greensmile's blog

Saying goodbye to a lot more than Teddy

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:25:47 -0700

This news, only a little earlier than anticipated, still shocks me and greatly saddens me.

Now and then I start to write posts in which I would grapple with and, mostly for my own sake, try to account for my own transformation from a rather uninformed conservative youth to a self identified liberal. I usually gave up and never posted.

Dammit, I am actually sobbing as I read the obits.

But I can't say why I will miss Ted Kennedy without describing how my attitude toward his politics and his political skills changed over the years.

When I first moved to Massachusetts in the early 70's, fresh from Nevada and straight from a home of staunch paleolithic republican sentiments, my typical reactions to Kennedy's causes such as health care were un-researched quips. "Oh sure," I would think, "a guy that has never lacked a massive family trust fund thinks I should pay more taxes so everyone can go see a doctor when he wants". I am now in a position to set up our own family trust fund and I can't always see a doctor Its so much easier to be heartless when your ignorance enforces a distance from the realities of hardships and unjust distribution of rewards that Kennedy mustered us to battle. Find any wingnut who still vilifies Kennedy and I will show you an ignoramus.

In 1976, I worked for a consulting firm and had to travel to Washington DC just to be an extra in a show of resumes for a potential customer. On one shuttle flight down there, it happened that the the Senator had the seat next to me. He rode coach without any ceremony at all, just another passenger not hinting any expectation of deference. I was not even positive it was him when he first sat down. I did not speak to him. He was paying a lot of attention to a copy of NY Times Magazine with a cover story on some political upstart who was then the governor of Georgia. It was a crowded field that year.

It was the Viet Nam war that still repelled me from Republicans but Carter has always conjured up hope and decency and I voted for him in hope. Kennedy seemed to me at that time a man beaten by his own bad luck but he resolutely soldiered on. His wary dance with corporate powers while he introduced bill after bill to make life livable for what we used to call the working class simply never let up. He had the big ideas if not the charisma to turn our political hearts. But it takes so much more work and organization and granite-willed persistence to redirect a nation that, in its private dreams, sees itself as potentially wealthy and independent individualists. Those dreams were exploited easily and have given us the local and the presidential politics of the Reagan revolution. And all through that dark period, Ted strove on, cutting deals, compromising where compromise would at least gain the embattled middle class some small help.

I was so disgusted by the response a self-absorbed electorate and media handed the profoundly decent but unwily Carter that I voted for John Anderson in 80. The national political scene had become an ethical vacuum. Yet all that while Teddy beat the drums for better benefits and programs. Even as I withdrew from the fights over the wrong issues that could have no winners, I recall being impressed how Kennedy could so respectfully engage the barking and repugnantly narrow representatives of One Selfishness Under God. That capacity to remain engaged, to find a way to get any opponent to look you in the eye ...that is the gift of a great politician. I grew to know I was not such a creature and he, with few peers, was.

Not until MoveOn offered me what seemed like a real voice, did I reengage in politics. But after four years of hopeful changes and improvements in US policy, my own politics are now nearly ready to walk off the field again. If a Radical Greens party springs up, I might waste my vote on them in symbolic and futile protest. I see a nation that has lied to itself about how bad its economy was until its crooked and faked affluence nearly collapsed. I see a country that has lied to itself about how to live well until it is rife with life style and environmentally induced diseases and wants only a quick cheap fix. I see a country with a pathologically overgrown sense of its place among the economic and military forces that will shape history. Economic and political power will be wrenched from the hands of any nation that poisons itself and lets the mass of ill, poor and unrepresented only grow. I see a nation that has now lost one of its last lions for the little man, one of the unthanked giants who worked to give those dreaming individualists what they needed rather than what they wanted. Without that concern which Kennedy embodied for the welfare of the citizen above the welfare of corporate power, we will be too weak a country to address our real problems.

I can't help taking an ever-dimmer view of America's situation

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:34:22 -0700

I find my savings going up in smoke and the new candidate for the arsonist party only 2% behind in the polls. NY Times, for one, mentions that we who have been saving the last 30 or 40 years for our retirement just took a hit many will not recover from.

There are a thousand things to say about the administration's attempt to use the massive screw-ups of our unregulated financial giants as a cover for taking the last bits of power from congress and the last bits of taxpayer money in the treasury and just giving it to Mr Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street. Fortunately, these things are being said. At TPM, HuffPo, TruthOut, Brad DeLong and Agonist you will find a flood of facts and contempt for what the administration is trying to do. TPM and Agonist have nice juicy dirt on McCain's connection to the beneficiaries of the proposed bailout via his lobbyists/advisers Carly Fiorina, Phil Gramm and Rick Davis.

So why am I writing? I guess I just want to report my thoughts and thus check in with the rest of you. In a way, I am contemplating a kind of internal exile just as Sean-Paul embarks on an external exile. I have soured on politics...it is the sport and distraction of people who have problems they can't ignore but don't understand and who do not wish to deal in person with the shiftless dehumanized bums they hold responsible. Seriously, just do one thing: do not let that senile sell-out, John McCain nor his Bush-in-a-skirt ratings buoy get in to office. Those idiots will plunge us into a dark age and a depression faster than I can get safely to a place off the grid, with low taxes and a climate that would let me feed myself.

I fear this bailout will be no longer lived, in its good effects, than the previous gyrations and heroics with which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have papered over the stock market's tumbles three times in the last 16 months. How long do you think this nation could go on ignoring all the laws of common sense economics, spending a trillion on useless wars, cutting taxes, letting jobs go off shore with no plan to re-educate the bereft workers and removing all obstacles to head long consumer spending and balance of trade hemorrhaging? How long? You can also ignore the laws of gravity until the moment of impact with the ground. Borrowing to prop up all those losing activities will naturally come to an end. Just as Reagan smirked in 1989 that communism was dead, I suspect Hu Jintao and Putin now smirk that capitalism as Americans do it, is in equally poor health.

It really and deeply hurts me that this country has been so weakened, I can not find an article in any of my reading that overstates how stupid and treacherous the Republicans have been. Even Larisa Alexandrovna seems too restrained.

I have read just one too many of these dooms day scenarios by "America-hating" liberals. I have seen too many of their predictions unfold like clockwork ticking.
Steve Fraser, writing the day before the administration's finance managers, Bernanke and Paulson called their desperate huddle on capitol hill, gave a pretty good summary of how bad things were, how drastic the solutions must be and a gentle reminder that this train wreck of ruined credit vehicles at all levels of the economy was not an accident. It is the largely predictable consequence of dismantling regulation of markets that has gone on throughout Democratic but mostly Republican administrations over the last 30 years. The line in Dubya's speech last night in which he claimed our problems were due to old regulations written for different times is a lie...his party tore up the regulations. There are many things that are meant by regulation but the rules and enforcements that would double check greed-colored decisions that risk other people's money should not be weakened until a species of human can be found that does not sucome to greed. I repeat: Democrats and Republicans have had a hand in weakening such rules and we ought to ask why they did so. I think Fraser's article also points in a good direction for solutions. Rather than these fits of spilled tax monies and deferred debt that suspend consequences for the risk taking of a coterie of bankers and deal makers who amass vast empires of paper wealth, we need to subsidize the creation of education, productive capacity and infrastructure, as the Chinese have been doing like mad for a decade, . You might give Mr. Fraser's remarks a little attention, if not for their appearance in TruthOut, then for their having also been picked up by the generally perceptive editors of Asia Times. Did y'all read Stirling's essay on "penultimate crises"? Are we there yet?

My blogging ceased recently. I found all I was doing was passing on the complaints you have already heard from sources closer to the fray. My excuses for writing have been the general relief of venting my anger at our subjugation by smug, selfish, ignorant and privileged fools, or the claim that every voice counts for something if it adds to the din of outraged hue and cry. But other than my feeble involvement with MoveOn, what have I done to change things? Not much. In my blog as a partisan in the war for sustainability, I have perhaps a more activist, or perhaps more accurately a PASSIVIST, approach to things. I expose myself to chastisement for abandoning a fight that I consider lost. I really don't think Americans, nor Chinese for that matter, in their governments nor in the minute daily struggles and decisions of citizens and consumers, give a damn for whether their strivings amount to a stable long term program for human life on earth. These economic dramas by which we seem to be caught up and swept along, are symptoms of an even bigger collapse that our nearly universal quest for a bigger share of nature's pie has doomed us to suffer.

I am contemplating what I suspect most readers would confuse with the programs of survivalists and the anti-government paranoids. I wont have a rack of guns and boxes of ammunition in a bunker but I do actually consider it likely that most of us will at some point in the next two generations, be forced to fend for our selves personally to gain food and warmth when they are no longer obtainable by the ordinary economy. Corporate greed may be accelerating the ruin and necessitating the occasional revamping of the macroeconomic machinery but the personal appetites, innate or induced by ad culture, on which that machinery has fed is equally to blame and more to blame for the irresponsible way we outstrip the mineral and biosphere capacities to support our life style ambitions.

I am planning a retreat from all this. I am lucky enough to be able to buy arable land at a time when the housing debacle in the US has put a few such acres on the market at a discount. I plan to work at jobs for pay or to otherwise participate in the emerging nationalized-finance economy as little as possible. We have finally heard sensible complaints from pundits who should have said long ago that the wholesale abandonment of fiscal conservatism by the republicans and the suspension of critical economic thought by the electorate are burying us and generations of our children with debt. If I make no money, I cannot be taxed to pay that debt. Take the repayment from the accounts of the chairmen and CEO's of Wall street, please. I will have beans and squash to plant and strawberries and peaches to can. I wonder though, if many take up my strategy, how long before the US income tax would be augmented by a national real estate tax or a "small farm" tax. Would our reduction to serfs in a subsistence agriculture economy be so very different from the present state of the late and unlamented middle class? Only the size of the paycheck and the demands on the earth's resources would shrink. Too many of the little people, the wage earners and workers, their vision diverted by hope that they too will participate in Dubya's mythical "ownership society" have seen that to pursue that participation via debt makes for a "foreclosure society". We are there now. Even before that was visible, it was clear that these workers were being saddled with deferred national debt spent on useless wars and bankers who had ceased to worry about risk. I refuse to carry these fat bankers on my back, no matter how diffuse and indirect the means by which I am hitched to their mistakes.

The day after I drafted this post, I found one Jo Fish at FDL had an inkling of the revolt that attracts me. Larisa is not the revolutionary at all.

I claim to have been a model citizen: If a democracy is a government that derives its legitimacy and its policy directions by consulting all its citizens, then it is an absolute necessity that those citizens actively engage in being broadly informed and recognize their individual obligation to bear the costs of the commons. Biden is right that it is patriotic to pay your taxes. I would go so far as to say it is idiotic not to. It is perverse that one of our nation's last great public investments in those commons, the Internet, had the potential for each of us to finally be constantly and broadly informed but instead our natures lent us the Internet as a means to form balkanized virtual enclaves. Our awareness of the plural nature of our society and the interdependence of its parts has changed to estrangement and an arms length perception of faceless competitors in our midst. We now have a country where the recognition of our obligations is atrophied. When I first began earning a good paycheck as a 20-something engineer, I did resent the chunk taken by the state and the federal government. In the 35 years since my career began, the household income here at Greensmile Acres has grown to 97th percentile and our tax bill is now 50% larger than the median yearly income in the US yet I have grown grateful that I can carry my share of the weight. I should be a Republican but I am not and I only resent the taxes pissed away on warfare and the useless leeches in the Defense and Energy and Fatherland Security departments. What madness is it that permits a man to see himself as a would be savior while lining his pockets with public monies for which greater needs are in plain sight? Our family has saved more and consumed far less than is typical even in our income bracket. We have lived 35 years with a modestly escalating and, we thought, absolutely sound prosperity resting on good paychecks and a value for prudent saving. Our story differs from Sean-Paul's. And that difference may only tell a story of one generation and its successor in this country. We have had money for our children's education. Our checks to the IRS do not mean we will have to do without. Retirement, if we ever wanted it, should have been a fat chest of goodies we were positioning at the end of our working years. We have had no debt for over a decade. But now the rotten condition in which Republican policies have left that chest, and the way the majority of voters in this country have supported, ignored or acquiesced to those policies despite being hurt by them all darken my view of life in this country. Of what have I been a model citizen? Will the feeble mined elders who have clung in their insecurity to the protofascist pitches of Rove and of Bush turn to cling the more fervently to McCain now that their fears and harms have been aggravated by a deeper plunge into financial insecurity? I want no part of such a nation yet I have no choice.

"In the long run" is a phrase that slips in to many a polemical paragraph, certainly in to mine, to warn you the writer fancies he has some perspective or can accurately project trends forward to some eventuality. I don't know how long we have to run before retrospectives of the history of protests against the selfishness exemplified by Republican economic policy can be said to remove doubt and ambiguity from my conclusions: some liberal economists and a few progressive legislators have had a good grasp of what was wrong with those policies. I don't know how long we have to run, period. Now that nothing less than our entire national economy lays bleeding, bled, and broken in a heap before congress, it is a bit late to admit that in the long run, pandering to the selfishness of taxpayers is a fucked up scheme and the most toxic substitute for leadership, however successful it may be in getting you in office for in the short term.

I do not trust these fascists. Though many liberal economists can see clearly enough that Republican deregulation is a cause of the over extension of debt instruments that finally collapsed our entire credit apparatus, I expect to hear daily in the news the bleating of Neoconservatives who will try to hide their matches and gasoline and say we are witnessing a kind of Reichstag fire on Wall Street for which, god knows how, those tax-and-spend liberals must be to blame. Naomi Klein has been mentioned by a few of my favorite bloggers in light of this week's economic events. That is apt. We might have paid more attention to the feckless pursuit of Bin Laden, now gone somewhat into reverse in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we might have looked at the connection between the devastation of Galveston and the disappearance of the polar ice sheets...real problems abound... but now the Republicans can shout "oh! look! An emergency! Quick, give me more power, cede more rights so I can protect you!".

What is being judged then, by all these tribulations? We cast all our judgments on our political champions so they may stand in for us, and we the voters absolve ourselves of blame. My disgust and withdrawal stem from this understanding: voting only dilutes blame, it does not absolve. If we stumble on as we have, electing McCain and otherwise teetering toward fascism, it is not John McCain who should be examined for his failures but we teh people.

I am not talking about somebody else, I am talking about YOU. The "we" who stumble includes me, all who say and do the right things as well as the dangerously ignorant and mislead who foam at the mouth over at TownHall.com. We all have the vote. Everybody says vile things about lawyers except the one who gets them out of jail or wins their civil case. Everyone resents the wealth of doctors...except the doctor who cures their disease. Everyone is saying vile things about bankers...except the one who lent them the money to start their business. Do you not see what a shitty job we are doing of sharing the world?

Identifying Obama, Finding America and political emotion

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:15:13 -0700

The phrase "The American Story", if offered as the title on a blank sheet each of us was to fill with a story might produce a decidedly motley collection. The myth that somehow there is one even vaguely unified American story is apt to find uncritical expression in some glowing pean penned over at Townhall.com. The grit, disappointment and glints of glory would more likely mingle in individual works cobbled up in a diary at Daily Kos.

You see, America, you never had one story. Or even one America. [Yes, I was for Edwards, *sigh*] You have had and enforced race, gender, class, religious and ethnic distinctions all through the history of your "one nation". The greatest political excitement, the buzz that lasts for decades, seems to occur when actual blends of the formerly segregated traits emerge in one candidate who can elicit an emotional connection with some portion of the main political stream. We did not get excited about Kennedy in spite of his Catholicism but because he enlarged our sense of what was tolerated and who could succeed in this nation. How deep and heartfelt that need for inclusiveness is among the non-bigots!

Obama is closer to an embodiment of "The American Story" if one is ever to be written, than any national candidate I am aware of.

The tenuous illusion of superiority based on no merit but accidents of birth in to one identity, be it racial or some other pretext for categorical thinking, is so frail it must be protected by instant ferocity and guarded by constant suspicion. You hardly have to read between the lines at Townhall.com to see that ignorance and fear at work. We are still the same creatures we have always been. That season when our nation, scarred by its civil rights struggles fixed so much hope on Jack Kennedy was as well the season when truly vile race and religious hatreds and anti-communist hysteria all surfaced and slunk around trying to swift-boat JFK.

So, America, you finally get a real American story, a candidate embodying the true and complete opposite of that illusion that purity of identity equals superiority and what do you do? You start looking, looking everywhere for stones to toss, for labels like "elitist" under which to hide raw ugly hatreds you dare not own up to.

I write this post as if there were one America to be addressed and do so out of profound hope. Having to pick ONE president definitely forces the issue and exposes the fallacies of our glib notions of national unity...but also challenges us to strive for that unity. The work is not easy and it is for conservatives, be they Democrats or Republicans, rather unfamiliar effort.

In spite of all the verbal gears you know are turning out there in your cortex, down in your limbic system politics is very much linked to and run by identity:" who am i, who are they, are they with me or against me"...that brutally simple and unexamined kind of thinking. I wish I could specify some meditation, some passage to be read or anything that would give the fearful among our voters [most of whom do not read blogs like mine] a glimpse of the irrationality that passes for political thinking. I should by now tire of saying this and you of reading it but just for emphasis: Emotion blends with reason largely outside our awareness. Reason is the tool and emotion the user. Emotion fires in ancient circuits laid out when dwell-times to reach a decision that exceeded a fraction of a second were punished with extinction. At the cost of nuance and deliberation, we have gross amplifiers of small discriminations built in to speed up decision. We work this way an know it not.

I offer two illustrations of the emotions at work in our political processing, for whatever they are worth.

Via casual but long standing acquaintance, I know several educated and successful persons who generally vote for Democrats and have mostly well targeted criticism for the failures of the Bush administration. Formative experiences for this particular set of people include religious persecution and being driven out of or unable to return to assorted middle eastern countries. Back when I was still wondering if Edwards was the candidate who best represented my values, emails were circulating among these expatriates repeating the false but mesmerizing rumors that Obama was a Muslim. Even now, in polite conversation with these people, they will offer some immovable doubt about whether Obama would sell Israel down the river. And that fear is followed by the speculation that McCain would be preferable to Obama. Hillary playing the Clingon-in-chief clearly speaks to these fears. Facts simply can't stand in the way of fears. In those very same conversations I hear reference to Obama being too long associated with Rev. Wright to credibly distance himself from Wright's inflammatory positions. Go figure.

I will confess now my own exercises that reveal to me my preferences among the choice of projected personalities of our candidates. My little meditation involves imagining having a conversation with or imagining what I would say to each candidate. I find myself trying to respectfully pose harsh questions to McCain, alternately enthused and annoyed and exploring certain inconsistencies with Clinton and most relaxed and fascinated with Obama. Its all just projection and mental exercise but if you relax and let your mind go, you can learn something about yourself. [By the way, with Dubya, I find the exercise of projecting engagement in conversation stalls when I need to explain the meanings of much of my vocabulary;-]

(cross posted at The Executioners Thong

A tale of two Williams from Yale

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:03:44 -0800

With a separation of a few years, two privately educated sons of prominent American families each go to Yale, join Skull and Bones, enlist in the army and later work for the CIA...parallel life stories, right?

Though I was raised in a household where "Firing Line" was one of the few shows we watched and I still admire and try to model the verbal opulence of William F. Buckley, it looks like I am going to have to be the one to say a few sane words to balance the effusive obituaries.

His enthusiasm and the gray skin of intellectual respectability his language pulled around the tottering remnants of 1950's anti-communism, nascent political operations of Christian conservatism and bits of lopsided libertarian freedom-lust and corporate cupidity did indeed, as the eulogies suggest, help greatly to make that collection of moral midgets with diverse agendas appear like one big circus elephant. And the crowd eventually followed the elephant. By the time Reagan was deposited into the howdah of the republican party, the boomers like myself were already feeling like we too might be wealthy enough to have something to loose and were long accustomed to an unrepresentatively conservative balance of voices on major media outlets thanks to the pioneering TV presence of Mr. Buckley.

Did William Sloan Coffin have a TV show? Buckley's upset with modernity as it touched Yale was already on display in his 1951 book, "God and Man at Yale", when Coffin, drained of his interest in fixing the world via the machinations of the CIA, took up religious study at Yale. Where Buckley's life work was a reactionary response to liberalism such as he perceived at Yale, Coffin passed him going the other direction in that same university. And note that Yale is not the monster factory you might presume from it's present graduate in the white house or from Mr. Buckley's vigorous defense of Sen. Joe McCarthy: Coffin and Abu Dubya were in Skull and Bones together as was Buckley later on.

But intellectualism is not the decoration that Americans, blue collared or red necked or red, white and blue populist like to declaim. And it is not the power-grab that Eric Hoffer made it out to be. It is another kind of labor, just one more tree in the orchard of human toil. It should be judged, as all supposedly practical efforts are, by its fruits.

The New York Times' obit will be typical:

Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism not just electoral Republicanism, but conservatism as a system of ideas respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964, and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
...
All great biblical stories begin with Genesis, George Will wrote in the National Review in 1980. And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.

That conflagration has burnt a lot of middle class families out of their American dreams.

The fruition of WFB's life long love of conservatism is NOT the moments he cherished such as the ascent of the vacuous Ronald-of-no-memory. The fruit was just ripening when Bush II took office. But now that fruit is coming ripe and you can smell it everywhere in the ditches and back alleys around Baghdad. "System of ideas" says the obituary....hmmm. The pastiche of conservative causes were all of tactical scale though Buckley cast spells of wholeness upon the collection of them. What wholeness then lets Mr Buckley, the sometime libertarian, excuse excessive police powers if the goal is anti-communism:

We have got to accept Big Government for the duration for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged, given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores. And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant centralization of power in Washington even with Truman at the reins of it all.

That two faced espousal of freedoms...isn't the current administration's dismissal of its legal obligations under FISA straight out of Buckley's old essay? Deregulated communications give us Murdoch uber alles, unregulated energy gives us Enron. Such are the fruits of Milton Friedman ideas championed by Mr Buckley and set loose upon us in the Reagan and subsequent administrations.

Its only my opinion but I say the wholeness that ties the disparate strains of conservative intentions together is on the strategic scale: they are a little bit afraid of almost everything they don't personally control. That in his last years, Buckley distanced himself from the religious excesses of Bush ideology and disavowed the Iraq war merely inform us that exuberant tacticians do not necessarily recognize the course their unwitting strategy compels.

Even Norman Mailer had to admit, nobody did so good a job as Buckley of dressing up the empty heart of conservatism so that it could be trotted out in the media and attract others who, self aware or not, did not want to share the world as the equals of the outgroups they misperceived or outright projected.

cross posted at at what will eventually be my old blog

I feel vindicated

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 09:36:38 -0800

Some of you might not have caught the hints.

Rummy and dummy part company. Someone finally got the hints. In spite of his professed confidence in Rumsfeld as Bush was campaigning out west last week [and damaging Republican election prospects], this resignation has been in hand for about a week according to Anderson Cooper, interviewing Gergen last night. That is about enough notice to give Rummy time to shred anything that would embarrass his boss even more, if that is possible.

To me, this long overdue departure seemed like the most achingly immanent requiting when I sat to write yesterday morning and there was so much good change to contemplate. I can't fairly claim "I told you so". I didn't know it was coming, I just knew it should come. But I have had an unusual vantage point from which to view this sad chapter of American history grinding up little people and making big money....

We have not had a SecDef so reviled by his own generals, not in the history of the repbulic. It was an unprecedented infection of a fool trusting an arrogant fast talker more than he trusted his own citizens. Its over. But the clean-up will take years. Some of Rumsfeld's pet technology projects might be in jeopardy. The annoying need to get men killed in order to win wars has already cut in to the budget for new weapons development. It is so clear to so many outside Cheney's charmed circle that it was an unnecessary war but why would a man of Rumsfeld's intelligence go along with it? Character. Rumsfeld has been the champion of a "transformation" program to put the world's most dangerous superpower on a course to ever greater fighting readiness by fighting smarter with technology. That in itself is not an evil thing but signing on to an evil war just to prove your restyled military could do the job is egotistical. It is tragically and abundantly clear this war was not Rummy's kind of war and what it needs, as was known by the generals from the outset, was massive troop strength, as much as four times the numbers deployed if it is to wind up with anything resembling conventional "victory". The real enemy was never in Iraq until we drew them there. The threats we faced before Iraq were entirely unconventional and would have been better countered by renewed peace initiatives in the Israel-Palestine conflict and by better intelligence with Arab-speaking agents on the ground and commando operations. We know now that Saddam was ready to cave but his concessions were hushed up to keep the war plan on track. I have made a very comfortable living as a technologist on one of Rumsfeld's favorite projects. I think the project has intrinsic strategic value outside the context of this stupid war and for the long term. But if Rummy's going takes a few plush jobs with it, so be it. I will gladly find more honest work if that hardship is the cost of restoring the integrity of military leadership and reasserting the military's role as a defense capability rather than a tool of baseless aggression. The cost that has been born by our fighting men and women, on the other hand, is unacceptable and unfair. How soon will they stop paying for arrogant mistakes?

I have been on this case for a while now:

It will be good to take a rest. Of course the problem is not solved. The retention of Rumsfeld so far past the time when he and his vision of the military were discredited is just one of the many examples of gross managerial incompetence that no president should be allowed. But it is the Bush mistake with the worst consequences.

Next? I hope Bolton goes very soon. The election has shown that Americans are not interested in bullying the world any more and our in-your-face UN embarrassador must go.

Politics fair and foul in a fight for america's conscience

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 13:19:55 -0800

Did any of you read this article in the NYTimes?

New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who "push homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomy" should be controlled. If your reply is "yes", the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists "the same legal rights and privileges" as Americans.
...

I want to illustrate what is at stake today. Its about a lot more than whether Americans will fight dirty among themselves. This is both a matter of my opinion and a matter of my experience as a GOTV phone volunteer. The kind of appeals made to undecided voters tell us what the campaigners think we are like. Now it is our turn to tell them what America is really like. [and yes, you should be apprehensive!]

Our November surprise turned out to be how little the Republican party knows or cares about legal or ethical campaign practices. Well, surely someone must be surprised. Plenty of fouls against FCC and other regulations but not enough MSM coverage and a downright peculiar failure on the part of many major media news organizations to point out that Dems are NOT doing dirty tricks. But this technique of probing for a voter's biases and pinning a vote suggestion to either religious intolerance or homophobia does not strike me as an intrinsically unfair campaign tool. Disgusting, pandering, encouraging the very worst in the psyche of the american electorate? Yes. Unfair? Not really. Giving voters the things they need is rare but promising them what they want is politics as usual.

Today the news will be of balky voting machines, mysteriously erased or misplaced voter registration rolls, hostile voter credential challenges in contested districts and just generally a huge sideshow of broken election infrastructure mostly to the advantage of Republicans that distracts from the real story that unfolds today: Can America regain is conscience today? The whole world dreads our elections now.

It is harmful to the prospects of any nation for its leaders to pander to the narrow mindedness, selfishness and fear of voters. These negative traits are simply human and universal pitfalls, not specifically American or Republican. They are a shortsighted toe hold for political ambitions, a dead end. It is the downward path by which fascists lead their nation's to disgrace and destruction. But it is politics as usual. Our vote this year, perhaps a little more so than in other years, is a referendum on whether America is just another "politics as usual" country and therefore destined for the same fates as other "empire as usual" nations that have gone before us.

Beside that long term rot of the moral reasoning among the voters, is there a short term harm in this vile appeal? Can blatant appeals to fear and bigotry rescue the Republicans? I wonder. The harm seems small because the bigots on whom such a phone call would work are the anxious little minds that already know who serves their special interests and insecurities. That phone call is not going to change the minds of anyone whose mind isn't already in a private fog of ignorant homophobia or having Fox News-induced nightmares about islamofascists hiding among the mosques in America. The hope [it certainly isn't facts I can cite from polling] that I am voicing is that the mysterious body of voters we label "undecided" are in fact mostly decent people who feel numbed or badgered or disgusted by the coarse, crass tone and divisive trickery that has become common procedure for getting elected. Or at least, its what got many of our current crop of defective congressmen elected. We may call these potential voters undecided only because of what a few of them told a pollster, but any sample of people who "don't know" who they are voting for seems like a useless basis to infer either indecision, indifference or reticence in service of their privacy. So it is just a hope then that among the mystery crowd there are those who need a nudge to feel that one candidate represents the best hope for all the people and for the long term and need a nudge to care enough to go to the polls. And there is a hope that such undecideds out number the bigots who balance between disgust and fear and could be tipped by an egregious phone trick. That is why I keep making the phone calls.

UPDATE: I just finished an hour of MoveOn calls-for-change into Connecticut congressional districts and maybe I was just having a good day but of the live people I talked to, one hung up and all the rest said they had or would vote for the Democratic candidate. Joe the republicrat will be all by himself among his state's delegation if that was a valid sample.

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Note:As you can see from the links, I owe particular thanks to the gratifying speed and authority of Josh Marshall's resources and his contributors at TPM where a handy scoreboard will go live when the first polls close.

FEC final regulations on elections and blogging due for congressional approval

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:47:29 -0800

The Federal Election Commission posted its "final" rules regarding blogging and the upcoming elections. You may have to be a lawyer [IANAL] to figure it all out but the worry is that if you don't, you may need a lawyer.

The document is here.

It is a draft of the final rules and its state of incompletion indicates that it has not been submitted to congress for approval, a last step before FEC can issue fines or otherwise enforce its rules. much more after the jump

Before it launches into its bureaucratic best effort at defining all that is new and dangerous about blogging, the document provides this summary of the changes incorporated since the penultimate draft:

The Federal Election Commission is amending its rules to include
paid advertisements on the Internet in the definition of "public
communication." These final rules implement the recent decision
of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in Shays v. 12
Federal Election Commission, which held that the previous
definition of "public communication" impermissibly excluded all
Internet communications. The revised definition of "public
communication" includes paid Internet advertising placed on
another person's website, but does not encompass any other form
of Internet communication.
The Commission is also repromulgating
without change its definition of "generic campaign activity" and
amending the scope of its disclaimer regulations, both of
which incorporate the revised definition of "public
communication." Additionally, the Commission is adding new
exceptions to the definitions of "contribution" and "expenditure" to
exclude Internet activities and communications that qualify as
individual activity or that qualify for the "media exemption."
These final rules are intended to ensure that political committees
properly finance and disclose their Internet communications,
without impeding individual citizens from using the Internet to
speak freely regarding candidates and elections. Further
information is provided in the Supplementary Information that
follows.

This set of rules has been kicked around for a while and now. The comment period is over. The summary would seem to imply the intent to preserve the freedom of speech of the freelancers. Proponents of regulation cite the intent to preserve the "level playing field" of the internet by requiring any website that is paid for from a campaign fund to disclose that fact. But critics have been numerous and raise many doubts If you Google the topic you get a lot more critics than proponents. Anyone with the skill and patience to wade through this document would do us all a favor to check it out. If I find anything out of whack, I will post about it.

Magnetically suspended reality

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 10:15:06 -0800

I confess, I do sometimes read the right wing rags. On February 23, Victorino Matus wrote in The Weekly Standard

Future Shock: Why the military is interested in magnetic levitation.
THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE has given millions of dollars to a company you've never heard of in order to fund something called Project M, whose aim is "The Use of Modern Sensing and Actuation Technologies Coupled With High Speed Processing to Control Complex Dynamic Systems." In English, this means three objectives: "active control of vibration, active control of mechanical shock, and active control of magnetic fields."
But for what purpose? To create an army of Magnetos capable of hurling large metallic objects at the enemy? Not quite. To find the answer, I turned to the recently retired chief of naval research, Rear Admiral Jay M. Cohen.

[I think a story like this is an ice cube in a cocktail served by the defense industry lobby. Would you like to see the whole iceberg? ~Greensmile]

You won't get a lot out of that story about new electromagnetic shock absorbing technology intended to make combat a bit less damaging to the warriors. You might wonder what Matus was talking about in his remark:

To create an army of Magnetos capable of hurling large metallic objects at the enemy?

He is talking about rail guns, a laboratory curiosity turned into a perpetual weapons system advanced research project. And the hoped for supergun is still very much on the Navy's shopping list: a BAA is military-industrial speak for "Our consultants tell us such things are possbible, anybody want to bid?" The BAA seeks among other things a study of the EMI from rail guns. About time. The projectiles are point weapons, not area weapons because they are just chunks of very high velocity metal. Fortification against this is just a large amount of dirt or a deep hole. With an EMI signature that a cheap AM radio could pick up, the enemy would have several seconds warning to jump behind the nearest berm because radio waves travel much faster than the ammunition. Ordinary structures in which civilians live would offer no protection.

U Texas Austin is helping spend the money The "all electric" stealth technology ship that would mount these guns is already being developed under the 100 billion dollar DDX program of Navy modernization.

The DDX program is the sort of bureaucratic behemoth that the B-1 bomber was:

the work is to be spread out among several contractors and many congressional constituencies,
an end date for delivery is a bit vague and,
Even its proponents have a problem with the price.

Details of this tecnology that would offer an achilles heel to enemies, if there are such details, would be classified areas of urgent research: As unfamiliar as you may be with these developments, our former Russian and emerging Chinese military contenders [we must be careful whom we label "opponent"] watch them keenly. Thus, much of what you will find on the web are those things the DoD and contractors think of as good PR. The public meant in "PR" is NOT the average tax payer nor blue state voter but the set of people who will eventually retire with some of that $100 million in their IRA or eventually fight with those "invisible" decks under their feet or their command. Al Qaeda could not care less about these massive weapon systems. Al Qaeda will never face them and can only pray such systems divert defense dollars from programs that would affect their freedom to strike.

These are primarily offensive weapon systems for naval and shore combat in an era when other countries have much more modest navies and an explosives laden inflatable manned by suicide bombers is a threat. Since the Falklands war, stand-off anti-ship missles have put a chill in the Nayv's plans for close-in ship vs ship and ship vs shore combat.

Like our Ballistic missile defense programs, whether or not the technology works is classified and what the final price tag will be is only a guess. Supposing it works and pretending for a moment that we can afford it, one still has to ask what the net benefit is of an escalation of an arms race we supposedly already won. Is there still a mission for this deadly system?

Priorities people! What are our priorites? "At least some of the money will create local jobs" is the sick way we countenance ruining our economy...and maybe a whole world.

crime does pay if your response rate is high enough

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:42:07 -0800

elevated from the diaries
Crime does pay if your response rate is high enough

NYTimes has an informative article on moves by AOL and Yahoo, two of the biggest providerss of email serice, to start charging bulk mailers for each email sent.

AOL and Yahoo will still accept e-mail from senders who have not paid, but the paid messages will be given special treatment. On AOL, for example, they will go straight to users' main mailboxes, and will not have to pass the gantlet of spam filters that could divert them to a junk-mail folder or strip them of images and Web links. As is the case now, mail arriving from addresses that users have added to their AOL address books will not be treated as spam.

For 1/4 of a cent, a bulk mailer can evade all the filters? For 1/4 of a cent, a phisher can send you a picture poisoned with spyware [yes, Virginia, there are still millions of unpatched home computers that can still be infected by merely viewing certain websites!]. The only real protection the average user, struggling to manage the "block" list with his AOL account tools, has is that the party paying the 1/4 cent has to identify themselves to AOL. If the payoff of 1/10% response to a million emails for a phishing scheme averages a mere $100 each, the scam that once yielded $100000 now has to recon on an added overhead of $2500...still profitable. These numbers are conjectured to illustrate the calulation made by those annoying bums who fill your inbox with crud. Their net depends critically on that response rate. If it were high enough, it would be worth the trouble to set up a sham company which would pay the fee and send out emails that linked back to a completely unassociated server. The article points out that this move changes the econmics of the game and indeed it does, but does it change it enough?

My opinion is that e-mail has been abused by commercial and criminal interests for two primary reasons: its "free" and its anonymous. This development that moves e-mail more toward the post office model does not quite plug either loophole but should give the pause to the worst offenders.

Yahoo has not settled on all the specifics of its attempt but will use Goodmail

Goodmail was founded several years ago with the idea that it would charge postage for all mail, but it has narrowed its focus to mail sent by companies and major nonprofit organizations, which will pay a reduced rate. Messages from paying customers will bear a special symbol to indicate that they are not fraudulent.

There is much more in the article. It is well worth the reading. It will be interesting to see who among the ISP's follows suit.

Science sermon: Why science isn't news.

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 09:24:20 -0800

elevated from the diaries
Science sermon: Why science isn't news.

The study warning that we cannot sustain US levels of metals consumption on a world-wide scale is news: it is the result of novel and far more complete analysis than prior work and it hints at serious consequences the next generation on this planet may face. But it gets no coverage thanks to the usual combination of innate hurdles facing the dissemination of scientific findings to the public. I want to share my understanding of this disconnect . . .

Among these barriers are:

Scientists write for other scientists. The article in Publications of the National Academy of Science would be a challenging read for most of us and be set aside before finishing the first page.
Science must start with numbers, data, facts and detailed evidence. Drawing big pictures from little pixels is a lot of work. The many inferential steps that connect numbers in a lab notebook to consequences in your checkbook are a path through a wilderness of claims and inertia. A path that few can follow and years in the traversal.
Science views decades, even centuries as "now". Consumers view the time between paycheck and next mortgage payment as "now". Blogs and newspapers and TV view today and maybe yesterday as "now". Politicians view the months until election day as "now". In order for any problem to merit attention it has to be a problem "now". We are not all on the same page of the calendar.

I will mention two cases in point...they should be familiar stories though you may be surprised by the timelines.

Rachel Carson writes that pesticides are wiping out preditor bird species in 1962 in a popular but controversial book...years of environmental study have preceded this book for non-scientists. The EPA was founded in 1970, DDT was banned in 1972, peregine falcon stocks just barely survived but have been on the rebound since. California Condors are not doing so well even today.

M. King Hubbert a geophysicist, predicted in 1956 that oil production in the US would peak in the 70's and then go into an unavoidable decline. He was ridiculed by a few and ignored by most. His modeling of oil production proved accurate to within a few years. Updated by vastly improved sensors and computer power, similar modeling of plant-wide oil production predicted a peak in the 2006-2008 timeframe and these predictions were showing up in popular science publications such as Scientific American in 1998. The term "peak oil" enters the pundit vocabulary a few years later. In 2004 to 2006, gas prices at the pump nearly double...whether this has much to do with the invasion of Iraq, either as cause or as effect, is still being debated. About the decline in the underlying resource, there is so little doubt by 2006 that a US president finally tells the nation: we have to kick our addiction to oil. Welcome Mr. President, to the 20th century!

Oh, and have you heard from those pesty scientists that we are running short on clean water? What a bunch worry warts!

Who ratted me out and why are they keeping all those records about me?

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:37:34 -0800

elevated from the diaries
Who ratted me out and why are they keeping all those records about me?

Why are the search companies bothering to retain all this data? They say knowledge is power and for marketers, these records, properly sifted and chewed up by AI inference engines pinpoint trends, demographics and ripe moments and right consumers to target with new products. That loss of privacy is a price we pay for the convenience of online seach and e-commerce. What is, to my mind, more certainly evil is that the developers of data mining services were so willingly commandeered when DOJ, stinging from 9/11 failures, wanted to find a terrorist in a haystack of data and DHS or the FBI bought the idea.

To paraphrase a question that Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show last night, put to the author of No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society, "So what you're telling me is that the same software that figures out when I should get an advertisement for an SUV is being used to figure out when the FBI should knock on my door to ask why my browsing habits match those of suspected terrorists?"

Movie recommendation: do go see <i>Why We Fight</i>

Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:35:56 -0800

Of Eugene Jarecki's movie, Enterainment Weekly says

Before it gets around to updating how the military-industrial complex actually works (hint: It's grown a bit more powerful since 1961), Why We Fight asks us to revel in the irony that President Eisenhower now sounds like the sort of guy who would get tarred as a leader of the ''Hate America'' crowd.

The reviewer at the Boston Globe said "It is the movie Farenheit 9/11 should have been"

Its all that. Go see it. Its just a documentary. It clarifies a whole picture of which most viewers have only seen parts. This movie can not be written off as a hatchet job the way Moore's movie can. You will be angry when you leave the theatre.

What is a mystery to me is why this movie got no build up at all while Moore's movie had Moveon.org behind it 100%. Yes, Moore's film came out in the heat of a pending election but no, the fight is not over yet.

The movie is not going to make anyone comfortable, already a plus in my book. With jackhammer force, the movie drives its point that the growing influence of the defense industry and its unholy embrace of congress and the pentagon have overridden most of the reluctance to go to war that is innate in the American character. Interviews with people who used to be military and government insiders is woven with interviews of ordinary people in the US and Iraq who have to try to understand all the awful events unfolding.

greensmile's blog

Saying goodbye to a lot more than Teddy

I can't help taking an ever-dimmer view of America's situation

Identifying Obama, Finding America and political emotion

A tale of two Williams from Yale

I feel vindicated

Go see "Why we fight"

Why is this seder different from last years?

The General Problem With Rumsfeld

one more time, WHY are we in Iraq?

Timing the news, good noose and bad news