Random Fate

Coda

Nature is proving that it can kill thousands for no reason, with no one to blame, no one to retaliate against. We are being forced to stare directly into the abyss of the nothingness that we all fear is at the end of life.

Some are overwhelmed.

Some are thoughtful.

Some are emotional.

Some are taking a break from writing.

Some are raising money and doing what they can to help.

Some are gaining perspective.

Some are losing perspective.

Some are playing politics.

Some are trying to score points.

There are as many reactions as there are weblogs, and as many reactions as there are people.

New Years is traditionally a time to review the year just past, to look ahead to the year to come, and to make resolutions. The year just past is ending in a tragedy that shows the insignificance of much that generated heated passions, emotions that now seem overwrought in the face of this visit by the Rider on a pale horse at the end of a year of repeated visits by his three companions, a terrible event that when combined with the three years preceding makes a sadly fitting coda to the twentieth century, a century of mass-production death only briefly interrupted by periods of hopes now broken and forgotten.

September 11, 2001, was felt all over America, with many knowing people in the areas affected by the attacks, learning the fear that goes with love when the loved ones cannot be reached. Now we have a tragedy 50 times larger, but with no Earthly agency that can be held responsible, no one to hate, only the anguish of lives ended before their time for no apparent reason, with no deeper meaning, nothing gained from such a terrible sacrifice, and the abyss yawns darkly at our feet returning not even an echo, much less any answers, to the aguished cries of "Why?" ripped from those who had those they love torn away.

Yet of these, there is still hope. Meaning may at last be found, unwilling and unknowing sacrifice may not ultimately be in vain, and the emptiness of the abyss rejected. In the closing minutes of this year when midnight comes, hold your loved ones close, and remember all those who can no longer perform this simple, human act, and remember also we all have loved ones that we eventually lose. In the end, the tragedy of losing the ones we love is the single thing we all have in common, and in that shared grief can be found understanding. Perhaps in the terrible coda this New Years presents we can all learn of our common humanity, our common pain, and what is truly, ultimately important.

Reactions

There is an interesting contrast of reactions to criticisms regarding the amount of aid provided by the United States for recovery from the tsunami disaster.

Tom Watson provides some context of how much money goes into other areas, such as the salaries of baseball players, and then points out a missed opportunity, "...Bush might've recognized the chance for a master counterstroke with the seething Muslim world - by pouring resources into Indonesia, where the region of Aceh and its hard-core militant Islamists were particularly hard hit."

Andrew at Verite reacts with anger, writing, "We're helping your citizens because you CANNOT. Be grateful for anything we give you. And don't you DARE say that the U.S. isn't paying its dues while turning around and no doubt criticising our policy of homeland security."

Please note that the two quotes above are used for illustrative purposes and do not provide the full discussion of either author. Read the entire posts to understand their respective vantage points. What I write here is not intended to establish or refute the details of what they argue but instead to comment on the style of reactions.

I understand the origins of these two reactions, and neither is irrational. They also show in microcosm some general trends I have observed. It seems that many cannot stand any criticism of the United States or whatever is their sacred cow (their political party, their candidate for President, their beliefs), and react with what strikes me as a defensive "victim mentality". This victim mentality appears on both extremes of the political spectrum and shuts down all discussion or possibility of change, resulting in people shouting at each other and issues festering rather than being resolved. Then there are others who react by thinking about what the criticism said, comparing what was said with things not necessarily directly related to the issue at hand in a search for context, and then seek opportunities.

Unfortunately, it seems that human nature is inclined more towards the "drama" of the victim rather than the drudgery of thinking in search of a way to achieve at least part of the ultimate goal.

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Links found through The Moderate Voice and Dean's World.

A thought for the new year

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
   -William Blake

Even though I have less time than I expected...

...I'm guest-posting over at sortapundit.

So, if you want more of my golden wisdom, go and read my first post.
(end ironic sarcasm here)

Meanwhile, on Mars...

...the two rovers named by schoolchildren Spirit and Opportunity are emerging from the Martian winter and getting power boosts.

It's been almost a year, and the rovers are still working, even though they had been designed to last only 90 days. Sometimes, NASA still gets things spectacularly right.

The path of the Opportunity rover:

Some thoughts from two bloggers on blogging

Here are two contrasting views on blogging, information dispersal, and the "new media" versus the "old media":

First, Joe Gandelman, The Moderate Voice, writes It's About "A Conversation" Versus "A Pronouncement"...

...and then Pennywit has a slightly different view which discusses News Filtration Systems.

Both are well worth reading in their entirety.

After my luggage "adventure" this trip...

...this quote seemed appropriate:

The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.
   -Henry J. Tillman

A bit rushed

I'm busier than I expected now that I'm in Austin. I should have anticipated being busy, but for some reason, I didn't. Hence, the shortcuts in the posts below, such as the cartoon for Rumsfeld not accepting responsibility for his mistakes. See the comments to that post for what my intention was.

So... please be patient.

Expect short posts for the next few days. I hope to have several long ones that I'll write on the plane back to France, assuming I have a power outlet on my row. I only have two batteries for my Macintosh PowerBook, and they don't last for an entire flight back to France, especially when I have a lot to write about and am running several applications simultaneously to access my notes and the saved web pages to link!

Things have changed

It wasn't that long ago...

Have you noticed...

...that the loudest voices are always those against something, rather than for something? And it doesn't matter if those people doing the shouting and making the demands are from the left or the right-wing, it's still "against" something.

Even when something is being advocated "for" the arguments are often presented "against" something else. I'm sure there are some fundamental reasons that lie at the heart of human nature, but regardless, I'd like to see more "for" and less "against" in our political system.

From the "sad but true" file...

...yet another observation that blogworld has proven beyond a reasonable doubt:

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
   -Caron de Beaumarchais

Perspective

The news from the areas hit by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami is more grim with every hour.

There is little to say or do other than to contribute to a relief organization, and to mourn for the lives lost...

...and to remember that no matter if the flight was cancelled and Christmas was "ruined" or if you spent the holiday arguing with your family, that is nothing compared to losing your family, your children, to a disaster like the one in southern Asia.

Joe Gandelman has a personal understanding of the helpless feelings that a natural disaster can cause that he has chosen to write about; it is well worth reading.

Something to remember

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
   -Oscar Wilde

Do you ever wonder...

...how we got to the technology you are using to read this right now?

Then read a brief history of microprocessors.

A simple question rarely has a simple answer

Blackfive asks:

So what would it take to get the Main Stream Media to change it's spots?

(And, ergo, what would it take to get the Main Stream Public to change their desire for car wrecks and disasters?)

I think he has the question inverted.

As I wrote a while back:

They wouldn't publish "biased" news if no one read it...

They wouldn't pay the high salaries of sports starts if no one paid to see the games...

They wouldn't make more "reality TV" or shows filled with gratuitous sexual innuendo if no one watched...

They wouldn't play schlocky, manufactured music on the radio if no one listened...

They wouldn't mud-sling if it didn't win votes...

"They" are after a buck, or votes, or power, and "they" use the most expedient way to gain the goal.

"They" pay attention to the collective choices that the public makes.

Ultimately, who is responsible?

Think about it...

I think this is just as valid now as it was last September when I wrote it. However, there is another aspect to this. From an email exchange I had last week discussing media bias, I wrote (note - edited for readability):

I work in the sciences, routinely reading technical papers and evaluating them for their accuracy and reliability. We have a mantra of "get your own data," which is another way of saying "trust, but verify." I deal with presentations of cherry-picked data every day, and I inherently mistrust all sources of information unless I have independently verified the data. That goes for what is reported in the news media, where I inherently mistrust them (not the least because I have seen them make egregious errors when reporting on science and technology). Therefore, regardless of any protestations by the media to the contrary, I have no expectation of lack of bias. I do take it on faith that they do try to be unbiased, just as I take it on faith that the administration is indeed doing what they feel is best for the country, even when I completely disagree with their actions (see my post on Rumsfeld's visit to Iraq for an example). As a consequence, I do not react when the media present themselves as trying to be balanced. Recall that Fox News uses as its slogan "Fair and balanced" although by any reasonable measure the editorial stance of that network is definitely leaning right, just as other networks can be said to lean left, or in my view more properly said lean anti-administration.

Therefore, to me, even if there is a bias in the media, I do not see an issue, because everything is biased. A savvy administration can get their message out despite any bias, and I do strongly feel it is entirely their responsibility to get their message out. The administration's message is ALSO biased. Since there is nothing in the Constitution that I can recall about the role of the free press other than "no restrictions on freedom of the press" it is difficult to justify a statement that the press/media is not fulfilling their proper role. The government is powerful, and the Constitution was written with that in mind, with the Bill of Rights explicitly listing limitations of the powers of the government. The opposition to the government, in this case the media (with the possible exception of Fox News, which while not in unquestioning support does not appear to be in opposition), while having an apparent power, does not have the moral authority that I believe the vast majority of people do still assign to the government in general and the bully pulpit of the Presidency in particular. Therefore to me, again, the proper role of the press/media is to present a view contrary to that of the administration/ Congress/ judicial system, each of which have real power in varying degrees to actually enforce their views, whereas the media only has the power to influence (not control) public opinion.

The "unbiased media" chimera is a relatively recent development, with most of the history of the United States filled with highly partisan newspapers that published material that makes even some of the most extreme bloggers of the recent election madness look tame by comparison. While I understand the reaction in anger at the contention by the mainstream media that they are unbiased when in the view of many they are not, in my view they do try to be unbiased, even if they don't recognize their bias. In me, that does not generate anger or contempt, but instead annoyance with a bit of sadness. As I said, I have railed against the media being intellectually lazy, and part of that intellectual laziness is that even when they do self-examine it is superficial and the biases are not truly recognized. Intentions do matter, though, even if they cannot be truly divined and must be taken on faith, otherwise I would be frothing at the mouth continually at some of the actions I see coming out of each and every administration.

On cultural issues, I would say there is far more of an unambiguous bias in the mainstream media than there is on political issues. Again, the issue will eventually become self-correcting, because if an alternative source arises along the lines of Fox News, then it will succeed in taking the ever-valuable eyeballs away from the mainstream media and eventually BECOME the mainstream. There is a reason for the continued existence of the religious oriented cable networks despite the scandals of the 80s, and revulsion against the left-leaning cultural bias in the mainstream media must almost certainly play a role.

Simply saying the media is biased with no deeper analysis any time bad news arises and is reported with emphasis over and above what is dedicated to good news brings to mind images of a little boy sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA!!!!", and sadly this act is repeated constantly on both sides of the political spectrum. Bad news must be met head-on and explained in the larger context, not simply dismissed as something from a "biased media." Ignoring bad news by blaming the messenger for his bias does not make it go away, nor does it help in making the right decision.

Sometimes, Earth-shattering changes start with one unremarked event

This is a milestone passing by almost unnoticed, but eventually may be thought of as another day the universe changed:

How Much for the Clone?

Wired News Report
12:14 PM Dec. 23, 2004 PT

The first cloned-to-order pet sold in the United States is named Little Nicky, a 9-week-old kitten delivered to a Texas woman saddened by the loss of a cat she had owned for 17 years.

The kitten cost its owner $50,000 and was created from DNA from her beloved cat, named Nicky, who died last year.

Yet while Little Nicky frolics in his new home, the kitten's creation and sale has reignited fierce ethical and scientific debate over cloning technology, which is rapidly advancing.

Commercial interests already are cloning prized cattle for about $20,000 each, and scientists have cloned mice, rabbits, goats, pigs, horses -- and even the endangered banteng, a wild bull that is found mostly in Indonesia.

Yet another manifestation of our pathological avoidance of accepting death as a part of life, just as much a part of life as birth.

What does it say about your weblog...

...when the "context-sensitive" Google ads come up with websites selling "stress-relief" products?

Fundamental beliefs

I originally wrote this as a reply to an email. I will not quote the original email here because the person who wrote it has his own weblog, and therefore his own venue to express himself, and I do not want to misrepresent his views. Instead, I will present only what I wrote, edited a bit for readability.

In my writings on torture, I am not questioning the motivations for why we invaded Iraq, nor am I disputing the need to continue the occupation until we can be reasonably sure that Iraq will not immediately decay into another failed state or turn into an Islamofascist Hell.

When I refer to torture, I am not referring to the panties on the head; I have heard credible stories of acts far beyond that. According to my moral foundation, torture is ALWAYS wrong. It does not matter WHO is being tortured, nor how much that person may DESERVE it.

Simply put, if we behave barbarically, then what separates us from those who do fly airplanes into buildings? If we say "These are our enemies, they are barbarians, therefore we can forget they are human," is that not exactly what they said to themselves before they committed their crimes? The Islamofascists say repeatedly that WE are the barbarians and therefore WE can be treated as non-human with no consideration. This also is the path the Nazis took to justify their behavior. I refuse to take that path, or even the first steps down it.

The most insidious evil is that perpetrated in the name of good, because once it is accepted in extreme circumstances, it becomes acceptable in less and less extreme circumstances until it becomes routine.

Look at how our culture has evolved with acceptance of things that were once completely rejected and you will see clear evidence of this facet of human behavior.

Civilization means restraint from barbaric behavior, and you cannot protect civilization by denying its basic tenets.

In 10 years, will we be able to look in the mirror and recognize ourselves? Will we like what we see?

It is up to us now to decide what will be in that future mirror.

Thoughts for the last week of the year

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
   -Herm Albright

The truth comes out when the spirits go in.
   -Irish Proverb

A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is of it wrong.
   -Unknown

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
   -Goethe

Generosity of spirit

In a post for the recent Spirit of America fundraising campaign, I wrote about the generosity that Americans are known for around the world.

The world knows the people of the United States, not the government but the people, as remarkably generous. Even during the height of tensions between the US and Iran, every time there was an earthquake in the region, the people of the United States contributed to relief efforts. Any time there is any kind of natural disaster in the world, the people of the United States are in the forefront in contributing money and other forms of aid to the stricken region, regardless of past or present enmity.

This is the generosity of individuals, generosity of material means.

This generosity is nothing to sneeze at and will add to the good in a world that has more than enough evil.

Ultimately, though, it is easy to be generous with money.

True generosity is generosity of spirit, which is far, far harder to achieve.

The generosity of spirit I speak of is not the trite "love all mankind" that is the mantra mindlessly repeated during this time of the year.

The generosity of spirit I speak of is not giving of yourself until you have nothing left for yourself.

The generosity of spirit I speak of is not denying your nature or your humanity.

What is it, then?

Generosity of spirit is recognizing the humanity of everyone.

Generosity of spirit is avoiding the laziness of labeling and taking the time to look at the heart of matters.

Generosity of spirit is opening your mind to the thoughts of others, even when you do not agree with them.

We are all human. We all have to eat to live. We all have to sleep to stay sane. We all suffer from the same curse so eloquently allegorized in the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge and have the need for our lives to have some meaning, some external recognition that we are important.

Generosity of spirit recognizes this common need, this essential emptiness we all share that can only be filled by others. The very recognition of this need satisfies it and assuages the loneliness that is so central to being human, yet this recognition is often the most difficult to give and requires a true effort of will.

The single biggest way we can do good in this world is to take the time to try to understand those we regard as our worst enemy and recognize in them the same humanity that exists in ourselves. Evil arises out of the refusal to see enemies as human. Does the world really need more of this evil?

From a voice of moderation

Joe Gandelman, The Moderate Voice, reiterates a point I have made several times here at Random Fate but from a different perspective. Go read to see his take on the left versus the right-wings in blogworld and how civil discourse does still exist, if sometimes harder to find than we might want.

Timing is everything, but it is not the only thing

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice writes in a post about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's current visit to Iraq in the wake of the recent "armor question" and "signature machine" imbroglios:

It is NOT unusual for an administration member in any wartime adminstration to visit troops during Thanksgiving or Christmas. And while Rumseld's trip is laudable, the timing is..ahem...a tad suspect.

While Joe is using some of his dry wit here, and while I have been no fan of Rumsfeld in his performance as Secretary of Defense, especially in light of the recent revelations that Colin Powell stated there have been too few troops in Iraq to properly control the country, I think it is rather unfair to "question the timing" of Rumsfeld's visit as solely a cynical ploy.

I disagree with many of the actions of the Bush administration, but I do not feel that they are entirely cynical and cold-hearted. While I am sure there was some discussion of the political benefits of a visit with the troops over Christmas, I do not think the sole or even the primary reason for this visit was for PR value in the US.

Blaming the messenger instead of analyzing the message

I left a comment to a post at Dean's World that is on a topic I have been meaning to write about here, so I'll repost it here while recommending you read Dean's post and the comments.

My comment (edited a bit for readability and correcting a grammatical error):

One of the key lessons of the Vietnam era is that public perception is one of the most important aspects of running a war in the modern (aka television) era. This lesson has apparently been forgotten. Blaming the public perception on some agenda of the mainstream media is laziness, because there is more to public perception than just the mainstream media news from Iraq, for the media also repeat almost unedited statements from the White House and the administration with little commentary or perspective added. You cannot say that the administration does not have the bully pulpit that Teddy Roosevelt spoke of.

However, if the picture painted by the administration is not consistent with the pictures coming out of the country (and the administration can make sure that "the good things" are shown) then the line taken by the administration painting the rosy picture is not believed. The recent acknowledgment by President Bush that the Iraqi police forces are not what we would like them to be adds credibility to what the administration says in the future, because he has actually admitted a problem. Nothing is ever as rosy as the situation in Iraq has been portrayed by the administration, just as it is not as bad as the reports directly from Iraq would indicate.

It is the responsibility of the White House to get its message out, and it is the responsibility of the media to find out the things that the government wants to hide. This is the nature of the adversarial system that has evolved in our country. Just as the court system is adversarial, with a prosecutor aimed at convicting the defendant, the media feels that its job is to ferret out the hidden secrets that people in power always hold and in holding the secrets ultimately degrade democracy.

Merely saying "the mainstream media doesn't want to show the good things and is unfair" does not hold the administration to account for not getting the message of the good happening in Iraq out, and is yet another variation of blaming the messenger instead of analyzing the message.

UPDATE: Dean has another post that shows how the messenger is being blamed. Also, via David Anderson at ISOU, apparently the question to Rumsfeld regarding the armor for vehicles that created such an uproar was not planted by an embedded journalist but may have been toned down from the question originally written by the soldier.

As I have said repeatedly, there is more to any story than what is on the surface, and facile statements made based upon surface impressions are not only unhelpful, but oftentimes create a furor that distracts from the true issues at hand.

Drive...

When I was married, I used to go out for a drive every Christmas Eve, alone. I started this when I was in graduate school in Arizona. Christmas in Arizona I suspect is much like Christmas in Australia, you’re running the air conditioner and hoping that the reindeer don’t drop out of the sky from heat exhaustion.

We lived in Phoenix, which is in the center of a huge plain called the Valley of the Sun, ringed by mountains. Over the eons that eroded into the giant basin and created a flat-bottomed valley that has occasional isolated, craggy, rocky mountain peaks rising from the almost perfect flatness like islands of rock in a sea of dust. This creates a huge hothouse effect from the inversion layers that form in the giant valley. Oddly, sometimes the air is crystal clear, usually immediately after the hot air in the valley finally breaks free from the imprisoning cooler air above. This happened one Christmas Eve, so as I drove through the night through one of the Indian Reservations I could see for miles. The Reservations had almost nothing built inside them, so even though they were on land that was at the same level as the rest of that flat-bottomed valley, some of the best views of the area could be found there.

Isolated houses were on the Reservation, and in the distance where the darkness seemed impenetrably dense I saw a small house, what we would call a shotgun-shack in Memphis, and it had red, green, blue, and yellow lights strung along the eaves. The house was isolated, nothing nearby, all alone in the night.

Years later, we lived near Portland, Oregon. One Christmas Eve, I played my “game” that I enjoyed along the narrow two-lane highway that crawled halfway up the cliff-edge on the north side of the Columbia River Gorge. I had a high performance all-wheel-drive sports car, and I enjoyed taking it out on that narrow, twisty road and take all the turns at a minimum of twice the recommended maximum speed. The 35mph turns started to be a bit touchy, but the real challenge was in the 40 and 45mph turns at 80 and 90mph.

The gorge is relatively narrow upriver of Portland, but widens out again after 40 miles or so, where a dam has been built, and a bridge across the river slightly further upstream. My route typically was to drive on the narrow winding highway on the north side (we lived north of the river), cross the bridge, and then take another narrower and even more serpentine highway on the south side. The highway on the south side had several places to stop that were at waterfalls fed by streams that arose from glaciers on Mount Hood and springs in the mountains near the base of Mount Hood. One of my favorite places in the world is Latourell Falls, where I would stop at midnight, park, and walk the quarter of a mile through the dark woods to the base of the waterfall.

Another Christmas Eve, I took a route that landed me on an interstate highway. I stopped at a truck stop to pick up a soda, and I saw the truckers eating their Christmas Eve Dinners in the truck stop cafe. There was an odd camaraderie in their isolation, each alone at their own table, or sitting on stool at the counter, with at least one stool between them, but none seeming to feel lost. They smiled at the waitress and bantered back and forth with her at midnight on Christmas Eve in a truck stop 50 miles from anywhere.

Even after my divorce, when I began to visit my parents for Christmas again, I still felt a need to go out alone for a drive on Christmas Eve. One year there had been an ice storm, the most common kind of “white Christmas” experienced in Memphis, and heedless of the danger I went for a drive. It was midnight on Christmas Eve, I had a bigger risk of getting run over by a reindeer than encountering another car. The ice storm had started early in the day, and with their customary intrepidness, drivers all over Memphis had abandoned their cars to walk, showing just how afraid of frozen water they are. When else can you get Americans to choose to walk when they could drive? As was typical in ice storms, the weaker branches of trees had broken under the extra weight of ice, creating a sad vista in tree-rich Memphis.

Even people who are not misers have ghosts of the past that haunt them.

Before you get too rigid in your thinking...

...here is something to keep you flexible.

Stolen from Jennifer:

A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
   -Leo Rosten

NOT stolen from Jennifer, but in the same theme:

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
   -Robert Anton Wilson

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
   -Kurt Vonnegut

And a final word from our sponsor:

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.
   -George Washington

To all the torture apologists

I have not been saying the war in Iraq itself has had only bad results.

What I AM saying is that you lose the moral high ground when you commit immoral acts such as torture, especially if the government that ordered the invasion searched for legal justification to avoid having the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners, so that "pressure" could be applied to them.

Saying "Saddam did worse" or "all we did was humiliate them" does NOT justify what was done, especially in light of the new information coming out (note-emphasis added):

New documents released yesterday detail a series of probes by Army criminal investigators into multiple cases of threatened executions of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers, as well as of thefts of currency and other private property, physical assaults, and deadly shootings of detainees at detention camps in Iraq.

In many of the newly disclosed cases, Army commanders chose noncriminal punishments for those involved in the abuse, or the investigations were so flawed that prosecutions could not go forward, the documents show. Human rights groups said yesterday that, as a result, the penalties imposed were too light to suit the offenses.

The complaints arose from several thousand new pages of internal reports, investigations and e-mails from different agencies, which, with other documents released in the past two weeks, paint a finer-grained picture of military abuse and criminal behavior at prisons in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan than previously available.

The documents disclosed by a coalition of groups that had sued the government to obtain them make it clear that both regular and Special Forces soldiers took part in the abuse, and that the misconduct included shocking detainees with electric guns, shackling them without food and water, and wrapping a detainee in an Israeli flag.

The variety of the abuse and the fact that it occurred over a three-year period undermine the Pentagon's past insistence -- arising out of the summertime scandal surrounding the mistreatment at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison -- that the abuse occurred largely during a few months at that prison, and that it mostly involved detainee humiliation or intimidation rather than the deliberate infliction of pain.

After the latest revelations, including the disclosures that officials in other federal agencies had objected to these actions by soldiers -- to the point of urging, in some cases, war crimes prosecutions -- White House spokesman Scott McClellan responded yesterday with a promise that President Bush expects a full investigation and corrective actions "to make sure that abuse does not occur again."

---

The new documents include several incidents of threatened executions of teenage and adult Iraqi detainees. In one instance, a soldier in a unit that lacked any training in interrogation -- but was nonetheless assigned to process and question detainees -- acknowledged forcing two men to their knees, placing bullets in their mouths, ordering them to close their eyes, and telling them they would be shot unless they answered questions about a grenade incident. He then took the bullets, and a colleague pretended to load them in the chamber of his M-16 rifle.

The documents indicate that the perpetrator, who was investigated on charges of assault and a "law of war violation," was given a nonjudicial punishment by his commander. Threatening detainees with physical harm to compel their testimony is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

In a second case, Army investigators concluded that a sergeant committed offenses including assault, dereliction of duty and cruelty when he conducted "a mock execution of an Iraqi teenager" in front of the boy's father and brother, who were suspected of looting an ammunition factory. Investigators also found that the actions were condoned by a lieutenant who conspired with the sergeant.

An investigative report also details an incident two days earlier, in which the lieutenant ordered a suspected looter to kneel, pointed a 9mm pistol at his head and then pulled the gun away just as he fired a shot. The outcome of both cases is unclear from the records released yesterday.

The documents also divulge a probe of the beatings of three mosque security guards in Baghdad in September 2003. After being arrested and cuffed during a search, the three Iraqis were kicked, stomped and dragged by a group of U.S. soldiers. Five soldiers were given reprimands and reductions in rank after being found guilty of maltreatment of prisoners, assault and other charges, the records show.

In another Baghdad case, a U.S. soldier was accused of trying to force an Iraqi civilian to hold a gun as a justification for killing him. The soldier punched the civilian in the face, held an M-16 rifle to his head and flicked the safety off to threaten him, according to the accounts of 19 witnesses. Another soldier eventually stepped in to protect the civilian, who had been hired by the U.S. Army to guard the Museum of Iraqi Military History, the records show.

Other documents describe the death in 2003 of detainee Abdul Kareem Abdureda Lafta, 44, in a U.S. Army jail in Mosul. He "appeared to be in good health" when taken into custody, and he quickly gained the attention of MPs by continually trying to remove the hood placed on his head and talking when guards told him to be silent, the documents say. One night, Lafta was put to bed with his hands tied behind him. Even so, one guard said he spent much of the night "constantly moving around on the ground" in his cell. In the morning, he was found dead.

A doctor who examined the body told investigators "he did not know what killed him." Another Army document says he was found to have a small laceration on his head. The investigators said "there is no documentation . . . explaining the lack of an autopsy."

In another case, Army investigators found probable cause to court-martial a soldier for shooting to death an Iraqi detainee, Obede Hethere Radad, without warning. But he was punished administratively and discharged.

To all you apologists out there who say "we only humiliated them" I say "Bullshit!!!"

To all you who are wearing blinders and say "the news media is exaggerating things for their own, left-wing agenda" I say "Bullshit!!!"

All the attempted justifications of "Saddam was far worse" excuse NOTHING that we do that is wrong. Because someone else cut off a man's hand, I'm OK because all I cut off was a man's finger, is this the kind of "logic" we need to sleep well at night?

Stop justifying and face facts. We have done wrong.

When I was younger and first learned about World War II, I could not conceive how the people of Germany allowed the atrocities that the Nazis committed against not only the Jews, but many other groups. Now, I see how many people see ONLY what they want to see and are WILLINGLY BLIND to whatever does not meet their preconceived notions, their agenda.

A comment to a previous post responded to one of the torture apologists in a way I felt was quite succinct:

...does it matter how they stack up side by side? Is this a frickin' competition? Or are you looking to see if we can somehow justify ourselves? "Oh, he was worse than we are, so we're OK." It's NEVER OK. It's always appalling.

I am beginning to question the fundamental humanity of those who are NOT appalled.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I have not and am not saying that no good has come out of the war, so stop justifying the war. I AM saying that these brutal, appalling acts of torture, perpetrated under an administration that deliberately sought legal means to avoid having the Geneva Conventions apply both undermine the moral justification for the war AND soil the United States almost beyond redemption.

I find a huge irony in the fact that we are about to celebrate the birth of a man who was tortured and nailed to a cross to die, acts recently depicted in all their brutality in a movie that helped many understand their faith better, and yet people are being apologists for acts that are of the same nature by saying "they are of a lower degree."

Wrong is wrong. Evil is evil. In this there is no "degree" that justifies NOT SPEAKING OUT AGAINST IT. In saying "Saddam did worse", you are merely pointing out that we are now in the same category, it is NO EXCUSE AND NO JUSTIFICATION FOR ACTS THAT ARE ALWAYS UNJUSTIFIABLE.

As I have written before: The acts which expose the feet of clay of the hero, of whom is expected better, cause far more damage than the acts of those who the world already knows are evil.

Some thoughts for a Thursday

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
   -W. H. Auden

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
   -Alvin Toffler

When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.
   -Voltaire

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
   -Catherine Aird

No longer a "just war"?

Bat One has a post at Pennywit on the attack at Mosul where he makes the comment, "What has not been widely reported in the mainstream press, the one that so concerned itself with prisoner abuse and Geneva Conventions, and Marines shooting bad guys, is that the deliberate target in Mosul was the hospital, and that the purpose of the attack on the dining hall was to create chaos and casualties, so that the later attack on the hospital and the care givers would be that much more effective." Upon first read, this appears to be negating our bad acts because the acts of the enemy in Iraq are worse. That may not have been his intention, but it raises a serious question in my mind.

My question is this: Repeatedly I have seen Saddam's torture chambers used as a way to give a "just cause" to this war. However, as we decry Saddam's torture chambers, we construct and use our own. Does this not undermine our "just cause"?

Saddam was torturing his enemies. We are torturing people we have labeled "enemy combatants". Morally, we have reduced ourselves to those we deposed in Iraq. Sorry, before I hear any objections I will state definitively that moral relativism doesn't apply. If we torture people, it's not OK because we are torturing "the bad guys". Recall that Saddam was torturing people he said were "the bad guys". And yet, we are supposed to be outraged that those who are our enemies are trying to kill as many of us as possible.

They are our enemies, and we have now, through the use of torture, put ourselves on the same level as the regime we attacked and deposed (not the terrorists who saw off heads, but the former regime of Saddam Hussein). Don't agree? Look at the list: Weapons of Mass Destruction? The US made the first atomic bomb, and is still the only nation to use one on their enemy. Defying the UN? Check. Now, the use of torture on our enemies.

9/11 seems to have erased all moral lines that were thought to have been inviolable for the United States before that day.

And now our enemies want to kill as many of us as possible. Does this make them more evil than us? This is not al-Qaida we are fighting in Iraq, and it is likely not even Wahabism. From their point of view, they are Minutemen fighting a foreign invader.

Please do not dismiss this as a "liberal" or "left-wing" position or question. I am reading events as they will be read from the perspective of history. Think about the judgment of history upon the actions of the United States in the last three years, and consider if we are as blameless and as innocent now as we were on 9/11 and as we continue to proclaim ourselves to be.

The mirror goes black

Torture.

We've used it.

The US government (in the form of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) has authorized it.

Who are the "good guys" again?

Will America ever be able to look into the mirror again and say "we are the epitome of freedom and respect for human rights"?

What's in a phrase?

Doug Mc over at The Reality Stick helps give some perspective to the "saying 'Happy Holidays' denies the Christ in Christmas" caviling.

We have been told we are a nation at war...

...yet no one other than the military and their families have been asked to make any real sacrifices.

The Bull Moose suggests a sacrifice that is relatively painless and would pay off dividends for the President. I have no other comments than to suggest you read it and think...

Vignettes from walking around Grenoble last Saturday

Searching in the open-air markets that have sprung up in every square (called places) for gifts that are unique to France, but the only things easily found that are truly “French” (as opposed to stuff mass-produced in China or artisan work that resembles what I’ve seen in Portland and Seattle and Austin and everywhere I’ve gone to outdoor markets in the world) is food. Cheese and bread don’t travel well on a 14 hour plane ride, and the sausages might elicit exclamations of revulsion upon sight of them rather than gratitude for the gift.

Hearing unfamiliar music that must be for Christmas because of the word “Noel” (the French word for Christmas), with the ever present French-cliché accordion in the band, then hearing a tune that is oddly familiar but not recognized until the chorus, “Jingle Bells” in French, an odd, almost surreal experience.

Walking past vendors selling food, sausages, cheeses, breads, searching for a cheese that is not too runny or smelly. I live in a country with over 300 varieties of cheese, and NONE of them is cheddar... I like cheddar, damn it!

A life-sized Pere Noel (aka Santa Claus) hanging from a balcony on one of the buildings ringing the place, looking like he’d slipped off and was holding on for dear life.

Driving up the river valley after a hard rain the night before, and seeing the snow-line marked clearly on the steep slopes of the mountains, and not very high, with a puffy, broken layer of clouds at the same level.

The people at the markets don't look exhausted from hard shopping and rushing around making sure they do everything they have to do in their overscheduled lives, possibly because their lives are NOT overscheduled, and they not only live in the moment, but they recognize there IS a moment to live. There really is joy in the air.

A mother telling her children to thank Pere Noel for the “sleigh” ride on a wagon with cunningly hidden wheels to make up for the lack of snow around the centre-ville, and the children’s voices saying singsong, “Merci, Pere Noel!!!!”

They still believe in magic...

Some quotes apropos of ANY season

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
   -Douglas Adams

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
   -Henry Kissinger

Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be.
   -J. S. Mill

I envy people who drink -- at least they know what to blame everything on.
   -Oscar Levant

If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
   -Professor Irwin Corey

More on Social Security "reform"

Another person whose thinking aligns with of my theory on Social Security "privatization" has written a column.

Privatizing Social Security should scare you

The idea assumes anyone can invest successfully -- and threatens to destroy the safety net for which Social Security was originally created. Yet privatization is being spuriously packaged as 'reform.'

By Bill Fleckenstein

If Mr. Market was easy to understand, we'd all become rich. But notwithstanding his inscrutable ways, there are pundits aplenty offering their opinions to anyone who will listen. It's a problem for folks sifting through all these opinions, as they try to discover the ones that will make them better investors.

There's more... I'd suggest reading and then thinking about it a while.

Iraqi elections and deja-vu?

I have just put up my first post at the new endeavor by the Commissar, the Iraq Elections Blog. My post is Targeted attacks could mean trouble, discussing how the execution-style attack on election officials this weekend could have larger implications than the media play on the story indicates.

On a related topic, the Bull Moose wonders if we are undergoing a deja-vu of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, but this time with a nominal ally, Saudi Arabia, being the ultimate source of support for our enemies the Wahabists. As he says:

Vietnam analogies are inexact and somewhat misleading. But, as in Vietnam, we are increasingly fighting in the midst of a civil war that is being fueled by outside forces.

I fear things will get worse in Iraq before they get better.

Bunny suits and spelling difficulties

Back in late July, I wrote about the widespread posting of the photo of John Kerry in the "bunny suit" at NASA. The Commissar had a very insightful comment to my question of "Is this what people really decide based upon?" In the comments to my post, he wrote:

Such images might, or might not, resonate with the people if they illustrate something that the people already feel.

Dukakis in the tank and Bush 41 at the grocery scanner* epitomized one's soft-on-defense-liberalism and the other's disconnect from ordinary realities of American's lives. Put the 'Dean scream' in there as well.

I don't know if bunny-suit-Kerry will come to symbolize his (alleged) waffling or something else about him. But, in an odd way, it will shake out.

*See Snopes on the falsity of the Bush scanner event.

A photo from the recent White House Economic Conference encapsulates perfectly what I perceive as the major problem with the Bush administration:

From Yahoo! News:

'Challenges' Prove Too Much for White House

Thu Dec 16, 4:17 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House went all out to showcase the advantages of President Bush (news - web sites)'s ambitious financial agenda this week, but in the end the "challenges" proved too much.

The word "challenges" -- a main theme of a two-day White House economic conference that ended on Thursday -- was misspelled on a large television monitor that stood in front of Bush during a panel discussion.

"Financial Challanges for Today and Tomorrow," the message proclaimed in dark blue capital letters against a bright yellow background.

The conference, which critics derided as a public relations event devoid of serious discussion, spotlighted a second-term Bush agenda that would reform Social Security (news - web sites) and the tax code while making tax cuts permanent and cutting the deficit in half.

The White House had no immediate comment on the misspelling.

Before you say "this is a trivial thing" let me remind you that the Kerry "bunny suit" photo was ALSO a trivial thing.

More importantly, though, is this: The saying "The Devil is in the details" is an old saw for a reason.

Any data that doesn't conform with the viewpoint of the President is minimized or ridiculed. This is not a Good Thing. Broad policy decisions are made based upon data, and pre-filtered data with a spin attached to it does not lead to good decisions. In addition, broad policy decision are one thing, but the implementations of those policies is another thing, and I think we have seen serious problems in the details because they are being neglected.

The details are significantly lacking in the current PR campaign waged by the White House on Social Security, and those missing details are another example that is of a singe piece with the run-up to the war in Iraq and the tax cuts that we now see have led to large deficits. The details neglected in the White House pronouncements on those issues have resulted in substantial costs, both human and monetary. There is also an irony that the President who is responsible for these deficits is raising the alarm over a Social Security "shortfall" projected in approximately 40 years, especially since with his promises to not cut benefits or raise taxes mean that the transition costs of a change in the Social Security system to a partially privatized system will mean even more deficit spending by the government.

This drive for "reform" does not appear to be driven by data, or at least by ALL the data, but instead by ideology, and I fear that similar to the Medicare Prescription Drug law benefited drug companies at the expense of the American taxpayer, Social Security "reform" will mainly benefit Wall Street investment firms, again at the expense of the American taxpayer.

Am I suggesting that President George W. Bush is pushing an agenda solely for the purpose of benefiting his buddies and make them richer? No, I am not saying that, even if that can be read into what I have written. I do believe that President Bush honestly thinks what he is doing is in the best interests of the nation. What concerns me is his method of decision making, and how contrary data seems to have no effect on his actions or decisions. Resolve is not a refusal to see reality, but unfortunately, that appears to be George W. Bush's interpretation of the meaning of that word. As was written by Willam S.Golding, "I don't think that word means what you think it means." Based upon what we have seen to date in this presidency, George W. Bush does not show the ability that his father did of being able to see unpleasant facts and change his direction accordingly, even if it costs politically (see the "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge of George H.W. Bush and how in accepting the reality that contradicted his resolve and acting correctly in response to the situation he ultimately lost his bid to be re-elected).

Faith is well and good in matters of religion, but in matters of public policy it should be a guide to help in deciding the moral course of action based upon the data, and only a guide, not the sole basis of policy decisions, no matter how unappealing the rational, logical conclusions arising from that data are. Ultimately I suspect the "faith-based decision making" that has on more than one occasion shown a complete disconnect with reality will be widely regarded as the key failure of this Presidency, especially when the squandering of goodwill after September 11, 2001 through a series of ill-advised decisions is considered.

A mixed bag

People tend to post link-fests to other weblogs. I've got a lot of links, not just to other weblogs, to post here that I'd love to write about, but either don't have the time, the energy, or think that there are enough people out there reading this during the count-down to Christmas, so I'll just link to the articles and hope that folks think about them without my prompting.

Speaking of Christmas, James Wolcott has some pointed commentary on the annual "put the Christ back in Christmas" meme circulating in conservative-leaning weblogs.

While some Nobel Laureates have said some pretty stupid things, a winner of the prize for Chemistry in 1996 is now calling for more focus on research and development of energy sources that don't depend on fossil fuels, something I agree with completely, and something almost impossible for me to emphasize enough how important this is for our long-term safety and success.

The Christian Science Monitor usually has very thoughtful reporting. Here are a few recent articles that are well worth reading:

Some reporting on cultural diplomacy: What US emissaries are hearing

A discussion on the monetary cost of war: The rising tab for US war effort

On a possible cultural chance in the Arab world: Democracy stirs in the Arab world

And on democracy closer to home: How far will Bush's domestic mandate go?

On domestic politics, there is quite a bit of writing about the prospect of revisions (aka reform) of the Social Security system in the United States.

The Economist asks "Should the American government borrow trillions to finance pension reform?" in Debt and Dotage

At MSNBC, they discuss if there is really a "crisis" in Social Security at all in answering a reader question and another columnist discusses the government accounting involved and how the numbers don't add up

Matthew Yglesias contends that there is no crisis in Social Security, and questions why the Bush administration is so bearish on America

Finally, the Bull Moose posts an indictment of Republicans and their words versus their actions on national defense.

As you can see, I've been thinking about a lot of different things lately. The topics and positions in these links are all worth pondering, not necessarily agreeing with, but they definitely contain many things to consider.

The best Christmas music of all time?

A Charlie Brown Christmas by The Vince Guaraldi Trio, the soundtrack to the TV special, especially the tune Christmas Time Is Here (the instrumental version).

To me, it has just enough wistful sadness evoking childhood past and rememberence of innocence lost and magic faded.

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Full disclosure: If you click on the link and choose to buy that CD, I get a referral bonus at no additional cost to you. Capitalism at it's best!!!

Who better to poke fun at than yourself?

This is why I like The Economist magazine. In an article discussing the patchwork of regulations on interstate alcohol sales and how they are affecting the small wineries in the United States, the last lines include this bit of humor:

Mr Lucas adds a broader historical perspective. “I blame this all on the English,” he tells The Economist. “You sent us a boatload of Pilgrims. Just think if the Mayflower had been full of Italians.”

The Economist is based in London.

I suspect the irony is lost on them

Via Dean's World:

A.C.L.U.'s Search for Data on Donors Stirs Privacy Fears
By STEPHANIE STROM

Published: December 18, 2004

The American Civil Liberties Union is using sophisticated technology to collect a wide variety of information about its members and donors in a fund-raising effort that has ignited a bitter debate over its leaders' commitment to privacy rights.

Some board members say the extensive data collection makes a mockery of the organization's frequent criticism of banks, corporations and government agencies for their practice of accumulating data on people for marketing and other purposes.

An object lesson on how easy it is for any organization to stage a creeping invasion of privacy.

In the midst of appreciating the irony in all its lugubrious glory, we should stop and think about the broader implications. They are neither pretty nor comforting.

A hot line to heaven

The Economist magazine has an interesting analysis of the role of religion in the Presidency of George W. Bush. An example of their balanced viewpoint is:

Mr Bush is in fact in the mainstream of recent presidents. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre points out, Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school while president. Bill Clinton talked about Jesus more often than Mr Bush and has spoken in more churches than Mr Bush has had rubber-chicken dinners.

They go on to point out some subtle points that I had not observed previously. As I have said repeatedly, even before I moved to France, it is important to get your news and analysis from multiple sources, including ones based outside the United States.

Meanwhile, near Saturn...

...the Cassini-Huygens mission continues it's exploration of strange new worlds.

Through the eyes of soldiers

Not reading, exactly, but recommended highly just the same:

Under Mars - An online archive of soldiers' photos

Take the warning regarding the graphic nature of the photos seriously. There are some very moving photos there, along with the mundane and everything in between.

This one is rather striking.

Just in time for the holidays...

...the latest Carnival of the Recipes (the 18th, believe it or not!) is up at Mountaineer Musings.

Hopefully I'll be able to participate again after New Years.

Some advice for the holidays

I'd follow this advice before going to bed instead of before leaving the house...

Reuters issues a correction

A correction has been issued for a Reuters News story:

Please read headline as "Michael Jackson to invite visitors to Neverland" ... instead of ... "Jackson to throw kids holiday party at Neverland" and in first paragraph "...open to a group of visitors on Friday."

Headlines, fascinating how much meaning is conveyed in such a few words. In a certain context a headline can be changed from having rather unpleasant implications to something banal.

I wonder if the "correction" was prompted by lawsuit concerns, or perhaps objections from the Jackson PR machine.

I don't know where she gets them

Jennifer posts another great quote.

We need to trade lists of quotes one of these days...

Motivations behind attempts at emotional manipulation

Pennywit raises some valid questions regarding cynicsm, intentions, and emotional manipulation. He covers it so well there is little left to add.

A former Republican Congressman looks at Social Security privatization

Joe Scarborough points out TANSTAAFL... Social Security privatization isn't going to come for free:

You see, they've got this really cool plan to privatize parts of Social Security that usually make free market conservatives like myself giddy. We start talking about the invisible hand and the power of market forces.

Only problem is that this plan to get government off our backs costs a cool $2 trillion in transition fees.

And— let me see if you are following me here— who pays for that?

That's right. YOU!

He then makes a similar prediction as I did regarding the ultimate outcome of Social Security privatization:

But that's not the biggest problem with this $2 trillion Social Security plan. What bothers me the most is the fact that everybody in Washington knows that allowing Americans to invest parts of their Social Security payments in the stock market will produce some winners. But capitalism also always produces losers, and we all know that there will be millions of Americans who will make stupid investments in the coming years. (See Enron, etoys, Pets.com, Worldcom)

So what will happen when they retire and start complaining to their local congressman and TV camera crews about how they're about to be thrown out in the streets because of the dumb investments they made with their Social Security payments years ago?

Congress will pass the "Save Our Stupid Seniors Investment Relief Act of 2025," thereby guaranteeing that all Americans will have all Social Security payments restored in full.

That will require that you take your third job in the Chinese high tech factory just so you can pay even more taxes to Washington.

It's a bright future, brought to you by a gang in Washington who really couldn't care less about what happens to the world they pass on to their children and grandchildren.

How do I know this? Because I was in Congress long enough to learn that you judge politicians by their actions, not their words.

And for more observations of a TANSTAAFL nature, Paul Krugman had this to say in The New York Times:

Privatization would begin by diverting payroll taxes, which pay for current Social Security benefits, into personal investment accounts. The government, already deep in deficit, would have to borrow to make up the shortfall.

This would sharply increase the government's debt. Never mind, privatization advocates say: in the long run, they claim, people would make so much on personal accounts that the government could save money by cutting retirees' benefits. Financial markets won't believe this claim, as I'll explain in a minute, but let's temporarily grant the point.

Even so, if personal investment accounts were invested in Treasury bonds, this whole process would accomplish precisely nothing. The interest workers would receive on their accounts would exactly match the interest the government would have to pay on its additional debt. To compensate for the initial borrowing, the government would have to cut future benefits so much that workers would gain nothing at all.

How, then, can privatizers claim that they could secure the future of Social Security without raising taxes or reducing the incomes of future retirees? By assuming that workers would invest most of their accounts in stocks, that these investments would make a lot of money and that, in effect, the government, not the workers, would reap most of those gains, because as personal accounts grew, the government could cut benefits.

We can argue at length about whether the high stock returns such schemes assume are realistic (they aren't), but let's cut to the chase: in essence, such schemes involve having the government borrow heavily and put the money in the stock market. That's because the government would, in effect, confiscate workers' gains in their personal accounts by cutting those workers' benefits.

Once you realize that privatization really means government borrowing to speculate on stocks, it doesn't sound too responsible, does it? But the details make it considerably worse.

First, financial markets would, correctly, treat the reality of huge deficits today as a much more important indicator of the government's fiscal health than the mere promise that government could save money by cutting benefits in the distant future.

After all, a government bond is a legally binding promise to pay, while a benefits formula that supposedly cuts costs 40 years from now is nothing more than a suggestion to future Congresses. Social Security rules aren't immutable: in the past, Congress has changed things like the retirement age and the tax treatment of benefits. If a privatization plan passed in 2005 called for steep benefit cuts in 2045, what are the odds that those cuts would really happen?

Second, a system of personal accounts, even though it would mainly be an indirect way for the government to speculate in the stock market, would pay huge brokerage fees. Of course, from Wall Street's point of view that's a benefit, not a cost.

There is, by the way, a precedent for Bush-style privatization. One major reason for Argentina's rapid debt buildup in the 1990's was a pension reform involving a switch to individual accounts - a switch that President Carlos Menem, like President Bush, decided to finance with borrowing rather than taxes. So Mr. Bush intends to emulate a plan that helped set the stage for Argentina's economic crisis.

If Mr. Bush were to say in plain English that his plan to solve our fiscal problems is to borrow trillions, put the money into stocks and hope for the best, everyone would denounce that plan as the height of irresponsibility. The fact that this plan has an elaborate disguise, one that would add considerably to its costs, makes it worse.

At the least, it is something to think about.

One of the things that makes us different than the rest of the world

John points out that while not being widely reported by a media that is interested in the sensational, not the important, the bad actors in some of the cases of prisoner abuse in Iraq are being tried and sentenced.

Iraq election lists

The Commissar has an interesting summary of the party lists for the upcoming elections in Iraq.

I still don't get it...

...perhaps it's a simple inadequacy on my part, but the widespread (at least from what I've seen) celebration that Rachel Lucas is blogging yet again (she's had more on-again off-again uncertainty than a hundred Hamlets) is beyond my comprehension. I read her first return, and her second, and now the latest incarnation, the so-called Blue-Eyed Infidel, and all I see is someone who likes to rant for the sake of ranting.

Fuck, I can do that...

I can do it better than she can, too...

I just choose not to, because it accomplishes absolutely nothing.

Is that what it takes to get readers?

If that is what the world wants, it confirms my occasional low opinion of people, an opinion that comes to the fore when it's late in the night and I've had more than a few glasses of Scotch.

On a slightly different note, there seems to be something odd about NZ Bear's TTLB ecosystem. It hasn't picked up posts here that I know have been linked to by many folks (my Spirit of America fundraising posts, for the biggest discrepancy, but others as well). Is there something that I'm doing wrong here, or a known bug, or what?

From The Onion...

Satire at its very best.

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Link from Dean's World.

If doing the right thing isn't sufficient enough reason...

...John of Argghhh! is offering some gifts for the first 10 people who contribute $100 or more to the Spirit of America campaign credited to the Castle Argghhh! Fighting Fusileers for Freedom!

The projects funded by the Spirit of America remind me of the movie The Mouse That Roared... think about it...

Ain't America great? I think so.

You can go to John's post to donate, or you can donate by clicking here:

Some thoughts for Wednesday

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
   -E. F. Schumacher

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.
   -Joaquin Setanti

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it should end there.
   -Clare Booth Luce

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.
   -Blaise Pascal

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.
   -Jimmy Breslin

...or blogging?

An appeal to reason

Here is an Intellectual Intercourse on why it is important to donate to Spirit of America.

You can also click here to donate:

Into a mirror, darkly

Boudicca has her own very personal take on the misdeeds perpetrated at Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay, actions taken in an atmosphere of an administration getting legal briefs written stating these prisoners are not covered by the Geneva Conventions, a contention repeated publicly by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Boudicca reminds us of the outrage arising from the public display of POWs by the Iraqis during the first Gulf war:

...I saw the faces of our soldiers and pilots, faces of beaten men, I remember thinking, “Those savages! We are Americans! We would NEVER do something like that to our prisoners! NEVER! What evil people reside over there.” Yes, I truly thought we were better than they. We are a civilized people of course and evidently, they.were.not.

But then the scandal at Abu Gharib occurred and I realized, there is evil everywhere, just because we are American, does not mean we are exempt. The beautiful thing about living in America is that those who committed the atrocities WILL be punished. Those who committed the crimes against my friend, will never be. I do take solace in the fact that those fueled by evil at Abu Gharib will get what is coming to them.

Rumsfeld "took responsibility" for the Abu Gharib scandal, Rumsfeld is responsible for the too few numbers of troops on the ground to occupy a conquered country that has resulted in more deaths after the proclamation of "mission accomplished" in a display of macho preening, more deaths than occurred during the invasion itself.

Rumsfeld still has his job.

Donald Rumsfeld will leave the post of Secretary of Defense at some point, moving on to be on some boards of directors for companies, possibly a heavy-hitter in a lobbyist firm, moving on to the comfortable life of wealth that the old-boys network provides you if you are fortunate enough to be a member of that elite club.

Those who actually perpetrated the evil deeds in Abu Gharib will be punished, as Boudicca says, but what about those who created the atmosphere in which that behavior flourished?

They will not...

I was once an idealist. I felt, no, I knew that the United States would never commit the evils that history is replete with. The United States was the ideal in my mind, the hero, the good guys. Then, as I grew older I had the same realization as Boudicca: evil is everywhere and ideals exist only in the mind.

Despite that loss of innocence, I still love my country. I still have high expectations of it.

A cynic is said to be a broken-hearted idealist. Last night, I wrote:

The acts which expose the feet of clay of the hero, of whom is expected better, cause far more damage than the acts of those who the world already knows are evil.

...and another piece of my heart is broken.

For those who like talk radio...

...there is a horrible secret revealed here.

And while you are there, be sure to donate to the Spirit of America fundraising campaign, or you can help the Castle Argghhh! Fighting Fusileers for Freedom by clicking here to donate:

An opportunity not to be squandered

Pennywit points out some news from Afghanistan that shows an opportunity that may have a narrow window, an opportunity that if acted upon would advance Afghanistan far along the path out of being a failed state.

Must-read blogging

Jennifer has a quote of the day that you MUST read. Not much else to say after, is there?

Go read it, otherwise, I'll have to steal it and post it here, and you don't want to turn me into a thief, do you????

I've been remiss...

... and I haven't done my duty as a Fusileer and linked to the post today telling you why you should donate to the Spirit of America, so go there, and please read and donate.

Or donate by clicking here:

Not such a wronged saint after all?

James Wolcott has an interesting first-hand brief "read" on Bernard Kerik...

Weeks ago, I found myself in the green room of a cable show with Ed Koch, Bernard Kerik, and Joe Trippi. I had been looking forward to meeting Trippi, but when I stepped into the room and saw these two other slabs of supreme self-assurance taking up real estate, I figured this wasn't the time for chitchat. Since the three were doing a segment together in a matter of minutes, I didn't want to be inconsiderate and "break their concentration," and besides, I couldn't think of anything approriately obnoxious to say in the presence of two stalwart Bush supporters. A hard spherical object, Kerik is physically formidable, not someone you'd want to skirmish with over the last sticky bun on the tray. Upcoming were the Olympics, and Koch asked Kerik if he thought there might be terrorist trouble. Kerik intoned that the security in Athens, in Greece generally, was very porous, and let the subject drop with a combination of ominous understatement and quiet authority that made me suspect I was in the presence of a champion b-s'er.

Kerik exuded too much quiet authority and dramatic effect, trying a shade too hard to convey that he knew things he couldn't speak of and was working from the deep inside, privy to secrets that he carried locked inside the bank vault of his barrel chest. I could see how this tough-guy shtick--which obviously wasn't entirely shtick, but a tough streak that had been refined into an urban lawman persona--would impress fake swaggarts like, well, George Bush, who likes to play dress-up as a range hand and fighter pilot to show what a Hungry man entree he is.

There's more, including some pleasantly acerbic general observations that are both highly entertaining and pointed in a way that even far right-wingers should consider, despite their likely outrage. In Wolcott's post there is a definite condemnation of this man...

...a man who despite his apparent promise on the surface had significant issues that arose when the deeper waters were plumbed, and sadly, they did not need to be plumbed too deeply (look here for a roundup of posts that look at the deeper, more turbid waters than those that appear on the surface).

Once upon a time...

...I wanted to be the ultimate Heinleinian hero, or perhaps a Master Keaton (those who know, know...), but now at 40 years old maybe more a Mito Komon...

...or ultimately, simply as a man who did more good than he did evil...

Somehow, somewhere along the line, I became someone who seems to be viewed as somewhere between a hyper-intelligent James Bond and the ultimate nerd...

Read on if you dare or care about the ramblings of a semi-drunk blogger writing his stream-of-consciousness...

...keeping in mind what Ghandi said, "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

Regardless, I'm alone by my choice except for my cat, despite having more than a few volunteers to "ease my loneliness" (sorry to those out there, it is not intended as a slam, but I can't find a better but still concise way to express it..)

Where do I go from here, since I live in France for the reasonably foreseeable future?

I could say "only The Shadow knows", but it seems I am The Shadow to most folks...

Those who haven't forgotten him, that is...

The loss of memory is the curse of civilization, and the ultimate death...

Which brings to mind something I have wanted to say to those who try to excuse the torture perpetrated by the United States in Guantanamo and Abu Ghirab (not to mention sending prisoners to nations where torture is used as a matter of everyday routine...):

The acts which expose the feet of clay of the hero, of whom is expected better, cause far more damage than the acts of those who the world already knows are evil.
   -John M. Grant (that is, me...)

Yes, by God, I'll quote myself since I think it's important enough!!!!

I watch the French music television (which unlike MTV still shows music videos), but all I see are pathetic attempts at saying something original in time to music on topics that were already old when Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. It is positively laughable seeing people barely out of their teens sing about love and loss from my 40 year old vantage point...

Then I see Eminem's video for Just Lose It and see that satire is not completely dead...

Then in browsing iTunes for Just Lose It I run across Lose My Breath by Destiny's Child, a tune that has an infectious, irresistible Brazilian rhythm (which reminds me curiously of the drum rhythms from when I was in high school marching bands...) that I wish I would cause in someone and then when I do, I fear it... Ain't the Internet grand?

Stream of consciousness becomes cognitive dissonance turns into cognitive dissidence which will hopefully collapse into oblivion before the night ends...

This ain't art, it ain't even blogging...

It's bullshit.

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Forgive the tone of this post. I realized during my 3 hour long meeting with the CEO of my company today that I am now swimming in deeper waters than I have ever tread in before, and I need to either become one of the sharks or be consumed by them. I am soothing this realization with a liberal dose of the best single-malt Scotch currently in production because my supply of the best single-malt ever made is still in my house in the US...

Something to remember with discussing Social Security reform and "privatization"

Never forget:

TANSTAAFL

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Believe it... This is the MOST fundamental law of the universe, even moreso than gravity.

I can't emphasize this enough.

For those catching up after a weekend of holiday shopping

I wrote a heck of a lot of words this weekend, and I don't want them to go to waste. Here are two posts I particularly don't want to get lost in all the noise:

Wahabism Delenda Est

A comment on Social Security "privatization"

Please comment! The silence has been deafening...

My first blog award...

... a Windy, has come from Jennifer, who describes me as giving great ping.

I've been described as doing many things well, with more than a few not appropriate for public mention, but "giving great ping" is definitely a new one. Not that I'm complaining!!!!

Entertainment has no soul if no sweat is involved in its creation

Joe Gandelman, ordinarily The Moderate Voice but on weekends guest posting at Dean's World, has noticed there is a dearth of entertainment that appeals to multiple ages on more than one level. His evidence is compelling, and it goes to show that the contemptuous, set-piece linked together with tenuous threats of plot factory-made crap that passes for entertainment out of Hollywood is having the green kicked out of it by innovative creators like the folks at Pixar for a fundamental reason.

People have seen all the plots, there aren't that many. The ancient Greeks knew and listed them all, thousands of years ago. What people want to see is creativity and work put into the interactions, into the dialogue so that it's aimed not at a single target-market, but instead is clever and appeals sometimes to the young, sometimes to those not so young, and sometimes to everyone. Creativity that comes not from some abstract inspiration, but from serious skull-sweat. As Jack London said, "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club."

Intelligence report from a Fusileer in a strange land

I've successfully infiltrated the heart of deepest, darkest France, and what do I find?

The depths of treachery, The Northern Alliance in league with the French!!! At last contact, they were trying to raise money by selling French Army surplus rifles - dropped once, never fired.

Help The Castle Argghhh! Fighting Fusileers for Freedom raising money for The Spirit of America instead of the allies of cheese eating surrender monkeys!!!

Click here to donate:

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Thanks to Pamibe for the graphic!

Why donate?

It is doubtless that the few regular readers I have are perceptive enough to have noticed that I am participating with the Castle Argghhh! Fighting Fusileers for Freedom in the Spirit of America fundraising campaign. More than a few people who know me well have asked me, "Why are you participating in this thing?" since it is far outside my normal path.

It is as simple as this: The world knows the people of the United States, not the government but the people, as remarkably generous. Even during the height of tensions between the US and Iran, every time there was an earthquake in the region, the people of the United States contributed to relief efforts. Any time there is any kind of natural disaster in the world, the people of the United States are in the forefront in contributing money and other forms of aid to the stricken region, regardless of past or present enmity.

No matter of how you feel about the Iraq War or the Afghanistan War, you cannot deny that helping the people in these countries is the right thing to do. Regardless of how you feel about the larger War on Terrorism, you cannot deny that giving the people of Iraq and Afghanistan a helping hand in putting together their lives and their economies will help prevent the kind of hatred that breeds further attacks to create more death and destruction, especially when that help comes directly from the people of the United States and not through some government program. It is difficult to explain how large an effect it has when people know that the help they received came from voluntary donations from individual people, not from a government because governments are viewed as almost always having an agenda. The Spirit of America is dedicated to helping the people of Afghanistan and Iraq put their lives together.

We in the United States are fortunate beyond all measure, and this great good fortune is not due to our own efforts but instead due to the efforts of those who came before us. The least we can do is share our blessings with others who do not have this good fortune, sowing the seeds that those who follow us will reap in a harvest of good will. So, even when put in the most Machiavellian terms, the Spirit of America projects will help the United States in the long term, turning potential enemies into friends.

The competition between weblogs for the fundraising campaign is all well and good, but in the end, it is the results that are the important thing. Donate if you can, no matter who "gets the credit."

Click here to donate:

The Commissar is building a new collective...

...a "blogues gallery" he terms it. For those who are comic-book illiterate, it is a play on the term "rogues gallery", the list of arch-villains of a costumed superhero of which Batman has the most colorful, and not just because of the silly, fun '60s TV series.

I'm off to make my character!

UPDATE:

OK, I'm a geek... Here's what I came up with...

Yes, it's silly, but I needed a break after my blog-novella chapter!!

Blog-novella: Chapter 4

OK, here is the apparently eagerly anticipated next chapter in the infamous blog-novella. The prose is a bit more purple than is typical for me, but it seemed to fit the subject matter, and besides, I don't have any more time to polish it. There are also a few key details in there that I know are wrong, but I didn't have time to send it to the US for my friends who have served in the military to fact-check me.

I have cut a few hundred words from the end when I realized that I had left the author of the next chapter nowhere to go. I may post the entire chapter I wrote later, a "director's cut" version as it were.

Before reading the extended entry below, be sure to read the preceding chapters:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3<