix of working class whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Most people on the east side work for a living.
And that's what I did when I lived there for six years. I rented a place near a neighborhood called Woodforest, a depressing would-be suburb/enclave composed of working class whites with managerial and upper middle class delusions of grandeur. You could just feel the racial and classist sense of elitism coming off the place--I felt much more camaraderie with the people of color there, who, unlike the nervous and clumsily pretentious white folk, were just fine with being working class. Every weekday during the school year, I hopped in my car and made the twenty minute drive further east to teach high school in Baytown, the epicenter of Houston's shitty nature, about which I have posted before, here and here.
Anyway, the point to this depressing rant is that Houston's east side is in the news again. Twice, in fact.
From the Houston Chronicle:
Pollution in east Harris County poses greatest health risk
Concentrations of a dozen air pollutants in the Houston area pose significant risks to public health, with the greatest risks in east Harris County along the Houston Ship Channel, according to a task force of public health and toxicological experts convened by Mayor Bill White.
The landmark study, which was led by the University of Texas Health Sciences Center, and included eight experts from five institutions throughout the state, marks the first time the city has scientifically screened some of the compounds that enter its air, and ranked them according to their health risk.
And
Seven of the 12 compounds that scientists said posed a definite risk to public health, especially to the elderly, young, and sick, are known to cause cancer. Eight are linked to respiratory ailments. Several others tinker with the reproductive and immune systems.
Click here for the rest.
Of course, this kind of study, screening for toxic emissions, is what the EPA is supposed to do, but seeing as how the agency is under the control of President Bush, well, you know, the city itself had to lay down the money to do it--it's a safe bet that the EPA will be persona non grata when it comes time to try to get the petrochemical plants to clean up their act. At any rate, Houston's east side is clearly much more dangerous than is popularly understood, which matches my experience in Baytown encountering people or friends and family of people with weird birth defects, strange cancers, and bizarre respiratory ailments. Good thing I rarely went outdoors during my time there. Unfortunately, most people aren't the homebody that I am.
It's pretty bad.
But wait, it gets worse. Again from the Chronicle:
3rd man in Aryan gang held
A third member of a white supremacist prison gang has been charged with capital murder in connection with the kidnapping and fatal stabbing of a Baytown man.
The arrest of Larry Welch, 20, of Baytown, is the latest development in a sweeping investigation that also has resulted in 10 members or affiliates of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas being charged with engaging in organized crime.
Most of the members became acquainted in prison, where they first joined the gang, authorities said.
Click here for the rest.
The Aryan Brotherhood is traditionally a racist white prison gang, the kind of group that raped Ed Norton's character in the shower in the film American History X. They've had a presence on the far east side since at least 1998 when I started teaching in Baytown, but it always sounded like they were a bunch of beer-swilling idiots fresh out of the pokey: it now appears they're trying to establish a serious and permenant existence on the outside as an actual crime organization. The developmentally disabled east side, where working class whites ridden with class anxiety intermingle regularly with blacks and Mexican-Americans, is the perfect hatchery for these rotten eggs.
I would have never believed it, but it seems that the shittiest of the shitty in Houston is about to get even shittier. I'm glad I don't live there anymore.
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Supreme Court: No-knock police searches OK
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
The case tested previous court rulings that police armed with warrants generally must knock and announce themselves or they run afoul of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches.
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, said
"Whether that preliminary misstep had occurred or not, the police would have executed the warrant they had obtained, and would have discovered the gun and drugs inside the house," Scalia wrote.
But suppressing evidence is too high of a penalty, Scalia said, for errors by police in failing to properly announce themselves.
Click here for the rest.
Frankly, I'm not personally terribly disturbed by the fact that the cops don't have to knock first anymore. As the Grateful Dead sang, "If you've got a warrant, I guess you're gonna come in." I mean, the courtesy is nice and all, but I don't see how it changes things one way or the other. On the other hand, an interesting scenario keeps coming up on the left-wing blogs: if a man has a right to shoot an uninvited intruder inside his home, and the cops are no longer going to knock and identify themselves, what's to stop a resident from mistakenly blowing away the police when they enter? There are obviously some problems with how this is all going to work out.
This doesn't mean I don't have huge problems with the ruling, however. What gets me is Scalia's statement: "suppressing evidence is too high of a penalty." He is, of course, referring to the famous but controversial for some exclusionary rule, and it sounds like the right-wingers on the Supreme Court bench are taking their first baby steps toward completely getting rid of it. It is an unfortunate procedural byproduct that the guilty sometimes go free because of the principle, but it's the only thing that actually gives the fourth amendment any enforceability. That is, if we simply rely on cops to police themselves on this, it's bye-bye for our right against unreasonable search and seizure. While many cops are honest, many are not, as my "Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes" posts these past few years have plainly shown. Furthermore, many honest cops will turn a blind eye to the bad behavior of their brothers-in-blue out of a displaced sense of loyalty. Hell, ultimately, honesty doesn't matter: most cops are pretty zealous in doing their jobs, which means that there is a built in incentive for them to bend the rules if it means they can make a bust--if there is no danger of losing the bust, there is no institutional incentive to follow the rules; we would simply be relying on the good will of manly authoritative men with badges and guns. In short, without the exclusionary rule, the fourth amendment is just writing on paper.
I hope these right-wing "strict constructionists," these judicial fundamentalists, know what they're doing. Probably not.
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Friday, June 16, 2006
IF JESUS WAS A RADICAL, HOW COME
FUNDAMENTALISTS ARE SO CONSERVATIVE?
From AlterNet:
Don't Bow To God's Bullies
To picture God in terms of power is also one of the great bait-and-switch gimmicks of all time. People within the power hierarchy proclaim that God is the ultimate authority, and then appoint themselves as God's interpreters and enforcers. They are God's humble bullies. It has been one of the most successful con games of all time.
The real Jesus was born illegitimately. He called himself "the human one." Just like Buddha, his authority came from truth, not power. He taught whoever has love has God. He said those who work for the common good are his church.
The real Jesus was an anarchist. He spent his life refusing to claim power over anyone. He said that God is understood in terms of love not power. We add nothing to the majesty of "the human one" by adding a throne or a crown. If he did not want to rule over others in life, why should he want it in death? That is why Jesus is called "lamb of God"; he spoke not as the king of the universe, but from its heart.
If you want to know why Americans are so frightened and why we are attacking anything that would challenge our dominance over others, read the Bible. Like Cain we have murdered members of our human family. Even when we silence our victims, the ground beneath our feet cries out against us.
Click here for the rest.
It may be a bit of a stretch to refer to the man who said "render unto Caesar" as an anarchist, but the essay's writer makes a pretty unassailable point: by today's standards, Jesus was a far-left extremist. That's pretty obvious when you sit down and read the Gospels without having the priest class there to tell you what it means. Indeed, one of my earliest posts here at Real Art does exactly that. There's just no way of getting around the fact that Jesus' major concern was not individual salvation, but social justice.
Why, then, are so many Christians these days so frackin' conservative? Why is Christianity's history so brutal and bloody? My general take on those questions is that Christianity, as an institution of power and ideology, tends historically to bend toward the prevailing attitudes of powerful elites. Generally, powerful elites couldn't care less about social justice; consequently, Christianity doesn't either. But, then, that's no answer. I'm simply describing the situation, which leaves us with that haunting question: why isn't Christianity the force for social good that it ought to be?
From CounterPunch:
Jesus, the Political Insurgent?
The early followers of Jesus found it safer to dissociate themselves from the Roman-despised and persecuted Jews. Safer to reinterpret Jesus' messiahship in theological and evangelical rather than political and institutional terms. Safer to appeal to the Gentiles because the survival of the early followers lay in spreading a Christian gospel to the Romans. The gospel of a resurrected Messiah and saviour of the world. Whose miraculous resurrection proves, rather than negates, his being the Messiah and also the only Son of God. Therefore, his followers hold the one true religion in the palm of their faith.
The conversion of Jesus from Jew to Christian is seen in his dissociation from Judaism and accommodating appeal to the Romans. This distortion of historical reality involves the shifting of blame for Jesus' crucifixion from Romans to Jews. The anti-Semitism in the New Testament is seen in reputedly cruel Roman prefect Pontius Pilate agonizingly sympathetic to a would-be liberator of Jews from Roman domination; in Pilate dramatically washing his hands of responsibility for Jesus' death, even though he alone had the power of life and death over Jesus. (John 19:10)
The distortion of historical reality is also seen in Jews being set up as "Christ killers." A "whole battalion-backed, yet uneasy, Pilate giving in to the "will" of subjugated, powerless priests, elders of the people, and other Jews who repeatedly cried out, "Crucify him!" (Mark 15: 12-16) Portraying the Roman Empire in such a favorable light in New Testament books written 50 to 100 years after the fact, may have advanced the evangelizing of Romans by the early followers of Jesus, but it cast a horrible curse on the Jewish people by putting into the mouths of their oppressed descendents, "His [Jesus'] blood be on us and on our children." (Matthew 27:25)
Around 300 years later the apparent conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine led Christianity to not only be recognized, but favored by the state. Finally, the persecution and martyrdom of Christians ended.
Click here for the rest.
So, in other words, for political expediency, early Christians betrayed Jesus' teachings in order to legitimize their religion. From it's beginnings, Christianity was about sucking up to oppressive state power, rather than challenging it as Jesus did; early Christians even found a class of people to persecute, the Jews, so as to advance their own status and power. Today's Jews, then, are feminists, liberals, homosexuals, and others, Jews too sometimes, but that hardly matters for this analysis. The point is that the remarkable contradiction inherent in institutional Christianity, reading and meditating on Jesus' words of social justice while at the same time twisting them to mean their exact opposite, is the philosophical device by which the religion swept through the Roman Empire, ever after embedding itself as a major aspect of both Jesus-worship and Western civilization. Who would have thought that Orwellian "doublethink" dated back that far?
The bottom line here is that irrationality, and preference for oppressive state power, are historically built into Christian practice, indispensible parts of it, in fact. That's why so many American Christians back in the spring of '03 were able to say "love one another" on Sunday, and "bomb the hell out of Iraq" on Monday through Saturday. Well, Sunday, too, in between prayers and hymns.
Pretty depressing.
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Wednesday, June 14, 2006
HOUSTON THEATER COMPANY
MAKES THE NEW YORK TIMES
From the New York Times courtesy of This is not a compliment:
Infernal Bridegroom Has a Hit With 'Speeding Motorcycle'
The punk-rock club where Infernal Bridegroom Productions stages its shows is in a rough neighborhood, far from this city's velvet-curtained theater district. So it is not surprising that the troupe's latest offering, "Speeding Motorcycle," is equally far from some of the traditional fare offered at the city's more conventional sites.
An original rock opera, "Speeding Motorcycle" consists entirely of songs by Daniel Johnston, a musician and artist whose childlike and hallucinatory work chronicles his mental illness.
"We have stranger tastes than the norm," said Anthony Barilla, Infernal Bridegroom's artistic director. The company's founder, Jason Nodler, wrote and directed "Speeding Motorcycle," which features several actors playing the role of Joe Boxer, a man who has lost his mind after being rejected by the woman he loves. Flat-top, plasticine headgear gives the impression that the crowns of their heads have been chopped off, leaving a black, felt-lined nothingness inside. Captain America and Casper the Friendly Ghost make cameo appearances. The score, meanwhile, ricochets from toe-tapping, feel-good songs to discordant, despairing dirges, a reflection of Mr. Johnston's bipolar disorder.
Click here for the rest.
Wow. I'm definitely impressed. Of course, it took a music critic who likes Daniel Johnston to notice them--the article appeared in the music section instead of the theater section; I guess the Times theater people are too snooty to write about any Houston theater other than the Alley. But that doesn't really matter: the IBP folk definitely deserve this. I've watched from the sidelines for over a decade as the once rag-tag band of thespians slowly but surely created a large audience of non-traditional theater goers, while taking on some of the most edgy and challenging material performed in the Bayou City. Along the way, I got the opportunity to perform with them, which was a very pleasant experience. And now they're being lauded in the Times. Kickass.
Congrats guys. You've worked hard for this.
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GLOBAL WARMING IS GETTING PRETTY BAD
From Yahoo News courtesy of the Daily Kos:
Study: Polar bears may turn to cannibalism
Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea may be turning to cannibalism because longer seasons without ice keep them from getting to their natural food, a new study by American and Canadian scientists has found.
The study reviewed three examples of polar bears preying on each other from January to April 2004 north of Alaska and western Canada, including the first-ever reported killing of a female in a den shortly after it gave birth.
Polar bears feed primarily on ringed seals and use sea ice for feeding, mating and giving birth.
Polar bears kill each other for population regulation, dominance, and reproductive advantage, the study said. Killing for food seems to be less common, said the study's principal author, Steven Amstrup of the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center.
Click here for the rest.
The headline for the story is misleading. It should read "Polar Bears Are Turning to Cannibalism" because, as the article observes, this is happening right now. It's pretty simple. The bears need the ice in order to get across water to where their food is; without the ice, they're starving and eating each other, just as human beings would probably do under the same circumstances. Take this as a bad omen: man made global warming may turn us into man-eaters, eventually, when the weather patterns have changed so drastically that the economy is destroyed, taking food production and distribution with it. Pretty creepy. As if polar bears eating each other wasn't creepy enough.
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Tuesday, June 13, 2006
PRESIDENT BUSH'S BIG DAY
Well, there's been so much bad news for the President for so long that it's only fair that he gets to have a Big Day. And what a day it was!
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Bush makes surprise visit to Baghdad
President Bush assured Iraqis in a surprise visit to Baghdad today that the United States stands with them and their new government. "It's in our interest that Iraq succeed," he said, seated alongside newly named Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The dramatic trip came as Bush sought to bolster support for Iraq's fledgling government and U.S. war policy at home.
And
Today's trip came as Bush struggled for solid footing for his presidency, rocked by the Iraq war and other problems. About 2,500 members of the military have died since the war began in March 2003.
War anxiety has been the driving force behind Bush's plunge in the polls and a cause of Republican distress about holding control of Congress in the November mid-tem elections.
Approval of Bush's handling of Iraq has dipped to 33 percent, a new low, and his overall job approval rating was 35 percent in a new AP-Ipsos Poll.
The poll, taken last week before the announcement of the death of al-Zarqawi, found that 59 percent of adults said the United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq — the highest level yet in AP-Ipsos polling. It also found that more than half — 54 percent — said it's unlikely that a stable democratic government will be established in Iraq — also a new high.
Click here for the rest.
I guess the second part of the excerpt says it all: this was clearly another publicity stunt, only this time without the fake turkey Spam-like substance for Thanksgiving. Over at Eschaton, Atrios called it "Operation Photo Op." Unfortunately for our Big Day boy, it's probably going to take much, much more than a quick trip to the green zone to lift those awful poll ratings. And I think the only thing that's going to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis is withdrawal. But at least the President had a Big Day over there. Probably got some sun, played some golf. Had a few beers. Just like old times in the deserts of West Texas.
But that's not the only thing for the Big Day boy on his Big Day. He got a nice big present.
Again from the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Rove won't be charged in CIA leak case
Top White House aide Karl Rove has been told by prosecutors he won't be charged with any crimes in the investigation into the leak of a CIA officer's identity, his lawyer said today, lifting a heavy burden from one of President Bush's most trusted advisers.
Attorney Robert Luskin said that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald informed him of the decision on Monday, ending months of speculation about the fate of Rove, the architect of Bush's 2004 re-election now focused on stopping Democrats from capturing the House or Senate in this November's elections.
Click here for the rest.
Damn.
Everybody was so hopeful about an indictment.
Everybody, that is, except for our Big Day boy! Today, little George found out that he won't have to face the remainder of his term without his brain! You just know that's got to make him happy. The only thing that could make today better for the Big Day boy is cake and ice cream. I hope he's having some right now. And I also hope he's wearing a party hat, you know, the conical kind, with a skinny elastic band to hold it on his head. Little George deserves some good times.
In all seriousness, there is rampant speculation on the left side of the blogosphere that Rove cut some kind of deal with Fitzgerald, immunity in exchange for testimony against Libby, or, god I hope, Dead Eye Dick, a.k.a. the Vice President. I mean, really, I seriously doubt that the grand jury bought Rove's faulty memory bullshit: "Oh, yeah, I can't believe that I completely forgot that conversation with that Time Magazine reporter when I told him about Plame; I guess I'm just a big idiot. Hahaha. Silly me." I guess we'll find out what's going here on in a year or so.
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Monday, June 12, 2006
Violent crime rises for first time in 5 years, FBI reports
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year, spurring an overall rise in violent crime for the first time since 2001, according to FBI data.
Murders rose 4.8 percent, meaning there were more than 16,900 victims in 2005. That would be the most since 1998 and the largest percentage increase in 15 years.
And
Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the 1990s and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.
"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."
Click here for the rest.
Of course, explanations for changes in the crime rate are always many and diverse. The Freakonomics guys, for instance, suggest that the famed crime rate drop of the 90s resulted from fewer poverty stricken children in the 70s and 80s, thanks to the legalization of abortion, rather than from conventional wisdom's favorite explanation, the booming economy. Consequently, I think the experts quoted in this article are only scratching the surface here. Bush's incompetence and lack of seriousness about governing certainly play a part in this crime wave, but I think he can't really take much of the blame for this one. Instead, we have to look back on his predecessors. Starting with Reagan, then continuing with Bush and Clinton, who Michael Moore once called the best Republican President we've ever had, neoliberal economic policies have shredded our once dependable social safety net, destroyed the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain for for better wages, benefits, hours, and working conditions, all the while paving the way for the outsourcing of good middle class jobs to other countries. This doesn't even get into health care issues or the conversion of our culture into spiritually vacant consumerism and materialism, or the triumph of greed as a philosophical value. What's going on is that twenty five years of brutal right-wing social engineering is starting to have a payoff. That is, people, lacking basic necessities, lacking hope, are getting desperate. The correlation between poverty and crime has long been known, but I think this is something new, something worse. Neoliberalism is turning us bad.
I expect violent crime only to increase in the years to come.
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WHITE HOUSE ON IRAQ: "MAINTAINING A FORCE OF
ROUGHLY 50,000 TROOPS THERE . . . FOR DECADES"
Buried deep in this New York Times article, courtesy of Think Progress, courtesy of Eschaton:
U.S. Seeking New Strategy for
Buttressing Iraq's Government
Mr. Bush on Friday made clear that the American commitment to the country will be long-term. Officials say the administration has begun to look at the costs of maintaining a force of roughly 50,000 troops there for years to come, roughly the size of the American presence maintained in the Philippines and Korea for decades after those conflicts.
But no decisions have been made, and Mr. Bush has carefully sidestepped any discussion of a long-term presence, insisting that American forces will be in the country only as long as the Iraqi government wants them there. Mr. Bush's aides said the meeting was not intended to focus on troop levels. But in many ways, that subject is the subtext of the entire discussion.
Click here for the rest.
And given that the US established Iraqi government is extraordinarily weak, which seems purposeful, and whose existence is completely dependent on our government's aid and assistance, it is likely that we won't be formally asked to leave for an extremely long time, which is, I believe, exactly how the White House has planned it. As the Think Progress piece observed, the GOP Congress is in on the act, too, paving the legal way for the permanent US bases that are being built in Iraq right now. Slowly but surely, and quietly, Bush is laying the rhetorical groundwork for what will amount to a permanent occupation of an oil-rich nation right smack dab in middle of the Persian Gulf region. And that's what they've wanted all along.
This has been obvious for a couple of years now. Granted, it defies conventional wisdom, but that doesn't really matter too much anymore. Noam Chomsky and others fairly early on observed that the Iraq invasion had to be about oil because none of the offered motivations make any sense. There were no WMDs. There was no connection with Al-Qaeda. A brief glance at US foreign policy overall plainly shows that the American elite couldn't care less about democracy or human rights abroad--actually, they're rather indifferent to those issues at home, too. In short, because all the explanations are lies, there must be another motivation. One must ask what the biggest benefit for the US elite coming out of Iraq is, and the answer is quick in coming. A strong US presence in the region essentially gives the government control over world oil supplies, which amounts to control over the world economy, which amounts to control over the world. This is a pretty big prize. And I'm not talking about getting the oil for ourselves: rather, it's about controlling the oil, who has access to it, and how much. The White House always meant to establish a permanent presence in Iraq.
Now, like Michael Corleone in Godfather III, the Republicans are attempting to make this criminal enterprise aboveboard and seemingly legal, moral even, suggesting that we're only there because the country is so unstable. "We're legitimate businessmen!!!" Not true. We're there because we're starting a new racket like the mafiosi we are, a racket that will shore up our power as boss of all bosses. And by "we" I mean "them." We're just shleps who live in the neighborhood.
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'Stench of despair' at Guantanamo decried
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
A "stench of despair" hangs over the Guantanamo Bay prison, where three detainees killed themselves this weekend, said a defense lawyer who recently visited the U.S. jail in Cuba.
No other detainees had tried to commit suicide since U.S. military guards found two Saudis and one Yemeni prisoner hanging by nooses made from sheets and clothing early Saturday, Army Lt. Col. Lora Tucker told The Associated Press on today.
While U.S. officials argue the suicides were political acts aimed at hurting American standing in the world, human rights activists and former detainees say prisoners are desperate after years in captivity and view suicide as the only way out even though Islam forbids it.
A European official urged that the widely criticized prison be closed, and two senior U.S. senators expressed concern that most of the prisoners have not been charged with any crimes. A Saudi Arabian human rights group called for an outside investigation of the deaths.
Click here for the rest.
This is not surprising at all. These guys have been locked up since 2002, tortured repeatedly, with no chance for release on the horizon at all--most of these prisoners don't even have a hearing in the works. Some, no doubt, are dangerous terrorists, but most were probably caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or maybe they're low-level Taliban fighters without any important intelligence info. While severly fucked up, the Taliban is not Al-Qaeda. Of course, they're depressed; I'm sure I would be, too. This is no way to treat human beings, which is why such treatment is Constitutionally prohibited for US citizens. That is, this is just plain wrong. And if it weren't so serious, the US claim that these suicides are a political stunt would be laughable: suicide bombers notwithstanding, killing oneself is a grave sin for Muslims--this is no stunt, it's miserable desperation. There's been a movement recently to get the place shut down, but I don't see what good that'll do. Bush'll just move 'em somewhere else, even further from the light of day. This is all sick and twisted, the eternal shame of America.
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Attacking Global Warming Science:
Where There’s George Will, There’s a Way
From Think Progress courtesy of the Daily Kos:
There is no scientific debate about whether human activity is contributing to global warming. Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity. In 2002, the Bush administration’s EPA concluded that global warming the the last 20 years was “due mostly to human activity.”
Click here for the rest.
I posted recently about a friendly little argument I had with a conservative buddy: he proudly proclaimed that there is no scientific consensus that global warming is happening or that it is being caused by human activity. I figured that he read such bullshit in the National Review or some such right-wing rag, and I'm sure they're pushing this fictional point of view out the butt, but, to be honest, because I cannot bear the sewer-bathing that it would take to find out, I'm not sure who all is advocating this global warming lie. Apparently, George Will, the most muppet-like of conservative commentators, is one of the more well known global warming skeptics. I suppose it's all well and good for right-wing journals to just make shit up to support their crackpot points of view, but Will works for the Washington Post, ostensibly a reputable newspaper of record. They really ought to dismiss him right now for spewing this crap. I mean, Will is a conservative, and it's just fine for him to offer conservative opinions, but global warming is not an opinion. It's a fact. There is no debate anymore about whether it exists, about whether mankind is causing it. We are facing very dire circumstances if we don't do something about it right now, and casting doubt on the facts, simply to support an ideology, is the height of irresponsibility. Will has no place in the public square. Of course, the Washington Post obviously doesn't give a shit--Will already bears severe ethical baggage, and, apparently, that's just fine with the paper that broke the Watergate story three decades ago.
I often wonder if human civilization will still exist a century from now.
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Sunday, June 11, 2006
EVERYBODY DIGS BILL EVANS
And you should, too. . .
From Wikipedia:
William John Evans, (better known as Bill Evans) (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980) was one of the most famous jazz pianists of the 20th century; he remains one of the major influences on post-1950s jazz piano. His use of impressionist harmony, his inventive interpretation of traditional jazz repertoire and his syncopated and polyrhythmic melodic lines influenced a generation of pianists, including Herbie Hancock, Denny Zeitlin, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, and his work continues to inspire younger pianists such as Fred Hersch, Esbjörn Svensson, Bill Charlap, and Lyle Mays as well as other musicians such as guitarist John McLaughlin.
And
In 1958, Evans was hired as the only white musician in the famed Miles Davis Sextet. Though his time with the band was brief - no more than eight months - it was one of the most fruitful collaborations in the history of jazz, as Evans's introspective scalar approach to improvisation deeply influenced Davis's conception. His desire to pursue his own projects as a leader, problems with drug use, and conflicts with other band members led him to leave Davis. However, he returned to the band at Davis's request to record the jazz classic, Kind of Blue. Evans's contribution to the album was overlooked for years; in addition to writing the song "Blue in Green" (credited to Davis), he also developed the germ of the track "Flamenco Sketches" on his 1958 recording "Peace Piece" from his album Everybody Digs Bill Evans. By the end of the decade, he had started his own trio.
Click here for the rest.
Bill Evans is my favorite pianist. I'm not so unique in that respect: he's easily on the short list for greatest jazz piano player of all time. But I'm not really trying to be a slave to the critics; Evans' playing was haunting and captivating--Miles Davis once described his work as being like delicate droplets cascading down a waterfall, and, man, did he get it right. Becky and I danced at our wedding to Miles and Bill playing "Blue in Green" on the Kind of Blue album, which still gives me chills whenever I hear it. I think I love Evans for the same reason that I like Miles, or Duke Ellington, or Pink Foyd, or Genesis, or the Beatles. Under the right conditions, Bill Evans can make me transcend reality, transporting me to an otherworldly realm of thought and imagination. He was that great.
So the reason I'm going on about him here is that I found a cool live clip of him on YouTube playing one of those transcendental tunes, "If You Could See Me Now." You'd really be a fool to not check it out. 
Bill Evans
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Saturday, June 10, 2006
Survey: 24 Percent Between 18-50 Tattooed
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
A generation or two ago, Yu's tattoos _ to say nothing of his pierced nose _ probably would have placed him in a select company of soldiers, sailors, bikers and carnival workers. But no longer: The American University employee is among about 36 percent of Americans age 18 to 29 with at least one tattoo, according to a survey.
The study, scheduled to appear Monday on the Web site of the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, provides perhaps the most in-depth look at tattoos since their popularity exploded in the early 1990s.
The results suggest that 24 percent of Americans between 18 and 50 are tattooed; that's almost one in four. Two surveys from 2003 suggested just 15 percent to 16 percent of U.S. adults had a tattoo.
Click here for the rest.
You can count me as part of that 24 percent, and damned if I can easily articulate a reason why I joined the ranks. I pondered the deed for nearly five years before I finally took the plunge. I mean, it was a permanent aesthetic alteration of my body, so I wanted to make sure that what I was going to get would be something I could live with. But I also wanted to make it a reflection of myself, which is difficult because that requires that I have a good understanding of myself, which I'm still not sure I have. At first, I thought I wanted something really radical, in the political sense, and was musing about a Vladimir Lenin tattoo (like his head here), but my old buddy Vince, as much of a communist, at that point, as anyone I've ever really known, strongly advised against it, reminding me how much blood the revolutionary had on his hands. This got me thinking that I'd better stay away from too terribly explicit of a message--there's no telling how I'd feel about whatever statement I was making then twenty years down the road. So I decided that something elemental, something universal but vague, would fit the bill. I was leaning toward some kind of a moon image because I love staying up all night, but when I finally made it to the tattoo parlor, on my birthday, January 3rd, back in 2000, I saw a dark sun that really called out to me. And, bam, after about a half hour of needling pain, I was tattooed.
Of course, none of this explains why I decided to get a tattoo in the first place. I'm still not sure about that; I really only know that I wanted one. Maybe it was because tattoos seemed to be part of the zeitgeist for young people in the 90s, and, even though I finally took the plunge three days after the decade had ended, I wanted to feel like I was a part of all that. I don't know. It's probably just because I think tattoos are cool, nothing intellectual or artsy about my decision process. I just wanted to be cool.
Six years later, I still love my tattoo, but I'm afraid it didn't do much to make me cool. Actually, I don't know what, if anything, will be able to pull off that Fonzie-feat for me, but my skin-art is kinda neat, don't you think?
After a while, I noticed that my "black hole sun" tattoo is reminiscent of the symbol of the house of El, Superman's family on Krypton, as depicted in the comics during the 60s and 70s. Kal-El's father, Jor-El, wore it on his chest in the days before Krypton exploded. Obviously, I love the Man of Tomorrow dearly, and always have, so maybe I made the right choice.
Nowdays I'm wondering if one tattoo is enough. What should I get if I do it again? I wonder...
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Friday, June 09, 2006
FINALLY! MAINSTREAM
MEDIA SKEWER COULTER
From the Houston Chronicle editorial board:
Trading in hate
After her crude and vicious comments attacking a group of 9/11 widows in her latest book and on TV this week, perhaps the public needs some eyedrops to clear Coulter out of its field of vision. Even in a country where people thrive by saying the most outlandish things, Coulter has stretched the limits of acceptable opinion voiced by people who expect to be taken seriously. At one time or another she has suggested the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity, the bombing of the New York Times building, the shooting of former President Clinton and the poisoning of a Supreme Court justice. Perhaps because her only threatening aspect is her tongue, and her willowy blonde appearance attracts television viewers, Coulter has enjoyed widespread exposure in mainstream media that generally shy away from providing platforms for extremist rhetoric from either the right or the left.
And
In an interview Tuesday with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today, the show host questioned Coulter closely about her description of four New Jersey widows who banded together to successfully campaign for the creation of the 9/11 Commission. Lauer read a passage from Coulter's new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, in which she stated that "these broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much." The widows, Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken, who together have seven children, replied: "Contrary to Ms. Coulter's statements, there was no joy in watching men we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored those men and miss them every day."
Click here for the rest.
I've known about the androgynously good looking Ann Coulter's ejaculations of trash-talking sophistry in grand high school debate style for some years now. The liberal meme about her is that she's essentially a Nazi, a perfect Aryan specimen in fact, but for some reason the corporate media keep treating her as though she actually has a legitimate point of view. It's probably because she's a Nazi, really. Anyway, this controversy kind of took me by surprise for pretty much the same reason that the NSA wiretapping controversy did: Coulter's been this big of a fascist bitch for years, just as the Bush administration has been violating civil liberties for years; why get angry now? I suppose that the 9/11 widows are just too sacred of a cow for the mainstream to tolerate their bashing. But really that's no excuse. The corporate media should have sent her to South America, to be with other Nazi retirees and tin-plated dictators, long ago. Instead, they keep calling her for guest appearances on pundit shows. I mean, it's nice that they've finally figured out about her jackboots and swastikas and all, but why did they have to wait for so long?
I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Whatever the hell that means.
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Thursday, June 08, 2006
Panel Discusses Evolution of N-Word in NYC
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
When Ozzie Wiggan first moved to a new high school in suburban New York, the black teenager would sometimes get into fights with white classmates over their casual use of the N-word. But the 17-year-old soon came to the sad realization that hip-hop culture had made it popular _ if not acceptable _ for people of all races to use the epithet, often in a way they considered harmless.
"I think people have forgotten what the N-word truly means," said Wiggan, who added that he doesn't use it. "When I hear that word, it hurts me so much inside."
Click here for the rest.
The N-word is both taboo and fascinating to me, and also problematic. Clearly, the word is often derogatory, especially when used by whites. However, unlike many liberals and anti-racists I know, I don't accept that the word by itself is bad or evil or necessarily meaning that its user, when white, is racist. I mean, sticks and stones and all that; there's no such thing as a harmful word--it is only context, intention, and reaction that makes the n-word harmful, which is one reason why it's generally regarded as okay for blacks to say it, who often redefine it in a self-empowering way, but not whites. On the other hand, that point of view is ultimately so much theory: whites should be extraordinarily careful when using the word because there is so much potential for causing great pain. The triumph of hip-hop throws all of that into disarray. When I was teaching high school I was continually amazed at how many white kids thought it was just fine to say "hey, nigga, wha's up?" Rappers, unfortunately, usually do not include with their music lectures on the sophisticated subtleties of the n-word, which is clearly sending out the unintended message that it belongs to everybody, which it does not. I feel pretty certain that this, in the grand scheme, only aids in the lingering of racist attitudes and opinions--if little white would-be hip-hop kids can say it, little Bubba, whose daddy is in the Klan, thinks he can say it too. It's all very confusing, I know, but, ultimately, this pop music simplification of complicated racial dynamics can come only to no good end.
I have no idea what to do about it.
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Al-Zarqawi's death a long-sought U.S. goal
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Tips from within Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's own terror network helped the U.S. locate and bomb a secret meeting among the al-Qaida leader and top associates at a safe house north of Baghdad, military officials said today.
And
President Bush and U.S. military leaders cautioned that the death of the 39-year-old militant was not likely to end the bloodshed — just as the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killings of his two sons failed to dampen the insurgency. A rash of bombings that killed nearly 40 people in Baghdad today confirmed that assessment.
And
At the same time, the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi, who was sensitive to U.S.-encouraged derision of a foreigner killing Iraqis, began cozying up to Sunni insurgents. It was probably the move that led to his undoing, said Ed O'Connell, a retired Air Force intelligence officer who led manhunts for Osama bin Laden and others in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen.
And
Al-Zarqawi was known for his extraordinary brutality as one of the extremist leaders in the largely Sunni Arab insurgency, earning him the title of "the slaughtering sheik" among his followers. He is believed to have wielded the huge knives used in beheading American hostages Nicholas Berg and Eugene Armstrong. Grisly videos of the slayings were posted on the Internet, part of the propaganda campaign that was key to al-Zarqawi's movement.
Click here for the rest.
Some observations. Al-Zarqawi was a ruthless son of a bitch and I'm certainly not shedding any tears at his demise. Unlike the capture of Saddam Hussein, this probably will make Iraq a safer place, if only a bit. However, as a consultant observed on NPR this morning, Al-Zarqawi's organization only accounted for about ten percent of the overall insurgency in Iraq, so, even though the sheer brutality of the violence ought to slack somewhat because this guy was the worst of the worst, the overall amount of violence will probably remain the same. On the other hand, it's nice that Bush isn't heralding the end of the war this time like he did when they found Saddam. Finally, the above article has me already sensing US propaganda at play: it is self-contradictory in that it suggests first that Al-Zarqawi's own men gave him up, then, later, it suggests that Sunni insurgents did the deed; which is it? I figure that the Pentagon hasn't yet made up its mind which story will play better in terms of public image, both here and in Iraq. Can't those fuckers just tell us the truth?
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Wednesday, June 07, 2006
THE LIBERTARIAN DEMOCRAT
From the Daily Kos:
Traditional "libertarianism" holds that government is evil and thus must be minimized. Any and all government intrusion is bad. While practical libertarians (as opposed to those who waste their votes on the Libertarian Party) have traditionally aligned themselves with the Republicans, it's clear that the modern GOP has no qualms about trampling on personal liberties. Heck, it's become their raison d' etre.
The problem with this form of libertarianism is that it assumes that only two forces can infringe on liberty -- the government and other individuals.
The Libertarian Democrat understands that there is a third danger to personal liberty -- the corporation. The Libertarian Dem understands that corporations, left unchecked, can be huge dangers to our personal liberties.
Libertarian Dems are not hostile to government like traditional libertarians. But unlike the liberal Democrats of old times (now all but extinct), the Libertarian Dem doesn't believe government is the solution for everything. But it sure as heck is effective in checking the power of corporations.
In other words, government can protect our liberties from those who would infringe upon them -- corporations and other individuals.
Click here for the rest.
Okay, this is an interesting idea, a true moderate position unlike what's currently touted as moderate in mainstream discourse. It's also an idea that's very appealing to me. While I would certainly love to see us all in something of a Marxist situation, where we produce only what we need, and therefore need to work only four hours a day for a living wage, which would free us for our own personal and social pursuits, we've got to walk before we can run, and this Libertarian Democrat concept is a very big step in the right direction. It's also appealing to me because, despite all my left-wing rantings, I'm pretty conservative in that I believe we should proceed toward radical social change only with great caution, slowly, so that we can minimize the massive screw-ups that are necessarily a part of the process--the Soviets and the Chinese tried to achieve economic justice overnight, and killed a lot of people in the process; we do not want to repeat their tragic and barbaric mistakes.
Hell, I might even settle for a hybrid capitalist-socialist society if it appears to get us closer to justice. If it becomes widespread, I could see myself getting behind this left Libertarian thing.
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COLORADO ROCKIES GO EVANGELICAL
From AlterNet:
In a remarkable article from USA Today last week, the Colorado Rockies went public with the news that the organization has been explicitly looking for players with "character." And according to the Tribe of Coors, "character" means accepting Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior. "We're nervous, to be honest with you," Rockies general manager Dan O'Dowd said. "It's the first time we ever talked about these issues publicly. The last thing we want to do is offend anyone because of our beliefs." When people are nervous that they will offend you with their beliefs, it's usually because their beliefs are offensive.
And
Then there are the fans. I spoke with journalist Tom Krattenmaker, who has studied the connection between religion and sports. Krattenmaker said, "I have concerns about what this Christianization of the Rockies means for the community that supports the team in and around Denver--a community in which evangelical Christians are probably a minority, albeit a large and influential one. Taxpayers and ticket-buyers in a religiously diverse community have a right not to see their team--a quasi-public resource--used for the purpose of advancing a specific form of religion. Have the Colorado Rockies become a faith-based organization? This can be particularly problematic when the religion in question is one that makes exclusive claims and sometimes denigrates the validity of other belief systems."
You might think MLB Commissioner Bud Selig would have something stirring to say about this issue. But Selig, who hasn't actually registered a pulse since 1994, only said meekly, "They have to do what they feel is right."
Click here for the rest.
Certainly, most American organizations "have the right to do what they feel is right." But professional baseball is a special case. As the article observes, baseball is a "quasi-public resource" in that there are a lot of tax dollars used to create the economic context, such as stadiums, tax breaks, and special infrastructure, necessary for owners to make money. While treated to a great extent as private business, big league baseball is in deep with the public sector. So deep, in fact, that professional baseball has been granted anti-trust exemption by Congress: it is a legal monopoly, and therefore subject to federal regulation. Baseball is anything but a normal business; rather, it is probably best described as a phantom limb of government. Consequently, this fundamentalist Christianization of the Rockies is very troubling. Never mind the fact that it is illegal for a business to discriminate on the basis of religion, which is what the Colorado team appears to be doing as far as employment practices are concerned; organizations taking government money are Constitutionally required to remain secular, Bush's "faith-based" charities scam notwithstanding. In other words, the new fundamentalist nature of the Rockies may very well be extremely illegal.
Stepping away for a moment from the legal ramifications, this ball club going all churchy is disturbing for, perhaps, an even bigger reason. This appears to be a new manifestation of right-wing Christianity's attempt to twist the values of this nation in their sick direction. As I've said before, it is every American's right to worship or not as they see fit, as well as trying to spread whatever their philosophy is to others, but this attempt to undermine secular society is unAmerican, dangerous to democracy, and just plain wrong. Egad, what's next? Christian liquor stores? I sure hope not.
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Why Haditha Matters
From the Nation:
Enough details have emerged from survivors and military personnel to conclude that in the town of Haditha last November, members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre. The killings may have been in retaliation for the death of a Marine lance corporal, but this was not the work of soldiers gone berserk. The targets (children from 3 to 14, an old man in a wheelchair, taxi passengers), the hours-long duration of killings, the number of Marines involved, the careful mop-up--all amount to willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis. As Representative John Murtha has pointed out, the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors imply a cover-up that may extend far up the chain of command.
Click here for the rest.
So there were literally hours for cooler heads to prevail, but they did not. In other words, this was no freak-out. Murtha connects the killings to the extraordinarily high amount of stress our service personnel have been under for years now in Iraq, and he's probably right about that, but, on the other hand, this was very clearly not a case of psycho bloodlust revenge. It was just too systematic for that. Certainly, it's scary and depressing to think of our troops being so mentally disturbed by the insanity over there that they would go over the edge into some kind of Apocalypse Now style of brutality, but it is far more frightening, I think, to ponder the notion that these murders might be a part of Pentagon policy in Iraq.
This is not the first time that this concept has been raised. Longtime British Middle East reporter Robert Fisk has asserted for over a year now that US counter-insurgency policy has been much less about actually taking down combatants than it has been about using extreme violence to scare the Iraqis out of supporting the insurgency. Essentially, the whole Fallujah operation was exactly that. The number of insurgents apprehended or killed was minimal, but the damage done to the city, including, of course, its thousands of non-military inhabitants, was enormous. Christ, we used fucking napalm and white phosphorous there, for God's sake! Chemical weapons of mass destruction that don't give a shit who's a terrorist or civilian. There is a very strong case to be made that the real US policy in Iraq is one of widespread terror disguised as "collateral damage." It would not be surprising if that were the case: it would follow a pattern used by Republican White Houses in Central America back in the 80s, and many of the architects of that plan, "The Salvador Option," are currently serving in the Bush administration.
The long and the short of all this is that the United States may very well be the worst terrorist nation on the entire planet. In history. Truly frightening.
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THE REAL FIFTH BEATLE
Singer-songwriter Billy
Preston dies at 59
From the Houston Chronicle:
Billy Preston, the Houston-born rock, soul and gospel artist who played alongside pop music's elite, including Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, has died in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was 59 years old. Preston had been battling heart and kidney problems for years.
Click here for the rest.
I've known Billy Preston for years as the hip African-American keyboard player who joined the Beatles for their "Get Back" recording sessions which were eventually released as the album Let It Be. Indeed, Preston played the cool solo on the song "Get Back;" I've always loved it, pretty groovy, even by Beatle standards. Eventually I figured out that he was also the same guy who had solo hits with his pop-funk 70s standards "Nothing from Nothing" and "Will It Go Round in Circles." Clearly, Preston was a creative force with which to be reckoned. What I didn't realize until reading this obit article is that he also played with Dylan and the Stones. Very cool. But I also learned that he played on two more Beatle records, The Beatles, a.k.a. "The White Album," and Abbey Road--he really was their fifth member, in a way that no one else could claim to be. While always well known to anybody who's been paying attention, it's a shame that he's not as famous as the people he helped to create great music. I mean, he played on the Stones' Sticky Fingers! He was a bigger part of the history of so-called classic rock than most of the people in constant overplay rotation on classic rock stations. He was that great.
Farewell, Billy Preston.
Billy singing "Get Back" in the ill-fated RSO
film Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
(Thanks to Midi Database for the cheesy Preston renditions.)
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Monday, June 05, 2006
Bush pushes gay marriage ban
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Cheered by conservative supporters, President Bush gave a push today to a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as the Senate opened debate on an emotional, election-year measure that has little chance of passing.
"Our policies should aim to strengthen families, not undermine them," Bush said in a speech. "And changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure."
All Senate Democrats, except Ben Nelson of Nebraska, oppose the amendment, and critics say Bush's efforts are primarily aimed at energizing conservative voters for the November elections. Together with moderate Republicans, the Democrats are expected to block a yes-or-no vote, killing the measure for the year.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., who sponsored the measure, acknowledged that politics played a part in the timing of the debate, but for a different reason: to force senators to take a stand and answer for their votes on the campaign trail.
Click here for the rest.
Not a chance in hell is the convential wisdom on how likely it is that this amendment will make it out of Washington. That's why everybody's saying that this ill-fated move is all about energizing the conservative base, now largely demoralized and disillusioned by both the GOP dominated Congress and their once great leader, when midterm elections happen this November--the fear is that a lot of conservatives, in disgust, won't show up; gay-bashing, the GOP hopes, will give them the piss and vinegar they need to get them off their couches and into election booths, avoiding a total rout by the Democrats.
Well, we'll see how that works out for them.
As for me, I still don't see the reasoning behind right-wing opposition to gay marriage. The homophobia, of course, I get: it's the real reason so many people have problems with gay marriage. But the logic offered by these bigots I just don't understand. They say gay marriage threatens traditional man-woman marriage. Well, okay, how? It changes the definition of marriage, they say. Well, okay, I concede that: same sex marriage does, indeed, change the definition of marriage. But where's the harm? How does that affect anybody at all outside of gay individuals who want to get hitched? Obviously, there is no harm; nobody is affected in any negative way at all. It's bullshit, in other words, sophistry that's been retro-fitted to accommodate pre-existing fear of homosexuals. That is, conservative homophobes didn't arrive at the conclusion that gay marriage is wrong after careful deliberation. Rather, their knee-jerk response is to deny gay people as many rights as possible, and to then come up with squirrely bogus arguments to justify the position after the fact.
It's all a bunch of crap.
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Lawmakers took millions in free trips, study finds
From Reuters via the Houston Chronicle:
Members of Congress and their aides took free trips worth nearly $50 million paid for by corporations, trade associations and other private groups between January 2000 and June 2005, according to a study released today.
Some of the 23,000 trips featured $500-a-night hotel rooms, $25,000 corporate jet rides and visits to popular spots such as Paris, Hawaii and Colorado ski resorts, said the study, by the Center for Public Integrity, American Public Media and Northwestern University's Medill News Service.
And
"In many instances, trip sponsors appeared to be buying access to elected officials or their advisers," the study said.
While some excursions were legitimate fact-finding missions, others appeared to have been little more than "pricey vacations" wrapped around speeches or seminars in which the lawmaker was joined by family members, the study said.
The data emerged from a nine-month-long review of congressional travel disclosure forms and coincided with ongoing federal investigations of political corruption and efforts to clean up how Congress does business.
Click here for the rest.
How corrupt is the Republican dominated Congress? Pretty damned corrupt according to this study. And this area of legal bribery is strictly small change when compared to the cash bonanza flowing out of corporate America for campaign finance. Nonetheless, it still stinks. Congressional Republicans defend these trips as, the article observes, "legitimate fact-finding missions." I can imagine a few circumstances where getting a feel for what's happening on the ground would be helpful in drafting legislation, but not many. Why, for instance, would a Congressman need to go skiing at lobbyists' expense? In short, this is a bunch of crap. Most of these trips are utterly unnecessary and are therefore bribery; Congressmen have their own substantial library as well as access to the internet like you and me. Really, when you get right down to it, there is no need for lobbyists, either, whose function is also defended by Congress as informational in nature: Congress should do its own research and completely ban all lobbying. There's just too much potential for abuse.
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Sunday, June 04, 2006
A.B.A. TO INVESTIGATE BUSH'S SIGNING STATEMENTS
From the Boston Globe courtesy of AlterNet:
The board of governors of the American Bar Association voted unanimously yesterday to investigate whether President Bush has exceeded his constitutional authority in reserving the right to ignore more than 750 laws that have been enacted since he took office.
Meeting in New Orleans, the board of governors for the world's largest association of legal professionals approved the creation of an all-star legal panel with a number of members from both political parties.
They include a former federal appeals court chief judge, a former FBI director, and several prominent scholars -- to evaluate Bush's assertions that he has the power to ignore laws that conflict with his interpretation of the Constitution.
Bush has appended statements to new laws when he signs them, noting which provisions he believes interfere with his powers.
Among the laws Bush has challenged are the ban on torturing detainees, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and ``whistle-blower" protections for federal employees.
The challenges also have included safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.
Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents combined.
Click here for the rest.
As a lawyer in the article observes, Bush can say anything he wants when he signs a bill into law. Apparently, "signing statements" have been used by Presidents for a long time, usually to simply and enthusiastically endorse whatever law is being signed. The problem with Bush is that many of his signing statements appear to be presented as legalistic enforcement interpretation, often completely nullifying the bill he's signing. Obviously, that's completely unconstitutional: Presidents enforce the law, but Congress has the sole authority to make law. This fits Bush's very disturbing pattern of amassing White House power. Basically, he just does whatever he wants and then waits to see if anybody's going to do anything about it. Then his people fight tooth and nail to stop the challenge. Meanwhile, as due process moves along slowly, Bush gets his way anyway. Oftentimes, when a court or Congressional challenge actually wins, he just ignores it. In other words, the President is trying to completely change our governmental system. He really is trying to crown himself king. And unless the whole damned country does a full court press against him, he's going to be King George I, and that's it for the republic.
Frightening.
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SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: EVERYTHING
THAT'S WRONG WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
From the Hartford Courant courtesy of the Daily Kos:
I had remembered that, out of the eye of voters back home, Lieberman developed working alliances with the most hypocritical and dangerous right-wingnuts like Ralph Reed and Charles Murray and Bill Bennett. But I had forgotten just how extensive a record he had accumulated.
I had forgotten how he played the leading role in 1993 to thwart Democrats who tried to close loopholes allowing companies to cook the books on millions of dollars of stock options. Thus began the regulatory abandonment that spawned Enron and its sibling rip-offs.
I had forgotten how that same year, Lieberman joined with Republican Sen. Alphonse M. D'Amato of New York and against Democrats to "work the cloakrooms" of the Senate, in the words of a news account, to "line up unanimous support so that a tax break eagerly sought by the real estate industry could be passed without senators having to vote on the record."
How many Connecticut Democrats remember that their senator was one of only two Democrats who voted with Republicans in 1995 to kill a lobbyist-gift ban? Or that he called affirmative action "un-American?" Or that in August 1994 he voted in favor of a proposal by Republican Jesse Helms to cut off all federal money from schools that offer counseling to suicidal gay teens by referring them to gay support groups or in any way suggesting it's OK to be gay?
Click here for the rest.
Lieberman first came to my attention when Gore chose him to be his running mate back in 2000. I was disgusted by the choice: Lieberman, best described as Puritanical on sex issues, was picked to provide a stark contrast to President Clinton's Monica-Lewinskizing, thus, in theory, distancing Gore from his soon-to-be former boss. I never understood why so many politicians and pundits attacked Clinton for his affair, obviously a deeply personal matter, and to this day I still don't get it. The President's sex life is like everybody else's, none of your damned business. At any rate, Lieberman was particularly scolding and self-righteous about it all, which is what got him the nod. From that point on, the son of a bitch was on my radar screen as Democrat-scumbag, one of many to be sure, but probably the most famous once corporate favorite Clinton left office.
Turned out that sex wasn't the only thing Lieberman was conservative on. Like the President he excoriated, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut is a great friend to big business, usually at the expense of everyday working Americans like you and me. Indeed, the corporate campaign funding-well from which most Republicans drink is a happy haunt for Lieberman, too--that is, the guy's tainted by evil money, and clearly does his best to let his contributors know who he's working for. But that's not all. Lieberman, often described by Fox pundit and all around Nazi shit-head Sean Hannity as his favorite Democrat, continues to support the bloody and unwinnable war in Iraq, which makes no sense at all these days. Is he going down this crazy path on the war to shore up his credentials on defense in order to position himself for a Presidential run? Maybe, but he doesn't have near the chance that Hillary Clinton does, who's obviously doing the same thing for the same reason, and is losing national support in the bargain.
In short, Lieberman is a conservative in the Democratic Party, part of an ideological force that, by pulling the party well to the right, has essentially paralyzed its political effectiveness through meaningless infighting with the party's liberal wing. Old Joe should just quit the party, I think, because he has no business being there. Fortunately, Lieberman may not get the chance to quit: he's currently facing a very serious primary challenge from a liberal named Ned Lamont who's got a lot of internet cash and grass roots support in the state. Man, I'd just love it if Joe gets shot down by his own party.
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Saturday, June 03, 2006
THE RIGHT WING ATTACK ON HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
From the Daily Kos, a quick essay on how the conservative vision for America is attacking the most basic foundations of Maslow's famous Hierarchy of Needs, which is making Americans quite literally crazy:
Here's my point. The farther down the pyramid we can be driven, by insecurity, illness, lack of expression, etc, the less human we become. We will do ANYTHING to feed ourselves and our families. After that, we will do anything to keep that resource safe.
To me, this explains why people vote against their self interest at one level of the pyramid to protect the next layer.
It explains to me why the abortion rate goes up under the Republican administrations. The feeling of security and having social needs met are much more supportive to a woman who is pondering whether to take the pregnancy to term; she is more likely to have the child if she feels financially and medically secure.
By piling debt on the class of society with fewer resources, the Republicans actually drive the needs to a lower and lower level where people will do whatever it takes (fill in the blanks here) to feed themselves and feel secure. Even vote for a Republican. Who can vote for a Democrat that wants to take you to the higher level of needs when you haven't got the basic levels secure?
Click here for the rest.
The essay's writer then turns to some good practical suggestions for how the Democrats ought to tailor their policy agenda to meet Americans' basic needs, an assertion with which I greatly agree. However, the essay, agonizingly, doesn't take the final step in reasoning that it ought to: by adopting every-man-for-himself policies, and by projecting a culture which values such a concept, the right wing is essentially, as Noam Chomsky has repeatedly observed, dismantling the civil society in
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Friday, June 02, 2006
Study: Third of firms read workers' e-mail
From Reuters via the Houston Chronicle:
Big Brother is not only watching but he is also reading your e-mail.
According to a new study, about a third of big companies in the United States and Britain hire employees to read and analyze outbound e-mail as they seek to guard against legal, financial or regulatory risk.
More than a third of U.S. companies surveyed also said their business was hurt by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the past 12 months, according to the annual study from a company specializing in protecting corporate e-mail at large businesses.
Click here for the rest.
You know, I'm a big civil liberties guy from way back. My extreme stance on freedom actually began back when I was fairly conservative--I figure that I embraced free speech first because I always hated being told to shut up as a kid, and embracing everything else was a natural next step, you know, once I figured out that we have lots of cool rights and all. I was even a card-carrying member of the ACLU for a few years until I figured out their shoddy positions on gun control and campaign finance, but that's another story. Anyway, no matter how I look at this issue, I can't find a civil liberties angle. Sure, it would be nice if employee emails are protected by the right to privacy, but I just don't see why they should be. They're written on company computers, on company time, sent through company servers, ostensibly for company business: it strikes me as completely reasonable that a company would want to know what's going on with its email traffic. Not just reasonable, companies would be stupid if they didn't check this stuff out. I mean, really, these emails belong to the company, whatever employee wrote them. My take has always been to simply assume that my email communications are being monitored when I'm at work; my personal emails are on a personal account, which I access at home. No big deal.
Why are so many workers morons on this?
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Thursday, June 01, 2006
FUCK THE VOTE
From CounterPunch:
The Real Reason Rock the Vote is Falling Apart
Duhigg attributes the crisis to overspending in non-election years and to the opportunism of the music industry executives who dominate the group's board and use Rock the Vote primarily to promote their own artists.
Rock the Vote has a more fundamental problem: It has hitched its star to politicians who are completely hostile to the needs and desires of the American people. For example, check out the political hacks it has chosen to bestow its Rock the Nation Award upon.
There's Bill Clinton, who presided over the 1996 Democratic Party convention which removed universal health care from the party platform even though more than 70 per cent of Americans are in favor of it.
There's Hilary Rosen, who was head of the RIAA at the time she was honored. Rosen rocked the nation by launching the war against file-sharing. Sharing music on-line is, to say the least, wildly popular.
There's Hillary Clinton, who, despite the unpopularity of the war in Iraq, has called for sending 80,000 more of our sons and daughters to the slaughter.
Click here for the rest.
It's not just that these politicians "are completely hostile to the needs and desires of the American people," which, of course, they are; it's that these guys support corporations over average Americans. Obviously, this makes complete sense because Rock the Vote is a corporate organization. Of course, they're going to support politicians who favor their goals. Really that's the same problem facing the Democratic Party itself, corporations over people. Taking it one step further, that's the problem facing America overall. Our entire federal government now seems to be run of, by, and for the corporations. The idea behind or justification for that is that it somehow makes America more prosperous, which trickles down to average people. But then, that's not at all true. Corporations, by definition, exist to maximize profits for their shareholders: there's nothing in that mission about helping people out; indeed, allowing that profit to trickle down is a disservice to shareholders, and corporations have been very clever these last couple of decades about making sure that they, and not the people, keep the lion's share of earnings. Anyway, the point to this little rant is that corporations and democracy don't mix. There is no such thing as a corporate sponsored group advocating democracy, and Rock the Vote was always a fraud.
Nice to see that it's falling apart finally.
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Houghton Takes on Fast Food Industry
From Publishers Weekly courtesy of AlterNet:
Houghton Mifflin is no friend of Ronald McDonald's. The publisher—which in 2001 released Eric Schlosser's now-definitive polemic on America's love affair with the greasy spoon, Fast Food Nation—was prepared to deal with controversy when it adapted that book for kids. But the house has been overwhelmed, and a little shocked, by the fast food industry's response to Chew on This. Schlosser's kid-friendly deconstruction of the evils of Big Macs, Big Gulps and Supersize fries, which he co-authored with Charles Wilson, has drummed up a healthy interest among kids. Released early last month the book—which will be No. 4 on The New York Times children’s chapter bestseller for June 4—has proven a big enough concern among certain food companies that Web sites have sprung up attempting to discredit the title and its authors. After The Wall Street Journal reported in April about the extreme tactics being used against the book, Houghton has decided to fight back.
Click here for the rest.
Eric Scholsser's Fast Food Nation is one of the best books I've ever read. With an overall theme about the fast food industry as context, the book successfully indicts shoddy labor law, economic class injustices, consumerism, predatory advertising, mega-agribusiness, the myth of the American dream, and, of course, the wildly unhealthy nature of fast food itself. And Schlosser's writing style is so plain and simple, yet immensely compelling, that it is the perfect vehicle for educating Americans about how so much of what they've been told about "the way things are" is, in fact, quite wrong. It should be required reading for all college freshmen.
Of course, the book's strength also makes it a target. Now that Schosser has adapted it for children it is particularly dangerous to the fast food industry: the grown-up book takes great pains to illustrate how America's massive capitalist PR machine starts to work on Americans while they are very young, instilling corrupt values so early that they are not easily dislodged later in life. The children's book strikes me as being the first real threat that this strategy has faced. That is, the reason they're going after Chew on This is because it's telling the truth to the kids to whom McDonald's and the like are always lying.
It's nice to see that Schlosser's publisher is fighting back--I hope they have the stomach for it.
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New Dixie Chicks album flies to No. 1
From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:
Despite a cool reception from country radio, the Dixie Chicks returned to No. 1 on the pop and country charts with their first album since publicly criticizing the president three years ago.
The album Taking the Long Way took the top spot on country albums chart and the Billboard 200 overall chart — which are based on sales rather than radio airplay — with 526,000 units sold in its first full week.
Click here for the rest.
Their new album didn't simply "[fly] to no. 1," it entered the chart at number one, the kind of thing Led Zeppelin used to do back in the 70s. It's extremely nice to know that Clear Channel has a limit to its corporate-conservative ideological power--to the best of my knowledge, the Chicks are still banned by the radio slumlord. If you didn't already know, the bland and blonde country trio encountered ferocious criticism during the run-up to the Iraq invasion when member Natalie Maines, a Texan, said that she was ashamed that George Bush is from Texas. And, frankly, I'd be ashamed, too, if it weren't for the fact that I've already been ashamed for years about the great number of truly dispicable individuals coming out of my home state, but I digress. This is pretty cool, a strong sign that things have indeed changed a great deal since the dark days of early 2003: things still suck greatly, but at least most Americans are coming around to how bad things actually are. I really think that a lot of people are buying this record just because of their anti-war stance. Alas, I will not be joining the crowds of Dixie Chicks record-buyers. I really like what they have to say, and I'm glad that they have the balls to stick to their guns, but I just don't like their music. It's not even really country, for god's sake. I'll take Willie any old day over the Chicks.
None of this is to be construed as dissing them, however. I'm not hurrying out to buy any Kanye West, either, and he's my newest pop culture hero.
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Astros seal deal with Clemens
From the Houston Chronicle:
Roger Clemens has reached a deal with the Astros, signing to pitch for the remainder of the 2006 season.
The team made the move official at a news conference this morning.
"The ball is in my court ... I know I have to take the next step and get my body ready," Clemens said today.
So that he can go down to the minors and work his arm into shape, Clemens signed a split deal. He signed a minor-league contract worth $322,000. Once he is promoted to the majors, he will earn the prorated value of $22,000,022.
Major-league salaries are paid at the daily rate of 1/183rd of the yearly rate per day.
In Clemens' case, his deal will pay him $120,218.70 once he is called up. If he's called up on June 22, he'll earn a total of $12,262,307 for the remaining 102 days in the schedule.
The deal is a major league record for a pitcher.
Click here for the rest.
Well, it's nice to see that the home team won its bidding war with Clemens' wife and kids--indeed, Houston eclipsed the Clemens Club's offer by two million. Good work Astros! All kidding aside, this is pretty cool. The Rocket isn't the only reason that the Astros made it to their first World Series last year, but he's definitely a big part of the puzzle. They especially need him now. The 'Stros got off to a nice start at the beginning of the season, but I keep seeing "Astros Lose" headlines lately, with which I am all too familiar throughout the course of my life as a Houston sports fan. After last year's kickass finish, I think I'm developing higher standards.
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