November 28, 2006
Ball and Chain
The Brits seem well ahead of the US in privacy reducing technologies, but I have little doubt that those technologies will migrate this way soon enough. From taking motorists' fingerprints on the road, to listening in on public conversations from a hundred yards away, to capturing everyone, everywhere, on camera, to installing devices in private vehicles, etc., etc., it seems there are few spaces left where one may not be intruded upon for no good reason. The technology has jumped well ahead of public debate about rights, privacy, and freedom—so far ahead it may just choke that debate off before it starts. Post-modern fascism: unlikely to be recognized when directly encountered...
9 of 10 Emails Now Spam
No kidding. And I know people who've given up using email because they can't stand the spam. This Reuters report tries for the 'fair and balanced' approach (see in particular the last para) but that's malarkey. Spam is an evil thing, a blight, and should be suppressed without mercy. It's wrong for a few hundred criminal gangs to operate botnets of millions of zombie computers. It's wrong for the IT infrastructure industry to turn a blind eye in hopes of making a few bucks out of it, from people replacing computers to paying extra bandwidth charges. And it's wrong for governments to fumble the issue. I pay taxes, I don't want potholes on the streets, and I don't want spam in my inbox. Is that too much to ask?
November 26, 2006
Half A League
Too many really smart people recoil reflexively in the face of 'conspiracy theories'. Myself, I've never been able to accept the "magic bullet" theory of JFK's demise, nor any of the associated coincidental events. RFK's assassination also puzzled me, but I never looked into either one in detail because it never seemed the effort required would result in any payoff. Chalk them up to unsolved mysteries. But now—and for those of you who haven't seen these news items yet, please pay attention—an independent researcher out of the UK has turned up interesting new facts surrounding RFK's last moments. Specifically, from film of Bobby's victory speech at the Ambassador hotel, Shane O'Sullivan has identified three shady, relatively senior CIA operatives. Muscle men. This is a rather shocking revelation, sufficiently so to propel the story onto prime time BBC television news. What does it all mean? At this point it's too early to say for sure, and there's no guarantee that any serious investigation may be reopened (though, as a practical matter, it would not be all that difficult to haul a few retirees over the coals), but my working hypothesis would be that Bobby, likely to win the presidency, might have demanded to know from the CIA what, if any, their involvement may have been with his brother's assassination. And that Bobby, if he didn't like what he found, could have reacted with considerable anger. Motive, means, opportunity. The case isn't quite clear yet but the beginning of a blueprint for one is.
November 25, 2006
Linguistic Somersaults in an Age of Aggression and State Terrorism
By Edward S. Herman
[A slightly shorter version of this article, without footnotes, appears in Z Magazine, December 2006]
In this age of a global rogue state's serial aggressions and terrorism, language is as essential a tool of the state's managers as guns, tanks, missiles and bombs. Orwellian language has always been widely used by governments, but in this post-Soviet era with Soviet containment ended, with an openly acknowledged "projection of power" and a familiar ruthlessness working side-by-side with an alleged "promotion of democracy," linguistic advances in putting state violence in a good light have been needed and supplied. The set below contains a few holdovers from my earlier Doublespeak Dictionary in Beyond Hypocrisy (South End Press: 1992). These are marked by an asterisk. Cross references are indicated by a q.v. (quod vide=which see).
Continue reading "Linguistic Somersaults in an Age of Aggression and State Terrorism"...
November 21, 2006
The End Is Nigh
I'm still spinning my wheels trying to find a good guest to talk about Peak Oil, or some other important dimension of our energy circumstances (suggestions welcome). But while we wait I thought I'd share this interesting chart from The Oil Drum. Whenever you see this kind of consistency among estimates—despite its being a non-representative sample—it's probably a good idea to take a closer look, because the majority may well be right. Note how far outside the pack the IEA and EIA are! In any case, if we're going to think about a 'transitional phase' during which we adjust (or not) to running out of oil, it does look like we may be already in it.
Cut and Run or Stay and Slay?
To acquire some useful disambiguation of the choices we face in Iraq we should set aside the false and empty notion that US policy ever intended to spread the blessings of democracy. The Pentagon may now be reviewing three options, but only because senior officers lack the necessary mental agility. In reality, there are only two: (1) Cut and Run, so-called, or leaving the Iraqis to their own devices; and (2) Stay and Slay∗, or using the chaos in Iraq as a threat against anybody else who might dare to oppose US power. Option (2), it now seems, is becoming prohibitively expensive not to mention downright dangerous. The question is no longer whether the Pentagon will realize that, but when. I would note, parenthetically, that it appears the Baker report won't come out until the lame duck Congress has pretty well wrapped up its business, leaving the check, so to speak, for the Democrats to pay.
∗ Thanks to Ed Herman for the term.
November 18, 2006
More Kids Than Cops
In the good old days—and everyone over 40 or 50 will agree with me, I'm sure—if two or three cops repeatedly tasered a student in a college library in front of twenty or thirty other students, for no reason, the other students would have beat the crap out of the cops. No question that that would have been true in the sixties. So what's going on now at UCLA? (And—thank god for cell phones that do video, no matter how much I hate cell phones generally.) Imagine that you're one of those who watched, or who recorded the incident for posterity. You see some kid, some completely innocent kid, that you know is innocent, being tasered repeatedly. Some sort of weird assault morphed with a rape. Right in front of you. But you don't do anything about it. For the rest of your damn life you're going to be messed up from guilt.
November 16, 2006
Ségolène Royal For President
I've wanted to write something about Ségolène Royal for months. Now that she's the official Socialist candidate for president of France (elections, I believe, to be held somewhere in April 2007) let me say I certainly hope she wins. I've been following her progress and while I still don't know a lot about her I'm quite sure she's far superior to her moth-eaten male rivals. As a life-long Francophile and one who has actually worked as a US diplomat in France (my first post) I think I can say with some assurance that she'd be good for France. And good for the US. At this point, from the polls it looks like she's going to be competitive. I'll continue to follow this story and will either write later on in greater detail myself or find somebody to write about her from Paris.
The Abstract and Brief Chronicles of The Time
Back in 2000 I told myself, in an abundance of loathing for Bill Clinton, that there wouldn't be much difference between Bush and Gore. How wrong I was! At least I've had the sense to recognize in retrospect that that's a fact, unlike some who continue to maintain there's not a dime's worth of difference between the parties. And yet, Democrats suffer from the very same financial obsessions as Republicans, if in a more benign way. Money makes their heads spin, not ideas. This is a serious problem.
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November 12, 2006
Beltway Bromo-Seltzer
A Sneak Peek At The Baker Commission Report
By Werther*
As we have stated in the past, the reports of government commissions serve their intended purposes best when they act as a cover-up disguised as an exposé. The 9/11 Commission Report is the classic and best-known recent example, with Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton giving bravura performances in pretended gravitas, with only an occasional lapse into imbecility by John Lehman or Jim Thompson. [1] The Robb-Silverman Report, by contrast, was so shakily constructed, and the co-chairmen's dissembling so unconvincing, that their "investigation" should have been accompanied by the music track of "Three Blind Mice."
November 8, 2006
The Day After
Despite the Senate remaining unresolved it's clear that the public has solidly repudiated the Republicans. And yet, despite all the wonderful talk from Pelosi, Dean, Emanuel, et. al., about reaching out and having a spirit of bipartisanship, Rove's cancer remains the driving force in the body politic: the idea of a permanent majority, far from being killed off, has now merely switched sides. It would be naive in the extreme to think that the Democrats, having seized the Gerrymander machinery, would fail to deploy it before the 2008 elections, starting as of now. "A spirit of bipartisanship" may indeed prevail on certain issues, like immigration reform, but the baseline relationship between the two parties cannot but be determined by their respective efforts to find the Rovian grail. Which means that progressive reformers will have to redouble their efforts for systemic, possibly even constitutional changes.
November 6, 2006
Hacking Democracy
Some time back I let my HBO subscription lapse because it was too expensive for something I didn't watch all that often. But they do have excellent stuff from time to time and one of their recent efforts, now available for viewing from Google, is definitely worth people's attention.
November 5, 2006
Will It Be Fearless Fosdick or Dick Tracy At The Polls?
It seems to me—and I haven't seen this in other blogs or news stories, though it may have been noted out there—it seems to me that the big advantage the Dems hold for Tuesday in fighting electronic vote fraud and other vote chicanery is that they're certain to take at least the House. Which means they'll acquire power to investigate, hold hearings, require testimony and, if any testimony is proved false, throw people in jail. That is, in fact, a lot of power. Now, if the Dems don't win the House we'll have a crisis of another sort, as it'll be unambiguously clear that the election was stolen. But assuming they do, the scope for malfeasance becomes significantly reduced. The Republicans will focus on tight Senate races and, of course, try to take maximum advantage of the confusion electronic voting produces, but major flips from pre-election polling would be most surprising. Expect, nevertheless, some fierce post-election litigation. At this point it looks to me like the Dems will pick up four or five Senate seats, net (short one or two for control) and should be thinking about how to bring a Republican or two across the aisle. (Lincoln Chafee, for example, assuming he wins his seat.)
November 3, 2006
Yes, We Have No Cod
A couple years ago I read somewhere that banana plants are expected to be wiped out, worldwide, in a short time—due to some disease or other that had glommed onto the most commonly raised banana trees. (Once as a kid in the Congo I cut down a banana tree out in the forest, and its owner tracked me down a half hour later, demanding to be paid, but that's another story.) Bananas, OK, I like 'em but I could live without them. Fish, though, would be a terrible loss. So I can't understand why this report, which has appeared in a number of places, hasn't gotten more coverage. No more fish to catch in the ocean in less than fifty years! Hell, I might even still be alive then. But I just can't imagine a world where you can't have fish for dinner. Perhaps by then it'll all be farmed, or grown in petri dishes, but that's really not the same. I wonder sometimes what people two or three generations from now will think of us?!
November 2, 2006
Terminal Foot-in-mouth-itis
The good thing about Kerry's gaffe is that we won't be seeing him again as a putative presidential contender. The bad thing is that—as a perverse delayed action Halloween trick—it's choked off a lot of last-minute momentum for the Dems, possibly even throwing the balance in the Senate. For the record, I don't believe Kerry's lame explanation about a botched joke. But the problem isn't pointing out per se that the stupid class happen to be the ones enlisting, it's that if you're going to tell such an uncomfortable truth you've got to have the guts and grace to beat back a withering propaganda attack from rightwing militarists. For Kerry, evidently, that would be too much like work when all he really wanted was to bask for a while in the limelight of Dems on a roll.
