Gitmo Judge Admits Confession Extracted By Rape Threat

From Think Progress courtesy of AlterNet:

In the first full war crimes tribunal of the Obama administration, a military judge held that a detainee who confessed to killing an American solider after he was threatened with being gang-raped to death if he did not cooperate may nonetheless have that confession used against him at trial...

And

Khadr was only 15 years old at the time of his capture and confession, earing his tribunal a strong condemnation from the United Nations. In the words of the UN, “Juvenile justice standards are clear. Children should not be tried before military tribunals.”

More here.

A few observations.

There is every good reason to believe that Khadr feared this threat: Reporter Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal, has asserted that the Pentagon possesses video tapes of children being sodomized at the US Army torture chamber in Baghdad; just as we now know that American torture under Bush was systematic, using similar techniques in both Iraq and Guantanamo, it is reasonable to conclude that people were raped at Gitmo, too. As the article goes on to observe, coerced confessions are notoriously unreliable. There's a damned good reason such "confessions" are inadmissible in civilian trials: they help convict innocent people.

For that matter, why the fuck is this guy being tried in this bullshit "military tribunal" format, anyway? He was doing grunt work for Al Qaeda, which is a criminal organization, not an army. "Military tribunals" were frighteningly inappropriate when Bush first started using them, and they continue to be frighteningly inappropriate under his "liberal" successor. Furthermore, how is it a "war crime" to return fire against a soldier who is trying to kill you? War crimes are about torture, or abusing POWs, or deliberately targeting civilians, or using banned weapons such as napalm or white phosphorous, you know, stuff that US forces have done repeatedly in Iraq and Afghanistan, not fighting back against an invading force.

This entire process is a disgusting farce. True terrorists should be tried in real courts for their crimes, and accessories, too, for helping them. But these bogus "military tribunals," which try unsuccessfully to invoke the gravity and justice and patriotism of the Nuremberg Trials, are just plain wrong. It is also wrong to treat a fifteen year old as though he were an adult. Yeah yeah, he's twenty three now, but he was just a kid when he was captured, and was clearly neck deep in weird religious philosophy he couldn't possibly understand. Just what the hell are we trying to prove here?

Why is Obama doing this?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

White House unloads anger over criticism from 'professional left’

From the Hill, courtesy of, well, everybody:

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”

More here.

Of course, the "professional" left is absolutely outraged. Not me, though. Frankly, I've been wondering for a while when White House rhetoric on liberals was finally going to match its actions. Now that the other shoe has dropped, so to speak, I'm kind of giggling about it all.

That is, as I've been writing here since it became clear that Obama was going to win the primary back in 2008, President Hope And Change is no liberal. Indeed, he's a corporatist Democrat, conservative, even, on virtually everything except the so-called social issues, FOX News weirdos and psychotic Tea people notwithstanding. President Obama has never approached his work in the nation's highest office from a liberal perspective, and anybody who's been paying close attention already knew that.

So this is kind of a "Ha! Told you so!" moment for me vis-a-vis liberal Democratic loyalists. I mean, my smug satisfaction in this arena has been slowly growing in the months since he was elected, watching liberals slowly realize that Obama is not the person they allowed themselves to believe he was. But this is a smoking gun, a frying pan to the face of stupid fucking liberals from sea to shining sea.

I wonder if it will have any effect on their ass-embedded heads.

In most ways, this has a lot less to do with Obama than it does with where the Democratic Party is today on the ideological spectrum. Whatever historical associations the party has had with the plight of average ordinary working citizens have degenerated for decades now into not much more than lip service. This became obvious to honest political observers by the mid 1990s when President Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council had finally solidified control of the party in the wake of its resounding defeat in the 1994 Congressional elections. Behind the scenes Democratic power brokers were saying "fuck the left" and holding out their greedy hands for corporate donations. In front of the cameras it was all lovey-dovey with the AFL-CIO. Clinton's reelection in 1996, and Gore's near election in 2000, simply convinced Democrat insiders that the DLC road was the right one to take.

Liberals seemed to notice none of this, continuing to see the Democratic Party as their natural political home. Actually, some of them did notice, voting for Ralph Nader in small numbers in '96, 2000, and 2004. But most liberals apparently had absolutely no idea what had happened to "their" party, even going so far as to blame Nader for Gore's loss, in spite of overwhelming, if unpublicized, evidence of GOP vote tampering. Thus, liberals have been in a state of total delusion and denial about American politics for a decade and a half.

That is, we now live in a de facto corporate state, with our elected officials responding far more to the influence of vast concentrations of wealth than they do to the concerns of regular Americans. The Republicans, obviously, are the corporate party of the far right: the Democrats are the corporate party of the right and middle right. And this is the party that nominated Obama to run for President. Of course, he's not a liberal. The Democrats no longer have the ability to nominate an actual liberal.

But nostalgia for the glory days when Democrats were truly left-of-center, for the most part, continues to hold the majority of America's left wing in thrall. All Democratic politicians have to do is make a few vague statements about jobs or abortion or whatnot, and that's good enough for the stupid liberal Democrat. "He's one of us, guys! Let's go knock on some doors!" The Party fully understands how liberals swallow its bullshit good-vibes rhetoric, and has benefited greatly from the deception. Liberals, conversely, continue to be clueless, always ready to line up and bend over.

Sure, they're mad now, but my bet is that they'll simmer down by November, totally ready to campaign and vote for candidates who do not in any way represent their political views. Tea Baggers are stupid because they think Obama is a socialist. Ditto for Democrat liberals.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Joe Negri: From Handyman To Jazz Guitarist

From NPR:

If you or someone you love grew up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, you may remember Joe Negri as Handyman Negri, the affable guy who solved problems in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. But jazz fans know him as a guitar virtuoso. At the age of 84, Negri has just released a new CD, his first in the stripped-down setting that showcases his finger-work.

And

"So I noted that living wasn't easy in New York. The kids had babysitters. Somebody had to take them to the park to play. The whole scene just kind of turned me off. So we packed up, came back to Pittsburgh."

That's when Negri started working in television. He appeared on the Ken Griffin Show, the Buzz and Bill Show and, finally, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood — all shot in Pittsburgh.

"Most people know him as an actor. They don't quite realize what they have here, you know?" says Mike Tomaro, the head of the jazz studies department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where Negri teaches. "They're missing a treasure. Not just a Pittsburgh treasure, but a musical treasure."

And

But Rogers did find ways for Negri to perform on the show.

"He found me a music shop, decided it should be Negri's Music Shop. And that was a wonderful part of the show, I enjoyed that. Because we brought in a lot of good guests, a lot of good musicians."

Including cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Ellis Marsalis and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Actor David Newell, who played Mister McFeely on the show, says Negri introduced thousands of kids to jazz.

Read or listen to the rest here.

So, of course, I love this guy because I actually remember him from Mr. Rogers, and his guitar playing really is top notch, which you can hear if you click through and listen to the report. But I am definitely struck speechless by his career trajectory: he decided life as a professional musician was too tough so he became...a professional actor. And succeeded. I mean, I know life is tough as a professional artist, but as a musician there's more merit involved--you've always got your chops. But acting is far more arbitrary. Skill is less important in the professional world, at least on television, than the vagaries of personality and looks. That is, you have far less control over how you are perceived by the powers that be as an actor than as a musician. And Negri succeeded.

But really, he's a far better guitar player than he is an actor. Don't get me wrong. I really like his Handyman Negri character, but the stuff I heard on the radio this afternoon blew me away. He's got a sound that takes me away like Duke Ellington or Miles Davis in their more dreamy moments, but it's not just the sound: Negri really is a virtuoso, playing his guitar like it was an extension of his mind.

I think I'm going to get his CD.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Rush Limbaugh and William Shatner Debate Health Care

I understand that I'm running the risk here of appearing to be headed toward an all Star Trek all the time format, but, apparently, Shatner's got this new talk show, and he manages to make an extraordinarily good point with The Big Fat Racist Drug Addict.

From Crooks and Liars:

SHATNER: Here’s my premise, and you agree with it or not. If you have money, you are going to get health care. If you don’t have money, it’s more difficult.

LIMBAUGH: If you have money you’re going to get a house on the beach. If you don’t have money, you’re going to live in a bungalow somewhere.

SHATNER: Right, but we’re talking about health care.

LIMBAUGH: What’s the difference?

SHATNER: The difference is we’re talking about health care, not a house or a bungalow.

LIMBAUGH: No. No. You’re assuming that there is some morally superior aspect to health care than there is to a house.

SHATNER: No, I’m not moral at all. I want to keep the subject, for the moment, on the health care thing.

Click here for video.

Set aside, for this post anyway, the fact that lots of specifics make consumer and producer behavior in the field of health care radically different from behavior in, say, the soap or automobile markets, which means that an honest discussion on the topic must necessarily be radically different from most other economic discussions. What I'm interested in is this notion of morality and economics.

Years ago, I met a right-wing economist during the Reagan era at a Rotarian hosted seminar on the ideologically loaded and widely distributed document known as "The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom." That's an entire story in itself, but one of the things that has nagged at me since then is this guy's assertion that the field of economics is not, and cannot be, concerned with any moral questions at all: economists simply describe economic reality, and the moral decisions are left to the politicians.

Of course, such an assertion is obviously false at face value. Declaring oneself to be amoral is, in fact, a moral decision. Indeed, the notion of "amorality" is so riddled with problems as to make the term virtually meaningless. Like it or not, humans are moral creatures, and we do not simply leave the sense of right and wrong at the office door as we head for our desks. I mean, I totally dig economists or journalists or scientists trying to remain as objective as possible in their observations and reporting, but the information they release to the public has moral consequences, and they're total fools if they make themselves believe that they bear no responsibility for that.

Actually, they're immoral fools if they think they have no responsibility for the intellectual work they produce. This side-stepping of moral issues in economics drives me nuts. It allows the economist the smug superiority he needs to make recommendations to corporations and politicians that drive thousands of people out of work, or off farms that have been in the family for generations, or into the desperation of prostitution or murder, or...well, you get the idea. The economist can sit back in his plush office chair, put his feet on his desk, and say "You know, it's good for the economy."

Really? From the perspective of the Indian subsistence farmer who is contemplating suicide because an international corporation has gamed local laws in order to steal his land, it sure does appear to be bad for the economy.

Indeed, closely related to this fictional stance of amorality is the bogus notion of market efficiency. It functions as a sort of backdoor moral excuse: "Yes, such measures will cause temporary disruption of workers' lives, but in the long run, the economy grows, and these people are able to reap an even bigger bounty than they were getting before." Yeah yeah. A rising tide lifts all the boats. So the theory goes. Except that it doesn't. I mean sure, sometimes it does, but when you consider the last thirty years of neoliberal reforms in this country that have caused wages to stagnate and even decrease in inflation-adjusted terms, that have caused great worker insecurity, that have made the concept of the single bread-winner family a thing of the past, that have effectively laid the groundwork for the elimination of the middle class as we understand it, it becomes achingly clear that the wealthy and powerful have perfected their ability to keep all that wonderful tide water to themselves.

That is, when economists talk about market efficiency, they never state for whom the market ought to be efficient. The kind of efficiency that makes the rich get richer while the poor get poorer is all so much Orwellian euphemism.

So yeah. Health care does have "a morally superior aspect" to it relative to other consumer products: people don't die when they can't afford toothpaste to brush their teeth; people do die when they don't have access to health care. And frankly, I think that I, and William Shatner, are necessarily morally superior to Rush Limbaugh for understanding that. But then, that's like saying I'm better than Judas or Hitler. Kind of an exercise in understatement.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THIS IS VERY LIKELY OUR FUTURE

From DailyFinance.com courtesy of Paul Krugman's blog Conscience of a Liberal:

Japan's Economic Stagnation Is Creating a Nation of Lost Youths

What happens to a generation of young people when:

* They are told to work hard and go to college, yet after graduating they find few permanent job opportunities?
* Many of the jobs that are available are part-time, temporary or contract labor?
* These insecure jobs pay one-third of what their fathers earned?
* The low pay makes living at home the only viable option?
* Poor economic conditions persist for 10, 15 and 20 years in a row?

For an answer, turn to Japan. The world's second-largest economy has stagnated in just this fashion for almost 20 years, and the consequences for the "lost generations" that have come of age in the "lost decades" have been dire. In many ways, Japan's social conventions are fraying under the relentless pressure of an economy in seemingly permanent decline.

And

Even more extreme is hikikomori, or "acute social withdrawal," a condition in which the young live-at-home person nearly walls himself off from the world by never leaving his room. Though acute social withdrawal in Japan affect both genders, impossibly high expectations for males from middle- and upper-middle-class families has led many sons, typically the eldest, to refuse to leave home. The trigger for this complete withdrawal from social interaction is often one or more traumatic episodes of social or academic failure. That is, the inability to meet standards of conduct and success that can no longer be met in diminished-opportunity Japan.

The unraveling of Japan's social fabric as a result of eroding economic conditions for young people offers Americans a troubling glimpse of the high costs of long-term economic stagnation.

More here.

So for several years now Krugman has been looking to Japan's recent past as a possible future for the US. In short, when Japan's enormous economic bubble burst back in the early 90s, they responded in much the same way the US establishment appears to be wanting to respond to our economic crisis right now, with budget-cutting austerity measures, and with anti-inflationary measures, even though the real enemy then, as now in the United States, was deflation: as a result, the Rising Sun's economy has been stagnant, sluggish growth alternating with recessions, for nearly two decades.

And it is adversely affecting their culture.

My gut instinct, too, is that something similar will happen here, if our leaders don't pull their heads out of their asses and throw off the neoliberal orthodoxy that makes them ignore economic reality. I mean, it probably won't be as bad as Japan, culturally speaking. Social roles and conventions play a much more absolute role in the island nation than in our gutter mongrel country. If there's one thing at which we Americans excel, it's flouting social convention. But it won't be particularly good, either. This shit is real. I have no idea how we will adapt to a reality where job prospects for most people range from totally shitty to non-existent, but I suspect it'll feel very much like the third world does.

After all, what we're looking at is enormous numbers of Americans who were raised with middle class values and expectations faced with real poverty for the rest of their lives. My personal hope is that our culture positively adapts, abandoning the notion of consumption-as-supreme-value in favor of human relationships, cooperation, and homegrown art and entertainment. In some ways it might not be so bad. On the other hand, most of us will be in poverty, or always on the verge.

One thing's for sure. It won't be very pleasant getting there.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Roi



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

STAR TREK
The Ultimate Computer

From Wikipedia:

"The Ultimate Computer" is a season two episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast on March 8, 1968 and repeated June 28, 1968. It is episode #53, production #53, written by D.C. Fontana, based on a story by Laurence N. Wolf, and directed by John Meredyth Lucas.

Overview: A new computer designed to control the ship causes havoc aboard the Enterprise.

More here.

And watch the episode here.

Notes:

* Interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, theme of technology rendering certain jobs obsolete.

* I've always liked Commodore Wesley, and I don't know why. I mean, he really doesn't do much in this episode, and it's the only one he appears in. Maybe it's nice to see a Star Fleet commodore who hasn't gone space-mad like Commodore Decker did in "The Doomsday Machine." I don't know.



* Damn, Dr. Daystrom is fucking tall.



* It's very cool to see, at the point in history that this one was made, a dignified African-American man portrayed as tragic hero. I mean, he's doing much more than opening hailing frequencies, if you catch my drift.



* Some cool tech in this one, and a very cool shot of the engines.

* The whole tech-rendering-people-obsolete thing is weak from the get-go. Why on earth would 23rd century people who are drowning in technology already be afraid of technological progress?

* Kirk's "red alert" in the back of his head about the M5 tries to expand the above mentioned tech theme into the already established human instinct over Vulcan logic conflict running through the whole series. But it still doesn't go anywhere.

* Yay! Sulu's back from working on The Green Berets.

* M5's turning off non-essential ship's systems is an absolute failure as far as dramatic moments preceding commercial breaks goes. Really, this is more of a function of the weakness of the MacGuffin.

* William Marshall, who plays Daystrom, and later went on to be The King of Cartoons on Pee Wee's Playhouse, is very much cut from the Paul Robeson mold. That is, he's pretty fucking great.

* If I had to be really really fucking disturbed because somebody called me "Captain Dunsel" I'd fail utterly. Leave it to Shatner's artificial acting style to pull off what a psychologically realistic style couldn't.

* Did McCoy call this drink "Finagle's Folly"? They continue to push the Kirk-is-useless theme too much, but I like this Kirk and McCoy scene; it very much hearkens back to a similar scene between Captain Pike and his ship's surgeon back in "The Menagerie." (Part one here, part two here.)

* It's interesting that the M5 chooses to destroy an automated ship before it starts killing people.

* Kirk is positively gleeful in his anger once the M5 finally screws up.

* Fabulous red shirt death.

* Great creepy monologue Daystrom delivers to McCoy.

* Great Kirk and McCoy discussion on the fine line between genius and madness.

* Very cool to see all these starships.

* So...does Commodore Wesley have a bigger captain's chair because he outranks Kirk?

* Very nice touch that the machine that makes people meaningless also kills people.

* Great line, from Daystrom to the M5: "You are great; I am great."

* Daystrom has one of the very best Vulcan neck pinch moments in all of Star Trek.

* It's been a while since we've seen some serious space madness. 'Bout fucking time.

* It's also been a while since we've seen Kirk destroy a computer with logical paradox. Always fun.

* Three stars. Some really good moments, and Daystrom is one of the great Trek guest characters, but its message kind of doesn't make sense, which sabotages much of the story. But definitely still worth watching.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

THE STAR TREK CALENDAR PICTURE OF THE MONTH IS...



...Chekov! And he's screaming!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

The Right-Wing's Racist Freak Out Over the "Ground Zero" Muslim Center

From AlterNet:

In May, news of the project grew more widespread and inflamed anti-Muslim rhetoric from the right (even though there has been a mosque in the neighborhood since the 1980s). Enraged (and now disgraced) Tea Party leader Mark Williams said the site would allow Muslims to worship their "monkey-god." From there, a right-wing freak out was born. "I hope somebody blows it up," said conservative radio talk show host Michael Berry. Rush Limbaugh said that because of the project, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed won't "have an impossible time" getting a "sympathetic jury" if he is tried in New York. The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol writes today that in order to save his presidency, President Obama should say the Islamic center is "a bad idea." Conservative blogger and executive director of "Stop Islamization of America" (SIOA) Pamela Geller said the Islamic center is a "triumphal mosque" on "conquered lands."

More here.

Augh. This is so 2002.

From everything I've read, it appears that this mosque and cultural center is exactly what it appears to be, a mosque and Islamic cultural center, no connections with radical clerics, no ties to Hamas or Hezbollah, no charitable donations going to the Taliban, not even any major criticisms of our fucked up and illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just a mosque and cultural center. So the sole issue here is that the thing is going up near the hallowed Ground Zero, where radical Islamic extremists flew hijacked jet planes into the World Trade Center.

In order to have a problem with that, as the essay goes on to observe, you have to equate all of Islam with the psychotic assholes who blew up the WTC. See the problem here? Obviously, all of Islam did not blow up the WTC. For that matter, all of Islam does not approve of that or any other act of terrorism, just as all of Christianity does not condone bombing abortion clinics. Indeed, most Christians and Muslims refuse to condone terrorism. That's because, for the most part, both of these religions support non-violence and peace.

So what's with the right wing on this? I mean, their boy, Monkey-Face Bush, told us again and again that we're fighting a war against terrorism, not against Islam. I guess they didn't get the memo. Or, rather, the right wing is heavily populated with bigots, racists, and xenophobes who hate Muslims just because they're not white Christians, and even though it's totally irrational, it makes a sort of sense that these angry conservatives see no difference between the 9/11 hijackers and average ordinary people who call the Supreme Being "Allah" instead of "Yahweh."

You know, I'm not particularly fond of Islam, myself--actually, I'm not particularly fond of religion in general. But this is some sick shit. One of the bedrock and most cherished principles of this nation is freedom of worship. I don't have to like Islam to see that such rhetorical vomit threatens that principle. I'm sure none of these people are capable of appreciating the irony that they were all "anti-American" this and "anti-American" that back in the days of shock and awe, and here they are trashing what it means to be an American.

These people are so fucked up.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

How to Dismantle the American Empire Before This Country Goes Under

From AlterNet, an excerpt from Andrew Bacevich's latest book:

Achieving these aims -- it is said -- requires the United States to funnel ever greater sums of money to the Pentagon to develop new means of projecting power, and to hold itself in readiness for new expeditions deemed essential to pacify (or liberate) some dark and troubled quarter of the globe.

At one level, we can with little difficulty calculate the cost of these efforts: The untold billions of dollars added annually to the national debt and the mounting toll of dead and wounded U.S. troops provide one gauge.

At a deeper level, the costs of adhering to the Washington consensus defy measurement: families shattered by loss; veterans bearing the physical or psychological scars of combat; the perpetuation of ponderous bureaucracies subsisting in a climate of secrecy, dissembling, and outright deception; the distortion of national priorities as the military-industrial complex siphons off scarce resources; environmental devastation produced as a by-product of war and the preparation for war; the evisceration of civic culture that results when a small praetorian guard shoulders the burden of waging perpetual war, while the great majority of citizens purport to revere its members, even as they ignore or profit from their service.

More here.

Bacevich is so extraordinarily correct. It's not a question of "support the troops" or "national security." Rather, it is a question of how taking the imperial road, that is, maintaining global military dominance, is affecting us at home. And it's not simply about dollars and deaths; it's also about our distinctive American culture: are we going to be the masters of the world are or we going to be free men?

A former colonel in the US Army, the West Point educated Bacevich is a self-described conservative, but with one major catch. His conservatism isn't in terms of slogans and demagoguery. As an academic, he deeply considers issues before making conclusions. He does not, for instance, support military action simply because we've got soldiers in the fight. He looks at the facts: is this really good for America?

Go read this excerpt, and if you like it, buy the book. I read his last one, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, a few months back, and it was excellent, very clear and concise, quick reading. If you're tired of all my liberal bullshit, check it out. It's what the GOP might sound like if it hadn't years ago descended into sanctimonious folk-malarkey.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Defining Prosperity Down

New Krugman, from the New York Times:

I’m starting to have a sick feeling about prospects for American workers — but not, or not entirely, for the reasons you might think.

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural,” a permanent part of the economic landscape — and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.

And

I’d like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn’t all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.

Get the details here.

I wonder.

Not about where we're headed, Krugman is right on target as far as that's concerned: bad economic theory is taking us into many years of sluggish growth alternating with chronic recessions. Clearly, we've set the controls for the heart of the sun, as it were.

No, what I wonder about is whether our leaders are committing economic suicide because they're heartless assholes who don't care about rank-and-file Americans, or whether it's because our leaders are incapable of questioning the Reaganomics that got us into this mess in the first place. My gut instinct is to believe the latter. I mean, it's impossible to stare into the souls of Congress to divine their true motivations, so all we can really do is speculate.

Krugman has good reasons for believing that Congress and the White House simply don't care. After all, based on what they actually do, the legislation that they pass, and the debates they have, it sure does look like they don't give a fuck. We're experiencing extraordinarily high unemployment, and all they seem to be focusing on is the deficit. Small business are going under day in and day out, but big business gets all the bailouts.

But, you know, I used to buy into Reaganomics, myself, years ago. And it's quite a beautiful and seductive theory. It is essentially supply-side in nature, arguing that the best thing the government can do to grow the economy is to generate policy that favors producers over consumers and workers. The idea is that once producers get really cranked up, their products get cheaper, and more jobs are created, which allows people more money to spend as consumers. In effect, or so the theory goes, the government doesn't have to deal with the demand side at all because supply-side policy takes care of that indirectly.

Like I said, beautiful. If only it worked in the real world.

Because I embraced the supply-side view over a quarter century ago, I've been watching all these years to see how it's working out. And you just can't get away from the fact that since Reaganomics became conventional wisdom in Washington, for Democrats and Republicans alike, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer. The theory says that shouldn't happen. There's supposed to be prosperity for everybody. But there's not. Things have gotten much worse since the Reagan era.

So if Reaganomics is, empirically, an utter failure, why does almost everyone in Washington continue to embrace it? Belief is a curious thing: it doesn't have to have anything to do with what actually happens. Virtually everybody in America, for instance, believes in the strange being known as God, but there is about as much evidence for His existence as there is for the Easter Bunny's existence. No problem. Lack of evidence makes people believe more strongly. Yeah, I know, that makes no sense at all, but, you know, what can you do?

People believe in God because it makes them feel good. People believe in Reaganomics for essentially the same reason. Evidence, reality, scientific studies, none of this makes any difference. I'm not really sure why Reaganomics makes people feel good, but I have a few ideas. Supply-siders pitch the notion as being about freedom, and hard work, and property rights, abstract ideas that are historically near and dear to the American heart. It's probably very much like Stephen Colbert's "truthiness." That is, supply-side economics feels right, feels American, so it must necessarily be right.

And that's where I think our idiot-leaders are coming from. It's not that they don't care about people spending years without a job, even though they legislate policy that ensures such a situation. It's that they honestly believe, in spite of mountains of evidence to the contrary, that their job-destroying agenda is, in fact, a job-creating agenda.

Kind of like medieval doctors who would bleed their patients to death, all the while believing that they were saving them. We really haven't come too far in the last thousand years.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Cop sues city, seeks overtime for BlackBerry use

From the Chicago Sun-Times courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

The city has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit.

Allen was issued a BlackBerry while he was in the gang-investigations unit. "These guys, regardless of rank, are spending in some cases hours on the phone dealing with search-warrant issues and calls from supervisors about cases -- and they're working when it's not their tour of duty," Geiger said.

"We believe we can prove it's a requirement for people who want to work in the gang-investigation unit," he said. "If you tell them you're not going to work outside your work hours and don't want a BlackBerry, you're not going to work in the unit."

More here.

In the thirty years since the beginning of the Reagan era, we've witnessed a steady decline in worker rights coinciding with a steady increase in worker responsibilities--over the same period, wages have generally stagnated, and in some cases even decreased. The reason for all this, of course, is that the Washington consensus, dominated as it is these days by pop neoliberal economic theory, no longer gives a shit about workers. Management, in both public and private sectors, have taken full advantage of this, squeezing their workers as much as they dare, with the comforting knowledge that the federal government will, in all probability, do absolutely nothing to stop them.

So you hear all these flimsy justifications coming down from management. "Well, it's not really work, you know, it's just answering the phone, checking a few emails." Except, of course, it is work. You sure as hell wouldn't be doing it unless keeping your job depended on it. And work, especially hourly work, must receive payment. The English language has a word that well describes unpaid work: slavery. I know, I know, we're all supposed to be team players. We're all supposed to be dedicated to our careers and all that. And employers are so smooth with the Orwellian euphemisms they use to describe off-the-clock work. But fuck that shit. Call it what you want, but working for free makes me your bitch. You get all the benefit and I get nothing.

I really hope this lawsuit succeeds.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Sammy



Be sure to check out Modulator's Friday Ark for more cat blogging pics!

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

STAR TREK
Patterns of Force

From Wikipedia:

"Patterns of Force" is a second season episode of the science fiction television program Star Trek: The Original Series, and was broadcast on February 16, 1968. It is episode #50, production #52, written by John Meredyth Lucas, and directed by Vincent McEveety.

Overview: The crew of the Enterprise visits a planet dominated by a "Naziesque" regime.

More here.

No, not "Naziesque." These are straight up Nazis. Go watch the episode.

Notes:

* "Zeon" equals "Zion." The Nazis of Ekos are trying to wipe out a planet filled with Jews, or, if you prefer, Zeons.



* These Nazis have nukes, which they're plan to use against Zeon for their "Final Solution."



* Major cultural contamination, big time anti-Prime Directive shit. I mean, this Federation historian guy, John Gill, has turned an entire planet into Nazi Germany. A far cry from Captain Picard's continual ethical struggles on the issue twenty years later in Next Generation.

* Less than ten minutes into the episode, Kirk and Spock are going native.



* Kirk says in amazement "The chances of another culture..." This is after they've been to a Mafia gangster planet and a twentieth century Roman planet. You'd think they'd start thinking of parallel Earths as normal by now.

* Kirk: "You're right! He's not one of us!" This is just the first of several extraordinarily funny remarks Kirk makes to try to get the Nazis to think he's one of them.

* It's impossible to be certain, but I've got a good feeling that this episode helped to inspire the infamous K/S stories. I mean, this is just soooooo gay.





* Most of the actors playing Nazis in this one totally suck, which makes them totally perfect.

* "Patterns of Force" has some of the funniest dialogue in all of Star Trek.

* This is another one, along with "Bread and Circuses," fueled by the weird Hollywood hybrid concept that makes Tarantino films so fun, in this case science fiction movie meets WWII movie.

* This is also a Holocaust episode. Who would have thought that genocide could be so amusing?

* Meathead is working for the underground for some reason.



* Engaging mystery drives the plot: what the fuck went wrong here?

* The Nazi war chants are hilarious: "Hail to the Fuhrer!" "Death to Zeon!" "Hail Victory!"



* There's something very postmodern about the documentary film makers ruse.



* "Enig is one of us." Really well executed moment of revelation.



* Melakon's racial analysis of Spock is hysterical. Why do they wait until the episode's almost over to bring this guy out? He's fucking great.





* I love it when they list conquerors, tyrants, and evil dictators who haven't yet occurred in history. Lee Kwan must have been one nasty badass.

* I give this one three stars. Good enough to engage you. It probably should only get two stars, but it's just so damned funny, and how could you not like Kirk and Spock taking on the Nazis?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

HISTORY'S FUNNIEST NAZIS

Okay, yes, the Nazis also committed some of the greatest crimes against humanity in history, and are therefore some of history's greatest monsters. In no way do I want to diminish that. The Nazis were, and are, horrible, evil, murderous people.

But, in addition to being history's greatest monsters, Nazis are also history's biggest clowns. Especially years after World War II. They're so humorless. They wear outlandish clothing. They goose-step. They espouse stupid philosophy. They're like Satanists in that it's really difficult to take them seriously in this day and age. It's like, "You're a Nazi? Really? Seriously? Well, okay. (snicker, snicker)."

Tomorrow, I'm posting my review of the Star Trek Nazi episode, something of an exercise in humor itself. I figured that tonight, I'd make a warmup post featuring history's funniest Nazis.

Here goes.

Colonel Klink, from TV's Hogan's Heroes



Sergeant Schultz, also from Hogan's Heroes



General Burkhalter, again from Hogan's Heroes



...and one more from Hogan's Heroes, Major Hochstetter



Major Toht, from Raiders of the Lost Ark



John Cleese playing Hitler in a Monty Python episode



Franz Liebkind from Mel Brooks' The Producers



Marvel Comics supervillain The Red Skull



California Governor and former film star Arnold Schwarzenegger



Arte Johnson's "very interesting" Nazi guy from TV's Laugh In



Tom Cruise in real life



South Park's Eric Cartman



Dumbass right-wing pundit Ann Coulter



Head of the Illinois Nazi Party from The Blues Brothers



White Supremacist and former state rep for
the community in which I now live, David Duke



The Pope



Doctor Strangelove



There you have it. History's funniest Nazis. Really, the best thing you can do with a Nazi is to point and laugh. They're idiots. Idiots who think they're better than you. And that's pretty funny, isn't it?

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

OBAMA, THE "ANTI-BUSINESS" PRESIDENT

From Paul Krugman's blog:

That’s basically the thrust of Mort Zuckerman’s op-ed accusing Obama of “demonizing” business.

The op-ed contains the usual — false claims that Fannie and Freddie caused the financial crisis, false claims that fear of government policy — as opposed to weak demand — is holding back investment and hiring. But I was struck by this passage:

The predilection to blame business was manifest in one of President Barack Obama’s recent speeches. He was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. Instead he lashed out at “unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restriction on activities that might harm the environment, take advantage of middle-class families, or, as we’ve seen, threaten to bring down the entire financial system.”

This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonisation – widely seen in the business community as a resort to economic populism on the part of Mr Obama to shore up the growing weakness in his political standing – is exactly the wrong approach.

That sounded odd, since Obama is not, in fact, given to random business-bashing.

More here.

Right. Indeed, Obama is business' chosen messiah, the man who the wealthy elite allowed to ascend to the nation's highest office in order to save the private sector from thirty years of neoliberal orgy and excess, a corporate Democrat cut from the same cloth as Bill Clinton, who spoke in liberalese, exuding good vibes, while ramming NAFTA up labor's chronically raped butthole. Obama Care came pre-approved by Big Pharma and the HMOs, a nice window dressing allowing the health care business to go on pretty much as it has in the past, but now without any threat from future legislative assault. And the Wall Street bailout came with very few strings: most of the top players who caused the financial crisis in the first place are still at the top--hell, a lot of them are working directly for Obama in the White House!

You've got to be a real conservative wack-job to even entertain the notion that President Obama is somehow "anti-business." Such an assertion dies immediately of absurdity upon utterance.

But what intrigues me here is the notion itself of being "anti-business." What, exactly, does this mean? Unless you're a communist, who believes that workers should own the means of production, or a socialist, who believes that the government should own all enterprise, you can't really be described as being "anti-business." Contrary to the psychotic ravings of various FOX News personalities, President Obama can in no way be described as a communist or a socialist.

Dig a little deeper, and "anti-business" gets a little weirder.

There are millions of businesses in this country. Some sell lemonade; some sell automobiles. Some employ hundreds of thousands; some consist of a single individual. Some compete against each other, while some just try to get out of the way of the big guys. Consider, for instance, all the fishermen put out of business along the Gulf Coast because BP, a major player in a totally unrelated industry, had an oops. Are you "anti-business" if you rhetorically condemn the oil giant for destroying all these small businesses? Or are you pro-business?

If I understand the term correctly based on usage, it seems that one is "anti-business" if he asserts anything that any business anywhere on the planet doesn't like. That is, it's like being "anti-American" or "anti-Israel." It is essentially a meaningless epithet used to slime a political opponent with whom one disagrees.

It's almost amusing. Slime is all the conservatives have left to play with these days.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

CASE STUDY IN BULLSHIT RIGHT-WING "ARGUMENTATION"

From an American Prospect blog, courtesy of Eschaton:

Defining Lynching Down

My apologies for being in Shirley Sherrod overdrive recently, but this piece from Jeffrey Lord nearly made my eyes pop out of my head. After reviewing the Screws case, Lord concludes that Sherrod lied about Sheriff Claude Screws lynching Bobby Hall because he and his colleagues simply beat him to death rather than using a rope:

It's also possible that she knew the truth and chose to embellish it, changing a brutal and fatal beating to a lynching. Anyone who has lived in the American South (as my family once did) and is familiar with American history knows well the dread behind stories of lynch mobs and the Klan. What difference is there between a savage murder by fist and blackjack -- and by dangling rope? Obviously, in the practical sense, none. But in the heyday -- a very long time -- of the Klan, there were frequent (and failed) attempts to pass federal anti-lynching laws. None to pass federal "anti-black jack" or "anti-fisticuffs" laws.

A lynching is an extrajudicial mob killing. No one who worked to document the practice of lynching in the South limited the definition of the term to solely include those lynchings that occurred using a rope.

More here.

Years ago when I was a high school debater, we employed a tactic known as a "spread." The "spread" is, in essence, an attempt to make so many arguments in your allotted speaking time that the other side can't possibly respond to all of them during their allotted speaking time. It doesn't matter if the arguments are any good, or how easy it is to refute them; all that matters is that you make a billion arguments: if your opponents don't respond to each and every one of them, you probably win the entire debate as a result--not responding to an argument is basically the same thing as conceding the point, whether it's a good point or not.

A few years after I had graduated, I started judging some high school debate rounds here and there. At the beginning of each debate, I would straight up tell the students I was judging, as an attempt to address the unfairness and anti-intellectual spirit of the "spread," that if an argument was totally stupid in the real world, I would accept as reasonable a two word response: "That's stupid." This got some good results. There were fewer arguments made, but, generally, they were good arguments. Debate, when I was judging, was less like a twisted chess match, and more of an exercise in thought and intellectual discourse.

Unfortunately, there are no judges when it comes to public political discourse. I mean, the mainstream news media is ostensibly the judge, but they abdicated that role many years ago. These days, it's the wild west. You can say whatever the fuck you want, and the media just amplifies it without any sort of common sense intervention or analysis. And the right wing takes full advantage of the situation. I mean, sometimes the left does, too. But generally the left is handicapped by the belief that people will respond well to a good argument, and usually enters a debate with that attitude. Most of the time, when met with total, jaw-dropping, right-wing bullshit, the left just stammers. They thought it was a knife fight, but the right brought shit loads of pies for face splatting.

This lynch-means-rope "argument" would be right at home in a high school debate "spread." It's totally stupid. It has no real-world correlation. It appears to be aimed at doing nothing more than forcing people to waste their time responding to it, which ultimately distracts from actual issues, thereby confusing what the overall debate is actually about. Indeed, lots of conservative "arguments" about race are along these lines. That is, there's not much thought behind them; they seem to exist just to fuck up the conversation. And that's bad. It means, for the time being, we're doomed to be mired in rhetorical games as far as discussing race goes.

But what's truly disturbing is that I'm not sure whether the people making these "arguments" actually believe them or not. Back in high school, we knew we were full of shit--we were just employing cheap strategy. But here in real life, it's very startling to contemplate the notion that educated, seemingly intelligent people would loudly proclaim utter gibberish because that's what's in their heads.

This isn't at all what I imagined adult life would be like.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Who Cooked the Planet?

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on Congress' failure to pass anti-global warming legislation:

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

More here.

If you have any doubt in your mind at all that our representatives and senators in Congress no longer act in the best interests of the people of the United States, take a close look at how our leaders have doomed our civilization to certain destruction.

There is no longer any serious debate about the existence of global warming, or that man made carbon emissions are causing it. Really, there hasn't been any serious scientific debate on the subject for many years. Man made global warming is simply a fact. And anybody who goes just a stone's throw outside the circus known as the US news media can easily verify it. Major legislation on the issue, severely limiting carbon emissions, is a no-brainer: this is what must be done in order to salvage what we can of the American way of life, whatever that might mean to you. Nonetheless, Congress appears to be incapable of performing this desperately needed task.

If they were actually working for the people of the United States, their ostensible function, such legislation would have been passed in the late 1990s. Instead, they maintain the status quo that got us into this dire predicament in the first place. That's because they, in reality, represent the will of the gigantic corporations which own and operate the US, and all these corporations are institutionally organized such that events occurring any further in the future than the next quarter are unimportant. Consequently, global warming is unimportant to the corporations, which means that global warming is unimportant to Congress.

It's all over now. Too late to really do anything about it. All we can do is wait.

Here's my advice to everybody under fifty:

Don't have any children; the world they will inherit will be bleak at best. Don't save for retirement because the economy will crash. Consider survivalism. Consider nihilism. Consider hedonism. Do what you love. Don't worry about the future because you already know that the future will be awful and there's nothing you can do about it.

Listen to the Doors.



$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$