CHICKEN

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Obama seeks to block release of abuse photos

President Barack Obama declared Wednesday he would try to block the court-ordered release of photos showing U.S. troops abusing prisoners, abruptly reversing his position out of concern the pictures would "further inflame anti-American opinion" and endanger U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And

The Justice Department immediately filed a notice with the court of its new position on the release, including that it was considering an appeal with the Supreme Court. The government has until June 9 to do so.

Obama said, "I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib."

Still, he said he had made it newly clear: "Any abuse of detainees is unacceptable. It is against our values. It endangers our security. It will not be tolerated."

The effort to keep the photos from becoming public represented for many a sharp reversal from Obama's repeated pledges for open government, and in particular from his promise to be forthcoming with information that courts have ruled should be publicly available.

Click here for the rest.

"Not particularly sensational." I wonder.

Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal, has spoken in interviews about the torture pictures he's seen that weren't released to the US public with the batch that made it out back in 2004. Horrifying pictures. Sodomy pictures. Pictures of teenage boys being raped. Hersh, an old school investigative reporter, a man who compulsively needs to dot his "i's" and cross his "t's", has no reason to lie about such things.

Are these the "not particularly sensational" pictures that would "endanger US forces"? I mean, that's fishy in itself. If the banned pics are "not particularly sensational," of the variety made public five years ago, how on earth could they "endanger US forces"? Everybody's already seen this stuff. People inclined to hate America because it tortures already hate America because it tortures. More photos of naked Iraqi POWs don't reasonably stand to piss off anybody anymore than they already are.

Further, releasing these pics sends out a message that is quite contrary to the images they contain. That is, this is a new president trying to right the wrongs of his successor, trying to come clean, confess our nation's sins, repair the damage. I can't possibly believe another crop of non-sensational abuse pictures would "further inflame anti-American opinion."

Unless, of course, they're photos of hardcore torture and rape. That would inflame the fuck out of everybody. That might conceivably "endanger US forces." It might also put prosecutions of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al on the fast track. I wonder if President Obama is having cold feet about potentially putting a former US president on trial for crimes against humanity. Just like Goering and Eichmann.

Conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, who has in the last couple of years become very disillusioned with the Bush administration he once championed, and others have speculated that Obama's recent torture memo dump is about slowly creating the social circumstances necessary for holding the people who ordered the torture responsible. You know, a leak here, some documents released there, some new pictures over there. Step by step bringing the US public to the inescapable conclusion that justice must be done.

I don't know if I buy such speculation, but if that's actually the case, and these "not particularly sensational" photos are indeed the horrific images to which Hersh refers, Obama might very well have chickened out.

I guess we'll see.

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

STAR TREK
CHARLIE X

From Wikipedia:

"Charlie X" is a first season episode of the original series of Star Trek, first broadcast on September 15, 1966. It was repeated by NBC on June 1, 1967. It is episode #2, production #8. It was written by D.C. Fontana, with the story by Gene Roddenberry, and directed by Lawrence Dobkin.

Overview: The Enterprise picks up an unstable teenage boy with dangerous mental powers.

More here.

Okay, not my favorite. Indeed, when I would watch this episode as a kid, I always had some embarrassment for Charlie's youthful stupidity, the same kind of feeling I got watching virtually every episode of The Brady Bunch, something along the lines of "this kid's making us all look like idiots." To this day, I still kind of just stare at the floor during Charlie's dorkiest moments.

On the other hand, maybe I should give "Charlie X" more credit: it moves me emotionally, and that's something of an artistic accomplishment.

At any rate, despite it tending to make me ashamed to have ever been a kid, there are some high points. Spock plays the Vulcan lyre while Uhura sings. Kirk performs kung fu while shirtless and glistening with sweat. Yeoman Rand is arguably at her hottest in this one. And there is also one of the creepiest moments I've ever seen on television: Charlie uses his psychic powers to render a woman faceless.

If you really want to see the classic sci-fi theme of the boy who got God's power, you're probably better off digging up the old Twilight Zone gem "It's a Good Life." But "Charlie X" is well worth watching, if only to see actor Robert Walker, Jr.'s honest and earnest work playing the title role--three years after the episode was shot, Walker recites the agonizingly ceremonial but great prayer during the commune scene in Easy Rider.

Check it out:



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

THE REPUBLICAN NATURAL ADVANTAGE

From AlterNet:

The GOP Clings to Guns, Gays, God, and "Go-Home"

They are up against the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs, Dick Cheney and other extreme right-wing forces who fear that the nation -- not simply the GOP -- is in danger of losing its national narrative, the myths and legends that have been part of the national psyche and character since its founding.

Arguably, the more conservative wing of the American political spectrum is correct: the old America they cling to no longer exists. And yet, the narrative that the more moderate council longs for -- one that views America as the beacon of the world, as the land of truth, freedom and liberty and justice for all -- is also a myth.

That narrative has always downplayed genocide, land theft and removal, slavery, segregation and legalized discrimination. Nowadays, it downplays border walls, racial profiling and an ever-expanding racialized prison system. The narrative has also downplayed the notion of empire and militarism, instead converting these imperial projects with the notion of a God-given right to "civilize" or dominate the world. This is the idea of Manifest Destiny. It is what drove our recent president, George W. Bush in his war against the Arab and Islamic world; he was on a mission from God. This is why U.S. and international laws were easily ignored or discarded; he was answering to a higher authority.

In this sense, both wings of the Republican Party are similar; both want to promote great American mythologies.

More here.

What's a liberal to do when a conservative uses as support for his pro-war arguments that America is "the greatest country in the world" and that we're simply bringing "freedom" to the nations we invade and occupy? Generally, before launching into an infinite number of possible responses, which are usually good counterarguments, said liberal will give lip service to our "greatest country" status, and concede that "freedom" is a wonderful thing: immediately, before he can even get to the meat of the discussion, our hypothetical liberal has already diluted his rebuttal, from a rhetorical if not substantive perspective.

That is, the liberal may be right in such a debate, but he just doesn't feel right. This is along the lines of Stephen Colbert's notion of "truthiness." I mean, you know, America is not the greatest country in the world. Indeed, there are many things about our nation that are great - for instance, we're definitely the most free society on the planet - but how is it even possible to determine that we're the greatest? Right. We can't possibly determine such a thing; it's entirely subjective. But we've had that notion drilled into our heads since before we were even in kindergarten. Even though it's not true, we believe it in our hearts.

In some ways, there's nothing wrong with this. It's good to have some pride in your culture, in your heritage, in who you are. But when such pride stands in the way of understanding reality, you have an enormous problem. As the proverb goes, pride comes before a fall, and the US has been falling down a lot lately.

Liberals, who tend to question authority and conventional wisdom, understand that America is not the greatest country in the world. But we also tend to feel guilty about embracing that truth. Consequently, we're almost always vulnerable to the "greatest country" rhetorical device. Things are so bad at the moment that American-mythology-as-argument doesn't play so well, but it's only a matter of time before some Reaganesqe "morning in America" figure steps up with the right wording to make such rhetoric once again devastating to common sense liberal positions.

How will liberals deal with this? "Peace is patriotic" failed miserably during the runup to the Iraq invasion: it seems extraordinarily difficult to twist American exceptionalism to meet liberal ends. Likewise, it seems nearly impossible to unravel lifelong mythology indoctrination during a single debate--indeed, even taking such an argumentative slant leaves a liberal open to the harsh "antiAmerican" attack.

Really, the only solution is long term: teach US history differently; show the good and the bad. Hopefully, and eventually, most Americans would end up having a more realistic understanding of what we are and what we're capable of. But there is fierce resistance to teaching real history--there are many who embrace the mythology over the reality, and they will go to great lengths to prevent such a thing.

This is a big problem. How do we reconcile love of country with practical self-analysis? It's not easy to look at yourself in the mirror. But the stakes are high. It's not simply national survival that's on the line. We're talking about the future of the world here.

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

100,000 HITS!

I almost forgot to notice this:



And it only took me six and a half years to get there.

Meanwhile, the big guns like Atrios and Kos get hundreds of thousands of hits every day. But no big deal, right? That's one of the things that's changed for me since the early days: I'm not so worried about becoming a bigtime blogger anymore. I mean, fame would be nice, very nice indeed, but I quickly realized that a desire for lots of people to read my words isn't what keeps me doing this everyday. Rather, it's therapeutic. Instead of getting pissed off at the news all the time with nothing more to do about it than bore my friends with endless ranting like I used to do, now I can rant with a sense that somebody, at least, somewhere, is hearing what I have to say--apolitical and non-artsy friends of mine greatly benefit from this in the non-cyber world, and a few of them who are foolish enough to read my opinions online seem to be getting something out of all this blogging, too.

And, of course, my ego is greatly stroked whenever one of those foolish friends approaches me in my daily life and tells me about something they read here at Real Art.

Beyond all the self-therapy my blogging affords me, I also believe it's made me smarter. Most of what I do here is about formulating arguments. I mean, okay, I post pictures of my cats and my Star Trek calendar and all that, but the vast majority of my Real Art writing is about refining ideas, figuring out what I think about the world and my place in it. It's a hassle at times - last night I only had one drink after work, telling my restaurant comrades that I had to stay sober so I could post on my blog - but it's rewarding overall: I'm much sharper these days in real world discussions about politics, movies, music, religion, you name it, whatever I'm writing about at Real Art.

There's nothing like reading over a post I made a week or two ago and saying to myself, "Yeah, that's right! You go, girl!" I've also found that whatever creative urge has made me waste my life chasing the theater or writing songs has found an outlet in my blogging: I often feel the same sense of satisfaction with my work here that I do in my more traditional artistic endeavors.

Anyway, congratulations to me! I'll celebrate again when I make it to 500,000 hits.

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

WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING IN THE "WAR ON TERROR"?

From the Huffington Post:

Petraeus: al-Qaida not operating in Afghanistan

The chief of the U.S. Central Command says al-Qaida no longer is operating in Afghanistan. But Gen. David Petraeus (peh-TRAY'-uhs) says affiliated organizations still have "enclaves and sanctuaries" in the country.

Petraeus says al-Qaida, which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, has suffered "very significant losses" in recent months in its hide-outs across the rugged, mountainous border in Pakistan.

Click here for video of the CNN interview.

And from the New York Times courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

Shaky Pakistan Is Seen as a Target of Plots by Al Qaeda

As Taliban militants push deeper into Pakistan’s settled areas, foreign operatives of Al Qaeda who had focused on plotting attacks against the West are seizing on the turmoil to sow chaos in Pakistan and strengthen the hand of the militant Islamist groups there, according to American and Pakistani intelligence officials.

And

It remains unlikely that Islamic militants could seize power in Pakistan, given the strength of Pakistan’s military, according to American intelligence analysts. But a senior American intelligence official expressed concern that recent successes by the Taliban in extending territorial gains could foreshadow the creation of “mini-Afghanistans” around Pakistan that would allow militants even more freedom to plot attacks.

American government officials and terrorism experts said that Al Qaeda’s increasing focus on a local strategy was partly born from necessity, as the C.I.A.’s intensifying airstrikes have reduced the group’s ability to hit targets in the West. The United States has conducted 16 drone strikes so far this year, according to American officials, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008.

And

For now, however, Obama administration officials say they believe that the covert airstrikes are the best tool at their disposal to strike at Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, which remains the group’s most important haven, but where large numbers of American combat forces would never be welcome.

More here.

To sum up: Al Qaeda, the Islamic extremist terrorist organization responsible for 9/11, has left Afghanistan and moved into Pakistan, where we can only take potshots at them. Setting aside for the moment the question of why US troops remain in Afghanistan even though their reason for being there in the first place has evaporated, one must marvel at US impotency on the terrorist issue.

That's the real story here. We invaded Afghanistan and disrupted Al Qaeda operations for a time, but this did nothing more than force the terrorist organization to move to an adjacent country in order to regroup. And we can't really touch them in Pakistan. We can't invade: the Pakistanis not only wouldn't like it, but they have nukes, and we're just not going to fuck with that. And the limited attacks we've actually been able to make haven't amounted to much more than aggravating the proverbial hornets' nest.

If Iraq and Afghanistan were unwinnable, then this is worse.

But that's always been the problem with the "War on Terror." We can't win. At least, we can't win militarily. Wars are about defeating armies, but terrorists aren't armies. They're political operatives who use violence to further their ends. And that's a key point totally ignored by the US establishment: Al Qaeda has political and cultural goals.

And some of those goals, like insisting that the West stops treating Islamic peoples as resources to be exploited, are quite reasonable. Until the US power establishment can address, at least, some of these concerns, terrorism will continue to be a very real problem.

Of course, if we want to really get serious about treating the Islamic world in a fair and just way, it means changing, as conservative historian Andrew Bacevich asserts, a great deal of how America does business around the world, which necessarily includes a great deal of how America does business at home. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely. I expect the so-called "long war," or what I like to call "the pointless war," to continue for the foreseeable future.

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

BIG OIL HAS BELIEVED IN GREENHOUSE EFFECT FOR FIFTEEN YEARS

From ScienceBlogs courtesy of the Daily Kos:

Times Exposes Industry's Global Warming Deceit

The New York Times exposes an internal document from the Global Climate Coalition, a group funded by the oil and auto industries, that shows that their own scientists were confirming the reality of human-caused global warming and the effects of greenhouse gasses as early as 15 years ago even while publicly trying to dispute that reality.

The document is from 1995 and it was a "primer" on the various issues being sent around to the auto companies for approval. It essentially admits that global warming is real and human-caused, that many of the counter-arguments are false and that we don't yet have good enough predictive technology to know the full effects, especially in local areas.

More here.

Last nail in the coffin.

Really, that ought to just about do it. When the scientists employed by the most vociferous of global warming deniers to "authenticate" their bogus view don't take the party line, you know it's over. I mean, of course it's not over. People who deny global warming are motivated by money and ideology, rather than reality, and will continue to bog down policy discussion with their bullshit until the severest effects of climate change become manifest, maybe even after that--it is a fair assumption, even, that most of these deniers believe their own lies.

But the fact that oil industry climatologists have long known about global warming ought to make for a handy rhetorical device when shutting up right-wingers who spout nonsense refuting scientific consensus on the issue. And the fact that Big Oil successfully hushed this report up for so many years ought to make all global warming dissenters suspect--we've got hard evidence now that the big guns on the other side of the "debate" tampered with the jury; why should we believe anything you people say?

Like I said, it's not entirely over, but the bullshit's end is in sight. That's a good thing.

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

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Dash and Reine



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

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

Why are frequent churchgoers more likely to support torture?

From CNN via Crooks and Liars:

The poll finds that of more than half of Americans who attend church services at least once a week, 54 percent say the use of torture is often or sometimes justified.

Only 42 percent of people who seldom or never go to church agree…

Evangelical Protestants are the religious group most likely to agree; while people unaffiliated with any religious group are least likely to support torture.

More here, with video.

In one sense, this seems counter intuitive. I mean, church goers follow the philosophy of Jesus, who said "love your enemies" and "let he who is without sin throw the first stone," among other things. Such philosophical maxims seem completely incompatible with torture.

On the other hand, church goers also believe that Hell is right and good, and that all human beings deserve to go to there when they shed their mortal coils--only Jesus worship can alter this fated destiny, and only for certain select individuals at that. And what is Hell but the universe's greatest and most horrific torture chamber? I mentioned this recently on Easter Sunday, but it is well worth repeating: being a Christian necessarily means believing that there is an important and righteous place in the moral order for torture. That is, the flip side to "love thy neighbor" is that God will brutally and eternally torture thy neighbor for you when the time is right.

In short, and in spite of all that Christian love and charity, Christianity is a religion that celebrates torture. When you look at it that way, it is no surprise at all that church goers support torture and people who sleep in on Sundays do not. It also tends to explain the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Catholic pedophilia scandal, and a whole lot more.

Just shoot me if you ever hear I've started going to church again.

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

STAR TREK
THE NAKED TIME

From Wikipedia:

"The Naked Time" is an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series first broadcast September 29, 1966, and repeated on April 27, 1967. It is a first season episode #4, production #7, and was written by John D. F. Black and directed by Marc Daniels. It has a sequel in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episode "The Naked Now".

Overview: A strange affliction infects the crew of the Enterprise, destroying their inhibitions.

More here.

Not only is this one of my favorites, I would easily put it in my top five. I mean, this one's incredible. Spock cries. Sulu runs around shirtless with a rapier. Reilly, a character who appears in only two episodes but became an eternal fan favorite, shuts down the engines while belting Irish drinking songs to the ship over the intercom. Scotty says, "I've got to have thirty minutes" to restart the warp drive as the Enterprise plunges rapidly toward certain destruction.

Seven episodes into the series and they had it completely figured out.

No matter how good the new Star Trek movie ends up being, it will be impossible to top The Naked Time. It's that great.

Check it out:



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

How tax havens helped to create a crisis

From the London Financial Times courtesy of the Huffington Post news wire:

Take hedge funds, for example. The tax authorities in the US and the UK have accepted a lax interpretation of residence and source rules, accepting that these funds are resident and their profits sourced offshore (mostly in the Cayman Islands) – even though they are effectively managed from London and New York. Not only are the funds’ gains treated as realised in Cayman, and hence not taxable, but their distributions are not subject to withholding tax – a great benefit for their investors. The funds’ location in a secrecy jurisdiction facilitates tax avoidance and is an open invitation to evasion.

For multinationals and rich investors the point is the same: returns on financial transactions are ultimately taxed at a low or zero rate, making them far more profitable than genuine business endeavours. This distortion of the tax system has greatly fuelled the excess of liquidity channelled into largely speculative financial transactions. The offshore secrecy system has been a main element of the opacity that has undermined corporate and financial regulation.

More here.

Some years back I told a conservative friend whose brother ran a hedge fund that based its corporate "headquarters" in the Caymans for tax reasons, even though it actually operated out of Houston, that doing so was anti-American. Whether it's legal or not is irrelevant, I told him: the net effect is to evade paying taxes, which are dues that all American citizens and businesses owe for the privilege of living and operating in the relatively safe and economically prosperous environment known as the United States. He stuttered in indignation that I would make such an assertion. To him, maximizing profits for investors is a company's only responsibility, and that's as American as apple pie.

Well, maybe. Okay, probably not.

The point is that companies have no national loyalties. Indeed, they have no loyalties at all, except to themselves. Such disloyalty renders severely problematic the notion of corporation-as-legal-citizen, but the more important conclusion we can make from businesses' sense of self-loyalty is that you can only count on them to do the right thing if it makes a better profit--that means that if doing the wrong thing makes more money, businesses will do it, and that happens literally all the time.

Indeed, the only thing guaranteeing that a business will do the right thing is regulation with teeth. And in a political and cultural landscape such as ours where regulation is always strongly suspected as being anti-business, it's extraordinarily difficult to get business to consistently do the right thing.

Case in point: the buttloads of liquidity, that is, free cash, redistributed to the enormously wealthy, via these legal tax havens, ending up creating global financial instability in the form of popped bubbles. In a sane regulatory and tax environment, such free money would be redirected into the real economy, the side of business dealing with making and selling stuff, which creates jobs and long term economic growth, as opposed to the paper economy, which wheels and deals with cash and speculation, often losing the farm in stupid investments.

Two lessons here. First, there are real consequences beyond simple fairness when you allow the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer: when flush with ridiculous amounts of capital, the rich tend to go to Vegas, rather than invest their booty wisely, as conventional wisdom asserts. Second, when you let capitalists do whatever they want to do, they tend to go crazy or moronic. Sometimes so crazy that they bring the whole house down on themselves and everybody else, which is what's happening right now.

I really do hope the ruling class is paying attention to what's going on out there.

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

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



...Mr. Scott!

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

WEIRD MEXICAN SWINE FLU BLUES
Dire warnings were premature, experts suggest

From the Houston Chronicle:

By the week’s end, an increasing number of experts were questioning whether it was overreaction.

“I don’t see anything to justify this panic,” said Robert Krug, a flu researcher at the University of Texas in Austin. “From all the evidence, this doesn’t look like a particularly lethal virus. People need a little more perspective.”

The perspective involves the seasonal patterns during which flu thrives and dies off, evidence that this virus lacks the kind of killer molecular features seen in some pandemics, cultural factors that could explain Mexico’s fatalities and the stark contrast between the annual U.S. toll from seasonal influenza and this outbreak’s mild severity.

More here.

I've been halfway expecting this.

Don't get me wrong. I think, as the experts quoted in the above linked article assert, that we're long overdue for some sort of nasty and lethal Michael Crichton style global pandemic. I worry about such things when I dwell on them too much. But I'm not worried about this weird Mexican swine flu.

Indeed, I might have even had it.

A while ago, maybe three weeks before the Mexico City epidemic made the news, I came down with what I thought at first was a nasty cold. After a few days of slugging through it, going to work, living my life and all that, I decided, based on the symptoms and how they seemed to be changing every couple of days, that I actually had the flu--colds tend to hit you with all their symptoms at once, while the flu seems to come in waves of different symptoms. But whatever. I've had much worse cases of flu over the years, so I just kept pushing through it. Probably infecting my coworkers, too, not to mention the customers I waited on, but the restaurant industry is traditionally skeptical of its waiters calling in sick, and I need the money, so what the hell. Within a week, I was pretty much over it, and that was that, I thought.

Two weeks after I had declared myself to be well, swine flu hit the headlines.

I may be a hypochondriac but I did not immediately decide that I had been sick with weird Mexican swine flu. It was only after reading about it, casually listening to NPR, watching excited reporters on CNN, that I started to speculate about my recent illness. I mean, everybody around the world was going "SWINE FLU! SWINE FLU! OH MY FUCKING GOD!" But when you examined actual details of the reporting, a story that stood in stark contrast the headlines began to emerge. An interview on Nightline with one of the teenagers in New York who had been infected was telling: the kid was like, "yeah, I felt sick and all, but it didn't really seem to be that big of a deal." Indeed, almost all swine flu cases in the US appear to be relatively mild. Some research doctors quoted on NPR speculated that the disease tends to weaken as it passes from human to human.

Then I heard the money quote, which is also mentioned in the Chronicle story: 35,000 Americans die every year from the flu. Not the dreaded weird Mexican swine flu. Tens of thousands in the US die from average ordinary seasonal influenza every season. The Mexican death toll hasn't even broken two hundred yet.

Add all that to the fact that within seventy two hours of the Mexican outbreak making the news, it was everywhere. Obviously, the dreaded weird Mexican swine flu has been around for a while longer than might seem apparent.

Anyway, back to me. It may very well be a coincidence that I had the flu right before swine flu became a big news story, but having it so late in the flu season is a bit weird--I usually get the flu during the winter, or at least, when it's still cold outside more often than not, early March at the latest. It may also be a coincidence that at my restaurant I have daily contact with Mexican nationals, who are both employees and customers. But you know. I started wondering if I was a part of the story, if lots and lots of people who were sick but thought nothing of it were also a part of the story.

Because I don't really care enough to hassle with a doctor, I'll probably never know for sure. But one thing about which I am becoming increasingly certain is that the Great Weird Mexican Swine Flu Pandemic of 2009 is a bust.

That's probably a good thing.

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

If Torture Prosecutions Go Ahead, Indict Clinton Too

From AlterNet:

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, the architect of the rendition program under Bill Clinton, said what many Democrats know but would rather not hear: that when it comes to sending people to face torture in other countries, the Clinton administration may be as vulnerable to indictment as the Bush administration.

I suggested that perhaps Scheuer ought to be indicted, as the one who designed the program. He insisted that he was only following the orders of the president.

More here, with video of the exchange.

"Only following orders" was not an acceptable defense at Nuremberg.

But having said that, Scheuer makes an incredibly good point. And I say bring it on. Let the chips fall where they may. This has never been about political parties or whether an elected official is on my side or not. It's about law, international treaties, and, most importantly, morality, the very soul of our nation.

Even though I've been critical of President Clinton on countless occasions - it is well understood that our last "liberal" president governed well to the right of Republican Richard Nixon - I have to admit that I've always liked the big lug. He may not be much of a liberal, but he sure does talk the talk well. You know, he "felt my pain" and all. But that doesn't matter. If he was in on the torture, nail him to the wall.

Nail them all to the wall.

If we have any love for our nation and the principles for which it supposedly stands, it's the only way. Anything less is tantamount to sweeping away the ashes of our old republic. We've got to investigate this and take it as far as it goes, even if it means putting people we love on trial.

And we've got to do it now.

Stupid Republicans: all the time they were trying to throw Elvis out of office for his meaningless White House blowjob, they could have impeached him on something real.

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

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie



Sammy



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

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

Why Are Record Numbers of US Soldiers Committing Suicide?

From Democracy Now:

EMMA PROPHET: There was a revealing article here, that I think actually got off of National Public Radio, that the first two months to three months of this year, there were more people that are active duty that committed suicide than there were killed in action. And that’s the first time that that’s ever happened. And it’s happening when they’re overseas, and it’s happening when they come home.

And it is an issue that has been pervasive with all wars. The effects of the trauma that they go through mentally is very profound, and there really isn’t anything set up that is pervasive enough to allow them to recover, that you may go see a counselor if you want to, but there’s no real program.

And

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think the military is dealing with this adequately, overall?

EMMA PROPHET: I’m not really seeing them dealing with it adequately. You have to be proactive. You can’t wait for the guy to go in, because he’s going to be afraid of looking weak. And the whole military—it doesn’t matter what branch you’re in—is to suck it up and go do what you’ve got to do. And that does not go well with dealing with psychological trauma.

Click here to read, watch, or listen to the rest.

Okay, so I disagree with their current mission. But this is bullshit. I mean, it's all bullshit: we've ordered them into psychotic situations for psychotic reasons, so it's no wonder that they're having to deal with psychosis as a result. And the biggest civilian cheerleaders for these anti-Muslim wars have also used the phrase "support the troops" in the loudest and most in-your-face way. "Support the troops" my ass. What they actually mean is "support the wars."

And when our young men and women come home permanently scarred, well, that's just testament to the fact that war is hell. I guess.

Like I said, I am deeply opposed to our dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we owe these people everything. It's not their fault that the civilian leadership has repeatedly abused them. For love of country, they've sacrificed life and limb, and psychological stability. It is an utter disgrace that this rash of suicides continues unabated. Getting an effective treatment program together isn't particularly difficult; it's simply a matter of people in the White House or Congress getting their shit together and issuing some good policy. Military attitudes about psychological intervention, however, are more difficult. But this is a cultural issue, and like I keep asserting in my Quis Custodiet posts about the police, organizational cultures can and do change all the time--it's really only a matter of getting the top brass on board and pushing it hard; ultimately, it's a command issue.

But right now, nothing appears to be happening on either front. What the fuck is up with that?

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

STAR TREK
THE MAN TRAP

From Wikipedia:

"The Man Trap" is a first season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. It originally aired on Thursday, September 8, 1966, and was the first episode to be shown on NBC. It is episode #1, production #6, and was written by George Clayton Johnson, and directed by Marc Daniels.

Although it was first aired, it was not the first produced (the pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and several regular episodes had been produced before it). The current official timeline considers "Where No Man Has Gone Before" to be set first.

More here.

The so-called "salt vampire episode." I don't think I'd ever be tempted to place this one on my top ten list. It suffers from the first season irregularities the show had while figuring itself out, making it feel a lot less like Trek than some random scifi offering from the era, but it stands well on its own. That is, it's a good story, with a good alien monster, and good bizarre spaceman deaths. Indeed, the Shatner pain-face displayed when the alien begins absorbing his bodily salt is one of the best of the series. That, in itself, makes "The Man Trap" worth watching.



BONUS!

Read a New York Times story on the new Star Trek movie here.

Read a Daily Kos blogger's ruminations on loving Star Trek here.

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

RAT ABANDONS SHIP

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Specter's switch puts Dems near filibuster mark

Veteran Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania switched parties Tuesday with a suddenness that seemed to stun the Senate, a moderate's defection that pushed Democrats to within a seat of a 60-vote filibuster-resistant majority with President Barack Obama's key legislative priorities on the horizon.

Specter, 79 and seeking a sixth term in 2010, conceded bluntly that his chances of winning a Pennsylvania Republican primary next year were bleak in a party grown increasingly conservative. But he cast his decision as one of principle, rather than fueled by political ambition as spurned GOP leaders alleged.

"I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy and more in line with the philosophy of the Democratic Party," he said at a news conference. He added, "I am not prepared to have my 29 year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate."

And

After nearly six full terms in the Senate, Specter is one of a handful of moderate Republicans left, a politician of remarkable resilience who has maneuvered successfully to protect his seat at home and his seniority rights in Congress.

More here.

And from the Daily Kos:

Specter's play for political survival

This move is about political survival, and nothing more. Specter's overriding concern is staying in the Senate, and he'll bend whatever conviction is necessary to make that happen. And since it was clear he wasn't going to survive a primary challenge, well, he did what he needed to do. I wouldn't be surprised, if the Dems pick up a good primary challenger to Specter, for the incumbent to suddenly re-find religion on EFCA. It's not as if Specter believes in anything beyond his title and choice parking spot near the Capitol.

More here.

And over at Eschaton, uber blogger Atrios, who lives in Pennsylvania, issues these warnings:

I've lived under the wanktitude of Specter long enough to know that he rarely actually does anything positive. As Harry Reid said to a small group of bloggers last year in Denver, (quote from memory) "Arlen Specter's with us except when we need him."

And

I hope this works out better than I expect, but 60 nominal Ds doesn't equal 60 votes.

More here and here.

Yeah, this is always exciting whenever it happens, from whichever partisan perspective you have--it's bad exciting when they leave your party, and good exciting when they leave their party. So this is fun news, one way or the other. Like taking a deck of cards and throwing it up in the air to see how it all works out. I'm like, "oooh neat!"

But from my personal perspective, which isn't so much partisan as it is ideological, this doesn't change the game too terribly much at all. As Atrios implies, Specter probably won't vote too terribly differently from how he was voting as a Republican: indeed, as Kos observes, the Pennsylvania Senator's traditionally conservative distaste for organized labor, expressed most recently in his opposition to the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act, is staying the same despite his party switch; it's reasonable to assume that the only significant difference will be the letter next to his name when he's identifed in news stories.

Indeed, even though this story is being framed in terms of how far the Republicans have moved to the right, which is true enough at face value, my take is that Specter's switch is much better evidence of how far the Democrats have moved away from the left. He's an obvious conservative, but he's fitting right in with the so-called "liberal" party, and they're pleased as punch to have him!

When you get right down to it, after a thirty year hard-hitting political war, the conservatives have won. The political establishment, which includes both major parties, the Washington bureaucracy, and the corporate news media, is, and has been for many years, conservative. The GOP, having completed its life's work, is now irrelevant, consisting of only the most dogmatic political warriors. But the war is over, and like Japanese soldiers hiding out in caves, itching to fight, for decades after they had been defeated, Republican warriors amble on in confusion. Real conservative politics, and real world relevancy, now reside only in the Democratic Party, and smarter Republicans are beginning to realize this.

We are not in a new "liberal" era. We are simply watching the same old conservative era stabilize itself. I expect more GOP defections in the future.

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

GOT THE WEIRD MEXICAN SWINE FLU BLUES?

This ought to mellow you out:



It seems like only yesterday I was doing something along these lines for the weird Asian bird flu. Tempus fugit, eh?

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

Yes, National Review, We Did Execute Japanese for Waterboarding

Former Clinton administration advisor and fellow Longhorn Paul Begala on one of the many points in the ongoing torture debate:

Sen. McCain was right and the National Review Online is wrong. Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times' truth-testing project (which this week was awarded a Pulitzer Prize), scrutinized Sen. McCain's statement and found it to be true. Here's the money quote from Politifact:

"McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as 'water cure,' 'water torture' and 'waterboarding,' according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning." Politifact went on to report, "A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps."

More here.

Okay, this doesn't particularly affect the torture debate one way or the other. After all, Americans used to torture their slaves, just as the Japanese tortured their prisoners of war, and then, after slavery was abolished, Americans tortured former slaves and their descendants. I mean, even after we executed Japanese torturers for war crimes, "good" white Americans were still lynching African-Americans in the South. Like all American generations, the so-called "Greatest" was both good and bad, and you don't win the torture argument simply because you appear to be on their side.

But still. It has long been understood by Americans, including General George Washington before there was even such a thing as the United States, that torturing prisoners of war is a shameful disgrace. We Americans have not always behaved according to our values, but, at least, we've always known what those values are--in the war crimes trials after WWII, we even put our money where our metaphoric mouth is, punishing torturers in both Germany and Japan. Until the post 9/11 era, we've never proclaimed to the world that torture is right and good.

How is it possible that when the Germans and Japanese tortured it was wrong, but when we torture, it's right? Obvious answer: it's not possible. As Noam Chomsky often observes, it is a simple moral truism that we should hold ourselves to the same standards to which we hold others. Anything less than that is necessarily immoral.

And we are in grave danger of becoming an officially immoral nation.

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

Reclaiming America’s Soul

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman states the obvious:

We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

And

That said, there are a lot of people in Washington who weren’t allied with the torturers but would nonetheless rather not revisit what happened in the Bush years.

Some of them probably just don’t want an ugly scene; my guess is that the president, who clearly prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is in that group. But the ugliness is already there, and pretending it isn’t won’t make it go away.

Others, I suspect, would rather not revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

For the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

More here.

So it appears that the recent release of memos concerning "enhanced interrogation techniques" has spawned the torture debate that the mainstream news media should have been having back in 2004 when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. In its finer moments, the discussion has gotten lively, but for the most part, it's been lukewarm, with corporate journalists continuing to give the benefit of the doubt to torture supporters, granting legitimacy to points of view that have none. No surprise there, but this better-late-than-never exercise in the marketplace of ideas underscores the rhinoceros under the coffee table: there can be no debate about torture.

Okay, I'll allow some wiggle room for the classic ticking timebomb scenario in which fictional figures like Jack Bauer tend to find themselves time and again. But in the real world, such situations are exceedingly rare, and have very little to do with the kind of wholesale human rights violations practiced as official American policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay. What we're talking about is long running, chronic, systemic torture. Time bombs don't tick for months and years.

No, the stark reality is that torture is deeply immoral, perhaps worse than cold blooded murder. People who torture are evil, and any nation that knowingly and willingly practices torture is also evil. There is no "debate" about this. It doesn't matter whether torture is "effective." Torture is wrong. Wrong. In the unspoken margins surrounding this debate is the real discussion: should America become evil in order to fight evil? Nobody comes out and says it in quite this way, but that's what it's all about, to be evil or not to be evil.

Obviously, I support America being good. Anybody who does not is necessarily a supporter of evil and wants to drag our nation toward siding with the denizens of Hell. Anybody who does not speak out against torture is, through their silence, enabling this slide into Hell, and is arguably just as guilty as the torturers themselves. This includes Democrats, journalists, average ordinary citizens, and some close friends and family of mine. I am saddened to judge my loved ones in this way, but this issue is just about as black and white as any we've ever faced. Torture is evil. We cannot support it.

Allowing the guilty to go free is supporting torture. We lose our national soul if we don't bring these people to justice. We must act quickly.

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

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Dash



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

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

QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From Comcast news courtesy of AlterNet:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Two FBI workers are accused of using surveillance equipment to spy on teenage girls as they undressed and tried on prom gowns at a charity event at a West Virginia mall.

The FBI employees have been charged with conspiracy and committing criminal invasion of privacy. They were working in an FBI satellite control room at the mall when they positioned a camera on temporary changing rooms and zoomed in for at least 90 minutes on girls dressing for the Cinderella Project fashion show, Marion County Prosecutor Pat Wilson said Monday.

And

The Cinderella Project at the Middletown Mall in the north-central West Virginia town of Fairmont drew hundreds of girls from 10 high schools in five counties. Organizer Cynthia Woodyard said volunteers, donors and participants are angry.

"I can't even begin to put words around what I consider an unspeakable act, the misuse of surveillance by a branch of our government in a place we felt so secure," she said. "Never in a million years would we have thought something like this would happen. We're in shock."

More here.

So last week some Republican tea-baggers came into the restaurant where I work for a quick bite after their protest--the local demonstration site was only about a block away. They even brought their signs: one of which proclaimed "Love your country; distrust your government."

"Now that's a statement this liberal can agree with," I thought to myself. I mean, I agree for different reasons, of course, but I certainly agree. And we should never forget that police are the government. They are not to be trusted. They represent the government's interests, and oftentimes their own, but never the interests of the citizens they ostensibly protect. Okay, sometimes government interests and citizens' interests overlap, but not enough to make cops above suspicion. We really ought to think of them as the armed security agents of the state, rather than your friendly neighborhood policemen.

Anyway, while Ms. Woodyard's anger is well justified, her shock and surprise are not. From rape to graft to brutality to various forms of corruption, cops do this shit all the time. Just do a Google search for "police corruption" or "police brutality" and you'll get tons of recent hits. This literally happens every day of the year. And as for "the misuse of surveillance" she decries, it's almost as though Woodyard hasn't been reading the paper for the last eight years: since 9/11 we've been living in a surveillance state!

Wake up and smell the coffee, woman. This isn't the nation you've been led to believe it is.

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

STAR TREK
THE ENEMY WITHIN

From Wikipedia:

"The Enemy Within" is an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, and was broadcast on 6 October 1966. It is a first season episode #5, production #5, and was written by Richard Matheson and directed by Leo Penn.

Overview: A transporter mishap divides Captain Kirk into two versions of himself, one good and one evil, but neither is able to function separately for long.

More here.

Okay, this is definitely one of my favorites. Totally a Captain Kirk showcase. I mean, it's always a showcase when you have good Kirk versus evil Kirk, which happens twice more, in the second and third seasons, but this is the first time they did it, and it's quite a romp. Lots of Kirk pain-faces, lots of screaming and pumped up over-the-top acting for which Shatner has been lampooned repeatedly for many years. I mean, this one's fucking fantastic. And it ought to be: the teleplay was written by science fiction great Richard Matheson, who wrote several classic Twilight Zone episodes, the book I Am Legend, which has been turned into three movies including the Charlton Heston must-see The Omega Man, and the book Bid Time Return on which they based the wonderful scifi romance film Somewhere in Time starring Christophers Reeve and Plummer, and Jane Seymour. But it's not just the writing and Shatner's acting that's so notable. This is the first episode to really feel like Star Trek would eventually feel for the rest of the series. Good pacing, clear and unforced character relationships, nothing weird or out of place. This is easily one of the best the show had to offer.

You'll love it. And you'll love Sulu's space dog, too.



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

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Past Use

From the New York Times:

Agency officials, led by Mr. Tenet, sought interrogation advice from other countries. And, fatefully, they contacted the military unit that runs the SERE training program, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which gives American pilots, special operations troops and others a sample of the brutal interrogation methods they might face as prisoners of war. Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed.

And

Overwhelmed with reports of potential threats and anguished that the agency had failed to stop the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet and his top aides did not probe deeply into the prescription Dr. Mitchell so confidently presented: using the SERE tactics on Qaeda prisoners.

A little research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found that Chinese Communist interrogators had produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister “brainwashing” but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.

“The Communists do not look upon these assaults as ‘torture,’ ” one 1956 study concluded. “But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.”

Worse, the study found that under such abusive treatment, a prisoner became “malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate.”

More here.

Okay, to a great extent, while quite interesting, this is all beside the point: it doesn't matter whether torture is "effective" or not; torture is immoral, something which, in theory, greatly differentiates us from terrorists. Having said that, this kind of incompetence is utterly par for the course.

Not long after the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the US press, at least one lefty writer observed that the kind of torture being used there and at Gitmo greatly resembled what the Chinese and North Koreans were doing back in the 50s to extract the above mentioned "false confessions." So it's been known, if not verified, for half a decade that the US has been using an "interrogation technique" purposely designed to elicit incorrect information. The only mystery has been how, exactly, such a strange and counterproductive program came to pass.

Now we know. Apparently, the whole attitude inside the White House was "we gotta torture; we gotta torture; who's got some torture for us?" In this atmosphere of panic-for-torture, it was easy for the first loud voice available to step up and command the discussion. Unfortunately, for the "grownups" of the Cheney administration, that voice turned out to be a whack-job psychologist who had been training US servicemen to resist Cold War style coercion. So we immediately went about using a torture technique absolutely guaranteed to get its victims to tell us what they thought we wanted to hear, rather than the truth.

I can't wait for the release of the memos Cheney is demanding that will show us all how his brutal torture regime "worked." My bet is that a lot of these guys confessed to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby and masterminding the Lufthansa heist. But I guess we'll see.

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

"Talk Like Shakespeare Day" Declared For Thursday In Chicago

From the AP via the Huffington Post news wire:

In honor of William Shakespeare's upcoming birthday, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has proclaimed "Talk Like Shakespeare Day" in the city.

A bit more here.

(clears throat)

This New World Mayor's good proclamation seems
A wondrous way to celebrate our love
Of language, stories, universal themes,
The kick-ass high brow shit that makes hearts move.

But how does one launch simply into verse?
Such complicated lines of iambs packed
With soul, with fire, with thoughts and moods diverse
Are better memorized for one to act.

Indeed, from time to time my privilege
To speak his speech so tripp'ly off the tongue,
To feel like God, or, like a bird, to fledge
Makes plain: my words and rhymes are so much dung.

No, there is one, and only one, Great Bard.
Besides, to rip him off is fucking hard.


Playing Shylock in Merchant of Venice back when I was at LSU.

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

420

From the New York Times:

Not-So-Secret Holiday Hints at Change for Marijuana Advocates

They will not be the only ones partaking: April 20 has long been an unofficial day of celebration for marijuana fans, an occasion for campus smoke-outs, concerts and cannabis festivals. But some advocates of legal marijuana say this year’s “high holiday” carries extra significance as they sense increasing momentum toward acceptance of the drug, either as medicine or entertainment.

“It is the biggest moment yet,” said Ethan Nadelmann, the founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Washington, who cited several national polls showing growing support for legalization. “There’s a sense that the notion of legalizing marijuana is starting to cross the fringes into mainstream debate.”

For Mr. Nadelmann and others like him, the signs of change are everywhere, from the nation’s statehouses — where more than a dozen legislatures have taken up measures to allow some medical use of marijuana or some easing of penalties for recreational use — to its swimming pools, where an admission of marijuana use by the Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps was largely forgiven with a shrug.

Long stigmatized as political poison, the marijuana movement has found new allies in prominent politicians, including Representatives Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, who co-wrote a bill last year to decrease federal penalties for possession and to give medical users new protections.

The bill failed, but with the recession prompting bulging budget deficits, some legislators in California and Massachusetts have gone further, suggesting that the drug could be legalized and taxed, a concept that has intrigued even such ideologically opposed pundits as Glenn Beck of Fox News and Jack Cafferty of CNN.

More here.

Because I am no longer quite the dope fiend I was back in my college days, this issue is no longer quite as personal to me as it once was. I mean, when I was teaching high school I had to have my students explain to me what "420" was all about. I was like, "It's a pot smokers' holiday? Pot smokers have a holiday now? Weird." Strangely, none of my kids were able to tell me how the whole thing started - the above linked Times story asserts that the idea behind "420" began in the early 70s out in California when some stoners made a point of lighting up every day precisely at 4:20 p.m. - but it is now mind blowingly clear that the marijuana culture is big time, and no longer dependent on baby boomer nostalgia for the hippie days. The stoner way is now its own separate entity.

And, of course, all these people have a good point. What does it matter if Americans get high? Sure sure, there are probably some health risks that come from smoking it, although there has never been any scientific data establishing this in the way it has been done for tobacco. But compared to alcohol, America's most popular recreational drug, marijuana is candy. Pot's illegal status has always been an absurdity, especially when you throw cigs and booze into the equation. By and large, pot prohibition is a strange byproduct of some of the odder bywaters of American political culture. It's common knowledge that "just say no" is a political winner, and the law and order crowd always easily chops the legs off any opponent who dares side with the stoners. But in recent years it's become more complicated. The anti-drug establishment is a booming industry. Politicians get elected by being anti-drug. Police departments get more funding by being anti-drug. The schools, too, and let's not forget the prisons. Boot camps and rehabs have sprung up all over the place promising parents and judges that they have the cure for marijuana "addiction." I mean, people are getting rich off marijuana's illegal status.

It is no wonder that ganja remains contraband. Too many powerful people would lose too much if pot were legalized. But this Times article suggests that it all may have reached some sort of breaking point. I don't know. I'll believe it when I see it.

Anyway, happy 420. Here's some Noam Chomsky audio, via YouTube, played over some amusing pot oriented pictures, tracing the connection between pot prohibition and class warfare:



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

HEY! MATT TAIBBI HAS A BLOG!

I had no idea that my favorite Rolling Stone writer's got his own blog. Guess I'll be checking it out pretty regularly now. Anyway, from Taibblog, a nice little rant on the continuing saga of the right-wing descent into irrationality and insanity:

The peasant mentality lives on in America

After all, the reason the winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other. That’s why even people like Beck’s audience, who I’d wager are mostly lower-income people, can’t imagine themselves protesting against the Wall Street barons who in actuality are the ones who fucked them over.

And

But actual rich people can’t ever be the target. It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

More here.

Taibbi is riffing on an observation liberals started making at some point in the 1990s: most Republican voters are not super wealthy, but consistently support policies and views greatly favoring the super wealthy at their own expense. Many liberal brains have exploded while trying to figure out how this is possible, which makes sense because this dynamic appears to be utterly irrational at first glance. My take is that rank and file Republican behavior has little to do with rationality but everything to do with tribalism. That is, working and middle class Republicans, almost always white, see themselves as being the same kind of people as the wealthy elites who fuck them over as quickly and easily as they fuck over other Americans. Consequently, getting a big tax cut, which most Americans just received from Obama's stimulus bill, becomes some sort of tax injustice because their white brothers who make more than $250k are getting a tax hike. Irrational, yes, but it's also tribal. Don't fuck with the tribe.

At any rate, Taibbi's got a really nice explanation of how this dynamic functions, if not an explanation as to why: Republicans, those without any real power or wealth, are groveling peasants. Pathetic in their authority worship. As sniveling as that tattle-tale kid in fifth grade who you gave a swirlie to because he fucking deserved it.

This is why I love Matt Taibbi: he takes old school liberal observations and gives them the fangs they need.

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

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Sammy



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

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