Isn't this milk kinda already spilt?

The New York Times > International > International Special > Tsunami Group Will Broaden Its Monitoring: "Officials in charge of the existing international tsunami warning system, which covers only the Pacific Ocean, have taken an initial step to broaden the network to the Indian Ocean and other possible trouble spots, agreeing to distribute their bulletins on earthquakes and possible waves 'to anyone who wants to receive the messages.'"

Jared Diamond on Decline and Fall

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Ends of the World as We Know Them: "History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal."

We'll make it, says Diamond, if we are able to learn from history. That, it seems, is a very big if.

torture by television ad...

This would be funny if it weren't in the midst of a not-at-all-joking article about torture at GITMO...

The New York Times > National > Fresh Details Emerge on Harsh Methods at Guantánamo:
In a recent interview, another former official added new details, saying that many interrogators used a different audio tape on prisoners, a mix of babies crying and the television commercial for Meow Mix in which the jingle consists of repetition of the word "meow."

New Year's Resolutions

Yesterday I read Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free. It is a study of 10 German Nazis that Mayer published in 1955. Mayer, a Jew of German descent who did not tell the people he writes about that he was a Jew, called these men friends. They were decent men, most of them. And they were Nazis.

I do not want to get into the argument here about whether our country is becoming fascist, about if things are really as bad as they sometimes seem. It's a new year, after all, and we must hope that it will be better than the old one. But I've been reading Mayer and thinking a lot about how we can learn from history how not to do terrible things. What must we do now, today, to reduce the chance that we will become Nazis? From Mayer's book, I have come up with some preliminary rules. All the relevant parts of the book on which I base these rules can be read here, except for some that I quote in an earlier post, here.

So then:

Where Do We Go From Here?

1. First, and most importantly, we cannot wait to be certain before acting, and acting in a way that does put our own selves at risk.We must put our faith neither in certainty, nor in uncertainty. If we believe that we are certain to face a fascist future, then what are we to do but conserve our energies, wait it out, save who and what we can? If we put our faith in uncertainty, we will have an excuse to wait before acting. We will wait for certainty, and until there is certainty we console ourselves that things may not happen the way we think. Then, once there is certainty, we conserve our energies. What else is there to do, once we are certain.

So the trap of certainty and uncertainty is a circular one. We are uncertain, so why act now, when we may not need to act at all? We are now certain, so it is too late to act.

We must act now, with neither certainty nor uncertainty, or rather, with the certainty that we will remain uncertain. Will what we do prevent what we think is coming, or, if it does not come, was what we did irrelevant and needlessly hysterical? We will not know.

For Mayer writes:

By know I mean knowledge, binding knowledge. Men who are going to protest or take even stronger forms of action, in a dictatorship more so than in a democracy, want to be sure. When they are sure, they still may not take any form of action...; but that is another point. What you hear of individual instances, second- or thirdhand, what you guess as to general conditions, having put half-a-dozen instances together, what someone tells you he believes is the case -- these may, all together, be convincing. You may be "morally certain," satisfied in your own mind. But moral certainty and mental satisfaction are less than binding knowledge. What you and your neighbors don't expect you to know, your neighbors do not expect you to act on, in matters of this sort, and neither do you.

Therefore, we must expect one another to act on our uncertain knowledge. If I do not expect you to act, you will not expect me to act -- we will not act. The expectation should be that we talk about politics, that we take stances about politics, that we go to protests and write letters and give money. There must be none of this "oh, I admire you so much for this-or-that" -- but only -- We are all going to the protest on the Common, what time shall we meet? We must act publicly, and together. We must not confine our protests to the dinner table, or to furtive discussions at work with other people who have the defeated, hunted look that we do. We cannot take up this burden by ourselves, we must expect it of each other.

2. We must not waste our time trying to convert those who now support this administration.
Those who support the administration are not likely, now, to be brought around to seeing it otherwise. They must deny it -- to admit that Bush is wrong is to admit that they are wrong, and no one does this, about such enormous things, and survives. We will have to wait for their children. To have seen Abu Ghraib and to support this administration is to be unable to see the facts. The men who were Nazis in 1935 were still Nazis in 1955; they could not be 're-educated'. It was their children and grandchildren who understood that what was done was wrong. So it will be here, as it is everywhere.

For Mayer writes:

None of my ten friends, even today, ascribes moral evil to Hitler, although most of them think (after the fact) that he made fatal strategic mistakes which even they themselves might have made at the time. His worst mistake was his selection of advisers -- a backhanded tribute to the Leader's virtues of trustfulness and loyalty, to his very innocence of the knowledge of evil..

"The schemers, Himmler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Bormann -- they built him up into a man of destiny," said Salesman Damm, the Party office manager in Kronenberg. "They did it so skilfully [sic] that he finally believed it himself. From then on, he lived in a world of delusion. And this happened, mind you, to a man who was good and great."

"Hitler was a man, one like ourselves, a little man, who, by doing what he did, was a testament to the democracy "you Americans" talk about, the ability of us little men to become great and to rule the whole world. A little man, like ourselves."

3. Though we need not bother to try to convert the believers, we must tell everyone we meet that we are enemies of this Administration.
Even when it is not 'done'. Especially when it is not 'done.' We may have no effect other than to make others see that not everyone they come into contact with is 'not worried', that people, ordinary citizens, take this threat seriously, and expect them to take it seriously too. We must not fear to speak because politics is irrelevant to the issue at hand, because we do not politicize work, or commerce, or our hobbies. We must be unseemly. If enough of us are, then it will no longer seem so strange. The point here is not to convert, as I said, but to prevent not just the conversion of others, but their acqueiscence. The people who did not vote, or who voted for Kerry, but did not understand this election to be, as we did, so crucial, the people who gave money but did not make calls, and we ourselves, who could have done more but did not (we could always have done more, after all), need to be reminded, all the time, everywhere, that we cannot acquiesce. We should not assume that we are safe because we oppose now, what is happening. We cannot be sure that we would continue to oppose it. Many people became Nazis who were not in their hearts Nazis -- who were in their hearts anti-Nazis, but they were Nazis all the same. People may have very good reasons for not "joining the party" and still join the party. They may speak reasonably of many things and still join the party, believing that they will prevent the party from doing those things, or that the party will not, after all, do them, or that their presence in the party will moderate the extremist elements, or that they won't be driven out by the extremists who have hijacked the party, or that the things they disagree with about the party are not, after all important. So, we should have no truck with the moderates, those willing to deal, those who think they can reform from within, or will serve as a bulwark against the extremists. Moderate Nazis did not save the Nazi party, and moderate Republicans will not save the Republican party.

"Yes, it was always the excesses that we wished to oppose, rather than the whole program, the whole spirit that produced the first steps, A, B, C, and D, out of which the excesses were bound to come. it is so much easier to 'oppose the excesses,' about which one can, of course, do nothing, than it is to oppose the whole spirit, about which one can do something every day."

4. We must not believe that education, that facts, will save us. Education did not save Germany. The truth will not set us free, but without the truth, we cannot set ourselves free. We must have the truth, we must have education, we must have facts, and reality, but we must not believe that this is all we need.

"How might your faith of that first day have been sustained?"
"I don't know, I don't know," he said. "Do you?"
"I am an American," I said.
My friend smiled. "Therefore you believe in education."
"Yes," I said.
"My education did not help me," he said, "and I had a broader and better education than most men have had or ever will have. All it did, in the end, was to enable me to rationalize my failure of faith more easily than I might have done if I had been ignorant. And so it was, I think, among educated men generally, in that time in Germany. Their resistance was no greater than other men's."

This administration is not burdened with reality.

Who has ever reached for the stars like the Germans, breaking asunder the bindings of reality that constrict the human heart and restrain that teetering creature, the reasonable man? Reality's ambivalence makes Hamlets -- cowards, say Hamlet and Hitler, who burned Hamlet -- of us all. Hitler cut all the knots that freemen fumble with. He did not resolve the problems that immobilized his people; he smashed them. He was the grand romantic.

We, on the other hand, must find a way to both be burdened by reality and not trapped by it. We must be reasonable and unreasonable, at once.

5. We must have the capacity for "calm, consistent insubordination."
It is not enough to simply oppose the excesses; we must oppose the whole program. We must have a program to oppose it with, but that is secondary to being opposed. Our "no" must not be a "three-quarters-yes" as it was said of the Social Democrats in Germany, as it is, I am sorry to say, of the Democrats now.It is this that Wes Boyd talks about, here: "If you believe your society needs to undergo fundamental change, as Boyd does, and you understand that such change is not a short-term proposition, you fight your war as a series of battles, and you don't fret over every loss, because it's the fighting, not the winning, that makes you stronger."

We must find a way to take up this burden. We cannot see it and refuse to carry it -- we will in that way soon lose the capacity to see it. We must share it together, and see it together. Or else none of us will see it, and none of us will share it.

Mayer writes: " A member of the pre-Hitler Prussian cabinet, asked what caused Nazism, said "What caused Nazism was the clubman in Berlin, who, when he was asked about the Nazi menace in 1930, looked up from his after-lunch game of Skat and replied,'That's what the government's there for.'"

And:

It was this, I think -- they had their own troubles -- that in the end explained my friends' failure to "do something" or even to know something. A man can carry only so much responsibility. If he tries to carry more, he collapses; so, to save himself from collapse, he rejects the responsibility that exceeds his capacity. There are responsibilities he must carry, in any case, and these, heavy enough under normal times, are intensified, even multiplied, in times of great change, be they bad times or good. My friends carried their normal responsibilities well enough...But they were unaccustomed to assume public responsibility.

The public responsibilities which Nazism forced upon them -- they didn't choose to assume them when they chose to be Nazis -- exceeded their capacities. They didn't know, or think, at the beginning, that they were going to have to carry a guilty knowledge or a guilty conscience. Anti-Nazism of any sort, in thought or in feeling (not to say action), would have required them, as isolated individuals, already more heavily burdened than they were accustomed to being, to choose to burden themselves beyond their limit.

Responsible men never shirk responsibility, and so, when they must reject it, they deny it. They draw the curtain. They detach themselves altogether from the consideration of the evil they ought to, but cannot, contend with. Their denial compels their detachment.

And I read the last entry of a liberal blog named Tristero dated November 3rd, 2004:

It's become much too hard to be an American.

In my case, I took a break from the middle of a pretty decent career, to add my dissenting voice during what was -and remains- a national emergency. Although my career hit some major snags as a result, I will never regret what I've done. How could I be a decent father to my daughter, let alone a responsible citizen, and not have tried to do at least something to prevent the madness of the Bush/Iraq war?

While the past year and a half has been in some ways enjoyable, and I've learned a great deal, constant exposure to the toxic nature of George W. Bush and his world has taken a serious toll. In more ways than I care to remember, my health has suffered, as has my emotional well-being. In a nutshell, America is now asking too much of its citizens in order to save it from heading over a cliff. That is why we elect representatives, so that we can do our work and not have to run a government. We're supposed to have a responsible and free press, so that normal folks need not work 24/7 exposing the lies and crimes of our leaders. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to do my bit, but I've already done more than I reasonably could. Politics, political writing is not my field, never was, never will be. There is a limit to how much I can do, how much basic research I'm qualified to undertake. I tried to exceed that, but I am simply not capable of continuing to do more.

It's time to get back to work. I have too much music I need to write. I had a lot of fun writing this blog, learned a lot, met many fascinating people who are far more intelligent than I, always a pleasure, and who I wish I could thank properly not only for their hard work, but for the pleasure and comfort it's given me. I may drop a line or two on this blog every once in a while. And I'll never stop caring about the issues that got me started in the blogosphere in the first place. But this is the time, as the great poet of the "old weird America" once sang, to keep on keepin' on. Thanks, all of you, for reading. I wish all of us luck.

It's true. Our country is asking too much of us. But neverthless, we must take up that burden. The alternative is worse.

The Sickness Unto Death

Many things I'm trying to work on posting, but Kid Biscuit and I are now both sick (not, at this time, with the "sickness unto death," just some viral thing) so my brain is not working properly. I have a torture post to write, and a 'new year' post to write, and a tsunami post to write. None of which I'm getting very far with. So, instead, here is a list of books next to Biscuit mommy's side of the bed:

• Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death by Kierkegaard
• Going To Pieces Without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein
• The Pessimist's Handbook -- Schopenhauer
• They Thought They Were Free
• Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decisionmakers
• Essays in Zen Buddhism -- D.T. Suzuki
• Anno's Journey
• Curious George
• Mac OS X - The Missing Manual
• The Impossible Will Take a Little While
• Active Treatment of Depression
• Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness
• The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Abortion Service
• Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf
• Kafka's Complete Stories
• The Feeling of What Happens
• Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco
• The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent -- essays by Lionel Trilling

Of course, anyone with a serious book habit recognizes that being in a stack next to the bed is, for a book, just a first step in actually being read. The next-to-bed stack is more an indication of the wished-for landscape of the mind than the landscape itself. Not the map, not the territory, not even a blueprint. More like a cloud of unknowing, to crib a second Christian mystic's term in the same blog post. I'm sure my personal cloud looks awfully pretentious. But I'd rather aspire to knowledge and seem pretentious than disdain it for fear of being tarred with the label.

I was going to link to each of the books above, as is customary, but you can run a search on Amazon just as well as I can, even better, since you probably don't have a sick, dozing, yet squirmy child in your arms right now, as I do.

Misc Stuff I've been planning to post on for a couple of days now

But the kid's been sick...

• Via Brad DeLong, Michael Froomkin on the Ohio Vote Count:

  Discourse.net: Delay, Delay, Don't (re)Count the Votes: Is there any way to understand this sort of tactic as anything other than an attempt to prevent an honest recount: "Ohio Official Refuses Interview Over Vote"? (Note that the headline is British understatement — in fact the Ohio Secretary of State is apparently trying to get a court order to block having to explain the weird things he’s done to lock out recounters, prevent observers from actually observing, and other very suspicious hijinks.




• Iraq Rebels Were For Bush, say French hostages
• From WaPo: "The FBI announced the appointment yesterday of its sixth counterterrorism director since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, underscoring the bureau's struggle to retain executives in senior positions."



• Also from WaPo:

  House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is leaning toward removing the House ethics committee chairman, who admonished House Majority Leader Tom DeLay this fall and has said he will treat DeLay like any other member, several Republican aides said yesterday.
  
  Although Hastert (Ill.) has not made a decision, the expectation among leadership aides is that the chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), long at odds with party leaders because of his independence, will be replaced when Congress convenes next week.
  
  The aides said a likely replacement is Rep. Lamar S. Smith, one of DeLay's fellow Texans, who held the job from 1999 to 2001. Smith wrote a check this year to DeLay's defense fund. An aide said Smith was favored for his knowledge of committee procedure.




• Finally, WaPo says we shouldn't worry too much about nuclear terror...yet.

The Other "T" word

More on Torture, lest we forget it amidst the horror of Tsunami.

First, TalkLeft reports that the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearing is set for January 5th: "Some liberal groups are opposing Gonzales' confirmation. Others are requesting Senators to conduct a thorough questioning of him and reserving judgment. TalkLeft falls in the latter group." I don't really get the "thorough questioning" angle."

What, pray tell, is there to question about, exactly? I'm all for getting him on the record about what exactly his position is, but I don't see how anything he says can possibly make up for the memos. Obviously, I fall in the "oppose" group, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose stated policy is: “The best way for the American people to send a message to the Bush administration and the world that ‘we the people’ of the United States do not condone torture is to mobilize to reject the nomination of Alberto Gonzales.”

Next, from Pandagon:

Jack Balkin wisely says:"The real challenge for the left is making people care about torture, even when torture is not on the front page." The real challenge for the left is making people care about anything once it slips off the front page. Hey America? What happened to those stolen munitions? What about that bureaucrat who got browbeat into concealing the true cost of Medicare? Come to think of it, who did out Valerie Plame? What was all that stuff about Tom DeLay's ethics? Didn't the troops need more armor or something? And wasn't there some controversy over Bush knowingly using bad intelligence to lead us to war? There was a Simpsons episode where Mr. Burns went to the doctor for a check-up, only to be told he owed his life to the hundreds of terminal illnesses intent on finishing him. There were so many trying to do the job that they'd jammed the doorway and none could get in. The doctor, of course, said that it'd take no more than a simple breeze to upset the balance and kill Mr. Burns. Mr. Burns, for his part, thought it meant he was invincible.

The Bush Administration is Mr. Burns. But in this reality show -- "Who Wants To Read The Boring Old Newspaper? " -- they're right. The sheer number of scandals ensure the electorate's ADD will approve a subject change far before any particular outrage reaches critical mass. Pour that in the blender with Congressional control, an insipid media and neutered Democrats, and scandals look unlikely to topple this group. But political landscapes are funny things and, as a wise man once said, even the slightest breeze could change everything....

Via Pandagon, news of Biscuit's home state Guv'nr

How, how, how did we end up with this guy as our governor? I read recently he is on the short list to receive the mantle of leadership when Bush is done with it. Yay.

Newsday.com - AP National News:

Hoping to bring capital punishment to Massachusetts, Gov. Mitt Romney is preparing to file a death penalty bill early next year that he says is so carefully written it will guarantee only the guilty are executed.

Based in part on the findings of a death penalty panel he appointed, the bill would limit capital punishment to the “worst of the worst” crimes including terrorism, the murder of police officers, murder involving torture and the killing of witnesses. It also would use evidence such as DNA testing to protect the innocent.

Romney wants his death penalty bill to be a model for other states.

“The weakness in the death penalty statutes in other states, of course, is the fear that you may execute someone who is innocent. We remove that possibility,” Romney said.

As Pandagon points out. it's never a good sign when someone claims something is foolproof. Who does Mitt Romney think he is, God? I thought Christians were supposed to be all about the human fallibility, judge not lest ye be judged, stonethrowers beware, etc.

Aid by country

As of tonight, the biggest donor is Spain, at $37 million. The US is still at $35 million. (My dear father-in-law asserts that the initial US offer was $100K, but I haven't found that online yet.)

Spain's GDP is less than one-twelfth that of the US.

To put it another way -- which makes the US look less bad, since it's a much wealthier country -- Spain is giving $0.85 per resident. The US is giving $0.11 per resident. (Oh, but we're planning to give much more, says our chief eggzeggudive who couldn't be bothered to stop lounging in Crawford to speak on the matter until today, four days after the disaster.)

South Asian relief

Folks, I know most of you likely already gave your guts out to the various Dem campaigns this year, but please consider giving to any of the credible aid organizations to provide emergency relief in South Asia. These poor people desperately need all the help they can get, and Mr. Global Superpower is being stingy!

Try to donate off-hours as all of the transactional sites seem to be overwhelmed during the day.

Here's a couple of resources to find organizations accepting donations for South Asian emergency relief.

NYTimes
CNN

Oh, well, who needs libraries when you've got Fox News?

From an NYT article about the now-famous Salinas library closings: "Libraries around the country are encountering hard times. According to an April study by the American Library Association, libraries in 41 states absorbed more than $50 million in financing cuts in the last year, and more than 1,100 libraries have reduced operating hours or trimmed their staffs."

Pandagon on 'The Kinkadization of Political Life'

Pandagon writes:

Regular readers know I'm big on Republican heuristics, all the surface shit they do to appear virtuous while surreptitiously picking Oliver Twist's pocket. But those shallow markers of Republicanism, which are really low-quality outgrowths of nationalism, also train voters to think in a certain way. They train them to think in narratives, in frames, and to discount policy arguments and deeper debates. When Bush's backdrop is an almost-psychedelic pattern of slogans, vaguely attentive viewers of the nightly news need merely glance at the screen to learn what Bush was speaking about, they certainly don't need to go dig up the speech or demand from the anchor a fuller rundown of its contents. When bills are named Healthy Forests and Clear Skies, few feel forced to dig deep for their contents, the intent is telegraphed right there in the title!

The crowning virtue in the current political world is at-a-glance politics. Whatever you're doing, whatever you're saying, voters should be able to receive and understand your message with nothing more than a glance. And this isn't a merely Republican trait, Clinton was a master of it. But the Republicans have infused it with their special Essence of Cynicism? and begun to telegraph messages entirely divorced from the event or policy's content.

As I've suggested before, "at-a-glance politics" is something we have to fight not just in those who voted for Bush but in those who voted for Kerry. And there are a lot of things militating against a resurgence in people paying attention. Lack of time, fear, avoidance and denial, and the taboo on discussing politics at work,the place most adults spend most of their waking hours.

Good News for the Day: Future Continues to be Hard To Predict

The New York Times: Argentina's Economic Rally Defies Forecasts:

When the Argentine economy collapsed in December 2001, doomsday predictions abounded. Unless it adopted orthodox economic policies and quickly cut a deal with its foreign creditors, hyperinflation would surely follow, the peso would become worthless, investment and foreign reserves would vanish and any prospect of growth would be strangled.

But three years after Argentina declared a record debt default of more than $100 billion, the largest in history, the apocalypse has not arrived. Instead, the economy has grown by 8 percent for two consecutive years, exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually returning and unemployment has eased from record highs - all without a debt settlement or the standard measures required by the International Monetary Fund for its approval.

.

Rove Wannabee Watch

College Republicans' Fundraising Criticized (washingtonpost.com): "The College Republican National Committee is under fire for using front organizations to collect millions of dollars in contributions, including money from elderly people with dementia."
Ah, yes, the College Republicans, training ground for Mr. Rove himself. Now run by one Eric Hoplin, who, when the scandal broke,

e-mailed top state officials of the organization, telling them not to speak to the news media. "We need the story to go away," he wrote. "The story is full of lies and distortions written by a well-known liberal who is out to get us. If the press asks you about it, tell them you have no comment."

NYT Book Review of New Yorker's mammoth cartoon book

I can't decide if this guy is for real...:

Now that America's urbane sophisticates have had to acknowledge their status as a fringe group so out of touch with mainstream moral values, tournament bass fishing, Nascar and Christian rock that their electoral and cultural clout is marginally less than that of Casper, Wyo., legions of self-doubting highbrows are asking themselves how this decline into decadence occurred.

Because of what enfeebling bad habit did the proud and potent thinking class that gave us F.D.R. and J.F.K. fade into a cynical, ironic, smirking bunch of spiritual weaklings headed up by Al Franken and Michael Moore? Was the problem attending movies instead of church? Deserting Burger King for Whole Foods Market? No, I've concluded. The blame lies elsewhere. The seduction of America's elites by the vices of humanism and skepticism can only be blamed on the New Yorker cartoon, an agent of corruption more insidious than LSD or the electric guitar.

And then later:

And though it would be foolish to suggest the medium has run its course and that renaissance and revival aren't still possible (America might elect another Democratic Senate someday, too) one does sense that the cartoons have done the job they first set out to do: purging any lingering puritanism from their relatively well-heeled audience and replacing it with a smart-aleck self-awareness that suddenly -- just look around -- feels useless, lonely and crippling.

Wow. So, since I find Roz Chast funny, I am probably a smart-aleck who feels useless, lonely, and crippled in Bushite America.

Oh dear god, he's right! What to do?

They count prison inmates as VOTERS? What a fucking travesty!

From NYT, op-ed, yesterday:

While other political forces support the mandatory sentences - most notably the powerful local prosecutors - prison rights advocates have recently begun to argue that prison district politicians are more concerned about keeping the prisons full than about crime. The idea of counting inmates as voters in the counties that imprison them is particularly repulsive given that inmates are nearly always stripped of the right to vote. The practice recalls the early United States under slavery, when slaves were barred from voting but counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in Congress.

A few months old ...

Bill Moyers on American Exceptionalism:

The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don't want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism. The poll also found that five or six of every 10 Americans "would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic." No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.

Passive aggressive Neurosurgeons

I love this. Two neurosurgeons write an Op-Ed about tort reform, and they use the passive-aggressive's favorite "not mentioning any names" tactic:

Hurting Care, and Lives (washingtonpost.com):

Many of our potential leaders understand this problem and the House of Representatives has more than once passed a tort reform bill that would limit awards for noneconomic damages to slow the upward spiral in malpractice premiums. President Bush has promised to sign the legislation, but each time the measure comes to the Senate for a vote, certain senators filibuster, effectively killing the measure. When one considers the enormous amount of money being handed out to these senators by certain special-interest groups, such as the American Trial Lawyers Association, one of the most influential political action committees in Washington, their actions are understandable, although unhelpful.

"Certain senators filibuster."

Oh c'mon now guys, why don't you just go ahead and name names?

Alberto Gonzales Propaganda from WaPo

WaPo bats for Bush in this sycophantic 'life story' piece: "Migrant Workers' Son Worked Way to Air Force Academy, Harvard, a Top Law Firm -- and Government"

Okay, part of me understands that all nominees get to have their 'life story' piece. And that it will either be about how they rose from humble beginnings to devote their lives to public service, or how they were born into privilege and taught that they had an obligation to public service.

But the other part of me thinks that life story bits do a disservice to the newspaper readership by 'reporting' on irrelevant yet attractive aspects of the nominee's life story to soften their reportage of truly relevant facts.

So you have some relevant facts buried in 3 pages of fluff about Mr. Gonzales's first job serving beverages to football fans, his migrant worker parents, and President Bush saying:"In many ways, Al embodies the American dream."

The important facts? The ones that are relevant to the question at hand: should Mr. Gonzales become AG? The WaPo delicately says that Gonzales is "likely to face tough questions regarding his role as White House counsel, particularly his memos that, critics believe, sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects in Iraq and encouraged the detention of others at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts."

So: "critics believe" that Gonzales may have "sanctioned" torture, and Gonzales may face some "tough questions" about this.

Tell me, dear WaPo, is it truly possible to believe otherwise about those torture memos? Given what is now coming out about the use of torture being the rule rather than the exception? "Critics believe"!?!

We are about to be stuck with an AG who thinks torture is A-OK, and is smart enough to interpret the laws so that it's somehow legal too. And the Post prattles on about how Gonzales overcame racial barriers and attended college prep classes in high school.

So, once more with feeling, could we focus on the torture please?

Hear, Hear!

Pandagon says:

The Democratic party's current problem is its own suckitude. Until we begin sinking plans to privatize Social-fucking-Security on sight, our attention must be firmly on the present, cause the future ain't looking good.

He was responding to more optimistic back-and-forthing about whether demographic trends are just about to, any second now, favor Democrats.

God Bless the USA

Can the Bushies EVER not aggrandize themselves?

"The United States, at the president's direction, will be a leading partner in one of the most significant relief, rescue and recovery challenges that the world has ever known," Trent Duffy, deputy White House press secretary, said in Crawford, Tex., where President Bush is spending the rest of the holiday season. (NYT)

In other words, the story is not the atrocious devastation in South Asia, it's the unprecedented magnanimity of the USA. Un. Fucking. Believable.

Hope From Big Pharma -- and Not in Tablet Form!

In "Big Pharma's Dirty Little Secret, Peter Rost, a Pfizer VP, says there isn't any reason to ban re-importation of drugs because of safety concerns -- that drug companies are just trying to protect their profits. Re-importation of drugs at lower prices is not in itself a long-term solution to the high cost of drugs, but doing so would force domestic drug prices down for everyone who currently has to pay 'list price' -- that is, those who can least afford to: people without insurance. In his last line, Rost writes "I joined this industry to save lives, not to take them. And that's the reason I've chosen to speak out."

More people -- in government, in corporations, and in private life -- need to speak out as Rost has. Every day, more are. And I am grateful.

So let me just sit here -- my son is sleeping on my lap, and I am watching the snow blow off the roof in eddies and whorls -- let me just sit here for a moment and be grateful for Peter Rost, who gives me hope. It is an unfamiliar feeling, and I would like to bask in it.

Penalizing the blue states

The almost-impossible-to-believe proposed tax code changes proposed by the Bush administration, whereby state and local taxes would no longer be deductible from federal tax, is beginning to take on an air of inevitability, claims from New York Democratic senators notwithstanding. It probably may actually help our cause that the governors of NY and CA are Repugnants. "Ownership society" my ass: the deductibility of local property taxes is the main devices allowing people of modest means to own their own houses. I think it's an extremely important deduction, even though it discriminates against renters.

(In an ideal, never-to-exist United States, I'd like to see either some sort of tax deduction for renters, or an entirely revamped system where there is a baseline per-family-member deduction -- essentially making basic-level housing payable from untaxed funds.)

Apropos of Mental Health

An op-ed in today's WaPo argues for mental-parity legislation:

A recently released medical study confirms that poor mental health and stress can cause us to age more quickly and get sick faster -- that there are actually molecular changes in the body when we are stressed. This probably isn't surprising to most people. Mental health professionals, through their experiences with patients, have long known that the mind plays a major role in the health of the body. But the landmark study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences solidifies it.

The mind and body are equal partners, one affecting the other, the research says. Mental parity -- making sure mental health is fully covered by insurance plans the same as physical health -- has long been a topic in Congress. Will this finding finally move the mental-parity legislation along? Will it change the way we treat patients? Will health care professionals recognize the importance of mental health treatment? Will insurance companies wake up and provide better coverage for mental health? Will they cover biofeedback, yoga, massage and other techniques proven to reduce stress and calm the mind? I hope so.

Obviously this is something I care a lot about too, but it's not an issue I'm active about. (i.e., I bitch, but do nothing more.) That fight is never going to be won while insurance companies are such a powerful lobby, and insurance companies will continue to be such a powerful lobby until we fix the health care system. I believe strongly that we need single-payer health care. In the absence of single-payer health care, we should at least strive to cover the uninsured. I would like my insurance company to pay for more of my mental health care, but I recognize that I get far better care than so many people out there who have no insurance and no money to pay for care themselves. If things continue in the direction they are going, more and more people will go uninsured. The current healthcare system benefits no one but insurance companies and rich people. That my mental-health coverage sucks, that mental illness is still discriminated against, is a problem, yes, but not the worst.

Now, I must go do my yoga video.

Earthquakes and Terror

From NYT: Most Powerful Quake in 40 Years Triggers Death and Destruction

Death toll at least 9,000, likely to rise, and rise, and rise...

We humans are not the only thing the earth's got going on. Sometimes, it does something that reminds us of that. Those who think that one man can keep them safe should ask who in this world can stop a tsunami, and then they should remember that safety is always an illusion, in the end.

The earth behaves in inhumane ways. It does not know from morality, kindness, or the Geneva conventions. It attacks innocents, killing without remorse. Shall we destroy it before it destroys us?

UPDATE 12/27/2004: Death toll at 23,000 and still rising steadily. This is really horrific. A list of orgs to donate to is here, at The Command Post (via Brad DeLong).

Biscuit Compendium Of Pessimism, #6

Via Pandagon, Blogger Unfogged on what's happening:

Just this: Now we know how it happens. I remember, as a kid, seeing news footage of people on the streets in Moscow, wondering what was wrong with them, why they were willing to live under a repressive regime, what about the Russian (or East German, or Romanian...) character allowed them to become repressors and repressed. But, of course, there was nothing special about them at all. In "response" to whatever threat, they and their government allowed some curtailing of freedom, and the logic of that move (threat necessitates greater control and less liberty) is inexorable. Most people, because they're not directly affected, don't think about their liberty at all; some people (like me), are upset, complain, but do nothing substantive; and a few people (always too few), try to make a difference.

Sometimes I get the sense that people are waiting for the skies to darken, as if the heavens will signal when we've become a repressive society; but that's not going to happen, and, in fact, it should already have happened. The difference between the U.S. now, and those repressive regimes is just one of degree: the policy, already implemented, of this government is for indefinite detention without charge; torture while in custody, and court proceedings which make use of information extracted by torture.

None of this needs to make a difference to us; the folks writing and reading these blogs. In all likelihood, none of us will be picked up, locked up, and tortured. But that's not the way to judge what's happening.

Biscuit Compendium of Pessimism, #5

Adam Werbach at Alternet, on why liberals shouldn't count on people's economic self-interest or on Republican over-reaching to save the day:

First, conservative economic policy hurts the people lowest down in the line, which creates more economic insecurity. When you’re feeling economically insecure, you’re going to look for something more to believe in. You’re going to search more for faith. And who are you going to look toward? This faith-driven conservative movement.

Likewise, when you’re scared because of terrorism and war, who are you going to look to? Conservatives. So the more scared you get, you look to conservatives. This is a positive feedback mechanism that they have set up.

It works the same way with the other liberal myth, which is that they’re going to overreach. In this case, the more they overreach, the more they affirm that position. So they have a feedback mechanism for overreaching—that’s what’ they’re suppose to do right now. It’s going to serve them better than not overreaching.

[...]

If things get worse people are not going to become economically more rational – that’s the point. The fact that despair is increasing – which it will – is not going to lead to the rebirth in liberalism. That’s not why they think that they’ve gotten this way, and it’s not how they think they’re going to get themselves out.

What Would Kafka Say? #2

"Can you know anything other than deception? If ever the deception is annihilated, you must not look in that direction or you will turn into a pillar of salt."

from the 4th Blue Octavo Notebook