Michael Kinsley spits out a mouthful of SURGE!

Michael Kinsley, Slate.com's founding editor, wrote a tolerably good article in Slate on the "Surge Strategy" in Iraq, arguing that while it has reduced casualties and violence, laudable goals indeed, it hasn't achieved its own aim: to produce stability such that more troops can withdraw than were added. That is, the point of the surge wasn't to provide stability enough for 130,000 US soldiers to continue staying there indefinitely, but rather stability enough that we could start drawing down soldiers. Going back to a (safer) status quo, but not so safe or stable that we can start leaving in even token amounts, is emphatically not a success:

In fact, President Bush laid down the standard of success when he announced the surge more than a year ago: "If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home." At the time, there were about 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq. Bush proposed to add up to 20,000 more troops... the surge was generally described as lasting six to eight months.

By last summer, the surge had actually added closer to 30,000 troops, making the total American troop count about 160,000. Today, there are still more than 150,000 American troops in Iraq. The official plan has been to get that number back down to 130,000 by July and then to keep going so that there would be about 100,000 American troops in Iraq by the time Bush leaves office. Lately, though, Gen. Petraeus has come up with another zenlike idea: He calls it a "pause." And the administration has signed on, meaning that the total number of American troops in Iraq will remain at 130,000 for an undetermined period.

So, the best that we can hope for, in terms of American troops risking their lives in Iraq, is that there will be just as many next July—and probably next January, when time runs out—as there were a year ago. The surge will have surged in and surged out, leaving us back where we started. Maybe the situation in Baghdad, or the whole country, will have improved. But apparently it won't have improved enough to risk an actual reduction in the American troop commitment.

Kinsley is making a basic point that (a weirdo-world morally consistent) President Bush would be on board with: we can't judge U.S. military "progress" in Iraq using the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Hard energy -- Realities and opportunities for our energy future

Take some time to read some brilliance and clarity about energy and sustainability.

Some friends have been sending around this:

Toward a Sustainable Future
By Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow Fred Kirschenmann
Fall 2006 Vol. 18 No. 3
Managing with less energy

A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of lifestyles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist. — Ivan Illich

Energy is on everyone’s mind and most of our attention is focused on developing alternative energy supplies to replace fossil fuels. This evolution in our thinking is driven by several factors: the recognition that the era of “easy oil” is over; our uneasiness about the political instability in the Middle East where most of the remaining oil reserves exist; and, of course, short-term investment opportunities in alternative energy development.

But three critical elements often are overlooked. First, all sources of alternative energy are much less energy efficient than our previous sources of oil and natural gas. Second, future energy use must produce far less greenhouse gases if we want to avoid major climate changes. And third, energy conservation and a more energy-conscious lifestyle must be part of our future. These are important factors that need to be integrated into energy policy if we want a sustainable future.

Energy efficiency ratios are seldom given full consideration in how we calculate our energy future. In media reports, alternative energy issues usually are framed in terms of switching to “renewable” energy and “weaning ourselves from Mideast oil.” The implication is that we simply need to change from oil and natural gas to ethanol, or use nuclear, solar or wind energy and life can go on pretty much as usual. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Days of cheap energy are gone
Peak Oil author Richard Heinberg, and Marty Bender who worked in this area at the Land Institute, point out that the days of “cheap energy” are over. In the 1940s when oil and natural gas reached peak discovery levels in the United States, we were getting 100 kilocalories of energy for every kilocalorie expended to extract the oil and natural gas. By the 1970s when we hit peak oil production, the efficiency ratio had dropped to 23 to 1. Today the efficiency ratio is somewhere between 8 and 11 to 1.

This drop in energy efficiency is largely responsible for short-term investments in alternative supplies. To mine the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, energy can be extracted at a ratio of 8 to 1, which makes economic sense compared to other energy sources. However, an industrial economy driven by cheap energy – and this would include modern agriculture – will likely undergo significant changes in the future.

It cannot be ‘business-as-usual’
A second consideration that must be an essential part of any energy policy is the need to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases. The economic and environmental cost of continuing this “business-as-usual” approach will soon be felt throughout the world. As the polar ice caps melt, sea levels will rise, putting major land masses (now occupied by humans) under water. More unstable climates and more severe weather events will make it increasingly difficult to maintain highly specialized monoculture cropping systems. The loss of biodiversity stemming from these severe weather alterations will reduce the resilience of local ecosystems, making it more difficult, if not impossible, for these systems to be self-regulating and self-renewing.

These emerging energy costs – both economic and ecological – will require that we fundamentally rethink our human economies and the consumptive lifestyles we seem to have taken for granted.

Perhaps one of the greatest fears that makes us reluctant to consider the kind of low-energy lifestyle essential to a sustainable future is that we have been indoctrinated to believe that consuming less energy inevitably means a lower quality of life. Several decades ago theologian and philosopher Ivan Illich suggested that a low-energy lifestyle, in fact, would result in a richer lifestyle because of the need for more human and social capital.

Illich argued that societies that opted for a low-energy lifestyle encouraged more diversity and culture, stimulating the development of more supportive communities, which would increase the quality of life. On the other hand, societies that opted for a high-energy lifestyle would inevitably lose individual freedoms due to the concentration of power in a technocracy that produced the needed energy. He argued that tools developed for “conviviality” would consequently produce a higher quality of life than tools developed for high energy consumption.

Today as we already witness the erosion of our rights and democratic freedoms, and see struggles intensify over rising energy costs, we might want to take a fresh look at Illich’s proposal.

Fred Kirschenmann

More from Ivan Illich is here, and podcasts from a colleague of Illich, Sajay Samuel, are here and here. (Links care of J-friend D. Bavington).

It's 3 o'clock: do YOU know where your Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six US Great Lakes Areas of Concern Report is?

Alert public-health involved J-friend NSH sends news of a seemingly suppressed government report finding major health problems in cities and for vulnerable populations due in some large part to industrial pollutants.

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen “areas of concern”—including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee—may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

In many of the geographic areas studied, researchers found low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer.

Why suppressed? Well,

Canadian biologist Michael Gilbertson, a former IJC staffer and another of the three peer reviewers, told the Center that the study has been suppressed because it suggests that vulnerable populations have been harmed by industrial pollutants. “It’s not good because it’s inconvenient,” Gilbertson said. “The whole problem with all this kind of work is wrapped up in that word ‘injury.’ If you have injury, that implies liability. Liability, of course, implies damages, legal processes, and costs of remedial action. The governments, frankly, in [the US & Canada] are so heavily aligned with, particularly, the chemical industry, that the word amongst the bureaucracies is that they really do not want any evidence of effect or injury to be allowed out there.”

The IJC requested the study in 2001. Researchers selected by the ATSDR not only reviewed data from hazardous waste sites, toxic releases, and discharges of pollutants but also, for the first time, mapped the locations of schools, hospitals, and other facilities to assess the proximity of vulnerable populations to the sources of environmental contaminants.

All this is particularly disturbing and also of the moment due to the recent discovery in Michigan of unprecedented* dioxin levels downstream from the home of Dow Chemicals.

Read more about the report at the Center for Public Integrity here.


*From a Detroit News article by Francis X. Donnelly, "Saginaw River dioxin find spreads fear", Friday, November 23, 2007:

"State action is triggered by readings of 90 parts per trillion; federal action is triggered at 1,000 parts per trillion, a level Dow insists is more reasonable. Still, widespread water sampling in recent years has found spots that far exceed even federal standards. Before last week, the heaviest dose of dioxin found in the Saginaw River was 32,000 parts per trillion. The heaviest in the Tittabawassee was 87,000 parts per trillion. The amount discovered last week near Wickes Park in the Saginaw River was 1.6 million parts per trillion. "

The Audacity to Agree with This Guy

It's useful that "The Audacity of... [blank]" can be used as a shorthand for talking about (satirizing) Barack Obama.

Rather than belabor the point that I'm not the possible 2009 president's biggest fan, I'm just going to link to a guy that summed up how I feel about Obama pretty succinctly.

Of course, many have pointed out that I'm a radical and so a mainstream candidate (i.e. anyone with any chance whatsoever of winning) is plainly never going to appeal to me. Be that as it may, the point of Professor Marc Lamont Hill still stands: Obama himself is packaging himself as the great bringer of change. He clearly doesn't represent a radical break from the status quo -- and if he's not a radical break (in the general, not necessarily progressive sense) then he can't represent fundamental change, hmm, ahh? It's sort of a logical impossibility. Of course, the continued argument is that one must kowtow to the status quo to be elected, and that the people aren't ready for a radical change -- and more pertinently, that presidents are not usually the instigators of radical change. Which simply makes me think, then:

a) change agents rarely kowtow to the status quo -- as I believe Frederick Douglas said (to paraphrase) -- "You cannot expect to applauded by the same system you are trying to oppose";
b) "the people" are never "ready" for change -- change agents build the movements that create this change that lurches society forward faster than it thought it could go (take your pick -- MLK Jr., Gandhi, Mandela, Castro, Guevara, and any number of other revolutionaries and visionaries you might name);
c) if presidents aren't instigators of radical change, then I can't really get all that excited about Obama -- keeping in mind that getting back to "normal" is still a world where Democrats have been as responsible for US foreign aggression, military intervention, deaths of foreign nationals, and maintaining US imperialism as Republicans -- I'm going to get excited about the next MLK, not JFK (i.e. the same JFK that brought us Vietnam and nearly WW III with the Bay of Pigs, for starters).

This attitude is perhaps that "negative attitude" I was accused of at my old job, when I felt I'd proved that the bodywash we wanted to design was chemically and kinetically impossible. I was told not to be such a pessimist -- but really, is pessimism the best way to describe "I think we're going to hit that mountain if we don't pull up?" Or is the optimism of "Pshaw, all we have to do is slow down a little bit and we'll be fine" really preferable?

With all due respect to Sir David Bowie, I'm afraid of Republicans

Actually, I'm afraid of Democrats as well, as readers of the J Continuum know. (Yes, even Obama. Deal with it.*)

But anyway, a forwarded e-list of Republican beliefs came my way, and I'm sharing it with you (on the presumption that it isn't misattributed copyrighted material):

To be a Republican you need to believe:

1. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton

2. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush's Daddy made war on him , a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a "we can't find Bin Laden" diversion.

3. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

4. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

5. A woman can't be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multinational drug corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

6. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans' benefits and combat pay.

7. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won't have sex.

8. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our longtime allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

9. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but providing health care to all Americans is socialism. HMO's and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.

10. Global warming and tobacco's link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

11. A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense, but a president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

12. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet .

13. The public has a right to know about Hillary's cattle trades, but George Bush's driving record is none of our business.

14. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you're a conservative radio host. Then it's an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

15. Supporting "Executive Privilege" for every Republican ever born, who will be born or who might be born (in perpetuity.)

16. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960's is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the '80's is irrelevant.

17. Support hunters who shoot their friends and blame them for wearing orange vests similar to those worn by the quail.


Friends don't let friends vote Republican.

*(Every time I think, use, or see this phrase, it reminds me of this. Note: We don't hire dirty centaurs.)

This is kind of like working, right? It DOES have to do with the environment...

More on the "Growth is Madness" Population conversation I mentioned in this earlier post.

A HUGE conversation has developed there; here is my latest contribution (out of context, alas, but I think it still makes some points in its own rambling way):

Quite the conversation here!

I'd like to come back to two or three points I may have (unsuccessfully) made in my original comments.

One is that of the Developed Countries' footprint. It is absolutely true that we can't effectively address environmental problems by exclusively focusing on population *or* consumption; it's also true that the Developed Countries, because of (generally) better governance structures and more coherent, stronger non-governmental actors have much more latitude to do both. The relative payoff is great, considering that this, what, 25% of the world uses 40% of the resources? So again, my argument is the effectiveness of focusing resources disproportionately (but not exclusively) on the "Developed" World for a greater payoff.

Two, this would also have effects on consumption in the rest of the world, as per some earlier comments both about the Western "model" of consumptionism and the complex feedbacks between population growth and consumption. Western popular culture and industrial food are not solely to blame for worldwide increases in resource consumption intensity, but they are major contributing factors. Were the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan to seriously change their approach to population and consumption, it would strike everyone as less imperialistic and condescending to address it in the world's poorer countries. To be sure, they are contributing more than their share, but my question is -- what effective means to you propose to address population growth and consumption in Developing Countries? We do all realize here that the reason population growth projections have been decreasing is the growth of female education and political power, especially in Developing Countries, where women with free choice decide much more often to have less children? Clearly, this is an agenda that should be pushed forward with all due haste and focus, but a huge part of the reason for the population taboo are the horrible and misguided things done in its name in the past -- forced sterilization (see especially Puerto Rico's "La Operación) being a notable one. Neither forced sterilization nor handing out prophylactics have noticeable effects on population growth in absence of female political power, thus while we can speak of population growth in the Developing World, it is of utmost importance to *always* pair it with concerns for equity and access to *sufficient* consumption. Those who reproduce most are the poorest and thus many are those who consume *below* their fair share, even in Developing countries consuming net *more* than a sustainble share. (Urbanization and elite consumption no doubt account for the lion's share of this consumption as well; I'd be interested on information of resource consumption from the world's poorest rural subsistence areas - not the factory farms they may work on that consume resources but don't distribute them back to those who are disadvantaged and likely to have "too many" children).

Thus a strategy of population and consumption decrease seems best for "Developed" countries, and a focus on substantive equity, redistribution, and political power and reproductive control seems wises in the Developing countries. Not only does speaking of women's empowerment and reproductive control sound more palatable to those who've been victims of "La Operación"-like schemes in the past, it *is* the vehicle that's been shown to be successful in reduced population growth.

(And one last point -- a great article by Sloan in 2007 in Biotropica and another by Ravnborg in 2003 in World Development show some very good initial proof that local population size isn't necessarily connected to environmental degradation; this connection shows up at the national scale but is weak at the local, at least in terms of deforestation, and they both show that it is not the faster-growing population of poor that consume the most resources on agricultural frontiers, but the relatively small number of medium-and-large landowners and rich farmers, who have the money and resources to, for instance, by a small farmer's farm and expand it further into the forest. Again, equity and elite consumption confound the population issue at a local scale, and empowerment and substantive equity would do much to address it. I suppose this is my overall point -- talk of population without talk of substantive equity isn't just asking to be caricatured as old-style draconianism, but also overlooks the most effective tool we have for reducing population growth.)

Scientists Rediscover that Lead and Carcinogens are bad for you

A fantastic review of two new books on "theories of cancer" by a friend and colleague of my mentor.

Sandra Steingraber discusses the evolution, devolution, and re-evolution of our understanding of environmental factors' role in cancer. (Steingraber is also the author of the fantastic book Living Downstream, a "follow-up" of a kind to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.)

Excerpted:

I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1979, when I was twenty years old and just at the beginning of my career as a biologist. At that time, US newspaper headlines featured Love Canal, the upstate New York community whose residents had been evacuated a year earlier when 20,000 tons of industrial chemicals were discovered buried under their basements. Toxic-waste activism in the United States was in the ascendant...

After breaking the bad news from the pathology lab, my urologist asked me about tyres: automobile tyres. Had I ever vulcanized tyres? His second question was about textile dyes. Any exposure to the colour yellow? And had I ever worked in the aluminium industry?

...Indeed, there were data on dyes and bladder cancer going back to the nineteenth century. In fact, there was absolute proof that certain textile dyes caused bladder cancer in humans. And yet, mysteriously, this evidence had not resulted in the abolition of these chemicals from the economy. Other suspected bladder carcinogens, for which the evidence was highly troubling, if not outright damning, were produced and used by the industries in my home town. The National Cancer Institute was generating maps of cancer mortality in an attempt to unveil other possible environmental carcinogens that could explain rising rates of cancer.

And then Ronald Reagan was elected President, and everything changed. No one asked me any more about my possible environmental exposures. In fact, by the mid-1980s, I was hard-pressed to find the word “carcinogen” in any pamphlet on cancer that I collected from my doctors’ various offices. Meanwhile... [t]he new focus of the National Cancer Institute was on “lifestyle” explanations for cancer.

...I was a vegetarian who ran four miles a day. Thus there was no explanation for my situation. “Some kind of fluke”, said one of my doctors. Wherever I lived, I dutifully submitted to cancer check-ups. By the 1990s, the new explanation for cancer was genetic, and I started receiving lots of questions from young intake doctors about my family history. I had fun with this. I would describe in detail my mother, diagnosed with breast cancer, my various uncles with prostate and colon cancers, and – the crowning point – my aunt who died of the same kind of bladder cancer that I had. The young doctors took furious notes. I would always pause a few beats before adding, “Oh yeah. And I’m adopted”.

Today, I’m a forty-eight-year-old professor in Ithaca, New York, and during my last renal ultrasound, the technician asked me casually if I’d ever worked with textile dyes...

After the full introduction that excerpt is taken from, Steingraber goes on to review "Two new books [that] expose and explicate the ongoing social contest that is at the heart of our shifting understanding about cancer":

Devra Davis
SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER
505pp. Basic Books. £16.99.
978 0 465 01566 5

Phil Brown
TOXIC EXPOSURES
Contested illnesses and the environmental health movement
356pp. New York: Columbia University Press. £19 (US $29.50).
978 0 231 12948 0

Read, learn, go. Hurry! Do it now!

James Baldwin: Your Must-Learn-About for Black History Month

Listening to my backlogged Democracy Now! podcast, an excellent hour discussing James Baldwin, gay African-American novelist, writer, playwright, poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. His Wikipedia entry is here.

A boy last week—he was sixteen—told me on television—thank God we got him to talk, maybe somebody was taught to listen—he said, “I’ve got no country, I’ve got no flag.” And he’s only sixteen years old. And I couldn’t say, “You do.” I don’t have any evidence to prove that he does.

And the moment you were born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock, around the age of five or six or seven, to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover the country, which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality involved any place for you.

--James Baldwin, in Cambridge debating William Buckley, also seen in the documentary The Price of the Ticket, written and directed by Karen Thorsen.

If the people of this nation are not capable of true self-evaluation, this nation may yet become one of the most distinguished monumental failures in the history of the world. People imagining their history flatters them, as it does indeed, since they wrote it, they are impaled on that history, like a butterfly on a pin, and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. Now, this is the place in which, it seems to me, the most white Americans find themselves: impaled. The do not know how to release themselves from it and suffer enormously, see, from that resulting personal incoherence. See, they are dimly or vividly aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie, alright?

Now, the one person who released us all from that suffering—I met on that blood-red soil of Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King. He told me, he says, “Jimmy, segregation is dead.” And I replied, “Yes. But just how long and how violent and how expensive of a funeral is it going to be?"

--Calvin Levels, portraying James Baldwin, on Democracy Now!, December 7, 2007.

A fantastic edition of Democracy Now!, a fantastically interesting and important person to learn about, a man with a fantastic cadence, diction, and pose. An incredible early advocate for civil rights, for blacks and homosexuals. A last quote from him that applies as well to the J Continuum:

"Look, I love America more than any country in the world, and it is exactly for that reason that I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. Anyway, that’s all I have to say about that."

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad (overpopulated?) world

My somewhat indignant response to a post at "Growth is Madness" about how environmentalists avoid the "taboo" subject of overpopulation. Considering that some of the most prominent academic and NGO environmentalists have made overpopulation prominent in their discussions at various points (cf. Paul Ehrlich, Garret Hardin, David Pimentel, Sierra Club...) I'm not sure I see overpopulation as a "taboo" subject among environmentalists. Some feel its still neo-Malthusianist bent is problematic, like I do, but that's different than being unwilling to discuss it...

Anyway, the post is here, my response (here) being:

What I really don’t understand here is the disconnect between intensity of resource use and exactly where population is growing the fastest.

With the exception of the United States, most of the “1st World” has its population growth slowing or leveling off. Meanwhile, many of the areas with highest population growth are the poorest, and are people living well below their means.

Now, clearly, people rich and poor are consuming resources at some rate (both directly and in the form of consuming resources for waste disposal/redemption). However, based on per capita consumption/energy use, the United States and other 1st World countries are using (I’ve seen estimates) 3-5X our “share” of resources. Meanwhile, the poorest millions in Africa and Asia probably use somewhat less than a whole “share” of total human resource use.

Thus on one factor you have, say “4″ for mean per capita resource consumption in the US (or resource use intensity), vs., say, 0.8 in Namibia. This means that resource use intensity is 5X greater in the US. In other words, one “less” US or UK citizen is equivalent to 5 “less” Namibians in terms of resource use; yet we rarely hear the “taboo” subject of overpopulation brought up in terms of a primary emphasis on the 1st World, where growth rates are perhaps not the highest, but where changes in growth rates will have a 5X disproportionate impact on things. This gives us some initial reason to focus on the 1st World — perhaps what is meant here, but one must remember that the anti-growth discussion started with Malthus as an argument for *leaving the poor to their lot, and starving themselves into lower population sizes.* Not only doesn’t this work, it’s a reprehensible method to inefficiently reduce resource use. (Malthus said that the rich would consume “prudently” so as to keep the economy going but not overmuch so as to overtax resources. Poppycock.)

Making the problem all the more complex in poor areas and (technically) simple in the richer Global North, women in poorer countries often/usually have less choice in childbearing, and men still see it as an important sign of virility (plus, if you’re a poor agriculturalist, having more kids is individually rational for you). In the Global North, kids and number of kids is much more voluntary. Add to this the fact that population growth slows most in poor countries not with the introduction of contraceptives or draconian measures, but when women achieve some political equality gains and *increase* resource use somewhat such that they also gain access to education and sufficient health resources.

So taking the factors into account, it seems clear that we should certainly work on bringing both population and use intensity down in the 1st World, but the way to address population in the 3rd World implies “development” with substantive equality — a project involving at least short-term increases in resource use.

THESE are the items that seem taboo to me. When we talk about population problems, our problems in the 1st World start at home; the places where growth is the fastest require more complex solutions than a simple mantra or approach of population reduction or contraception can possibly achieve. Implying that the fast-reproducing food can’t have their fair share of food and water until they have less kids while Bill Gates races around on Lear Jets and procreates little mega-consumers unimpeded is the true madness.

Today's Best Thing Ever: Fun with Atheists and Fag-Haters

Overheard in the pretend virtual café where all the J-friends congregate together, from J-friend SYYS:

Maybe what I like about atheists is that, proportionally speaking, their beliefs are just as shocking as those of the faithful. I wouldn't be surprised if an equal number of believers and atheists would say that God is (or should be), in essence, them, but with virtually limitless power. The temptation to not challenge oneself is rampant on either side. For example, when I see people picketing with signs that say "God hates fags" I have this temptation to run over and say, "Isn't it incredible how you and God just happen to agree on EVERYTHING? That's such an amazing coincidence!" I feel like my beliefs are being challenged in a meaningful way by christians and atheists alike, and it's so rare for atheists to feel like their beliefs are being challenged in a meaningful way. Everyone deserves to have their beliefs challenged, right? It's the best! wunderbar!

Though I have to say, I think atheists have their beliefs challenged all the time, but only in that tiresome abstract way of politicians "WE'RE ALL CHRISTIAN HERE, RIGHT?" pandering. I think they/we are challenged less often in our day-to-day lives.

It inexplicably reminds me of a quote I can't find a source for -- from a review of the move "Contact" based on a book by Carl Sagan and starring Jodie Foster. This world body asks Foster why she should represent Earth to aliens, since 75% of the world believes in some kind of God and she doesn't. The reviewer summarized this as: "Inexplicably, all the world's religions got together and got over their differences in order to annoy Jodie Foster."

That's all.

The Clinton Family Fun-Time Minstrel Show

This is my fawning response to a great Slate article here by Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton. The title is "The Clinton Fallacy: Black Americans' love for Bill Clinton is built on a fallacy -- Did blacks really make big economic gains during the '90s?" (The answer is not really.)

A money quote:

In many ways, the scandal-marred, deeply partisan years of the Clinton administration proved disappointing in the face of such early optimism. Welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier are some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years... But there is evidence that Clinton's unmatched popularity among blacks confused many about the true economic impact of his presidency. In a 2005 article I co-authored in the Journal of Black Studies, I analyzed five national surveys from 1984 through 2000. The data show that nearly a third of black Americans held false understandings of black economic conditions during the Clinton years. By the time Clinton left office, many African-Americans incorrectly believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. In the '80s, barely 5 percent of blacks believed blacks were economically better off than whites. By 2000, nearly 30 percent of African-American respondents believed that blacks were doing better economically than whites. This belief is simply wrong. There is no evidence to suggest that African-Americans were in a better economic position than whites at any time in American history, including during Clinton's presidency.

Damn straight. I was young during the Clinton presidency -- but even when I liked him, I never got why he was "the first black president" -- other than that he possibly did the best job of pretending/showing that he cared about black people than any other president. JFK's "Boston Brahminism" was never the personal touch that Clinton brought, plus his sax-playing and modest beginnings showed a president a little less... Upper-class white (despite that being what he is now) than we'd seen in a while.

Said another way: Clinton was probably the President least like Richard Pryor's impersonations of white people, which can't but have helped his popularity.

This is my slightly less informal response to the article on Slate's Fray:

It was over-time to start discussing Clinton's honorary "blackness" and what he did to deserve it. Identity politics are misunderstood, misused, and unjustly maligned in today's United States, where there are real and profound racial disparities stemming from past and present circumstances. Beyond the inherited disadvantages of lesser wealth and savings from the African-American slave and then underclass, blacks in the US suffer from a system that's convinced itself it's fair when Jim Crow is still in living memory. Many people are alive today who lived under segregation, yet we pretend that it's a past and best-forgotten phase in the US at that.

All this is to say that there are real disparities between races, and adoration of Clinton, who did nothing real to change this, and abandoned black progressives like Gunier and Elders, is as misplaced as the belief that blacks are equal to or better off than whites -- a perception too common among whites, as well, breeding some of the dissatisfaction with affirmative action and related programs. (After all, if black people are equal or better off, why should they get the breaks?) Eric Alterman rightly pointed this out as, in part, a failing of the media to accurately portray reality in the US, dividing blacks on TV news into criminals and stars. Clinton's stardom is part of this syndrome, and he of course has done nothing to correct it.

One can argue about Clinton v. Obama v. abstention or a third party, but one must do it from the knowledge that neither Clinton can lay claim to honorary blackness outside a bubble of hype and misperception -- they stood for business as usual. Indeed, sadly, these misperceptions are what led people like JFK to be revered, when Nixon and Ford did more substantively for civil rights. They were forced to do it politically, but did it all the same -- while people like the Clintons and JFK and perhaps even Obama get a free pass.

Clinton wasn't the first black president. He was the first BLACKFACE president.

Solidarity, on a belated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day note

Brought to my attention by J-friend Becky:

“It's one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace. The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that everything he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

MLK Christmas Eve Sermon, 1967 .
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/12/276406.shtml

That about says it all.

Obama's Deep Gooey Substance

I've got your audacity, right here.

A GREAT article by Slate's John Dickerson, on Barack Obama: "A Few Inconvenient Truths. Is Obama as much of a straight talker as he claims?"

Another election year must-read, in my humble opinion.

(Deep gooey substance? What the Eff? This the Eff. Though I'm toying with the alternative descriptive phrase for Obama and (to a lesser extent) Edwards, as having the politics of the "gooey nougat center". Opinions?)

Courage, Audacity -- and the vain hope that the candidates will read this Time article

This is awesome.

I'm quite sure I don't agree with Joe Klein on everything, and indeed, I don't agree with his whole Time article, but I'd so I'm on board for most of it.

Frankly, it's the most intelligent center-progressive agenda I've seen from anyone in the US that I can think of. Maybe I'm just overwhelmed by someone, somewhere, writing something sensical about the election, but there you have it.

Go, read.

...a Presidential election would seem a perfect moment for laying out an ambitious new goal or two, especially at a moment when 70% of the public thinks the country is moving in the wrong direction. The problem is, politicians hate having to talk about anything remotely adventurous in the midst of an campaign. They prefer safe recitations of conventional wisdom... The candidates owe us answers, whether they want to give them or not... you can learn a lot from the character of their evasions—how their minds work, how much they know, what their basic principles are. Occasionally, they might even say something courageous. And very occasionally, there comes an election where the ability to be courageous, to tell the public things it may not want to hear, is the most important quality we need in a leader. I suspect 2008 will be that sort of election. [Ok, good luck with that one, Joe-boy -- J] The public has come to understand what market-tested political blather sounds like, and it may be ready to reward a politician who tells some inconvenient truths, to coin a phrase, who asks for the sort of sacrifices, in pursuit of specific goals, that President Bush refused to do. But which sacrifices, which goals?

Energy independence.
Universal health insurance.
Education reform.
Mandatory national service.

Solutions are possible, but they will require drastic changes in the way we go to school, get our health care, serve our country, live our lives. No politician with any sense would attempt to join all these battles, all at once, in the midst of a presidential campaign. But in 2008 a candidate who refuses to show some courage on at least one of these issues probably lacks the character to be President.

True enough, man.

Go, please, read this.

Big Brother is Watching, Listening, and Reading... for Bootlegged Britney

In a potentially light-weight return to blogging, I would like to call your attention to this Slate article about AT&T's apparent desire to start monitoring all their electronic traffic from their customers for illegal content.

In what may end up being nothing or may end up being, as author Prof. Wu calls it, the beginning of a privately-run police state (though likely without a young Red Forman heading Detroit crime syndicates under the table for OCP). He rightly points out:

No one knows exactly what AT&T is proposing to build. But if the company means what it says, we're looking at the beginnings of a private police state. That may sound like hyperbole, but what else do you call a system designed to monitor millions of people's Internet consumption? That's not just Orwellian; that's Orwell.

This may be nothing, as I think Wu's right that it would be corporate disaster for AT&T: "AT&T's new strategy reverses that position and exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders." But as the sole poster as of 10 minutes ago points out, AT&T was known as The Death Star among telecom peeps in-the-know in the old days. "Mandycat" goes on to point out: "They persistently and diligently bought up well-run and profitable companies like NCR and proceeded to destroy them. They even took the extra precaution of changing NCR's century-old name to something idiotic like "GIS" just in case there was any residual goodwill left intact. It was like a sickness."

Hmm... a plausible explanation has popped up here, claiming that perhaps this is just a pretext for remaking the internet hierarchically so that they can indeed get around network neutrality and discriminate service quality between high-payers and average joes and joanns (guess who gets higher quality). Seaturnip says: "I don't think AT&T at all wants to analyze HTTP connections for pictures, as you suggest. That would indeed be horrendously inefficient. They are probably mainly interested in stopping bandwidth-guzzling movie piracy via peer-to-peer protocols such as BitTorrent."

What say you, oh people of the internet? Is the idea that AT&T will go through with what it announced last week, that "it is seriously considering plans to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of U.S. intellectual property laws" indeed, as Wu says, "[A] prospect ...too totalitarian for my tastes"? One would think, but of course, I would've said not too long ago that a different prospect would be too totalitarian for most Americans' taste: "AT&T [is] already accused of spying on our telephone calls."

J. Edgar Hoover, eat your heart out.

(ps: what the hell is "eat your heart out" supposed to actually MEAN, anyway?)

The Hindu: A Brief History of US Imperialism

A great summary of the problems of US Imperialism -- which abroad has arguably been just as bad under Democrats and Republicans:

The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky

For The Hindu, Arundhati Roy recounts a brief history of US foreign aggression, adventurism, neocolonialism, and cruelty, through the prism of Chomsky's excellent construction (based on a term from influential journalist Walter Lippman's book in 1922) of Manufactured Consent: the sleight of hand that makes us think we really know what's going on in the world, and give our tacit and explicit consent to US policies that we would likely recoil from if we knew the truth of it.

Ask yourself this, in this holiday season: would you really, eyes wide open, happily and merrily trust a government that looked to "save" the Vietnamese while being so gleeful about their demise:

Here's an American pilot talking about the joys of napalm:

We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot — if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene — now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter [white phosphorous] so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And just one drop is enough, it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.

So the lucky gooks were annihilated for their own good. Better Dead than Red.

And lest we forget, sadly forget: we've used Napalm, or perhaps more accurately, Napalm II in Iraq. As Marx said, History repeats itself, 1st as tragedy, 2nd as farce: We still have to melt the people to save the people, apparently. And do they thank us for it? Sheesh.

Merry Christmas, and an anti-imperialist New Year...

Grow up!

A nice piece from Herman Daly (a founder of ecological economics) can be found at an exciting blog discovery, here at Growth madness (though the top blogpost right now is about how environmental writers do a fundamental disservice by avoiding the problem of population; it's a statement I don't disagree with, but don't agree with; population is part of the problem but with 4% of the world population consuming 23% of its resources, the actual number of people, especially the vast majority who consume far less yet in general reproduce at higher levels than that 4% -- with that in mind, it seems the 4% and those like it are the most significant element of the problem at present, not just the number of people more generally).

Daly talks about growth & development & what they mean, in language that I pretty near 100% agree with (and have "independently derived" if you will - I haven't read this by him before, but have used pretty similar definitions for growth and development as he does).

And in other, more important news: Antonio Taguba, of the famous (infamous?) Taguba Report (aka the ARTICLE 15-6 INVESTIGATION OF THE 800th MILITARY POLICE BRIGADE) retired this year and is now talking more about what happened. He says there's more that's not being released, and pretty much flatly contradicts the idea that the torture at Abu Ghraib didn't come from higher up -- not earth-shatteringly surprising news, but news that deserves to be told and retold nonetheless. I, for one, had certainly not heard about this:

… descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son… Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts… a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee… photographs of Arab men wearing women’s panties…

“Sodomizing a female detainee”? That is rape, folks… anal rape. I really wish the media would call these things a little more bluntly. “Sodomize” just sounds so Playboy Channel. “Oohhh… kinky fun fun.”

(from Hell's Handmaiden).

See the links for more on Taguba's revelations and his poor treatment ("You and your report will be investigated,") in return for doing his duty -- making sure the US does its best to live up to its ideals. (Wow, is that an idealistically patriotic sentiment, especially coming from me! But I mean it here...)

The New York Times: General Says Prison Inquiry Led to His Forced Retirement, June 17, 2007

The WaPo: Abu Ghraib Investigator Points to Pentagon

and The New Yorker again: Annals of National Security: The General's Report

We owe Gen. Antonio Taguba a debt that only history will fully realize.

Oooo... Good quote!

From today's Slate's Human Nature column (of which I'm a very begrudging fan):

Human Nature's view: The problem with libertarianism is that the first thing people do with freedom is take away the freedom of others.

(Human Nature is written by Bill Saletan.)

My other favorite quote for the day/week/month/year: Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment."

Barack Obama -- Meh.

I had a recent conversation with a new friend that in part focused on Barack Obama and whether he really does represent a new kind of politics and/or a step in the right direction.

Being a bit of a radical malcontent, but with strong pragmatist and idealist roots, I conceded that he might be "the real deal" in that he might mean what he says about new politics and blahedy blah. Certainly, a number of my very astute friends believes he's on the level. I, personally, have my doubts, which I have had some trouble enunciating. I also haven't done extensive research on the man yet, so I can't completely rule him out.

In terms of superficial research, however, I seem to recall that he did say he wouldn't rule out bombing Iran, and also that he did rule out supporting gay marriage. It is my impression -- possibly an incorrect one -- that he was somewhat more bullish on gay marriage until Clinton & others advised him to scale it back a bit, and that he took the more "nuanced" stand of being for civil unions. My chief problems with these two positions he took during his Senate campaign run is that: HE WAS RUNNING AGAINST ALAN KEYES!!!! Alan Keyes couldn't have won that election with the help of God Itself. It seems to me that if you can't stake out controversial views in a no-lose election, then you're just not the person for the job as far as I'm concerned.

Slightly, but only slightly, less superficial research, (that is, Wikipedia without my verifying info in the primary sources listed) gives me similar impressions as my previous ones. If anything, they're slightly sourer. My friend CN feels that, though he disagrees with Obama on a number of issues, from reading his books, CN feels like Obama really is thinking them through and weighing them, and has principled, logical reasons for his stances. I'll have to read it, too, but I have my doubts. My thing is, as a news junkie, I feel like I have an above-average bead on what's going on (though perhaps that's just ego on my part). And Obama's positions do not, in my mind, follow logically from his stated beliefs.

Example A: He talks about bombing Iran and Pakistan if necessary, and the dangers posed to us by a nuclear Iran. Uncontroversial, right? Um, well... if you consider that there's no reasonable explanation for why Iran would attack Israel or the US with nuclear weapons, the idea of starting what would be a bloody and costly conflict against them seems, well, stupid. What do I mean? Simply that: Iranian dictators and religious mullahs are no more completely insane shit-for-brains idiots than the leaders of Soviet Russia, present day Pakistan, or India. Mutually assured destruction (charmingly acronymed MAD) worked and works in those examples -- despite some possibly close calls, neither Russia nor the US launched any nuclear weapons at each other during the Cold War, despite various batshit crazy members in each's government. A more recent example is the acquirement of nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India. A number of commentators within and outside of both countries said, essentially, that this was it, MAD wasn't going to work, because what foreigners didn't appreciate is the sheer amount of enmity between the countries, and that MAD be damned, someone was going to say "Fuck it," and start a nuclear conflagration. While that certainly's still theoretically possible, no one's talking about it right now. Why? MAD *did* work.

The Mullahs & Ahmedinejad are similarly not so batshit crazy as to sign their own death warrants with an attack on the US or Israel. Dangerous rhetoric or not, dictators may be reprehensible, but most of them are somewhat savvy in the ways of keeping power, and know that a) if they bomb the US or Israel or Europe, their country, and likely they themselves, are ash; b) if they explicitly threaten to bomb US or Israel, their country is ash; c) if they give nuclear material to terrorists in order that the terrorists bomb the US, Israel, or Europe, their country and ass are still very much grass. From Afghanistan and Iraq, it's perfectly obvious to anyone to see that the US wouldn't wait for the ocular proof to retaliate, and even the whiff of a hint of an allusion that terrorists got nuclear material from Iran would mean, in a word, DEATH for them. (Besides which, some analysts think loose nukes and US & Russian attack readiness are the biggest threats.)

Obama does get into further nuance, but it seems to me that it's hard to imagine a realistic scenario where bombing Iran makes sense. He talks about a nuclear "domino theory" in the region if Iran gets nukes, but bombing Iran would only be worse. In fact, the single BIGGEST thing he could talk about to make us safe is to go back to nuclear disarmament instead of nonproliferation. The difference is, in the prior, ALL countries -- US included -- agree to continuously destroy and decommission their nuclear stocks. If the US, the 800-lb gorilla in our story, agreed to reduce nuclear stocks, other countries (such as Russia) would be able to realistically consider reducing theirs as well. Instead is making sure our nukes are still ready to fly and making new ones from time to time. The LATTER approach, today's nonproliferation focus, simply says "We don't want any more countries to have nukes. Those of you that do, though, um... for shame! But, we won't do anything, you're too dangerous now." Nonproliferation basically tells a country that the only way to be able to defend yourself from US attack & intervention is to finally GET nukes, because once you get them, you're an irrevocable member of the club. Smoke 'em if you got 'em... Not to mention, the hypocrisy of Israel's open secret of their nukes, which are technically treaty and UN violations as grave as it is when "bad countries" do it. What's it called when you have one standard for yourself and friends and another for other people?

Sigh. That wasn't supposed to be so long. My work break's about up. My other examples were going to be Palestine -- where Obama says no one's suffered like the Palestinians, but that when Israel is threatened, we will always stand with Israel, and that Palestinians need to recognize Israel's right to exist -- with no similar demands made that Israel not threaten Palestine or that Israel formally recognize a Palestinian state's right to exist (they've never formally done that as far as I know). 3 times as many Palestinian civilians have died as Israelis; who's the aggressor now? The nuclear power, or the poorest would-be state in the world? And lastly on gay marriage, his retreat to civil unions. My argument is not that these aren't politically wise moves, but rather than if he's running "a new kind of politics," then he should be aware of and promote disarmament instead of nonproliferation or threatening rogue states; he should stand behind tough love for both Palestine AND Israel, rather than just demands of the former and sympathy for the latter; and he should at least admit that civil unions is an intellectually indefensible compromise on gay marriage. "But maybe he really believes marriage is a religious rite and not an actual right?" you say? Well, last I checked a) a number or religions, including individuals and sects within Christianity and Judaism, allow and will perform gay ceremonies, and b) religious freedom was a national right. So if it's a religious issue, and some religions allow it, how does allowing states to ban it represent an intellectually honest path to civil unions, which would be distinct from marriage legally at least in name? And if it's only in name, then isn't that a shell game?

Again -- his positions are reasonable. Civil unions are a famous example of Bill Clintonian triangulation. Keeping the idea of bombing Iran alive is a genuflection to the idea of looking like a tough guy for prez. Being careful not to even fairly criticize Israel -- a necessity for any American pol. But NEW? Hardly. Bill Clinton called his New Kind the 3rd Way. Bush called his Original New Kind compassionate conservatism. Obama calling his New Kind of Politics the New Kind of Politics doesn't make it true this time, either.

The American Apartheid Will Rise Again

Have you heard of The Jena 6? I hadn't, until recently. (TGTDN! Thank Goodness There's Democracy Now!)

I'm running more short on time than usual, but follow the links. You'll think you're in the fucking past -- not just because this happened, but because it isn't being addressed nationally the way it absolutely must and should be.

...

In other news, another shocking story from the August 1 Democracy Now!, though a wholly different level/kind of shocking. Bottled water apparently, wait for it... isn't all that great! Specifically, several more companies have admitted their bottled water is freaking tap water from public utilities:

"...most people don't know that Pepsi's Aquafina, Coke's Dasani, comes from our public water systems... Nestle owns several dozen brands of bottled water. The bottled water brand they source from our public water systems is called Nestle Pure Life. They also own Poland Spring, Ozarka, Arrowhead. The list goes on. And regionally, it's distributed across the country. And then we also have Coca-Cola, which bottles Dasani water, and, or course, Pepsi with Aquafina." -- Gigi Kellett, Associate Campaigns Director at Corporate Accountability International

I know people have railed at bottled water before, but the thing is, it doesn't seem to have taken. Dennis Miller ranted about it some years ago, people laughed, and that was the end -- pass me the Dasani, please -- yes, the Dasani made of tap water that is essentially a 7000X markup on the original tap water. Yes, that's smart -- that's the efficient genius of capitalism at work. And it's not as if this conspicuous and senseless consumption is benign: "The environmental impact of the country’s obsession with bottled water has been staggering. Each day an estimated 60 million plastic water bottles are thrown away. Most are not recycled. The Pacific Institute has estimated 20 million barrels of oil are used each year to make the plastic for water bottles." (Democracy Now!)

So unless you're in the land of Montezuma or somewhere else without improved sanitation and US water quality, you might want to consider at least buying a Britta and a reusable sports water bottle -- you can get the same water quality at almost 1/7000 the price, AND cut down on "foreign oil dependence", garbage, pollution, ozonation, and bone-headed capitalism.

Go to Corporate Accountability International and DemocracyNow.org for more information on water; see Democracy Now! and LeftTurn.org, or just Google Jena 6 for more information on that topic.