STAR TREK PROGRAM NOTE

Unfortunately, I'm delaying my coverage of the episode "Return to Tomorrow" because my screencap source has its gallery down for maintenance or upgrading or somesuch. I mean, I could just do the review, but I have so much fun finding the right pictures. After all, I do these Trek posts more for my own gratification than anything else. And the pictures are extraordinarily gratifying. Especially for "Return to Tomorrow" with lots of Spock smiles and Kirk pain-faces as well as the very beautiful guest star Diana Muldaur.

Hopefully TrekCore will have its shit together by next week and we can get on with some deep space fun.

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Recovery effort falls vastly short of BP's promises

From the Washington Post courtesy of Eschaton:

In the 77 days since oil from the ruptured Deepwater Horizon began to gush into the Gulf of Mexico, BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day.

The disparity between what BP promised in its March 24 filing with federal regulators and the amount of oil recovered since the April 20 explosion underscores what some officials and environmental groups call a misleading numbers game that has led to widespread confusion about the extent of the spill and the progress of the recovery.

"It's clear they overreached," said John F. Young Jr., council chairman in Louisiana's Jefferson Parish. "I think the federal government should have at the very least picked up a phone and started asking some questions and challenged them about the accuracy of that number and tested the veracity of that claim."

And

Meanwhile, BP also kept revising its estimate of the amount of oil leaking into the gulf. In the early days after the spill, BP and federal officials placed the daily flow rate from the ruptured rig at 1,000 barrels a day, and then raised it to 5,000 barrels a day. In late May, a group of scientists charged by the government with estimating the flow said the rate was 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day. And in June, the official estimated rate jumped to 35,000 to 60,000 barrels a day.

Because of these changing numbers and wide ranges, the amount of uncollected oil might be as low as 1.1 million barrels or as high as 4 million barrels.

Earthjustice, which has joined with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups to sue the federal government over BP's response plan, warns that because these estimates continue to climb, the spillage numbers could go higher.

Earthjustice also says spill damage is being obscured by misleading numbers.

More here.

Full disclosure: I live in Jefferson Parish, so Young, as council chairman, represents me. And I fully agree with him, which probably has very little to do with the fact that I live in his parish, and probably has much more to do with the fact that I'm extraordinarily aware that Washington has for many years been seized by a strange and solemn deference toward corporations, one that trusts them to do what's best for America, indeed, one that believes that what corporations do is, by definition, always best for America.

It is no surprise at all that BP's figures for Gulf catastrophe were completely unchallenged by the federal government. After all, what corporations do is what's best for America. Why would anyone challenge them?

The reality is that corporations do what's best for themselves, which may or may not be good for the country, depending on the circumstances. Currently, BP is in major CYA mode, which is why they're lying right to our faces. This may very well end up being a good strategy for the oil giant: by the time thousands of liability lawsuits make it to court, what BP knew, and when they knew it, will be a major point of contention--"no one could have possibly expected it to be this bad..." Unfortunately, what's good for the corporation, this time, is most decidedly not what's good for America.

Like the environmentalist organization says in the excerpt above, such lies make it difficult to know the extent of environmental damage. If we don't know how bad it is, it becomes that much more difficult to fix. That's why Obama needs to completely take over. Just kick BP out. I mean, retain them as consultants and whatnot, and subpoena all relevant documents, but it is utterly obvious at this point that they have an agenda that runs counter to the nation's. BP can no longer have any say in this matter.

Does the President have the balls to oppose the Washington pro-corporate consensus? Is he even inclined to do so?

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



...Mr. Spock!

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GOVERNMENT=CORPORATIONS=GOVERNMENT=CORPORATIONS

From Glenn Greenwald:

The BP/Government police state

It's been documented for months now that BP and government officials have been acting in unison to block media coverage of the area; Newsweek reported this in late May:

As BP makes its latest attempt to plug its gushing oil well, news photographers are complaining that their efforts to document the slow-motion disaster in the Gulf of Mexico are being thwarted by local and federal officials -- working with BP -- who are blocking access to the sites where the effects of the spill are most visible. More than a month into the disaster, a host of anecdotal evidence is emerging from reporters, photographers, and TV crews in which BP and Coast Guard officials explicitly target members of the media, restricting and denying them access to oil-covered beaches, staging areas for clean-up efforts, and even flyovers.

The very idea that government officials are acting as agents of BP (of all companies) in what clearly seem to be unconstitutional acts to intimidate and impede the media is infuriating.

More here.

I keep saying that I can't tell the difference between Big Oil and the government. To some extent, of course, that's metaphor--obviously the government and the oil companies are distinct entities. What I mean is that the oil companies, through both campaign contributions, and the utter lock they have on the American imagination in terms of the omnipresent role oil plays in our economy, have vast influence over the government, at all levels, with elected and appointed officials alike.

In the case of BP, however, it's really starting to look like there is literally no difference between Big Oil and government. The excerpt talks about the Coast Guard, but the blog post from which it is taken also reports how local and state police in Louisiana seem to be working directly for BP, harassing reporters and forcing them out of areas that are ostensibly open to the public. The post also mentions how a reporter covering a BP toxic emission release in Texas City a couple of weeks before the spill pretty much encountered the same thing, local cops seemingly on the BP payroll.

This is, to me, something entirely new in America's slow evolution from democracy to corporate state. I mean, there's literary precedent, of course, in science fiction films like the Alien series, or the original Rollerball film. But this blending of corporate authority with civic enforcement is, to my knowledge, unprecedented in real life.

Clearly, this arrangement will most likely end with the spill crisis, but it's got me wondering how much time we have before corporate forces determine that they no longer need the government, and decide to run everything directly. I mean, this is the trajectory we're on, and I don't see anything on the horizon standing in its way. Certainly not the Democrats, definitely not the Republicans.

And none of this even addresses how fucked it is that government is teaming up with private business to censor information that the public desperately needs to know in order to make important decisions about running the country. Almost as if they believe that the public has no business running the country.

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Fareed Zakaria Criticizes 'Disproportionate' Afghanistan War On CNN

From the Huffington Post news wire:

Fareed Zakaria criticized the Afghanistan war in unusually harsh terms on his CNN program Sunday, saying that "the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem."

His comments followed CIA director Leon Panetta's admission last week that the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan may be down to just 50 to 100 members, or even fewer.

"If Al Qaeda is down to 100 men there at the most," Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war?"

More here, with video.

Okay, this is actually pretty good news. CNN is a bedrock of corporate journalism: that this was allowed to air is nothing short of a signal that there are now cracks in the establishment consensus on the ten year old US policy of perpetual war. I mean, don't get me wrong. This is one news media personality on one cable news channel. But it was the sight of Walter Cronkite condemning the Vietnam War that started the ball rolling for LBJ's decision to not seek reelection in 1968. As fucked up as they are, the corporate news media matter. If they really are starting to drift in this direction, it can only be with the express permission of their corporate bosses, the people who really own and run the country. And if that's the case, it's only a matter of time before we're out of Afghanistan.

It is interesting to note that Zakaria's criticism of the Afghanistan war is only in terms of monetary expense and ineffectiveness in dealing with Al Qaeda. He does not characterize the entire notion of waging war on Muslim populations as counterproductive, doesn't point out how doing so simply serves to recruit more terrorists. He doesn't talk about US support for Israel, no matter what atrocities it commits. He doesn't talk about oil imperialism. He doesn't mention the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. What he does is leave open the option for this kind of Bush era warfare as long at it is cost effective--only this war, being fought in this way, is a bad idea.

Of course, that's no surprise. Zakaria is, after all, a corporate mouthpiece, and his stated views in this capacity must necessarily reflect the corporate point of view, or, at least, the point of view of some of the players within the corporate oligarchy.

But, for now, I'm calling this a nice development.

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The Declaration Of Independence, Read Aloud

From NPR's Morning Edition:

Twenty-two years ago, Morning Edition launched what has become an Independence Day tradition: hosts, reporters, newscasters and commentators reading the Declaration of Independence.

It was 234 years ago this Sunday that church bells rang out over Philadelphia, as the Continental Congress adopted Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Listen to it read by professionals here.

Okay, I have to admit that this is pretty cool.

I listened to it at least twice yesterday, and, while having such good speakers "speak the speech," as it were, is very nice indeed, I was reminded of how pure a statement of American principles the Declaration is, especially when compared to the messy compromises and counterbalances of the Constitution. That is, the Constitution is a document legally mandating how the country should function from day to day: the Declaration of Independence is a document of American identity.

It is also worth noting that the men who signed it took their lives in their own hands by legally declaring themselves to be committing treason against the throne. They, like all good Americans, were willing to die for their principles.

Happy Independence Day! The Wikipedia article on the Declaration, which includes its full text, can be found here. Go check it out while you listen to the reading.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Frankie and Sammy



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

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STAR TREK
By Any Other Name

From Wikipedia:

"By Any Other Name" is a second season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, first broadcast February 23, 1968 and repeated May 31, 1968. It is episode #51, production #50, written by D.C. Fontana and Jerome Bixby, and directed by Marc Daniels. The title is taken from a line in Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet says, "...that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet".

Overview: Beings from another galaxy steal the Enterprise in an attempt to return home.

More here.

No awards for artistic excellence, nor for brilliant acting, nor for special effects, no new ground broken, nothing to really turn you on to Star Trek if you're not already a fan or into science fiction more generally. But if you do like Star Trek, check this one out. It's very solid, a good story, with lots of nice little touches.

It's all very standard. Technologically advanced aliens from another galaxy, scouts for a potential intergalactic invasion to take place centuries in the future, take human form in order to hijack the Enterprise as a replacement for their own wrecked ship. In spite of their superior technology and intellect, these people are self-glorifying conquerors, morally inferior to our Star Fleet heroes, very much in the tradition of Flash Gordon villains. Indeed, their pompous leader, Rojan, is a pasty faced wooden creep seemingly pulled right out of a 1950s Justice League comic book--his acting isn't what I'd call good, but he is interesting; you kind of can't stop looking at him as he declaims his way through the episode. Rojan's sidekick, Kelinda, is something of a 1960s Bond babe--actually, the actress who plays her, Barbara Bouche, really was something of a Bond babe, playing M's secretary Miss Moneypenny in the 1967 Bond parody film Casino Royale. At first you want to dismiss her as just another hot chick for Kirk to seduce, but she ends up giving one of the better performances of the episode.

At any rate, given the charming touches of old school sci-fi, the net effect, as far as the episode's overall feel goes, is very Wally Wood, not unlike this pic here. And, yes, the episode feels just as weird as the picture.

But "By Any Other Name" isn't simply an exercise in science fiction nostalgia and strangeness. There are some extremely well executed moments. For instance, in the wake of a foiled escape attempt, one where Kirk inexplicably shows expert knowledge of unique Vulcan physical abilities, Rojan metes out a sort of Nazi justice, randomly choosing two members of the Enterprise landing party, morphing them into their chemical components, crushing one to death, and then turning the other back into a whole and healthy person. Rojan's casual, nonchalant affect all the while is truly disturbing. Very clinical and psychologically creepy.

Of course, this chemical component state ends up being the fate for most of the crew back on the ship--the previous set up makes this later sequence all the more effective.

The ease with which the aliens utterly dominate the Enterprise puts Kirk into a manic, listless, and impotent frame of mind, which ramps up the episode's weirdness all the more. By the time Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty, the only crewmen left in their natural biological forms by this point, have hatched a plan to regain the ship, however, the Captain is back to his usual confident self. That leaves him completely ready to execute his part of the plan, seducing Kelinda, which you knew was going to happen from the moment she first appears on screen. But the other three have their part to play, as well. McCoy hops up one of the aliens on amphetamines. Spock gets under Rojan's skin while playing three dimensional chess.

And Scotty has his greatest moment in all of Star Trek, getting one of the aliens drunk in an hours long marathon boozing session, going through, by my count, four bottles of liquor. It takes Saurian brandy, another unidentified spirit of some sort, a third bottle of something Scotty describes simply as "green," and, finally, an "old, old, old bottle of Scotch...whiskey!" Scotty drinks the guy under the table, taking him completely out of action. The Chief Engineer takes himself out of action, too, but only after he has accomplished his mission.

In the end, as you would expect, the crew takes back the ship, convincing the now emotionally unstable aliens to stay in our galaxy instead of reporting back to their superiors. Yeah, I know, that's a plot spoiler, but, like I said, the story's pretty standard. It's all in the execution, and this one is really well executed.

Go see how they get it done.


Breaking the intergalactic barrier last seen in "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

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Is Gov. Bobby Jindal Sabotaging Gulf Efforts for Political Gain?

Quick answer: probably.

From AlterNet:

But, taking a cue from Rudy Giuliani's exploitation of the 9/11 attacks while mayor of New York City, Jindal saw a chance rebuild his political capital by using the Gulf oil spill. He sprang into action with press conferences and helicopter rides to show he's a take-charge leader. The governor quickly became Obama and the federal government's chief critic, relentlessly attacking their allegedly slow response to the spill and lambasting the "red tape and bureaucracy" preventing him from getting the job done. Jindal's theatrical deployment of these trappings of leadership has been largely rewarded by favorable press coverage, reigniting speculation of a 2012 run. But new revelations and a close inspection of the facts suggest that Jindal's sound and fury is little more than political grandstanding for the Fox News set, and it serves to obscure Jindal's own serious failings in the spill response effort. While Jindal has been relentless in attacking the federal government for dragging its feet, he has delayed the deployment of National Guard troops, led a crusade to build artificial sand berms that most experts say won't work, and confused the planning of the spill response. Moreover, experts said his "antagonism could actually slow down that response." "When that stuff happens, you actually take away the ability of the unified command to get their job done," said former Coast Guard official Doug Lentsch, who was involved in the Exxon Valdez disaster and helped develop the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. But the true impact of Jindal's blustery leadership may never be known, as Jindal vetoed a bill Friday that would have required him to make public all of his office's documents relating to the spill.

More here.

Katrina was easy.

New Orleans went for nearly a week, with people sitting on rooftops, or festering in the Superdome and Convention Center, starving and thirsty, or trying to get out but being shot at by nervous cops, before Bush's depleted FEMA and federal troops finally showed up. Almost always in such situations, it's a federal show, but the feds were way late to the theater this time--while everybody was waiting, Bush took time to vacation and play air guitar, and to publicly applaud FEMA's crony-appointment director, "Heck of a Job Brownie," who hadn't really done much at that point.

Like I said, easy. Blame can be assessed with one simple question: where the fuck was FEMA?

It's not so easy assessing government response to the BP oil spill. Certainly, I'm not terribly pleased with President Obama's leadership on this one. His now infamous deference to corporate authority, I believe, made him drag his heels for weeks, while BP lied, by several orders of magnitude, about the severity of the spill, until he finally took a stronger hand in directing and coordinating efforts to stop the leak and clean up the mess. It remains to be seen just how effective his efforts will be in the long run, but I'm encouraged by his recently pushing BP to establish a massive fund to pay for damages before they cut and run into legal limbo land.

Assessing the State of Louisiana's response is even more difficult. I mean, I don't really know what the state is doing, or what its responsibility is relative to the feds' role. Further, and this goes for both assessing the state and the feds, I don't really know what the government is capable of doing, or if the government is doing it. And, apart from the very broad imperative to stop the leak and clean up the mess, I don't even know what all needs to be done.

When you see people stranded in flood waters, you automatically understand that somebody needs to come rescue them. When oil gushes up from the bottom of the sea, threatening ecologies and livelihoods, it verges on incomprehensibility. So it's extremely difficult to know that Jesus Jindal has a point when he blasts the Obama administration for ineffectiveness in dealing with the spill, or that Louisiana's governor is, indeed, a hands-on guy, doing really well what Obama is doing really badly.

But I do know this about Jesus Jindal. He's a fucking puppet. People say he's really smart, but when you actually listen to what he has to say, it isn't much more than a clear articulation of that day's Republican talking points. I've never heard him utter an original thought, or even anything coming close to being thought provoking. I also know that his eyes have been set on the national arena for his entire political career: everything he says and does, everything, is aimed at getting into position for a serious White House run some day in the future.

None of that necessarily invalidates his criticisms of the Obama administration, or makes his helicopter photo ops nothing but PR stunts. But it sure does make it all very suspect.

Anyway, go read the essay. It's got lots of links to various sources validating its assertions. My gut instinct is that Jindal is cynically using the BP spill disaster as the ultimate political advertisement at the expense of the constituents who elected him, which would be no surprise because, in the Karl Rove era, Republicans are way better at that sort of thing than Democrats. But, like I said, I don't really know.

Go decide for yourself.

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1,000 Troops For Every al Qaeda Operative in Afghanistan

From Think Progress via AlterNet:

The U.S. has committed nearly 100,000 troops to the mission in Afghanistan. ABC This Week host Jake Tapper asked CIA Director Leon Panetta how big is the al Qaeda threat that the soldiers are combating:

TAPPER: How many Al Qaeda, do you think, are in Afghanistan?

PANETTA: I think the estimate on the number of Al Qaeda is actually relatively small. I think at most, we’re looking at 50 to 100, maybe less. It’s in that vicinity. There’s no question that the main location of Al Qaeda is in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The 100,000 U.S. forces that have been tasked to dismantle the 100 or so al Qaeda members — a ratio of 1000:1 — is complicated by the fact that we are also engaged in operations going after the Taliban leadership.

More here.

Right.

The reality is that Al Qaeda is now in Pakistan, which we will most definitely not invade because they have nuclear weapons--the "50 to 100" Al Qaeda operatives still in Afghanistan are very likely stragglers, or lost, or trying to get to Pakistan, certainly not an organized force for mayhem and anarchy, and therefore not really worth all the trouble. That leaves the Taliban as enemy in Afghanistan, the people who controlled the country before we got there. In other words, we're fighting yet another home grown insurgency. Kind of like we were doing in Vietnam. And Iraq. And we're doing this in order to keep Al Qaeda from coming back. But why would they come back when they appear to be able to thumb their noses at the US from over the border?

So we're fighting an indigenous insurgency so as to create a modern nation state where there has never before been one to keep out an enemy who most likely doesn't want to go there. Needless to say, this makes absolutely no sense. Does the Obama administration really believe this bullshit?

Conservatives are saying that the BP oil spill will destroy the Obama administration. I'm starting to think our President's Waterloo lies in Afghanistan, rather than the Gulf of Mexico. Remember how successful LBJ was at home? The Civil Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, "The War on Poverty," he got shit done. But Vietnam rendered it all meaningless by the time the primaries rolled around in 1968.

I guess we'll see where this all leads.

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The two poles of journalism

From Glenn Greenwald's blog:

With his Rolling Stone article on Gen. McChrystal, Michael Hastings has become both the personification of, and spokesperson for, Real Journalism, and as a result, has provoked intense animosity from establishment-serving "reporters" everywhere. He apparently committed the gravest sin: he exposed and embarrassed rather than flattered and protected a powerful government official, and in our upside-down media culture, doing that is a sign of irresponsibility rather than fulfillment of the basic journalistic function.

More here.

If you engage in discussions on whether the corporate media are liberal or conservative, you're kind of not getting the point. I mean, okay, I engage in such discussion, but it's usually in order to get my point across: the corporate news media serve power, which necessarily means a pro-establishment bias, which is, by its very nature, a conservative bias. Of course, my understanding of the word "conservative," in this sense, includes a lot of people who think of themselves as "liberal"--indeed, the far left generally understands American liberals as apologists for the establishment, people who defend the overall power structure as basically sound, but needing a few tweaks; really, conservatives couldn't exist without this kind of liberal, who makes the right wing appear to be a lot less crazy than it actually is.

That is, the whole liberal/conservative construction of news media ideology is more about partisanship than it is about actual ideas: who's being treated better, the (corporate) Democrats or the (corporate) Republicans?

Anyway, given this establishment-protection role the corporate news media play, it is no surprise at all that media figures have come out swinging against a real reporter who, unlike his most of his journalistic comrades, actually did his job. That is, if the news media really is the so-called "Fourth Estate," then it ought to be playing watchdog over the activities of our society's institutions of power. That's what this guy did with his Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal. That other reporters are condemning Hastings, rather than nominating him for awards, buying him beers, and patting him on the back, tells us a great deal about the press in this country.

That is, they're a bunch of idiot-stooges who should be spat upon by every American citizen who takes this country seriously.

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The Third Depression

From the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman opines on the self-destructive attitudes of right-wing economic orthodoxy:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

And this third depression will be primarily a failure of policy. Around the world — most recently at last weekend’s deeply discouraging G-20 meeting — governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is inadequate spending.

And

So I don’t think this is really about Greece, or indeed about any realistic appreciation of the tradeoffs between deficits and jobs. It is, instead, the victory of an orthodoxy that has little to do with rational analysis, whose main tenet is that imposing suffering on other people is how you show leadership in tough times.

More here.

I've already started telling anyone in casual conversation who is willing to listen that we're in for about a decade or so of a sluggish economy with very little growth and high unemployment. I'm also starting to wonder what the investment angle is for someone like me who has a pretty good understanding of how fucked up the macro-economy will be for the next ten years: can I make some money off this?

At any rate, even though I have, at this point, accepted its inevitability, the coming third depression is very disturbing, and by "coming," I mean "already here."

That is, as Krugman has been observing relentlessly for months now, it just doesn't have to be this way. The austerity people, who are the majority of politicians and economists worldwide, are afraid of inflation caused by deficit spending. And, to be fair, inflation and deficits are problems, in the abstract. It's just that there isn't any imminent danger from deficit spending, while there is imminent danger from massive spending cuts.

Here's how deficit spending fucks the economy.

There are a finite number of dollars out there. When the government borrows beyond a certain threshold, a certain percentage of the GDP, the massive scale of these loans start to squeeze the overall dollar supply. The government borrows so much money that there is necessarily less available for everybody else, which means businesses can't expand and can't hire more people. So economic growth becomes stagnant. Factor in population growth, which creates more workers needing more jobs, and unemployment becomes a problem.

Now, the government could simply print up more money to deal with how deficit spending squeezes the dollar supply, but when it does so, each dollar, because there are more floating around the overall economy, becomes worth less, which causes inflation, which has its own set of horrific economic problems. So, in the long run, deficits screw the economy by forcing stagnation, or by causing inflation, and both are really bad.

In the short run, of course, deficits do no harm. And in the current economy, deficits are actually quite beneficial, and these benefits go way beyond any sort of compassion oriented arguments.

Have you been reading the headlines about states laying off teachers and shutting schools down because they don't have the money to keep them open? The reason the states don't have any money is because of the recession: people have lost jobs, and business activity is way down. That is, during a recession, tax revenues drop off sharply. Virtually all the states are bound by their constitutions to keep balanced budgets, so they have to cut spending. The Feds, however, have no such constraint. They can borrow not only to keep the government functioning, but also to spread the wealth around, which keeps tax revenues from shrinking further.

Are you following this? Cutting spending right now will necessarily result in a smaller tax base, thereby destabilizing the financial picture for state and federal government alike. In other words, the austerity strategy will do nothing but cause the need for more austerity as government income is dried up by foolhardy austerity measures. The deficit hawks want to make things worse, not better.

None of this even addresses the need to spend a whole shitload more than we're spending now, in order to make up for the fact that nervous consumers aren't spending, which makes nervous businesses avoid expansion. That is, in classic Keynesian form, massive government spending, on a scale that dwarfs what Obama and the Congress have been willing to do thus far, creates an economic environment such that businesses and consumers alike feel much better about parting with their dollars.

Ideally, when the crisis has passed, the government can then cut spending and start to pay off its debt, but with a much better and self-sustaining economy, which results in much higher tax revenues. So the real way out of the Great Recession is to spend like crazy now, which revives the economy, which then pays off, over the long run, the debt incurred today. Conversely, cutting spending right now will do nothing but worsen the situation.

None of the deficit hawks have directly responded to this argument. They just kind of fear monger about how bad it is to run deficits, and then they all nod their heads in agreement, an economist's echo chamber. That's why Krugman says that the call to cut spending has "little to do with rational analysis." It's all based on "DEFICITS BAD!"

I continue to be very frightened that, apparently, I, a guy who waits tables for a living, understand this stuff better than the people who make big bucks to do it.

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GOD IS AN INHUMAN AND EVIL MONSTER

Or he's omnibenevolent and therefore has very little, if anything, to do with the Christian Bible. If he exists at all, that is.

From AlterNet, an intellectual meditation on the power of prayer:

Why God Doesn’t Listen To Your Prayers

In the debate Wilson is asked by Barker if it is good that God ordered the killing of the Amalekite men, women, children and babies in the Hebrew Bible (1 Sam 15:3 NIV): “Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” His response is scary, but granted it is consistent with his ethic that everything God does is good:

Barker: You think it was right?

Wilson: The people of God were blessed by this when they were conquering the enemies of God. And the one who took the children of the enemies of God and bashed them on the rock was blessed by God. That’s in the Bible and I have no apologies for it.

Barker: Do you think that’s good morality? Do you think that’s not a cruel thing to do? Do you think its a good thing to do?

Wilson: God is the definition of good. We begin all our reasoning from this position. We reason from what God says to our morality.

Wilson has also tried to be morally consistent in respect to other aspects of the Bible. From “The Controversialist” in Christianity Today:

But when I asked what he thought of the death penalty for homosexual acts suggested in Leviticus 20:13, he did not shy away from the theonomic hard line that disturbs many Christians. “You can’t apply Scripture woodenly,” he says. “You might exile some homosexuals, depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim. There are circumstances where I’d be in favor of execution for adultery. … I’m not proposing legislation. All I’m doing is refusing to apologize for certain parts of the Bible.”

The same distortion of the word “good” by Wilson is what is required if we are to believe that an interventionist God who answers prayer is good.

More here.

The essay writer uses these statements to argue from a believer's point of view that God doesn't answer prayer, which, to me, is self evident.

But the passage excerpted above makes plain a point that long ago helped make me an agnostic: God, if he exists, cannot possibly be the being described in the Bible. If God is all good, the fountainhead of all morality in the universe, which is a fairly commonplace description of the Almighty, then the entity named Yahweh automatically rules himself out. After all, genocide is immoral. This wipes out in one fell swoop three of the world's major religions, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all grounded in the Old Testament.

Of course, defenders of the Bible assert that if God does something, it is, by definition, absolutely moral. That is, God and morality are the same thing. Never mind for a moment how this reeks of President Nixon's defense of his Watergate crimes - "If the President does it, it's legal." - my take is that if a supernaturally powerful being comes my way and tells me that I should worship him, he should, at least, pass the smell test: powerful entities who tell me that genocide is right and good don't pass the smell test.

That is, Christians have it the wrong way around: you start with morality, and determine whether a given "God" fits that; then you decide to worship him. 'Cause, lemme tell ya, if the Biblical God really is the all powerful owner and operator of the universe, we're all in a heap of trouble, both in this life, and in the next. Torture and justice become the same thing. It doesn't matter what kind of life you lead, how kindly you treat people, how much you've sacrificed for others. All that matters is that you've sworn allegiance to a narcissistic and powerful creature with the temperament of a two year old. It would be like that Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life." Horrifying.

Of course, you'd have to be a fucking moron to believe that this is the essential nature of the universe.

Lots of fucking morons out there, I guess.

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FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Reine



Dash



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

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STAR TREK
"A Piece of the Action"

From Wikipedia:

"A Piece of the Action" is a second-season episode of Star Trek: The Original Series first broadcast on January 12, 1968. It was repeated on August 30, 1968, the last episode to air in the 8:30 pm time slot on Friday nights. It is episode #46, production #49, written by David P. Harmon and Gene L. Coon, and directed by James Komack.

Overview: The Enterprise visits a planet with an Earth-like 1920s gangster culture.

More here.

While not as great as last week's "The Immunity Syndrome," "A Piece of the Action" definitely deserves to be recognized as one of the great Star Trek episodes. It's a straight up comedy, and coming some weeks after "I, Mudd" and "The Trouble with Tribbles," both uproariously funny, it is clear that everybody involved with the show had completely perfected their approach to comedic science fiction: this is better, I think, than its two comedy predecessors, funnier and with a tighter narrative--indeed, it's paced like the best dramatic episodes, rampaging forward like a freight train, which is well suited to humor.

What's most amazing about "A Piece of the Action" is that it's all variations on a single joke, the incongruity between two radically different genres, futuristic sci-fi and the old Hollywood gangster flick. I mean, this is the kind of tongue-in-cheek hybrid that Quentin Tarantino and others made a billion dollars with years later. But Star Trek appears to have done it first.

Being a mobster piece, the episode is populated with wise-cracking thugs, dunderheaded tommy gun wielding psychopaths, trashy party girls, and mob molls. I mean, they just pull out every cliche they can think of. But what really makes the whole gangster thing work is using a couple of great character actors to play the rival mob bosses, Anthony Caruso as Bela Oxmyx and Vic Tayback as Jojo Krako. Both actors jump into it head first and never come up for air, creating mobster characters every bit as memorable as Tony Montana, Vito Corleone, and Tommy DeVito. They're that fun.

But they're even more fun when they're visited by Star Fleet.

Kirk and crew come to Sigma Iotia II in search of a ship, the Horizon, which was lost a century earlier, shortly after it visited the planet. Because the Prime Directive did not exist at that point, the Enterprise fully expects to find rampant cultural contamination of the Iotian civilization; they do not expect to find a world that has modeled itself on Chicago Mobs of the Twentieth Century, a book from the early 1990s that the Horizon had left behind. A great deal of the first third or so of the episode's humor comes from various crew members' confusion about the resulting Mafia planet.

Indeed, much of the story's arc is about Kirk's learning curve. At first, he's as befuddled as everybody else, and easily taken advantage of by the local mobsters--again and again, he finds himself held hostage, machine guns at his head. Then he starts to figure it out, escaping captivity by concocting a card game, in the classic and brilliant "Fizzbin" scene, to distract the thugs holding him, Spock, and McCoy on ice. When his science officer declares the overall situation to be totally illogical, Kirk finally has the permission he needs to go native and really get things done.

This one really is laugh-out-loud funny. The whole cast appears to be truly enjoying themselves, which makes watching it all the more fun. Go treat yourself.


Kirk and Spock using their "heaters" to subdue a couple of Krako's henchmen.

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Short, Tense Deliberation, Then a General Is Gone

From the New York Times:

But this is the highest profile sacking of his presidency. The time between Mr. Obama’s first reading of the Rolling Stone article and his decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation offers an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress: He appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive.

In a subsequent meeting with his Afghan war council, Mr. Obama delivered a tongue-lashing, instructing his advisers to stop bickering among themselves.

“The president said he didn’t want to see pettiness; that this was not about personalities or reputations — it’s about our men and women in uniform,” said a senior administration official, who like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity in offering an account of the last two days.

More here.

Actually, it's about far more than our men and women in uniform. It's about democracy.

This was totally the right call. There is a damned good reason our founding fathers made the commander-in-chief of the US military a civilian: there are too many examples throughout history, right up through today, of various nations' armies deciding that they could do a better job of ruling than their civilian governments--once the military has decided that it wants to run the country, it's over; there's little, if anything, a nation can do to stop it. Our founding fathers' solution to this massive threat to our democracy was to place the President in total charge of the military, and to make all members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, which mandates their command structure.

Top generals publicly trash-talking their civilian commanders comes way too close to upsetting this already fragile political arrangement. It doesn't matter how good of a warrior McChrystal is. He had to go.

And this is kind of sad. Pretty much everybody says that McChrystal is a great general, a great leader. One of those guys like Patton or MacArthur or Custer or Montgomery, who motivated men with charisma and an intense personal style.

According to Reuters:

(Rolling Stone editor Eric) Bates said he was not surprised McChrystal was so forthcoming and blunt, saying the military leader saw himself as a "terrorist hunter" with "cowboy style."

And from Wikipedia

He runs seven to eight miles a day, eats one meal, and sleeps for four hours a night.

I even heard on CNN last night that McChrystal often runs around Afghanistan bare chested. I mean, what a hardcore dude. Alas, it appears that the flamboyance that works so well on the battlefield is ill suited for interacting with civilian leadership. That is, McChrystal apparently doesn't know when to shut the fuck up, something his replacement, General Petraeus, knows how to do well. Indeed, this all reveals some of the fragility of the anti-coup system embedded in our Constitution: military thinking must necessarily be black and white, while civilian politics is nothing but shades of grey. Perhaps in a democracy the greatest generals have to be confined to lower rungs of the leadership ladder--what makes them great at war is the same thing that makes them awful with democracy.

Of course, what makes this really sad is that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, and, at this point, meaningless, given that Al Qaeda is no longer there, and the "nation" in which we fight hasn't ever really been a nation state in the way we understand the term in the West, and therefore ill suited to becoming one today.

Sigh.


General Stanley McChrystal.

Okay, just kidding. It's actually Robert Duval playing
Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.

Same difference.

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STAR TREK PROGRAM NOTE

Starting tomorrow night, I'm going to be running Star Trek episodes on Thursday nights, rather than Wednesday nights. It just fits my schedule better lately. It's also appropriate because NBC tended to move Trek's time slot around a bit, something that virtually everybody at this point believes contributed to its pointless demise.

Anyway, see you tomorrow with "A Piece of the Action."

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MICHAEL MCDONALD FEST!!!

From Wikipedia:

Michael McDonald (born February 12, 1952) is a five-time Grammy Award winning American singer and songwriter. Sometimes described as a "blue-eyed soul" singer, McDonald has a distinctive "husky, soulful" baritone voice. He is known for his work as a member of the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, and for several hits as a solo artist.

More here.

So this guy I know at work has been grooving lately on Michael McDonald's first solo hit, "I Keep Forgetting." He sings it a lot. And that gets me singing, too. Suddenly, I find that I keep remembering how totally omnipresent McDonald was for about a decade or so--he really was part of the soundtrack of my late childhood and early adolescent years. If he were Phil Collins, such remembering might be a bit painful, but he's not, he's fucking Michael McDonald, member of Steely Dan, my favorite band next to the Beatles, who also fronted the band with the greatest name of all time, the Doobie Brothers.

When was the last time you had a serious Michael McDonald fest? If you're like me, it's been at least twenty five years, back when every day was a Michael McDonald fest. Well that's just too damned long.

Let's start off with some Doobies:



But McDonald, an incredible lead singer, was equally adept as a background man, not an easy task for someone with such talent, playing second fiddle to a usually less talented singer.

You know, like Christopher Cross:



Or Kenny Loggins:



And sure, Steely Dan's Donald Fagen is also a less talented singer, but as an arranger/composer, he was probably the best at understanding how to maximize the McDonald effect:



But it wasn't simply his singing: McDonald was, and still is, a brilliant composer. That is, you were listening to Michael McDonald even when you didn't know you were listening to Michael McDonald.

Like with this Carly Simon recording:



Or even this Van Halen song he co-wrote:



Van fucking Halen. I had no idea until I read it on Wikipedia. He really was everywhere.

Anyway, it's been a grand fest, hasn't it? I can't think of any better way of closing it than with the song that got me started:



God, I love Michael McDonald.

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THE NUMBERS DON'T LIE

From AlterNet:

6 Shocking Ways Conservatives Helped
Cause the Economic Destruction of America

It seems that you can look at a chart of almost anything and right around 1981 or soon after you'll see the chart make a sharp change in direction, and probably not in a good way. And I really do mean almost anything, from economics to trade to infrastructure to ... well almost anything. I spent some time looking for charts of things, and here are just a few examples. In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.

More here.

I spend a great deal of time here trying to debunk a lot of the conventional wisdom on economics. I would say "right-wing economics," or neoliberalism, or Reaganomics, whatever you want to call it, except for the fact that this point of view has come to totally dominate establishment thinking over the last thirty years. So it is now, and has been for some time, conventional wisdom. Almost always, I'm all about point by point explanations of how these conservative ideas simply have no real world correlation. That's why the above linked AlterNet quickie is so fabulous: it totally shuns argumentation and just looks at the numbers.

And, lemme tell ya, the numbers ain't pretty.

Like the excerpt says, virtually any way you look at it, neoliberal economics, which began its uninterrupted reign of dominance, through both Democratic and Republican Congresses and administrations, back when Reagan took office in 1981, have made this country a shitty place to live. We've gone from being a creditor nation to being a debtor nation. Personal savings have dropped to less than zero, while personal debt has skyrocketed. The already wealthy have seen their share of total national wealth increase dramatically, while everybody else has seen their share plummet. Economic growth, on average, has stagnated.

Click through the link and look at the charts. The numbers don't lie.

If anti-regulatory, pro-free trade, anti-tax, and anti-labor policies are so freakin' great, then why have three decades of neoliberal experimentation failed so miserably? I'm sure you can guess what I think.

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Right-Wingers Hate Government But Love Gov’t Help

From AlterNet:

The editorial board highlighted the fact that Rand Paul, the bizarre Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, has ideas that sometimes “crash into reality” in awkward ways. For example, Paul hates “big government” programs like Medicaid and Medicare, but the health care programs nevertheless constitute about half of his professional income. Indeed, the right-wing ophthalmologist would like to eliminate most of the federal government, but he’s prepared to leave Medicare intact — the socialized-medicine program that’s helped him pay his mortgage.

Likewise, Paul wanted nothing to do with contributions from senators who support the financial industry bailout in 2008. The pledge suddenly disappeared when his campaign decided he needed the money.

More here.

Unfortunately, this isn't the Rand Paul post I've been meaning to write for a few weeks, you know, on how he thinks it is an infringement of sacred property rights for the government to force businesses to serve all races and ethnicities. That one's going to wait for a while longer.

But Paul is fairly representative of the whole conservative big government/small government bipolar intellectual construction of liberalism versus conservatism. Like most self-described conservatives, Paul hates "big government" and loves "small government." Years ago, when I was conservative myself, I thought I understood what that means. Even as a liberal for some years I thought I knew what "big" and "small" government meant. More recently, for the last five or six years or so, however, I've decided I just don't get it.

I mean, sure, I understand what the words "big" and "small" mean, and, of course, I know the word "government." But what, exactly, is "big government"? I have no idea. Back when I thought I understood, I might have said something along the lines of "big government is what we're seeing right now in the Gulf of Mexico, with the Feds moving in to control response to the oil spill, which conservatives should hate because private business could do it better, and because it deprives us of the important economic activity, all the money to be made, that would be created by a private sector response." But, at the moment, conservatives are criticizing the Obama administration, virtually in lockstep, for not being more active in responding to the disaster.

Back when I thought I understood "big" and "small" government, I might have used welfare and other social programs as an example of "big government." But then I discovered the concept of "corporate welfare," big tax breaks and straight-up cash payments to private business, as well as the existence of certain industries, the airlines, for instance, or the recorded music industry, that simply couldn't function without federal support and regulation. Conservatives aren't particularly critical of any of that stuff.

Maybe conservatives are talking about government regulation of economic activity. You know, get the government off the people's backs, and all that. Conservatives hate regulations. But when it comes to the other side of it, you know, labor, conservatives are all about using government to restrict workers' ability to come together and collectively bargain with employers. So it can't be economic regulation, per se, that constitutes "big government."

Then there are roads, the courts, the police, and the military. We've got a pretty big country, situated in a pretty big world, so the government needs to be pretty big in order to supply these necessities that even the most orthodox neoliberal agrees we need.

Either there's something I'm not getting, which is possible because I'm not brilliant, or there is simply no consistent principle behind the notion of "big" and "small" government. Despite my lack of brilliance, I'm inclined to believe the latter option: "big" and "small" government, as political or economic ideas, have no correlation to reality. That is, everybody, across the entire political spectrum, wants to have big government, whether they admit it or not. In the end, it has nothing to do with size, and everything to do with what the government does with your money.

What the government ought to do with your money is a reasonable discussion; whether the government should be "big" or "small" is an exercise in bullshit, and therefore a waste of everybody's time and energy. Yet the conversation continues, with the bogus parameters accepted by both sides. And the big/small debate decisively favors conservatives: who can argue against thrift and savings, or in favor of "oppression"? With conservatives on the winning side in such a debate, there is no incentive on their part to end this characterization of American politics.

Are liberals going to do anything, ever, to change the debate's parameters? If history is any indicator, the answer is "no."

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