The Rectification of Names

The curious case of the busted bunker busters

2012-03-10T17:53:00.000-05:00

Bowling Bombs. From Freaking News.

One of the more arcane bits of controversy arising from last week's visit from Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington is the question of whether anything happened on the issue of the so-called bunker buster bombs made in America (Lockheed) for which Netanyahu yearns, as something that could be used to blow up Iran's underground nuclear facilities, should he find it necessary to do that.

It started for me at one or another digital hangout where a mildly paranoid participant was frantically informing people that Obama had decided to equip Netanyahu with all the bombs [jump]
he could use for that purpose, citing stories in the Times and the Guardian. Well, I knew that wasn't true, because I had seen the report in Tuesday's Haaretz:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu requested the United States approve the sale of advanced refueling aircraft as well as GBU-28 bunker-piercing bombs to Israel during a recent meeting with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a top U.S. official said on Tuesday.

The American official said that U.S. President Barack Obama instructed Panetta to work directly with Defense Minister Ehud Barak on the matter, indicating that the U.S. administration was inclined to look favorably upon the request as soon as possible....(Haaretz, March 6 2012)

What the President had done seemed to be limited to setting up a chain of communication—and one that you would have thought already existed. And it looked to me, though this is certainly not what Haaretz was saying, like a way of putting a decision off, in a polite and encouraging way.

But then Ma'ariv claimed on Thursday (in Hebrew only, and I can only confirm through English-language sources such as the Israel Matzav blog and the New York Post), that

The US offered to give Israel advanced weaponry -- including bunker-busting bombs and refueling planes -- in exchange for Israel's agreement not to attack Iranian nuclear sites, Israeli newspaper Maariv reported Thursday.

President Obama reportedly made the offer during Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Washington this week.

Under the proposed deal, Israel would not attack Iran until 2013, after US elections in November this year. The newspaper cited unnamed Western diplomatic and intelligence sources. (New York Post, March 8, 2012)

So there was a totally opposed theory, or an alternative cabal of anonymous sources with a different story. Not only was there a lot of leaking going on, but some of the leaks had sprung in the wrong vessel: they weren't true.

Meanwhile, the original paranoid story had turned out to be wrong in a particularly annoying way: the paranoids and I had failed to look at the dates of the Times and Guardian stories about Obama lavishing Netanyahu with bombs, and they had nothing to do with last week's talks, because they were published last November—moreover the arms shipment they discussed had taken place or was alleged to have taken place way back in 2009 (I'll get to the stories themselves in a while). Which made me wonder, in that case, why would Netanyahu be fussing about them now? I mean, he has them already, right?

As it turns out it's not that simple. He may not have them, for one thing, and then if he does have them, he may feel they're not enough, or not the right sort, or both. And then it's interesting in its own right to follow the degree to which a lie can be halfway around the block while the truth is still getting its boots on, as they say, and the way the competition between the two is a matter of propaganda even when it's very difficult to understand what the propaganda value is.

This is material way out of my league, but I've been giving it a lot of time, and there's so much material I think I'll have to publish it in chapters. So, with little further ado, this is the first one.

Oh, and by the way, the White House, however, leapt today to deny that there was any agreement at all:

President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not discuss in their meetings this week a reported Israeli request for advanced U.S. military technology that could be used against Iran, the White House said on Thursday.

"In meetings the president had there was no such agreement proposed or reached," White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters. Obama and Netanyahu meet in the Oval office for two hours on Monday and then had lunch together....

Carney's comments on Thursday seemed to specifically relate to those meetings participated by Obama and Netanyahu, while failing to comment about the content of other lower-level talks. (Haaretz, March 10, 2010)

They didn't deny, you'll notice here, that Panetta might have agreed about something with somebody.

What goes around comes home to roost, or something

2012-03-09T11:35:00.002-05:00

Turnout in the Republican primaries is seriously low, Kos in person reports, and Dr. Newt Gingrich, million-dollar historian and famed verbal terrorist with the international Belgian colonialist conspiracy, thinks he knows why: it's that rotter Romney, or rather the SuperPac that isn't coordinated with him, I mean of course it isn't coordinated with any candidate—that would be against the law!—but it's more specially not coordinated with Romney than anybody else, Restore our Future (a terrific retroactionary name, by the way, with its evocation of a future that has become a little shabby and shopworn, so that we need to spiff it up somewhat before we carry it with us on our long march into the long ago).

Fire belly Newt. From IMproPRieTies.

Anyway, Gingrich says it is all the negative advertising that is driving the voters into staying home, and he may well be right (even a stopped clock etc.). According to Wikipedia [jump]
in any case, the best research out there (Ansolabehere, S. & Iyengar, S. (1995). Going negative: How campaign advertising shrinks and polarizes the electorate. New York: The Free Press) shows that negative advertising does indeed diminish turnout, tending to work more to the advantage of Republicans than Democrats, but it doesn't say anything about primary campaigns.

Republicans are famous for their efforts to decrease turnout in general elections, but something tells me they don't actually know how it works, or understand how negative advertising is a part of the same process; for instance, when they're specifically aiming at lowering turnout—through things like voter ID laws, advertising false venues and dates in targeted communities, bribing ministers to advise congregations not to vote, etc.—they focus only on minorities, specifically black people, without thinking of the advantages that would accrue to them from getting a wider population to stay home. And then negative advertising lowers turnout in the way it is happening in this primary season, they think it's a bug rather than a feature, as the Newtster is complaining.

In fact the reason low turnout favors Republicans isn't well known at all, I believe, and so I'm going to spell it out for you: it's very simply that most voters don't like Republicans and would prefer not to vote for them, so that the less of a majority there is voting at all, the better their chances of winning, or rather not losing, of being the last man left, like the Little One in "Ten in the Bed" ("There were ten in the bed/And the Little One said,/'Roll over! Roll over!'/ So they all rolled over and one fell out...").

Thus, in the 2008 elections a majority of the voting-age population came out and voted for Barack Obama, and Democrats won. In the 2010 elections a majority stayed home and the Democrats lost; it's going too far to say Republicans won, but they didn't lose, and that got them the House of Representatives and the ability to stop the Senate from doing anything. The actual winner of the election was "Don't vote, they're all the same," or more succinctly "Fuck 'em all," but that candidate couldn't actually take an oath or a seat, so the second-place Republicans stepped in. (In my approach, "Don't vote" wins when it gets an absolute majority; when it only has a plurality, the human winner is actually a winner.)

And because the Republicans don't realize that they are losers even when they technically win, Willard Mitt Romney, or rather the SuperPac not coordinated with him, didn't realize that the strategy of negative advertising Blitzkrieg in the primary was only going to widen people's natural dislike—that while it would no doubt help him not lose in the primaries it would blow back on the party as a whole, including himself. (I mean, in the November Blitzkrieg...)

Call for signatures

2012-03-08T23:52:00.000-05:00

You can sign an official WhiteHouse.gov petition here (h/t m50bing0 at Kos) asking the administration to pardon Bradley Manning of any and all crimes he may have committed in the course of liberating extremely important facts about the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and subsequently to back Manning's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before you start giggling, just step back a minute, and think. It's true that Manning is a somewhat comic figure, bewildered where Daniel Ellsberg was dashing, and especially after that third WikiLeaks dump, which was more about amusing gossip than information being held back to deceive the American people. It's partly the fault of the press, because that was the batch of documents that got them really excited. They quickly lost interest in the horrifying Collateral Murder video, showing our troops in Iraq murdering a Reuters employee from a helicopter like Sarah Palin after a wolf, and in the Afghan War Diary, 92,000 documents unveiling the criminality and the hopelessness of our situation in Afghanistan, but it was the quarter of a million US embassy cables that really got their attention, with their stories about high life around the dictators in Baku and Grozny, and news of European politicians saying nasty things about one another.

It is the first two items that really count, and if you think of the risks he knowingly ran, and the skill he brought to the job, and the more-or-less torture he has undergone since his capture, he really is indisputably a hero, and it's not that funny. Again, sign here.

From The Cult of the Dead Fish.

F for Effort

2012-03-08T10:01:00.000-05:00

I saw Arne Duncan in the All-Stars celebrity match a couple of weeks ago, and I have to admit he looked spectacular. He could be the Bill Bradley of the 21st century--if he wasn't so damned dumb. And lacking in empathy.

Picture from Fox News Orlando, of all places.

Former "reformer" (i.e. privatizer and "accountability" hound) turned actual reformer (i.e., someone who wants to improve schools in the US) Diane Ravitch has prepared a report card for the secretary of education, in the New York Review. I think it's a little weird on her part to criticize Duncan for disrespecting the 10th Amendment, the one that grants unmentioned rights to the states, for pushing a federal takeover of the system; it would be wiser to let the feds do what is needed under the General Welfare clause and stop doing what isn't needed. Some states need federal help; Texas needs help (and I mean tough love) in curriculum. No state needs help in figuring out how to let private industry suck more cash out of the education system, but I'd like to see them get some assistance in not doing it.

Other than that, it is a nicely packed summary of what our department of education has been up to in the last three years, and why it should stop. So click above and read it.

The origin of specious

2012-03-07T09:19:00.001-05:00

Attorney General Eric Holder has finally come forward to explain how it's legal under certain circumstances for the President to order the killing of a US citizen, and it isn't very pretty. For the argumentation and a learned critique, I'll refer you to today's series of posts by EmptyWheel, starting maybe with this one, which lays out Holder's claim that the "due process" promised in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments doesn't necessarily need to be a judicial process, and then methodically demolishes it.

This frail and unfortunate effort at Jesuitical casuistry comes just as I'm arriving at peak position in the cycle of Obama fandom, which waxes and wanes for each of us according to factors variously seasonal and unpredictable, not all of which have been successfully identified, but does have something to do with what the President actually does, and the long trajectory across which his plans come to a sometimes surprising fruition.

One thing that has had me gasping with Obama-amazement is his skill in managing the Israel-Iran confrontation without openly hurting anybody's feelings; as Binyamin Netanyahu barks and blusters his way through his Washington engagements, Iran and the Powers decide to resume negotiations, and Iran sends out one of those "signals" by reversing the death sentence against another American "spy", Amir Mirzaei Hekmati.

And then it starts to become clear that the Affordable Care Act, bless its ambivalent heart, is really driving a stake through the heart of the vampire health insurance industry, in that unbearably gradual Obama tempo (in this metaphor, the rules on medical loss ratio would count as daylight, and preventive care without copays is garlic). Denying coverage has been their big engine of profit, and if they can't do it they are going to die, and a semi-public system built out of those exchanges, the nonprofit private insurers, and Medicare is going to rise, almost of its own accord, to take their place.

And then the Justice Department comes up with this stupid argument. Go figure. I can't write the post I wanted to write at all.

He was farther out than you thought...

2012-03-05T19:39:00.000-05:00

As the Wall Street Journal reported it,

"what we need to talk about to defeat Barack Obama is getting good jobs and scaling back the size of government and that’s what I do,” Mr. Romney said in a campaign stop [in Canton] Monday morning.... “Other people in this race have debated about the economy, they’ve read about the economy, they’ve talked about it in subcommittee meetings, but I’ve actually been in it,” he said.

"Come on in," he shouted back to his friends on the shore, "the economy's fine!"

But seriously, what's this about? "Getting good jobs and scaling back the size of government and that's what I do"—Oh, yeah? And when does he do it, exactly? In the small hours, in his special black mask and cape and Californio hat? Has old Mitt been cutting back the size of your government? When you weren't looking? He certainly wasn't doing it in Massachusetts. He has always gotten pretty good good jobs, though, all three of them, and probably for his kids as well.

"Other people may have debated about zoology, they've read about zoology, they've talked about it in faculty meetings, but I've actually been in it!"

Presidents on parade

2012-03-04T22:02:00.000-05:00

Snappy comebacks:

The German foreign minister, Guido Westerweile, said that President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus was "Europe's last dictator." Lukashenko said, "It's better to be a dictator than gay." But how can he be sure?

But it's best to be the Prez.

From The Australian. Photo by AP.

Man up, Vova! Moscow doesn't believe in tears! (Not my line, alas, but too good to pass up. Apparently state TV actually broadcast the gorgeous old Brezhnev-era movie on election [jump]
day, so it was on people's minds...) This is the former Once and Future, now Current, President of the Russian Federation outside the Kremlin after the results were announced. I think he's trying to decide whether he's really Boris Godunov or Sally Field (They like me! They really like me!).

And speaking of elections
they had some in Iran, didn't they? Reuters reports

Clerical Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has tightened his grip on Iran's faction-ridden politics after loyalists won over 75 percent of seats in parliamentary elections at the expense of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a near-complete count showed.

The widespread defeat of Ahmadinejad supporters - including his sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad - is expected to reduce the president to a lame duck after he sowed divisions by challenging the utmost authority of Khamenei in the governing hierarchy.

The candidates you like were under house arrest, so it's not to get too excited. And we don't know if Ahmejinedad was too wacky for the ayatollahs or not wacky enough, though I think betting is on the former, which is something like good news if true.

From the Class of 1952 Reunion website.

Meanwhile, back in Ohio,
the little northwestern town of Uniopolis seems fated to die; Governor John Kasich has shrunk it past the point where you could drown it in the bathtub and let it wash right down the drain; a report in the Los Angeles Times says it

has already laid off its part-time police officer and decided not to replace its maintenance worker, who recently retired. To save cash, Mayor William Rolston will propose Monday that the town turn off the street lights, and that Uniopolis disincorporate after more than a century in existence.

"We've decided that with the budget cuts, we just can't do it anymore," said Rolston, the mayor of 19 years, speaking from the town's one-room municipal building, its wallpaper covered with heart-shaped American flags.

When Kasich said he was going to balance the state budget without raising taxes, they thought it sounded like a good thing. They voted for him over Governor Ted Strickland by a margin of more than 2 to 1.

Aipac up your troubles

2012-03-04T15:55:00.001-05:00

Portrait of mask and actor. Uncredited illustration from notes by William A. Johnson, University of Cincinnati.

Martin Indyk on NPR this morning (audio here) explained the Israel-Iran situation in a way that really made me understand the Israeli position better—not Netanyahu's position in particular, but the very broad position of everybody, basically, that isn't a dove.

He's talking about Iran's reaching the "threshold" of ability to build a nuclear weapon, [jump]
and it's easier to get the uranium from 20% pure to 90% than it is to get the first 20%, and they're building triggers and delivery systems (these points as suggested by the IAEA report of last spring), and so on, as usual, and I'm thinking as usual, that he's presenting the evidence as far clearer than it actually is (the IAEA report doesn't even mention triggers; in a later IAEA report the alleged trigger-making turned out to be making nanodiamonds, which are not a weapon, though they are also not a girl's best friend).

And then he's talking about sanctions and how they will simply stiffen the collective Iranian neck, which sounds like a valid enough point, though I hardly see how bombing them would bring them to the negotiating table any faster.

And then it hit me that the Israeli position is in the literary sense a tragic one: they don't believe that anything is going to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon at some unpredictable future moment, they realize full well that an attempt to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities will be a disaster and a failure, but they see themselves eventually doing it anyway, giving it their best shot like Hemingway heroes, and unable to think it out beyond that.

And how do they know the Iranians won't decide not to build the weapon? Because the Iranians are irrational. (Not that I'd necessarily disagree with the premise, but how many lunatics does it take to make a folie à deux? That's what I thought.)

So here's hoping Barack Obama has a little of that comic sense so sadly missing from most world leaders, and which you do feel in him once in a while. And here's hoping he has a really nice chat with Shimon Peres (who has that comic sense in spades) today.

Update:
Yup, I think they had a nice talk:

"Mr. President, I know your commitment to Israel is deep and profound," Peres said. "Under your leadership, security cooperation between the U.S. and Israel has reached its highest level. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a friend in the White House. He reflects the values that make American great and make Israel secure. Thank you President Obama on behalf of my people."

"Already, there is too much loose talk of war," Obama said. "Over the last few weeks, such talk has only benefited the Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil, which they depend upon to fund their nuclear program. For the sake of Israel’s security, America’s security, and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster; now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition that we have built. Now is the time to heed that timeless advice from Teddy Roosevelt: speak softly, but carry a big stick."

Women and narcomanes

2012-03-04T11:30:00.000-05:00

In what sense would you suppose requiring insurance providers to buy women health insurance that covers preventive care including birth control is the same as Denmark giving away free heroin to drug addicts "so they won't commit crimes to get the money"? No, I can't figure it out either.

That was the venturesome analogy offered by Bill O'Reilly, reacting yesterday to the testimony before Congressional Democrats of Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, [jump]
who talked about the difficulties caused by the fact that

Georgetown Law, a Jesuit institution, does not provide contraception coverage in its student health plan and... contraception can cost a woman more than $3,000 during law school. She spoke of a friend who had an ovary removed because the insurance company wouldn't cover the prescription birth control she needed to stop the growth of cysts.

I was staying away from this story when it was just a matter of Rush Limbaugh calling Fluke a "slut" who was having "$3000 worth of birth control pills worth of sex," displaying interesting misconceptions as to how birth control pills are in fact used. But the stuff about Denmark sounded like one of those wonderful right-wing fantasies, and nobody was checking it out, so I thought I should.

It turns out that the Danish government really does supply free heroin to some addicts, at five county clinics throughout the country, though not really as a crime-prevention measure, but within a larger program of "substitution treatment" with drugs like methadone:

As part of the treatment provided to the most seriously affected heroin abusers, in January 2010, the Danish Government initiated scheme of treatment with medically prescribed heroin, and about 30 drug users were on heroin treatment by July 2010.

Addicts are required to come to the centre once or twice a day, and each dose is administered under medical supervision. “If the junkies say no to state-paid heroin, the state has obviously got to revise the programme” – and listen more closely to the addicts, adds Politiken.

Anyway, the terms of the O'Reilly analogy are as follows: health insurance providers are like the Danish government, women who wish to separate the question of whether to have sex from the question of whether to conceive a child are like heroin addicts, and filling your birth control prescription without making a copayment is like registering and getting a fix twice a day at a county clinic.

Well, they can't be exactly alike, in that, putting it crudely, birth control pills never gave anybody an orgasm. Unlike the Danish clinic, the insurance policy cannot supply a person with the pleasure itself, which she has to find by the same means whether she is using the pill or not, and which unlike the pleasure of opiates practically never, for women, involves paying for it.

But wait: there is a real parallel, in the negative consequences: if you get your heroin from the clinic, you won't get busted, and if you get your sex while using birth control, you won't get pregnant (and the fact that both will be for free is secondary, but not unimportant). Now we may be getting a little closer to the way O'Reilly thinks.

O'Reilly thinks women, many, or most, or virtually all of them, are addicted to sex; that is, he doesn't actually believe in addiction as a disease, but more a weakness of the will, a getting "out of control"; he thinks women are what liberals would call addicted to sex, but he would call hysterically self-indulgent, and that only severe regulation and the threat of punishment can hold them back, and that the punishment is pregnancy and the regulation is by men. Which is a pretty familiar concept after all:

I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing:
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.

They'll tell you that's not what they mean, but if you unpack the analogies, there it is. You shouldn't have talked to that serpent, it's your own damned fault.

From Francis Quarles, Emblems Divine and Moral, 1866.

What Atrios said

2012-03-03T00:28:00.000-05:00

I mean, sometimes there isn't really anything to add.

The smart bet in this country for decades has been to find new and creative ways to siphon taxpayer money into your pockets. That's what education privatization is about. That's what social security privatization is about.

Except all the other stuff—prisons, mail, health care, defense services, diplomatic protection, tax refund processing... Granted, once you get started it could keep you up all night...

Between Barack and a hard place

2012-03-02T23:51:00.001-05:00

From Obamulkes.com.

MadDog in comments over at EmptyWheel reads the Obama interview by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic and the Netanyahu analysis by Daniel Levy in Foreign Policy and asks us:

Ask yourself if Bibi hasn’t boxed Obama into a explicit “strike Iran” corner, or at the very least, shifted US foreign policy on Iran so far to the right that the US will have no choice but to commit to “strike Iran"?

Given that Bibi has already locked up a guaranteed Repug commitment to his “strike Iran” cause, then view Bibi’s moves described in those 2 articles as closing the deal with Obama.

So I did, but I got a different answer than he did; namely, "No." And if anybody's boxed in, it's the icky PM.

Levy's article seemed to me to be about how Netanyahu may be strong at the moment in political position in Israel but is weak by nature, a typical bully, really, dangerous only [jump]
as long as he's allowed to be by those who are stronger. What I got from the interview in the first place was a really heightened respect for Obama's mastery of diplomatese, a language meant to be misunderstood by those who are not the intended recipients of the message, so I could of course be part of the crowd that's supposed to be bamboozled and totally wrong and I honestly wouldn't even feel embarrassed, though I might be pretty annoyed.

Not that I think he's saying the US will not attack Iran. It's more like, Don't you worry your pretty little (or in Netanyahu's case pretty large) head; we've got the situation covered, and we will decide when to attack Iran, and all options are on the table, including the option of never.

Thus,

I don't know exactly what the prime minister is going to be coming with. We haven't gotten any indication that there is some sharp "ask" that is going to be presented.

I.e., I may have heard of some kind of proposal, but I haven't officially heard of it, so if you officially bring it up don't expect me not to be officially surprised.

When we came in, Iran was united and on the move, and the world was divided about how to address this issue. Today, the world is as united as we've ever seen it around the need for Iran to take a different path on its nuclear program, and Iran is isolated and feeling the severe effects of the multiple sanctions that have been placed on it.

I.e., it's not as if our approach wasn't getting any results.

At the same time, we understand that the bottom line is: Does the problem get solved? And I think that Israel, understandably, has a profound interest not just in good intentions but in actual results. And in the conversations I've had over the course of three years, and over the course of the last three months and three weeks, what I've emphasized is that preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon isn't just in the interest of Israel, it is profoundly in the security interests of the United States.

I.e., I'm certainly not going to publicly call you weak and hysterical if it's not necessary, and you ought to know that by now.

I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff. I also don't, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.

I.e., but by the same token, you have no excuse for publicly calling me weak and appeasing.

And I think the prime minister and the defense minister, [Ehud Barak,] feel a profound, historic obligation not to put Israel in a position where it cannot act decisively and unilaterally to protect the state of Israel. I understand those concerns, and as a consequence, I think it's not surprising that the way it gets framed, at least in this country... that articles and stories get framed in terms of Israel's potential vulnerability.

I.e., what did I just say?

But I want to make clear that when we travel around the world and make presentations about this issue, that's not how we frame it. We frame it as: this is something in the national-security interests of the United States and in the interests of the world community.

I.e., and if on occasion you don't like the sound, maybe you could start not listening to me as carefully as I don't listen to you.

our argument is going to be that it is important for us to see if we can solve this thing permanently, as opposed to temporarily. And the only way, historically, that a country has ultimately decided not to get nuclear weapons without constant military intervention has been when they themselves take [nuclear weapons] off the table.

I.e., an attack is not going to accomplish anything, so just drop it.

what I think is absolutely true is that the prime minister and I come out of different political traditions. This is one of the few times in the history of U.S.-Israeli relations where you have a government from the right in Israel at the same time you have a center-left government in the United States, and so I think what happens then is that a lot of political interpretations of our relationship get projected onto this.

ZOMG, he said left! He never said left before! Oh, Barack, I'm so sorry I doubted you! I was always a believer at heart!

And goodbye Davy, of course.

Eleven-dimensional Chutes 'n' Ladders?

2012-03-01T23:32:00.000-05:00

Maori prisoners in the Waikato Wars. Illustrated London News, February 1864, from New Zealand History Online.

You read it here first. Or you could have, anyway, if you wanted to. When President Obama issued his signing statement with the signature of the noxious National Defense Authorization Act, last New Year's Eve, I was online almost instantly to let you know that it didn't look so bad after all—that I was pretty sure that he at least really really disliked putting people under indefinite military detention.

Now, from Talking Points Memo via Vyan at Kos, we've got the administration's [jump]
guidelines on how the law is to be interpreted, and it looks just about impossible to put anybody under indefinite detention at all unless they're already there:

Under broadly written categorical waivers carved out by the Obama administration, the military custody requirement will be waived if the suspect’s home country objected to military custody; if the individual is a lawful permanent resident arrested in the country or for conduct conducted in the country; when a suspect is originally charged with something other than a terrorism offense; when a person is originally arrested by state or local law enforcement; when a transfer to military custody “could interfere with efforts to secure an individual’s cooperation or confession”; or when transferring an individual might interfere with joint trials with other defendants.

President Obama also said that the Attorney General, working with other national security officials, has the ability to issue additional waivers for “categories of conduct, or for categories of individuals, or on an individual case-by-case basis, when doing so is in the interest of national security.”

As TPM quotes Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, the routine has "read this law virtually out of existence."

A big reason for that political Observer's Paradox I was talking about a month ago—the way our observations of the news have a kind of curious quantum effect on what the news is—is, to put it simply, the Internet as it has developed over the past ten years or so, and the fact that it delivers the news somewhat faster than it actually progresses.

And this is especially complicated by Obama's habit of rolling out the news with extreme deliberation, a professorial attempt to get the audience to focus, perhaps, with the sequence of carefully staged leak-like events followed by the actual announcement followed by the explanation followed by the laying out of the details followed by the effective date of whatever it is, which can be several years after those first signals.

In the meantime the rest of us are focused on the position of the idea: is it left, is it right, how far, to what degree? The emoprogs, the legalists, and the folks like me who like to call themselves "left" will have begun to howl on the basis of the earliest approximations of what Obama has in mind—that whatever plan it may be gives up everything to the right already, and now he's sending it out for further compromises—while the right screams socialism, fascism, Islamism, Mau-Mau terror, and everything else their fear-crazed imaginations can come up with.

And when the thing finally materializes we can't see where—or whether—we've managed to push it; it's moved somehow outside the region we were quarreling in, and whatever judgment we want to make has the character of open-mouthed surprise. The credit card company can't raise our interest rate on the basis of a late payment? The insurance company can't demand a copay for a preventing care visit? Uh... okay. In fact awesome, but... what about those drones? And the drones are in some different phase where Obama doesn't want to talk about them at all.

I've been trying to read online a little bit less and old-fashioned periodicals a little bit more. I'm unlikely to be scooping anything any more, as I did (in my non-humble opinion) with that New Year's Eve announcement. Hopefully, in return I'll be getting a little more judicious, and before I try to change the story I'll let the story change me.

Truth terrorism lives!

2012-03-01T08:39:00.000-05:00

In a victory for truth terrorists everywhere, with some wonderfully heartening news from Jay Rosen via Kos's The Troubador, National Public Radio has issued a new ethics handbook (This is NPR. And these are the standards of our journalism) clarifying the network's policies on the issue of "balance" vs. truthfulness, and come out in favor of the latter:

we strive to consider the strongest arguments we can find on all sides, seeking to deliver both nuance and clarity. Our goal is not to please those whom we report on or to produce stories that create the appearance of balance, but to seek the truth.

A detail I especially like is the recognition in that "all sides" rather than "both" that it isn't ever just a question of adopting what she said or what he said but of developing an independent understanding.

This does not constitute an endorsement of Mamma Stamberg's frozen cranberry relish.

Zombie pin-up girl tote bag from BuyZombie: The Undead are Online.

The week in the Persian Wars

2012-03-01T00:47:00.000-05:00

Persian War, the hurdler, by Persian Gulf out of the Chanteur II mare, Warning, born 1964. The story of his brave and arduous life and more pictures are at TVG Community.

So, where were we? On the 21st, Netanyahu and Barak said General Dempsey was "serving Iranian interests" by having the chutzpah to disagree with them. On the 22nd, the IAEA announced that the current round of talks with Iran over weapons inspection had failed after their team was barred from inspecting the military plant at Parchin, where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the nuclear weapon. On the 24th, US intelligence repeated what it has been saying since 2007, that there is as yet no evidence that Iran has decided to build one.

There's lots more, but I am more and more of the opinion that what is mainly happening is elections—Iran's first of all (this week!), Israel's likely next, (they don't have to come till 2013, but Netanyahu knows his chances of winning are more likely to get worse than [jump]
better over the coming months), and of course ours in November. The rest seems a lot like theater, except when Ayatollah Khamenei says that building nuclear weapons is a sin, or permits the foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, to say it for him, as happened Tuesday in Geneva. It is my firm belief that the Supreme Leader is not kidding, indeed that his faith does not permit him to kid when he has laid down a fatwah on the subject. (Islamophobes claim that the doctrine of taqqiya which allows Muslims to conceal their faith in a hostile environment also allows them to lie with impunity, but then the same kind of people used to say the same kind of thing about the Jesuits and their "mental reservations", and I'm pretty sure the Jesuits never built any nuclear weapons.)

At EmptyWheel, Jim White finds (from an interview on what used to be Russia Today) that the Iranian government did not, or says it did not, bar IAEA inspectors from the Parchin site where Iranians are suspected of working on trigger explosives for the bomb; it's just that the guys they sent weren't actually inspectors, said ambassador Ali Asqar Soltaniye, but legal, political, and technical experts. Proper inspectors would be an entirely different matter, although they would still have to meet some preconditions. (Though he would, as far as that goes, have let this team visit someplace else...)

In the same post, White threw some cold water on the current Israeli sloganeering about the "zone of immunity", the theory that if Iran is not attacked soon enough its alleged nuclear weapons program will become "immune" to attack altogether (reraised in today's Times in an op-ed by former Israeli intelligence chief Amos Yadlin).

I personally react very childishly to these slogans, the "ticking time bomb" and the "blood on their hands" and the "partner for peace" and so on, which are meant not as argument but as substitutes for argument, kind of the way Olestra is a substitute for fat, giving you the right emotional response and mouth feel but unable to proceed in any normal way through your body.

Anyhow the point is that Iran will never be immune, because if they are really building a nuclear weapon then a crucial part of it will be deep underground at the Fordo facility near Qom, and that's not immune and won't be. Which corroborates my own increasing feeling that the Israeli war talk is largely bluster (Christy1947 at Kos called it "Netanyahu woofing"), and really likely to remain so.

Meanwhile, North Korea has announced its deal on nuclear testing. They are suspending all weapons testing and uranium enrichment activities, and allowing inspectors at the Yongbyon complex, and the US is sending food—20,000 tons of nutritional supplements per month, a process with inspectors of its own to make sure it goes to the deserving hungry. It is not the deal but the setup for serious negotiations, and it is really good news, no mockery.

Except I'd like to note that Kim Jong-un clearly enjoys looking at things, in a way his late father, with an artist's sad awareness that the composition would not come out quite right, at least toward the end, did not; as the Tumblr shows:

Looking at bathwater.

Looking at containers.

Stockmen and bondsmen

2012-02-28T23:14:00.001-05:00

Now that the Dow has closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, I wonder if the Times is going to redo their famous chart showing the stock market difference between Democratic and Republican presidents from October 2008:

Given that it's already up 56% since Barack Obama took office three months after that, it might even lead a person to suspect that the Times has a liberal bias and is waiting till October 2012 to do it. If things carry on as they have been doing, that's going to be pretty graphic, as they say.

But speaking of liberal biases, I now have a new idea on the foundational difference between Democrats and Republicans that is directly related to this news. Like so many others who have grown to feel that the liberal-conservative classification doesn't apply any more, I have been talking for quite a while now in terms of a conservative party that we have to vote for and a crazy party that explains why we have to vote for the conservative party, but I'm not really satisfied with that either.

Partly because it's still fun to vote for Democrats, because they're still so truly forward-looking in so many little ways, whether we're talking about same-sex marriage or [jump]
undocumented immigrant veterans or the possibility of sending everybody in the country to college. (While Rick Santorum [people, people, click that link! the special Santorum definition is down to page 2 of the Google results!]) openly says that going to college is bad for people, evidently turning them into so many wicked Voltaires who will favor Free Love and scoff at the Holy Father.) Or SUPERTRAINS, as Atrios would say.

The Democratic Party isn't conservative (except on and off in the good way, in regard to retaining our Bill of Rights and our planet and such) so much as they are not opposed to people who have too much power—they have a kind of tenderness for elites whose interests, we feel, are not ours. And not just because they're the ones who foot the campaign bills, although that is surely an element; it's power people of a particular type, not so easy to define, including not just movie stars and personal injury lawyers but even for-real financiers. Which ones? That's what I want to speculate about.

My first incredibly simple-minded thought was this: Democratic presidents are good for the stock market, and what's the opposite of stocks? Bonds! Are Republican presidents good for the bond market?

Well, to make a short story not too much longer, Dr. Google was onto this as fast, frankly, as if I'd asked her for a cassoulet recipe. The answer is, you bet, pal, and then some. Up popped a web page from 2008, from the Liscio Report, roughly contemporaneous with the notorious Times chart, with everything I had dreamed of, including lots of those reader-friendly graphs.

Here's the one for presidents and stocks, with a breakdown somewhat more ambiguous than the one from the Times, and a commentary still more so:

The blue years have an edge on stock returns, with the S&P 500rising an average of 4.7% a year in real terms (price only, excludingdividends, deflated by the CPI) under Democratic administrations,compared with 2.9% under Republicans. (Starting the clock in 1949raises the Dem average to 6.9%.) Still, there are some red bars towardsthe top of the heap and blue bars toward the bottom.

Strangely, there’s not all that tight a link between stockmarket performance and profit growth. In fact, the rankings of the twomeasures show a correlation coefficient of 0.43. Sometimes stocks marchto their own drummer.

And then for the bond market the evidence is just about overwhelming:

Unlike the stock market, there’s a clear partisan pattern tobond returns: Republicans are a lot more bond-friendly. Real totalreturns—price plus coupon, deflated by theCPI—averaged +4.2% a year under Republicans, vs.–2.1% under Democrats. And, as the graph shows, the averageis a pretty faithful representation of the relative performance ofindividual administrations.

Recall that Clinton came into office with plans for a stimulus program,that were shelved under pressure from what he called “a bunchof ******* bond traders.” This should be kept in mind whenevaluating the bond market’s prospects should Obama win inNovember. It may be that the world has changed to the point where theold Democratic pattern won’t hold this time.

And how did the Obama predictions work out? According to The Money Architects, writing in March 2011,

Government bond yields are now at 60-year lows, [money manager Ben] Inker said at a presentation March 25. The last time bond yields were this low was the 1940s and they generated returns worse than cash for 40 years.

The results are far clearer than any kind of blather about liberals and conservatives could possibly be. Democrats like equity, Republicans like debt (owning it, that is, not so much owing it); Democrats are stockmen, Republicans are bondsmen. Your basic money guy is so hedged in both directions that he doesn't even know how he rolls, but it's not about him, it's about principles so deep that they are not wholly conscious: Democrats like to profit from success, Republicans like to suck the remaining blood out of failures.

The trickle-down theory actually works when Democrats are in charge—it's a rising tide that's meant to lift all boats; when Republicans are running things it's a wave from our neighborhood to theirs. No, Democrats are not socialists—they're plutocrats, just like you've been saying, but they're plutocrats who can live with socialism, if that's what it takes!

Stratfor the memories

2012-02-28T00:16:00.000-05:00

Clown Bluey entree.

Kos exploded around lunchtime yesterday with news from the WikiLeaks dump of internal mails from the global strategies espionage firm/paranoid travel magazine Stratfor, and the revelation that Israel had destroyed all of Iran's putative nuclear weapons facilities sometime late last year. It was wonderful watching how the wisdom of crowds works—by the time I was done with lunch just about the whole mob of us had come to realize that the story was just idle gossip and [jump]
that anybody who is paying that firm for their special client subscription reports is what P.T. Barnum referred to in terms of "there's one born every minute."

I do like the Christian Science Monitor 's take:

an initial survey of the e-mails published so far on WikiLeaks's own website reveals not so much a corporate Central Intelligence Agency as a geopolitical version of the comedy “The Office,” complete with lunch theft, ribald interoffice accusations, jokes about interns, and unsubstantiated blather about world politics.

Or maybe like the National Review Online staff. The lunch was a frozen container of Amy's tortellini with pesto.

One of their clients, the strategic and tech consulting firm Booz Allen, pays them around $20,000 a year for their subscription.

But their most notable writers, Fred Burton and Scott Stewart—the only staffers with any actual intelligence experience, having worked as special agents in the state department's diplomatic security division—allow you to get a look at much of their writing for free, at sites like:

World: Today’s News/Christian Views
Zimbio (blog)
Future Brief (ex-magazine and semi-active website)
Constructive Society World News Review

Their reading list is at a similar level of sophistication; one of their best minds, Marko Papic, gets his hot ideas from reading Forbes Magazine.

As for Fred Burton, he may have a pretty active fantasy life; one of his flights is about a long chat with Penny Pritzker, who supposedly told him in November how disappointed she was with President Obama

over Obama's "weakness and wimpyness" towards China ("Fred, they only understand strength") and Obama's failure to meet with the Dhali Lama. The fundraiser stated he/she [we learn that it is "Mrs. P." later in the exchange] was personally disappointed ("betrayed") for helping Obama get into The White House and does not intend to support Obama next election, absent a drastic turn-around.

(It's that confidential "Fred, they only understand strength," that makes me certain the interview never took place.)

Burton also claims that Pritzker was a major funder of Acorn, which means that he himself must be a pretty avid reader of birther websites like Citizen Wells News, because you can't find that story anywhere else (not that there was every anything wrong with funding Acorn, just that she didn't happen to be doing it, because if she had it would be reported in some respectable venue; and because it isn't what I'd her imagine her style to be, just like it wouldn't be her style to drape her arm around Fred Burton's shoulder and tell him how she likes to deal with the Chinese*).

Dear heroes of the environmental movement—may all your enemies be this inept!

*If Penny Pritzker ever did come face to face with Fred Burton it would undoubtedly be on an occasion where she was paying for his drinks along with those of hundreds of other people, so she would courteously hope he is having a good time and then spot somebody she's desperate to catch up with, at the other end of the room—"So nice to meet you, Frank—is it Frank?"

Grapple from the Apple

2012-02-27T09:50:00.000-05:00

In a sane world, it would be the New York City United Federation of Teachers local that would be clamoring for the city to release the test score–based teacher ratings to the public, while the Department of Education would be begging to keep them a secret, because it only takes a glance at the numbers to see how stupid and unserious these numbers are, using the scores of tests that have been totally discredited in the first place, leaping all over the map for any individual teacher from year to year, and with incredible error margin spreads of 35 percentage points for the math scores and 53 (!) for English.

“No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone, and we would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,”

said Shael Polakow-Suransky of the DOE, trying to be reassuring, but why would they make any use of it at all? The numbers are basically arbitrary, and should not play any role in principals' decisions whatever. The fact that they have used them shows, really, what bad faith the mayor and his chancellors have been bringing to the table in this long debate.

Photo from Village Voice.

Also in a sane world, if the city's police force wants to investigate potential terrorists, instead of infiltrating Muslim student organizations all over New Jersey they could try infiltrating the FBI, because pretty much every terrorist plot they have uncovered over the past x many years has had an FBI informant right in the middle of it—doing practically all of the work, too. There's a pattern there.

Up a slippery slope

2012-02-27T00:44:00.000-05:00

The irrepressible Rick Santorum was chatting with folks at James Dobson's American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Miss., February 3, when he got to the subject of slippery slopes and the example of the Netherlands, where, he said, elderly people feel the need to wear bracelets saying "Do not euthanize me" to keep safe from the murderous medics prowling the cities:

Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.

You can hear the audience gasping in horror: Those poor old folks! But it's not true, [jump]
obviously (the Washington Post's fact checker Glenn Kessler gives it an awesome rating of four Pinocchios, as having no factual foundation of any kind), as well as extremely offensive to our usually phlegmatic Dutch friends.

Santorum was not simply making this stuff up off the top of his head, as you might suppose; his factoids belong to a kind of meme, or myth as I prefer to call it, that has been evolving over the past 20 years. The story of how these imaginary data came to exist is instructive, and includes a very elegant case of retroactionary thinking.

1. The Remmelink Report

In 1990 a Dutch parliamentary committee of inquiry chaired by the former attorney general Jan Remmelink carried out a study of medical practice relating to euthanasia in the Netherlands, to see how the situation had developed since the notorious case of Dr. Geertruida Postma, whose mercy killing of her mother in 1971 earned her a sentence of one week in jail, suspended, from a compassionate judge. The results were published by the principal investigators--R.B. van der Maas, J.J.M. van Delden, and L. Pijnenborg, in several formats in Dutch and English, most conveniently in the article "Euthanasia and other medical decisions concerning the end of life," in The Lancet 338/8761 (September 14, 1991—Ebsco link, you'll need a library account to follow).

What the so-called Remmelink Report reported, then, extrapolating from a close study of an initial sample of 400-odd physicians and 7000 deaths, was that 38% of deaths in the Netherlands in 1990 (54% of "non-acute" deaths) involved end-of-life medical decisions: providing high doses of opioid pain killers in a way that could possibly shorten the patient's life in 17.5% of the cases, withholding a treatment that could possibly prolong life in another 17.5%, and practicing active euthanasia or assisting a patient's suicide in about 2.1%. A further 0.8% of the total did not meet the definition of euthanasia, in that the decision was made without an explicit and persistent request from the patient; mostly on the basis of the patient's previously expressed wish, and otherwise when

the patients were near to death and clearly suffering grievously, yet verbal contact had become impossible. The decision to hasten death was then nearly always taken after consultation with the family, nurses, or one or more colleagues.

When the use of drugs for the alleviation of pain and symptoms (APS) might shorten the patient's life, generally only by a few hours or sometimes days, the physician discussed this with the patient only 40% of the time; most of the rest (73% of the subgroup) were incompetent. In nearly all cases of APS, the physician's primary aim was to alleviate pain, but in 6% of that total it was to shorten the patient's life.

In non-treatment decisions (NTD) the primary aim was "not prolonging the life" of the patient in half the cases, and the amount of "life foregone" was considerably greater: more than a week in a third of the cases, and in a very small number as much as six months. The decision had been discussed with the patient just 30% of the time, and 88% of the rest were incompetent.

2. The Fenigsen Rejoinder
Richard Fenigsen, a Polish cardiologist who had been living in the US since his mandatory retirement from a Dutch hospital in 1990, found an alternative way of looking at the data, which he published in his "Physician-assisted death in the Netherlands: Impact on long-term care", Issues in Law & Medicine 11/3 (winter 1995). Exactly what he did is not clear, because he doesn't say, beyond "the figures presented in Tables 1 and 2 are taken or computed from the Report..." (my emphasis), but he seems to have found a way of calculating the percentage of APS cases where the drug was "intended to terminate life"—perhaps the full report of the Remmelink commission gives percentages for when the physician's secondary aim is to shorten the patient's life, in addition to the 6% as above where shortening life was the primary aim.

Extrapolating numbers for the 1990 Dutch death statistics as a whole out of the percentages, he arrived at the following table:

Legend for Chart:

A - Physician-Assisted Suicide
B - Active Euthanasia
C - Morphine Overdose Intended to Terminate Life
D - Total

                                A       B         C           D

With Patient's Consent        400     2,300     3,159      5,859
Without Patient's Consent      --     1,000     4,941      5,941

Total                         400     3,300     8,100     11,800

yielding that figure of 11,800, or 9% of all the deaths that occurred in the Netherlands that year, as the total number of active euthanasia cases—a bit more than half, as you see in column D, being without the patient's consent.

Only it really isn't euthanasia, whether by the official definition of the Dutch government or by the common practice of doctors since time immemorial ("We could keep him alive for a couple more hours, Mevrouw, or we could make him comfortable and happy for the little time he has left"). Fenigsen's real purpose is to create the numbers that will make the audience gasp—that 9%, and the idea that half of the cases of euthanasia are involuntary, and that's why he keeps his own role in the creation a bit of a secret, letting is seem as if they are the raw Remmelink data.

Be that as it may, the numbers found their way into Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the Netherlands: A Report to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution by Chairman Charles T. Canady, September 1996 (based on testimony by Fenigsen, but footnoting only the Remmelink report as if that was what was being cited), and thence to an anti-euthanasia shop in Wisconsin called the Nightingale Alliance, from whom I suspect Fenigsen is getting some wingnut welfare (you can book him as a speaker through them), where they have taken the standard form of an unsigned page of Fast Facts about end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands (and it's not easy to find, either):

a. About 9% of all deaths were a result of physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia in 1990. (1, 2)
b. Dutch doctors practice active euthanasia by lethal injections (96.6% of all deaths actively caused by physicians in 1990). Physician-assisted suicide is very infrequent (no more than 3.4% of all cases in Holland of active termination of life in 1990). (3)
c. For patients who die of a lethal overdose of painkillers, the decision to administer the lethal dose of drugs was not discussed with 61% of those receiving it, even though 27% were fully competent. (4)
d. The Board of the Royal Dutch Medical Association endorsed euthanasia on newborns and infants with extreme disabilities. (5)
e. Well over 10,000 citizens now carry "Do Not Euthanize Me" cards in case they are admitted to a hospital unexpectedly. (6)
f. Cases exist where doctors administer assisted suicide for people determined to be "chronically" depressed. (7,8)

The reference numbers are to footnotes you can check out on the link. Again, the Fenigsen material is credited not to him, but to the report from which he cooked it.

Anyway, the Nightingale Fast Facts have circulated—without their footnotes—to Right-to-Life websites all over the country as well as sites for high school term paper plagiarists; I love to think that's where Santorum might have gotten his notions from, but the fact is that they're just floating around the circles he hangs out in and from which he draws such political power as he has.

The Hendin Handout

Fenigsen is also a source for the terrorized old people, which he cites from an article in De Volkskrant, "Ouderen bang voor onvrijwillige euthanasie bij ziekenhuisopname [Elderly Afraid of Involuntary Euthanasia in Case of Admission to a Hospital]", June 9, 1993:

In 1993 the Christian Protestant Association of the Elderly (PCOB) surveyed 2,066 senior citizens and found that many feared involuntary euthanasia in case of admission to a hospital; some older people, out of fear of involuntary euthanasia, delayed their admission to nursing or senior citizens' homes, even when they could no longer care for themselves at their own homes.

Something like this really did happen (here's a story from the Reformatorisch Dagblad, for instance), but I don't know how relevant it is. Anyway the "Don't euthanize me" cards (or bracelets in Santorum's story) aren't there. That seems to go back to the psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, medical director of Suicide Prevention International, who wrote in his 1996 Suicide in America that

the Dutch Patients Association, a group organized by Protestants opposed to both euthanasia and abortion.... receives inquiries from people wanting to know if a particular hospital is "safe".... they distribute a "passport for life" indicating that, in medical emergencies, a patient does not want his or her life terminated without their consent. (From GoogleBooks)

Here he was not exactly wrong: the Nederlandse Patiënten Vereniging is indeed opposed to abortion and euthanasia; their levenswensverklaring is what we call in America a "living will", to be used when a patient is demented or comatose and cannot tell the doctor what she or he wants, but it only comes in the one flavor, advising them that you'd rather be a vegetable than dead; you must also specify whether you are Protestant, Rooms Katholiek, or Joods, and you have to pay. If you subscribe to a different, or no, religion or if you are looking for "do not resuscitate" you must work through a different channel.

Santorum's bracelets, however, have a quite different source. No, Santorum didn't make this up either. We can pinpoint the exact moment when it arrived: September 3, 2004, when Msgr. Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, presented the official Vatican attack on a Dutch proposal to allow children under 12 to request assistance in committing suicide. The reference is not to be found in His Grace's essay published that day in the Osservatore Romano, or in any of its press reports in Italian, French, and German, but is found in all the English ones:

The Vatican official said the Dutch law is rapidly moving away from assisted suicide and towards euthanasia. Many residents of the European nation wear arm bracelets telling doctors not to end their lives prematurely.

The Netherlands is the first nation in the world to allow euthanasia — which prompted millions of the western European country’s residents to wear bracelets asking doctors not to end their lives if they are severely injured.

Such legally sanctioned abuses have created a climate of fear among elderly persons and hospital residents. They wear arm bracelets telling doctors not to end their lives prematurely, or they relocate to nursing homes across the border in Germany where euthanasia is still illegal.

Ever since the Netherlands became the first nation in the world to legalize euthanasia, millions of Dutch residents have begun wearing bracelets informing doctors of their request not to be euthanized in the event of a serious injury.

As well as one in Swedish (presumably they had to share in whatever the English-speakers got):

Nederländerna var det första landet i världen att tillåta eutanasi. Oroliga människor har börjat bära armband med budskapet på att de inte vill att läkarna ska avsluta deras liv ifall de blir allvarlig skadade.

Whether the bracelets were a feature of the press release in English and missing from the other languages, or whether His Grace delivered his remarks in person in several languages to the press but mentioned the bracelets only in the one, it seems clear that there was some kind of campaign to persuade Americans, and only Americans, that these imaginary bracelets really existed, for whatever strange, deep, Jesuitical purpose, with the immediate consequence to us that the idea etched itself into Senator Santorum's heart, or hovers around in the rafters of his mind with the other little factoids, ready to spring out in the form of an "argument" about a slippery slope.

The Triumph of Time, ca. 1480-90, by Jacopo del Sellaio. From Kunst für Alle.

Oh, and a slippery slope that goes uphill; that's the retroaction part. The Remmelink study was repeated in 1995 and 2000; according to the report on the third one (Bregje D. Onwuteaka-Philipsen et al., "Euthanasia and other end-of-life decisions in the Netherlands in 1990, 1995, and 2001," The Lancet 362/9381 (August 3, 2003)), researchers ascertained that

The rate of euthanasia and explicit requests by patients for physicians' assistance in dying in the Netherlands seems to have stabilised, and physicians seem to have become somewhat more restrictive in their use. Euthanasia remains mainly restricted to... patients with cancer, people younger than 80 years, and patients cared for by family physicians, who were already frequently involved in 1990.

But that left the pro-coma forces, I think, in a somewhat peculiar position; they found themselves attacking a law passed in 2001, while their data, the only data Fenigsen had really tried to analyze, came from 1991. So their arguments tended to take on a retroactionary form, as in an "Adventures in Old Age" column in Psychology Today by Ira Rosofsky ("Assisted Suicide? How About A Dutch Treat?"):

In 2002, the Dutch enacted The Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act, which formalizes the rules for assisted suicide. It adds the provisions that a second physician reviews the case, and that the patient be at least 12, although parental consent is required for those between 12 and 16....

There are unintended—or maybe not so unintended—consequences of Dutch practice. In 1991, the government published the Remmelink Report on assisted suicide. It found that although about only 1 to 2 percent of deaths are from voluntary assisted suicide, much higher percentages are due-maybe as high as 15 percent—from termination of life sustaining procedures, and there may be a thousand annually who are sped on their way—perhaps with high doses of pain killers—without their consent, impermissible killing.

Yes, as we've seen so often, in the conservative argumentation a law may have consequences ten years before it is enacted!

Sunday breakfast links

2012-02-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

Juan Cole, whom we depend on for interpretations of mid-East events, has been adding something quite new to his bag of tricks: translations from the Persian of Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi al-Khayyami (1048-1131), better known to the rest of us as Omar Khayyam. Unlike the heavily scented Victorian versions of Edward FitzGerald, Cole's translations are as clean and crunchy as celery, sometimes funny and always bracing:

If a stranger proves faithful,
I adopt him into the family.
But if a relative sins,
I take a dim view of him.
If poison proves helpful,
it is actually an antidote,
and if an antidote attacks me,
it is really a toxic sting.

I don't think we know when they're going to show up, you just have to follow the blog.


The Friendly Bear. Persian miniature, 18th century.

The above illustration is from the extraordinary blog (multilingual, but mostly in English, sometimes not quite idiomatic) Poemas del río Wang, and a very lengthy post on bears, which ranges from an excerpt from a dialogue by Erasmus in which a bear and a lion discuss correct Latin pronunciation to a very recent short-short story translated from the Czech.

Gill Mann at Rumproast offers an answer to the age-old question of what if Michael O'Hanlon were an advice columnist. The Brookings Institution wunderkind warrior (actually in his 50s, but tousle-haired as ever) would definitely have his own distinctive voice.

The website Letters of Note collects letters by the famous and not-so-famous, from Billie Joe Armstrong to E.B. White and so on, including this masterpiece, written or dictated in August 1865 by the freedman Jourdon Anderson and addressed to his erstwhile owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, in response to an invitation to come back and work on his farm.

Cheap shots and chasers

2012-02-24T16:44:00.000-05:00

Cantor Can’t Explain Why Americans Oppose GOP Agenda

The story itself doesn't quite live up to the headline—Cantor wouldn't acknowledge that Americans oppose his agenda, of course, so he just didn't answer the question—but isn't it fun to imagine him losing that perpetual sneer for a moment, scratching his head, and telling the interviewer, "Honestly, I don't have a clue. Strangest thing I ever saw, in fact."

Dana Loesch, 2/17/2012

in fact, this big battle that I’ve, uh, totally won with Keith Olbermann by the way, like, not only won once but twice and three times… uh, there were individuals saying, [high voice] “Oh what about the Virginia rape? The rapes that, the forced rapes of women who are pregnant?” What!?
Wait a minute, they had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.

What Dana doesn't realize is that most boyfriends don't have stainless steel penises.


Chris and Dana Loesch. From Riverfront Times. You'll remember Chris as one of the tastefully wigged rappers at the CPac convention a couple of weeks ago.

In a nice little human interest story about a Rodeo Drive screening room (Oscars color commentary), Susan Stamberg mentioned that the subject matter of the film The Flowers of War is "the Rape--some have called it--of Nanking". (Audio here.) That's NPR's recalibrated objectivity policy: when they say they don't want to seem biased to conservatives, they include Japanese conservatives, some of whom prefer to call it the "Blind Date of Nanking", where the two parties had a nice time but decided it wasn't really going to lead anywhere.

Japanese soldiers practice their bayonet technique in Nanjing, on live Chinese prisoners. From Dismal World.

And in other moderation news, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation has hired a special PR firm to help them deal with the fallout from the foundation's unintentional attempt—well, it wasn't everybody's intention—to do something bad to Planned Parenthood: Penn Schoen Berland (PSB), founded by former Democratic pollsters (doesn't say what the "former" applies to) Mark Penn and Doug Schoen. Penn's strategy is as yet under wraps, but rumor has it he'll be raising an entirely meaningless slogan and subtly suggesting that Planned Parenthood uses cocaine.

There's something about a bishop...

2012-02-23T21:47:00.000-05:00

There's something about a bishop...
There's something about a bishop that is
comical but at the same time deeply unnerving.


From Flavius Josephus, at Byzantine, Texas. The Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.

Bulgaria's commission charged with announcing the names of people who collaborated with the country's former communist-era secret services announced on January 17 2012 that 11 out of 15 members of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church's governing body, the Holy Synod, had worked for State Security....

Galaktikon was agent Misho; Domitian, agent Dobrev; Ignatii, agent Penev; Yoanikii, agent Kirilevich; Grigorii, agent Vanyo; Yosif, agent Nikolov; [jump]
Kalinik, agent Rilski; Kiril was a secret collaborator with the code name Kovachev and was an agent code-named Vladislav; Nataniel was a collaborator code-named Blagoev; Simeon of Western and Central Europe was a collaborator, as Toris, and an agent, code-named Hristov; Neofit's code name as an agent was Simeonov.

Yes, more than two thirds of them were spies on their parishioners, the clergy that served under them, and of course each other. It wasn't just the Orthodox, to be fair: according to Josephus,

Georgi Yovchev, bishop of the Roman Catholic eparchy of Sofia and Plovdiv from July 31 1988, was agent Petar.

Among Muslims, chief mufti Moustafa Alish Hadji was named as agent Andrei. Other senior Muslim clerics were Iskren Dobrouzhaliev, as agent Dobromir, Hasuf Halil Hasuf, a regional mufti and an agent code-named Hristo, Hedim Gendjev, collaborator, Osman Ismailov, collaborator, Ridvan Kaduov, an agent and Shefket Murad Hadji, an agent.

And you know who else has been a bishop? A part-time volunteer one (they're all volunteers) in the Latter-Day Saints? Of course you do.

Several Mormons affectionately describe him as a man who can't remember names and can't tell a joke, but did preach inspiring sermons....

The candidate has always "smiled faintly when listening and talking, even about serious or controversial matters," [says Philip Barlow, chairman of Mormon Studies at Utah State University who was a counselor, or assistant, to Romney when he was a bishop]. "Romney smiled in conducting religious services or planning meetings. He smiled while hosting friends at his Cape Cod vacation home. He smiled when comforting a wounded congregant."

This was not a false persona, Barlow writes, but a "mixture of good will, confidence, optimism, enjoyment of intellectual challenge, and idiosyncrasy."

I love Romney relishing the intellectual challenge of hosting friends in Cape Cod, or comforting a wounded congregant. And the Mormon Girl herself, Joanna Brooks, warns us not to judge him too harshly over his sometimes problematic relations with those Mormon feminists (who knew?):

To put Romney’s record into perspective, it should be said that adhering to the LDS Church’s conservative positions on gender is nothing exceptional for a Mormon bishop. Like most clergy, bishops typically uphold the policies of the institution they serve. This, of course, does not excuse Romney’s egregious incidences of coldness and disrespect towards women as reported in Salon and elsewhere. But it’s wrong to depict Mitt Romney as some kind of hardliner, because as far as Mormon men of his generation go, on gender, Romney is rather moderate.

Oops, Joanna, careful! Some of those Republicans might be listening!

Request for signatures

2012-02-23T09:59:00.001-05:00

The Australian government is contemplating plans for a marine reserve of a million square miles, but they need expressions of international support; you can send one through the very international Avaaz, at http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_coral_sea_4/?vl.

Image from Supergreenme.

Welcome Whiskey Firefolks!

2012-02-22T20:20:00.001-05:00

Thanks, and drop by any time!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Insider poopology

2012-02-22T20:15:00.002-05:00

Time Saving Truth from Falsehood. By François Lemoyne, 1737.

Just about the same time as I got the message from Mara Liasson that the new rules on insurance coverage for family planning were all part of Obama's 11-dimensional election strategy which involves getting Rick Santorum the Republican nomination—actually it's not her fault, I made most of it up—the august Markos was coming up with a similar idea: that Democrats should go vote for Santorum in the upcoming primaries and caucuses that allow it, starting with Michigan, by way of, if not actually nominating Santorum, at least making Romney's victory as painful and exhausting as possible; he called it Operation Hilarity.

High-minded Kossacks rose, however, in protest against the plan, which smacked [jump]
to them of Nixonian duplicity.* Don't know if these are the same intensely moral people who feel that Peter Gleick shouldn't have shown anybody his documented proof that the Heartland Institute was shamelessly conspiring to deceive the American people on the subject of climate science, a deception that could contribute to the destruction of life on the planet as we know it, because he got the documents under a false name. I mean, it's just not cricket. Not rugby, even. If Tom Brown wouldn't do it to Harry Flashman, we certainly shouldn't do it to people that are deliberately putting Bangladesh, the Maldives, most of Louisiana, and countless other places in mortal danger for the sake of a few dollars! Heavens, what would Dr. Arnold say?

I can't get over the bizarre ideas floating around these days on the subject of journalistic ethics, you know, where it's all defined by the rule book, without regard to the context of the infraction, so that it applies equally and identically to outing the celebrity with a girlfriend or boyfriend or whole closetful of wet suits and auto-asphyxiation devices on the one hand and revealing a conspiracy that's going to cause serious harm to thousands of people on the other.

If somebody made a movie about Peter Gleick it would star Tom Hanks and emphasize the clandestine side of it, with dead drops and vaults over walls and so on, and the audiences—including all the wingers!—would cheer him on like crazy, and when the villains busted him on a technicality they'd get booed. And for that matter, if there were a movie about James O'Keefe, it would be one of those teenage grossout comedies where the plot is an elaborate plan for the protagonist to impress girls and get laid—which would not happen until after he'd been humiliated into total abject surrender, and openly admitted it was a stupid idea. Why are people capable of seeing these narrative lines so clearly in the theater and blind to them when they're in real life? It's such a mystery.

Anyhow, Kos has come back today to let us know that the Obama campaign—or rather its uncoordinated superPAC—has mounted its own Operation Hilarity in Michigan, burying Romney in attacks on his preference for shutting down the auto industry, to get Santorum the win. And Kos hasn't given up either—so good on 'im, as they say under the Southern Cross.

*Actually they had a more serious fear, to be fair: that Santorum might somehow get elected, which would be even a worse disaster than if Romney did. Personally I don't think so: I figure Santorum is too stupid himself, and too despised by the upper ranks of the Republican party, to be anything but an obstacle to their plans and his own, whereas Romney would have a certain kind of mechanical effectiveness.

Really Tom watch: Presidents' Day edition

2012-02-20T22:44:00.000-05:00

Mustache snow globe. From gifts.com.

Just when I realized I hadn't done anything to commemorate Presidents' Day (I always think of it as Nixon's Birthday, movable because Nixon wasn't exactly born), out comes Really Tom Friedman with the original version of his Sunday column in the Times, with all the fire and fervor those copy editors leach out of his prose, and on a presidential subject, calling for a centrist third party candidate!

As I’ve said many many many many times before, and not only because my iPad’s word processor gets its default style stuck on “antedated David Broder schtick,” America’s two parties are in no shape to undertake the radical reformation of capitalism necessary to make us thrive in the 22nd century. Santorum and Obama are symptoms of a national disease: idea-having. One has the big idea that marginal tax rate increases should fund increased safety-net and infrastructure spending. The other believes that Jews have horns full of diamonds. My point is, there has to be something in between those two positions, some path between boring old reason and the wild farragoes of what I’m only assuming was a failed lobotomy.

So have a happy—at this point in the day perhaps it should be have had a happy holiday and get some sleep.

What are bad writers for? (addendum)

2012-02-20T15:30:00.000-05:00

While I was preparing my effusions on the literary efforts of James Poulos, I was not alone. Hordes of bloggists leapt at Poulos's text like hounds on the umbles (actually, no; the hounds get random bits of flesh, which might be a better metaphor anyway, while the umbles are reserved for the servants, baked into umble pie; but I digress); in addition to the links given in the earlier post I should mention TBogg, SEK, Betty Cracker, and Rich Yeselson. But the most startling approach is undoubtedly that of Doctor Habilitatissimus Michael Bérubé, who laid down a claim that Poulos's writing is not merely not bad but actually in some sense—well, extraordinary; "modern," he says, "perhaps on the very cusp of the post-modern," citing as evidence the following text:

to the growing discomfort of many, that framework hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua [jump]
outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia a few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life it is established beyond all doubt what many deny that man in Possy of Testew and Cunard that man in Essy that man in short that man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines and concurrently simultaneously ironically, one of the best places to look for a way out of the impasse is the strain of left feminism that insists an inherently unique female “voice” actually exists that’s a claim about nature what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the strides of physical culture the practice of sports such as tennis football running cycling swimming flying floating riding gliding conating camogie skating tennis of all kinds dying flying sports of all sorts autumn summer winter winter tennis of all kinds hockey of all sorts penicillin and succedanea much good would come from a broader recognition that women have a privileged relationship with the natural world. That’s a relationship which must receive its social due — if masculinity in its inherent and imitative varieties (including imitation by quasi-feminized males of quasi-masculinized females!) is not to conquer the world.

Now, if you look closely at this you will realize that it is not exactly Poulos's text at all, using words such as "extension", "apathia", and "quaquaquaqua" that are foreign to Poulos's distinctive style. A little more probing and we see that it actually is Poulos's text in bits interspersed with bits of another text, and quite a famous one: Lucky's great speech from act 1 of Waiting for Godot, in which the hitherto mute slave, invited by his master to "think" for the entertainment of Vladimir and Estragon, talks himself into a frenzy of academic-sounding but disconnected phrases, one of which is "divine aphasia", which just about describes it. Bérubé has constructed a kind of palimpsest text in which Poulos is seen as as it were overwriting Lucky's speech, as if to say... something...

As if to say, maybe, that Poulos has something in common not so much with Beckett the writer as Lucky the thinker in his representation of the existential dilemma of... I know! Of conservatives! Poulos is Lucky, the hapless slave whose special talent is performing a demented simulacrum of thinking, for the mockery of an audience, veering inevitably out of control (Vladimir finally stops him by clapping his hat over his head).

James Poulos. No photo credit.

And by the same token Tucker Carlson is Pozzo, the pompous self-righteous slave master—and the rest of the cast? David Brooks as the urbane, companionable Didi and Ross Douthat as the shy and tortured Gogo, obviously:

Brooks:
Suppose we repented.
Douthat:
Repented what?
Brooks:
Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn't have to go into the details.
Douthat:
Our being born?
Vladimir breaks into a hearty laugh which he immediately stifles, his hand pressed to his pubis, his face contorted.
Brooks:
One daren't even laugh any more.
Douthat:
Dreadful privation.
Brooks:
Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It's not the same thing. Nothing to be done. (Pause.) Gogo.
Douthat:
(irritably). What is it?
Brooks:
Did you ever read the Bible?
Douthat:
The Bible . . . (He reflects.) I must have taken a look at it.*

And what about Godot? (Spoiler alert: He doesn't show up.)

*Originally I was going to use the exchange where Didi tells Gogo that if they hanged themselves they would get an erection, and Gogo says, "Let's hang ourselves immediately!" but I decided that was too easy.

Hook that drive and you could land in the moral hazard

2012-02-20T12:55:00.000-05:00

If somebody were to turn over a very large amount of cash to me, I could not only pay off all my credit card debt and the mortgage, but buy a new, much larger apartment, with a washer and dryer, and a big pantry with a chest freezer.

Sausage. From Free-Extras (?).

Then I'd do my basic shopping at Costco, and buy a whole free-range chestnut-fed pig from a gentleman farmer and make my own sausage, and that's not all. I'd start getting really
good clothes—especially shoes—so that I wouldn't have to buy them so often, and season tickets to the opera and the Philharmonic, and memberships in all the museums. Jesus, being rich can save you so much money!

All the people with power keep telling us that a national economy is just like a family, meaning that the nation has to sit down around the kitchen table (assuming it can afford [jump]
an eat-in kitchen!) every month and figure out how to stretch its income around its priorities, and be sure to pay up those credit cards before it thinks about going on a vacation ("What do you think about the Persian gulf for spring break this year, nation?" "Come on, Dad, we always go there!"), etc. And all the smart people keep telling us that that's a stupid analogy. But I think we can find a compromise position between these two extremes: Yes, it's a stupid analogy, but it's fun.

If Greece were a family, it would be one on a street that's been gentrifying over the years, as the neighbors get wealthier and snootier while they themselves have not, but they still get their kids those $120 sneakers and the wide-screen TV and the golf club membership, and put in a pool so they can invite everyone over for a barbecue, and get into massive debt, so the homeowners' association decides to take away their cars until they pay up; so that they won't be able to go to work, so that in effect they won't be able to pay anyway.

Why does the homeowners' association adopt this apparently self-defeating policy? Because they are such deeply moral people. They may want their money back, but even more do they long for the justice that affirms the rightness of their world view. If Greece were to prosper, it would be as if God doesn't even care whether you pay all your bills on time and maintain a special savings account that will pay little Corky's tuition at Amherst; it would be as if Greece were just as good as you. So they throw Greece into debtors' prison, with a sigh.

If they really wanted their money back, they would not merely reschedule the payments on easy terms with no new collateral, they'd give Greece some money outright—seed money, startup capital—and watch it get rich, the way they got their own start from the US after the war in France and Germany and Italy and Japan and Taiwan. Instead of loaning to Greece, they could invest in it, that is stop obsessing over the principal and think about perpetual dividends. But they just can't lower themselves to treating Greece with respect: it's what you call conservatism at the macroeconomic level.

A-and say, Mr. Ant? I know I've been spending those summer evenings playing my guitar when I said I'd use my off-hours to do legal proofreading, but it's because I had this idea for an album? Also you can't imagine how boring legal proofreading is.

Your old pal,

Grasshopper

Who says?

2012-02-19T16:35:00.000-05:00

Everybody keeps telling us that small business is the "engine of job creation" in the United States, but it's not so clear. Following up a post from Ontario at Kos:

According to Who creates jobs? Small vs. large vs. young by John C. Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda, NBER Working Paper No. 16300 (2010), small business is not that much of a job creator. Looking at Census Bureau data for the decade from 1992 to 2005, they found that

businesses tend to create jobs in proportion to their importance in the economy. Thus, large mature firms—those more than ten years old and with more than 500 workers—employed about 45 percent of all private-sector workers and accounted for almost 40 percent of job creation and destruction in this study.

Where small size of the firm had an effect, it wasn't because it was small but because it was new:

The real driver of disproportionate job growth, they find, is not small companies, but young companies. It is the startup firms that generate the surge of jobs that earlier research attributed to small companies.

After which they sell out to Microsoft (that's the program), or fold and put together a job-creating emo band or gourmet taco truck.

Call for retroaction!

2012-02-19T15:06:00.001-05:00

Paleo at Daily Kos notes a speech where Rick Santorum more or less called for the abolition of public schools. You say you're not surprised? Fine, but what I want to call attention to is an unusually upfront example of what I have called "retroactionary" ideology, the place that's so far right it's physically impossible—the belief that rather than just reverting to the way things used to be (the reactionary way) we should literally aim backwards in time.

Aristotle as depicted in the 1493 Nürnberger Chronik, from Wikipedia's article on "Anachronism"

It was in a talk yesterday, in Columbus: [jump]

For the first 150 years, most presidents home-schooled their children at the White House, [Santorum] said. “Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.”

“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”

Now, this needs a little initial unpacking. First, in the second sentence Santorum has swallowed a few words,* a "with the idea" that should have gone between "come" and "up". Then, I'm not sure whether he meant to suggest that the only American children that needed an education were the president's children, from 1788 to 1938. He probably uses the presidents just as typical examples of the American family. I'll leave it to aspiring presidential historians to work out how true the statement is: Wikipedia, bless its heart, provides a list of presidents' children, but it will take a bit of arithmetic to work out which ones actually lived in the White House, and I honestly have other things on my mind.

The "frankly much less" is a rare example of a grammatical train wreck that is virtually unanalyzable; an expression that seems to be just on the edge of meaning something but vanishes when you try to figure out what the meaning is. It uses the classical Gingrich "frankly", which normally means "I'm about to double down on a really amusing falsehood," and "much less" looks like a blind man's bluff grab for the "still less" that follows a pompous negative: "I cannot accept that the federal government should be running schools; still less, frankly, that state governments should." But does the True Conservative really want to say that state control is much less acceptable than federal control? Or does he really want to say that it's much less anachronistic? Frankly? And how's that exactly?

"Anachronism" generally means two different things. In everyday media talk, it refers to things from the past that pop up incongruously in the present—the wigs, say, in an English courtroom. In the discussion of literature and art, it more typically refers to something from the present projected into the past, like the chiming clock in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, or the 15th-century German clothing worn by Aristotle in the picture above.

Which kind of anachronism is federal control of schools in the US? You might say neither, given that schools in the US have not been controlled by the federal government at any time, past or present (except I guess in DC). But what if Santorum is talking about the future as he envisages it, a hideous socialist orgy of baby-free sex and peculiar family arrangements in which everything is under federal control? In such a case federal control of education would be an anachronism projected into the now, to be fled from!

And where would we flee? Back, back, back to the 1840s, when the frankly much less anachronistic state control didn't exist much either, and perhaps John Tyler in the White House was home-schooling the little John William Dunjee, Tyler having found time during the Nullification Crisis of 1832 to impregnate a slave woman in the home of some family friends in the Richmond-Petersburg region?**

You see how it all makes sense this way? He's not holding out any hope to his voters that voting for him will encourage a better future. He's urging them to flee from the future, any future at all, and into the Pure Land of the past!

*In much the same way as last January, when he skipped the "ieve you can make Dunl" part of "I don't want to make believe you can make Dunlap people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money" (he was talking about Dunlap, a town not far from Council Bluffs which would no doubt be familiar to his Iowa audience), making it sound, scandalously, as if he meant to be talking about black (actually, "blap") people.

**No, John William Dunjee didn't get to live in the White House. And he may not have been Tyler's son for that matter. It's awfully hard to find any White House children at all before Teddy Roosevelt's brood, to tell the truth, and this was the best I could do on short notice.

Hurts me more than it does who?

2012-02-19T11:39:00.000-05:00

Say what you will about those ayatollahs, you can't deny they have a sense of humor. To punish the European Union for imposing an embargo on Iranian oil, effective July 1, Iran's oil ministry has announced that it has stopped selling oil to Britain and France right away, with hints that Spain, Italy, and Greece could follow. Crude oil prices went up to $103 a barrel in US markets yesterday, "up 12 percent in the last 6 weeks and up 21 percent from a year ago" according to the Fairfax News (they had the most vivid numbers). That way the Europeans will get an early chance to find out if they really like the sanctions or not so much.

Peak Oil. From Howe Street.

What are bad writers for?

2012-02-18T22:01:00.001-05:00

Roy Edroso has been inviting us to savor the writing of James Poulos, at the Daily Caller, on the topic of "What are Women For?", a question you may never have asked yourself.

Witches at work. From A Blurred History.

Thers, whose opinions I normally revere, insists for some reason that James Poulos does not truly deserve to be called the worst writer on this or any other Internet (his italics); he thinks that [jump]
the title belongs to one Paul J. Celia, editor of What's wrong with the world: Dispatches from the 10th Crusade, who is indeed pretty bad:

I would drill even deeper into this and ask: what is at back of demographics? The answer is human reproduction, what George Gilder in his brave and brilliant book Men and Marriage called the sexual constitution. From there it is a very simple trace of logic to the realization that human sexuality can never, ever, be a purely "private" matter. It is, always and inevitably, a matter of absolutely vital public importance.

But really, you want to reserve an award like that to a body of work that shows a certain level of boldness and aspiration that Celia's flabby prose and facile ultramontanism just don't have—although his poetry is very remarkable, using a little-known prosodic technique in which each line appears to have a metrical structure that is unlike the metrical structure of any other line in an entire (sometimes quite long) poem:

When one dim and darkening day, as whispers have long foretold,
No German balance sheet, no synthetic neo-deutschmark sold
By even the cleverest rocket science modeling risk probabilities
Can avert the crack of doom, can calm the quaking knees
Of financiers and securitizers stalking every trading floor
In Paris and in London, faraway Dubai and Singapore
Nor sparing Basel, Frankfurt, New York or Reykjavik,
Every last bank integrating capital, the globalization trick;
Liquidity and margin calls, swap spread, three-party repo:
Mystique of technicality like any human hubris is laid low.
(from Celia's EUROZONE HUBRIS BLUES APPROXIMATELY)

Calm those quaking knees!

Anyhow, Poulos has the audacity that can push a bad writer into a kind of transcendent awfulness beyond meaning itself:

Left opinion is no longer defined by the comfortably careworn liberal consensus that Sandra Day O’Connor conveyed in the abortive plurality decision of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. There, the metaphysical trouble kicked up by the elective killing of fetuses was relegated to the realm of life’s cosmic mysteries — a place liberals contemptuously deride as beneath human dignity when referenced in terms of the suffering of the crucified Christ.

Look at the oxymoron of "comfortably careworn" next to the redundancy of "contemptuously deride"! Close your eyes and imagine what's meant to be abortive, the plurality or the decision, and what exactly that entails!* Take that Disney dark-ride trip to the realm of life's cosmic mysteries, a location where you evidently should not leave your metaphysical trouble! According to liberals, you woud be lurking somewhere beneath human dignity if something or other were referenced (footnoted? referred to?) in a particular way, though not otherwise...

But then

The purpose of lifting the left’s Potemkin skirts is not to score tits for tats.

I don't mind if it is, actually, as long as he's the one who ends up scoring the tats. Potemkin skirts, obviously, are false-fronted skirts whipped up by your one-eyed prince after he failed to make you the real ones on time. The implied equivalence between the left and Catherine the Great may have something to do with an association linking man-on-dog to woman-under-horse and a revolting and absolutely false piece of gossip about Catherine, no doubt spread by Jesuits in the counter-Revolution because Catherine was in fact a sort of liberal; and I'm not sure why the skirts instead of the villages—I guess you could say that for Poulos, it takes a village to raise a skirt?

So what are women for?

...the dominant but failing framework of liberal sexual politics.... hasn’t come anywhere close to answering even the most basic questions about what women are for — despite pretty much universal recognition across the political spectrum that a civilization of men, for men, and by men is no civilization at all, a monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal enterprise. A few inherently meaningful implications about what women are for flow naturally from this wise and enduring consensus, but no faction of conservatives or liberals has figured out how to fully grasp, translate, and reconcile them in the context of our political life.

Seems to be several questions rather than just one, some more basic than others, that a particular political framework was meant to answer but didn't. One very basic question of course would be how a civilization of men, for men, and by men would reproduce itself, supposing you wanted to try it out, as organisms like ourselves are ill suited to reproduction by cell division or budding.** But that wouldn't explain what women are for—it would do a better job with what are men for, since it's the Y chromosomes that are the advanced feature that presexual beings don't have any of. I wonder if that's an inherently meaningful implication?

You see what I mean, though: this is bad writing amplified into another world. It's somebody purposely setting out to create the same kind of effect that Sarah Palin improvises, but in the austere and deliberate language of a newspaper editorial—like a composer trying to duplicate the feeling of a really tedious heavy metal guitar solo with an ensemble of oboe, harpsichord, and theorbo. It's superlatively bad; it's practically hors concours.

In a later post, in response to a "wave of anger and condemnation that has come from some quarters," Poulos tries to clarify what he was aiming at:

At the heart of the culture wars is a very deep-seated disagreement over whether or not women’s natural bodies give women unique or particular purposes — and, if so, what those purposes are, and how our morals, politics, and laws ought to treat the relationship between those purposes and women’s choices about how to actually live.

Here a little light begins to dawn. If he thinks women's natural bodies give them unique or particular purposes, then yes, I disagree with him; I'd agree that women's natural bodies give them abilities and options that I and other men don't have, but I wouldn't use the word "purpose" at all—or "unique" either, since there are in fact lots of women around. (With unnatural bodies, like the Bionic Woman, it'd be another story on both counts.)

Presumably the idea of women being endowed with extra purpose that is missing from men comes from religion, and specifically from Genesis; because the Lord doesn't bother to offer any explanations as to why he creates humanity in Genesis 1:26, but when he starts working on woman in Genesis 2:18, he says explicitly,

It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him a helper as his partner.

In Genesis 2, woman is made for man, like a kind of housewarming present. ("Everybody needs a crock pot and a good corkscrew, no matter what they think; and also, I got you this woman, you'll love her.") Whereas man is just there, like God and in God's image, so that he doesn't need to be explained—he is that he is.***

And Poulos goes on to say what he thinks women can do—it's not just childbearing, indeed he even seems to be a bit of a pro-choicer, but what's hinted at in that picture of a "monstrously barbaric, bloody, and brutal" society without women (sort of like a Dominican monastery):

women’s bodies might equip them to play a particularly important social and political role.... Philosophers from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger have disapprovingly warned of the apparently natural propensity of men to fill up the world with stuff — machines, weapons, ideologies, and so on — that often objectifies and instrumentalizes people, and often distracts us from its own sterility as regards fruitful human living [and] I’m not alone in thinking that women are uniquely able to help humanity avoid becoming enthralled to the more sterile cultural creations of men.

Yes, that's it: the purpose of women having those natural bodies of theirs is to stop dudes from buying too much stuff! Like, if she didn't have boobs I would totally get an I-phone. A-and a gun. Actually, there may be something to that, as far as the phone goes at least, except it would be one of those cases where it's really more a bug than a feature.

And what are bad writers for? Well, I think good writing—no, hang on, I think trying to write well is about finding out what one understands: what's in there, in your perceptions and their juxtapositions to each other, and out of the language system, from which you can draw an understanding. And by a similar token, there is a way of deliberately writing badly that is about hiding what you understand, about papering it over with what Sarah Palin calls "verbage" ("Don't forget to take out the verbage, Todd"). You can understand conservative writing better if you read it as—let's not say lying, it isn't necessarily deliberate in that sense, but hiding, from the thing back there in the mind that terrifies them, whatever it might be. Poulos, for one, has some very deep anxieties about women, and he's writing to conceal them from himself first, before anybody else.

*He may think "abortive" means "pertaining to abortion", as in, "He stood with his sign in front of the abortive clinic."

**Maybe he's thinking they'd still have women, but not in the civilization; barbarian women, perhaps, living in procreation camps.

***That, Poulos, if you ever happen to see these lines, is why so many women and other people were offended by your essay—it's as if you were to ask, "What are black people for?—They're different, aren't they, what's up with that?" The answer isn't, as many conservatives who don't want to be racists imagine, that they aren't different from you; it's that you're different from them as well; you're speaking as if from a privileged point of view for which there isn't any justification.

That was a lot of work! I think we need some Brahms.

Cheap shots and chasers

2012-02-17T18:27:00.004-05:00

Said the pediatrician: I'm afraid he's going to be severely conservative, Mrs. Romney—but with suitable care and a loving home environment there's no reason he shouldn't have a fulfilling life...

Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields Special Nerd Handshake

Now that Michelle Bachmann's not running for president any more, she's back to her old job of making the other Congresspersons look sane by comparison. From Huffington Post:

The House and Senate both approved a payroll tax cut bill on Friday that would extend unemployment benefits through 2012.

But according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the extension is hardly the bill's crowning achievement.

"They're extending unemployment, too, but the big thing that we get is no longer can a welfare recipient walk into a strip club and get money out of an ATM machine to pay for a lap dance," she told conservative radio host Mark Levin on Thursday night. "Now, I'm not making this up. That's the big thing that we get out of this bill."

And remember these?

At a Santorum rally in Tacoma, Paul Constant (h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice) reports a little crowd taunting a lone freedom-from-religion protester,

pinching their noses and miming as though they were swatting away flies. "I can't stand the smell of this guy," one fly-swatter said, adding, "it's like he's got garbage in his pockets." An old woman told the nose-pinchers, as she squeezed past the whole scene, "Watch out for the maggots." Another woman clucked her tongue, and told her friends, "If you're an atheist, you'll just believe in anything."

Just shoot me.

Anthony Shadid

2012-02-17T09:23:00.002-05:00

The death of Anthony Shadid, 43, of asthma, as he was working undercover in Syria, was an enviable one in a classical-Greek sense, in that it was so glorious—a kind of dramatization of his bravery and commitment, when he was at the height of his powers as reporter and writer. For the rest of us, it's pretty bad news. Partly because of his knowledge of Arabic, but even more because of his curiosity about and concern for ordinary folk in the war zones, he captured again and again the things we really needed to know about Baghdad and the other dangerous places where he made himself at home, in a way hardly anybody else came close to.

Achilles and Ajax playing dice. Black-figure amphora by Exekias, late 6th c. B.C.E., from Heritage Key.

The idle 'prentice

2012-02-17T00:03:00.002-05:00

The idle 'prentice executed at Tyburn. From William Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747).

The Times this morning, Landon Thomas, Jr., was all on about the young people of London who are never in their natural lives going to have jobs—

Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992.

And indeed it's horrible, the sequence of stories of... Hang on a minute, when did Britain [jump]
get into the Euro zone? It's hard to believe that was one of David Cameron's beastly plots! But actually no, it hasn't happened, so calm down, our author was merely suggesting that the country was figuratively in the Euro zone, with its economic affiliation to the continent next door, which means that as they say when Europe catches a cold Britain has a headache, or something, and that debt-driven austerity crusade is no joke either.

But as you read through the individual tales of the young people interviewed, it starts to come clear that they all have something narrower in common, which is a lack of qualifications for the jobs that do exist, and not through any fault of their own:

the majority of those who took to the streets in London last summer were young people who were unemployed, out of school and not participating in a job training program.
Classified by statisticians as NEETs (not in education, employment or training), they number about 1.3 million, or one of every five 16-to-24-year-olds in the country.

While youth unemployment has long been a chronic issue here, experts say the British government’s debt-reduction commitment to rein in social spending appears to be making the problem worse. Insufficient job training and apprenticeship programs, they argue, contribute to the large pool of permanently unemployed young people in Britain.

And is that a consequence of troubles in the Euro zone, and debt-driven austerity crusades? Not exactly. Young people can't afford to go to university, for example, because they can't pay the tuition, and that got started in the first place long before the debt-driven austerity thingy, when the government first began imposing tuition on university students, in 1998.

That's right (yes, my fellow Americans, for a large part of the 20th century Brits paid no university tuition at all), tuition fees were introduced to British undergraduate and postgraduate students in September of 1998, when Mr Tony Blair, of the newly christened New Labour Party, was just starting to enjoy himself; up to a thousand pounds (means tested) a year. Then up to £3,000 a year in 2004, and by 2010, when Mr Blair was no longer available to be kicked around, as the saying goes, to a maximum of £3,290. So most of the increase (technically infinite, since it started with zero) was long before the Euro debt iffiness and austerity such and such; although not for long, since this year it is permitted to rise to £9,000, which looks like class warfare on an American scale.

And as far as vocational training and apprenticeship programs go,

Britain lags far behind countries like Germany, Austria and the Netherlands in its use of training programs to introduce young people to permanent work

Fewer than one in 10 employers in Britain offered apprenticeships in 2010, she said, compared with at least a quarter of employers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And while government financing for such programs has increased in the last few years, [Hilary] Steedman [of the London School of Economics] said that much of the money went to training existing workers 25 years and older rather than building the skills of 18-to-20-year-olds.

“It’s completely perverse,” she said, pointing out that 40 percent of the 500,000 or so apprenticeships go to people age 25 or older. “Companies are subsidizing 25-year-olds who already have jobs.”

What happened in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands? Aside from generally everybody speaking a Germanic language? Social democracy: the bourgeoisie and the working class together worked out a deal in which both would survive and thrive, which has ruled the countries ever since. When conservatives are in charge, things can get unpleasant, but they never threaten the fundamental contract; if they did, they'd lose the next election.

In England and Scotland, no such contract has ever existed—what the working class has achieved has been generally by combat or by stealth, and usually on the cheap, and starting in 1979 with the vile Mrs T. as prime minister, the bourgeoisie began working to take it down. Not the National Health, of course, people wouldn't stand for that, but a little here and a little there; and then came Mr Blair to accelerate the process, for reasons that, like his reasons for committing British troops to the disaster in Iraq, will probably never be known.

What didn't happen in Germany? When there's an economic crisis and conservatives are in charge there, they never really threaten to alter that basic compact; the socialism part remains largely intact, and young people have somewhere to go until they can find a job. The bad side being that those same conservatives treat the Greek or the British workers like criminals in need of strictest discipline, when it's actually the bourgeois in both countries who need to reform their behavior.

Insider Poop Watch

2012-02-16T09:38:00.001-05:00

NPR sports analyst Mara Liasson, covering the "caucus-race" trial heats in the coveted White House Stakes competition, said something unexpected--I guess that's news in itself:

Talking Head Makes Original Observation

Effects on Market Uncertain

Anyway, she said President Obama is responsible for the recent froth in the candidacy of Rick Santorum; the announcement of new regulations on health coverage of birth control has brought the "social conservatives" to a boil and they're out in force, with their mistrust of the Mormon and longing for purity. So I'm like whoa, as the young folk say, could Obama be doing this on purpose? Keeping the Republicans undecided, or worse, trying to get Santorum the nomination? Some of that 11-dimensional chess?

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt

2012-02-15T22:58:00.004-05:00

And it's time for another of our irregularly scheduled discussions of things that are undreamt of in Thomas Friedman's philosophy or, as his next book is likely to call them, Flying Elephants.

From Squidoo.com.

Today's case starts with the Egyptian minister of planning and international cooperation, and an old pal of Suzanne Mubarak's, Fayza Abul Naga, who is said to be the person mainly responsible [jump]
for putting those 16 Americans working in (ostensibly) pro-democracy organizations in jail. I'm not going to take any position on her investigation, by the way; in this context I'm one of those stupid Americans who gets enraged when foreigners spend money to influence our elections but not always when Americans spend money on theirs (in my case especially when the Americans are named Soros)—I hope to have a coherent idea some day but I'm not there yet.

The interesting thing about Abul Naga for me is that she has inspired some unusually thoughtful writing in the New York Times, by David Kirkpatrick with reporting by Mayy El Sheikh:

“This is a country of separate islands now,” said Mohamed Anwar el-Sadat, the nephew of former President Anwar el-Sadat and a newly elected lawmaker who recently called Ms. Abul Naga to testify before a parliamentary committee. “The Foreign Ministry, the Justice Ministry, the Parliament, the generals of the military council — everyone is his own island.”

The ruling generals were “surprised” by the actions against the American groups, Mr. Sadat said, recounting what he said were conversations with top military officials. “They had not been informed, and they believed the timing was wrong,” he said. “But she knows that Tantawi is only in charge while the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is there. His time is over, so her time is over.”

Signs abound that the military’s authority is fading fast. Civilian judges have for the first time begun to rule against the military council. The police hesitate to use force or even take action for fear of retribution, and earlier this month their diffidence contributed [to] the deaths of more than 70 soccer fans in a riot in Port Said, a parliamentary inquiry found.

Lawmakers, in turn, are moving to dismiss the interior minister, but no one yet knows whether Parliament or the military can claim that power.... “Power is in a very fluid state right now,” one American diplomat said, speaking anonymously under diplomatic protocol. “American pressure scares them less than the mob in the street demanding the execution of Tantawi.”

So it's a fascinating picture of a revolutionary society, with the distribution of power among thugs and non-thugs constantly evolving and unpredictable. The anonymous diplomat also said, “It means society is really coming apart at the seams,” but isn't that an awfully limiting way of looking at it? Wasn't Egyptian society already fully apart at the seams a year ago? Isn't that why the revolution took place? What's happening now is the formation of new seams, not a pretty picture, and far from guaranteed to have a happy outcome, but full of marvelous potential as well.

Ancient Egyptian Super Mario. From the Smosh Pit.

Loves them just the way they are

2012-02-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

Potato Eaters, by Albert de Vos. From Tim Harrison's blog.

Whoever said that "God must love the common folk—he made so many of them" (Dr. Google seems to be stumped on this one, with a pretty big majority going for Abraham Lincoln, but not one of them citing a source) was being snarky, but the panelists on Fox News's The Five were being something else yesterday; they said in effect that liberals must hate the poor because they are attempting to exterminate them—as ThinkProgress reports it, [jump]

that contraception is really [a] scheme of the left to eliminate poor people. Often-sarcastic co-host Greg Gutfeld first floated the idea, saying, “it’s more about getting rid of the poor.” “The right want the poor to get rich, the left want the poor not to exist,” he added. “It’s not a bad point,” former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino chimed in. Co-host Andrea Tantaros added, “Yeah, population control.” “Did you really just say that?” liberal co-host Bob Beckel responded flabbergasted.

They were revealing more about themselves, I'd say, than they realized.

Obviously the traditional left favors there being fewer poor people. If the right really "want the poor to get rich" that'll do the trick a lot faster than family planning—all you have to do is give us a lot of money! But that would mean they want the poor not to exist too, right?

And then it would be redistribution and socialism and the wrong way. The right way to get rich would be by being a risk-taking entrepreneurial job creator, and then if everybody's rich who's going to take the jobs? So I guess they just want a few poor people to get rich.

The right doesn't want poor people not to exist. It loves poor people, and it loves them best in quantity, because they are the reserve army of the unemployed, who exist to keep a downward pressure on wages. And they hate cheaply available birth control because poor people with smaller families are more likely to stop being poor and to escape from some of that overwhelming love.*

During the Reform and Opening Up period in China after the Cultural Revolution, and then in Russia during the Yeltsin reign, I often thought that the successful fledgling capitalists, having been carefully raised by committed Communists to regard the acquisition of capital as evil behavior and a crime against suffering humanity, were the ones who got the wrong idea when their governments started encouraging them to acquire capital—they thought it meant they were supposed to start being evil and criminal, and leapt uncomplainingly in.

But when our own cheerleaders for capitalism insist on behaving like Marxist caricatures, it makes me think that Marx knew what he was talking about when he wrote about the ideology of the bourgeoisie as something strictly controlled by their class interests.

As for me, you bet I don't want poor people to exist. They don't have to be rich, either; I just want them to have decent jobs. With benefits. And health care. Including family planning.

*They love undocumented immigrants, too, which is why they're against amnesty—"Please, my darling illegal alien, never change!"

Happy news

2012-02-15T00:13:00.000-05:00

Jeremy Lin Meme. From JerseyChaser.

Jeremy Lin—Linsomnia! Lintoxication!—and the newly competent Knicks won their sixth game in a row, the first one with Amar'e Stoudemire back from his brother's funeral. Welcome back Amar'e! I couldn't watch the game on the television since my cable company and their network are having one of those greed competitions, but I saw the extraordinarily dramatic last couple of minutes over my son's shoulder on his computer. I also got to hear the Tweets celebrated on ESPN:

Dave McMenamin, Lakers Beat Writer
The Lakers’ players lounge just erupted when Lin hit that big 3. World Peace emerged and ran through the locker room yelling ‘Linsanity!!’

Preoccupied as I was with car bombings, I totally forgot that World Peace was not world peace at all but merely Metta World Peace, that is the Artest formerly known as Ron, and so got the impression that Lin's feat was even more consequential than it actually was, though I couldn't have said why world peace would choose the Lakers' players lounge as the venue for its appearance anyway.

The Jeremy Lin of Wagner singing (calm, modest, extremely hard-working, and then out of nowhere spectacular beyond reason), Jay Hunter Morris, brought the two-year unfolding of the Met's and Robert Lepage's new Ring cycle to a close with his Siegfried in Götterdämmerung. At the close, world peace actually did emerge on stage, although that was written into the orchestral score and had little to do with the singing.

Morris did have a couple of moments of vocal weakness, one unfortunately at the heartbreaking moment when Siegfried dies in a preposterously difficult sotto voce head tone. Deborah Voigt, who I was worried about a year or so ago when her Brünnhilde voice in Walküre sounded a little dry to me, did not seem to have any weakness at all. Happy Valentine's Day, Debbie! Watching them "live in HD" at the old Ziegfeld on 54th Street, and seeing their faces closer than the folks in the $300 seats, I have been impressed through the whole series (unlike this guy) by the quality of the acting, which sometimes achieves a depth that you really don't imagine coming from singers (especially Iain Paterson as Gunther and Hans-Peter König as Hagen).

From act 2 of Walkure.

Just the facts, Ma'am

2012-02-14T22:55:00.000-05:00

Stately bungalows of Aurangzeb Marg. From bornrich.com.

As you know, yesterday afternoon Tal Yehoshua-Korene, who works along with her husband at the Israeli embassy in New Delhi, was riding up Aurangzeb Road on her way to picking up her children from school when the rear of the car blew up. She was badly injured, with shrapnel in the spine, and is in critical condition; her driver and two other people were hurt as well. A security camera picked up the image of a young man in leather jacket on a motorcycle riding up to the car while it was waiting at a stoplight, just a few seconds before the blast, and "placing something" on the trunk; it's thought that it must have been a bomb mounted [jump]
on a magnet so it would stick when it was dropped there, a technique now familiar from the murder of the physicist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan in Tehran last month.

At around the same time—it's not as generously reported—a driver for the Israeli embassy in Tbilisi noticed a package stuck to the undercarriage of his car and called the police; there was a grenade inside the package, but the police were able to defuse it. I would like to note that I unreservedly condemn all car bombings and attempted car bombings and similar behavior including that of the person, said to be carrying Iranian travel documents, who blew off his own legs in Bangkok today with grenades he was using to try to murder a Thai taxi driver and a policeman.

Binyamin Netanyahu was quick to denounce the government of Iran as being responsible for the attacks in India and Georgia;

"Iran and its client Hezbollah," saying that standing behind Monday's attacks is "Iran, the world's greatest exporter of terror."

Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman added that

"We know exactly who is responsible for the attack and who planned it, and we're not going to take it lying down."

The government of Iran denounced the attacks as a

false flag operation, executing the attacks itself in order to “stir up sympathy from other countries...." The past record of the Israeli regime clearly demonstrates that its elements have previously carried out such operations to gain popularity and evoke sympathy from other nations, said Deputy Chairman of the Majlis Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy Ismail Kowsari on Tuesday.

Juan Cole offered very cogent reasons for supposing that the Delhi attack could hardly have been carried out by agents of Iran but was more likely perpetrated by an internal Indian group of Sunni Mujahedin and had nothing to do with either the Iranian or the Israeli government—they would have been totally convincing if it weren't for the thing in Georgia, for which he offered no explanation.

I would think the Georgia operation would be extremely easy for Israeli intelligence to carry out—they wouldn't even have to leave the embassy, and assuming the driver was in on the plot, it would be guaranteed not to hurt anybody—but I seriously refuse to consider as a possibility that the Israeli government had any role in the attack on Ms. Yehoshua-Korene and her driver, where people (meaning as it often does with the Israeli government, I'm sorry to put it this way, non-Arabs) were badly hurt and could easily have been killed.

Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak chimed in on the subject of the Thailand explosions to accuse the Iranian government of

exporting terror around the world. "The attempted terror attack in Thailand proves once again that Iran and its proxies continue to operate in the ways of terror and the latest attacks are an example of that," said Barak.

The Thai government declines to say what was motivating the would-be bomber who blew up first his house, then a taxi, injuring five further people, and finally parts of himself, but, the Guardian goes on to say, the two men they have in custody are both evidently from Iran:

Saeid Moradi, who was seriously injured in the blast, is an Iranian national who is thought to have entered Thailand from South Korea on 8 February at the southern resort town of Phuket. The second suspect has been named as the Iranian national Mohammed Hazaei, 42, who was detained after trying to board a flight to Malaysia, according to local media.

One of Moradi's legs flew into a school playground. I have no theories to propose at the moment. Just stop it, everybody, now, please.

It's not about contraception (addendum)

2012-02-13T16:29:00.001-05:00

Matter of fact, you know that transportation bill into which the Roy Blunt not-about-contraception legislation is to be folded as an amendment? It has another remarkable provision that

would strip several thousand workers within the rail-industry of their federal minimum-wage and overtime protections, potentially making low-wage jobs pay even less.

[jump]

Listed in the bill under the heading "Technical Correction," provision 6602 would exempt several companies who transport rail workers from their obligations under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the 1938 law that guarantees basic worker rights. The carveout would allow a handful of boutique contractors to pay no overtime to their drivers who haul rail workers between worksites, often driving long distances of 300 miles or more. (Huffington Post)

There's just no little structure of decency so small that they won't sooner or later be probing it for weakness and trying to wear it down. In the name of Freedom (only for those who went to the right schools, so they'll know how to use it).

Digby sends us to a wonderful way of understanding why the libertarian idea of liberty is so restricted, in the writing of the Prince of Austrianism, Ludwig von Mises, as expounded by Mike Konczal. What Konczal is particularly interested in (and with good reason!) is the objection of this particular libertarian to the concept of Free Love, in the 1922 monograph on Socialism.

Free love is the socialist’s radical solution for sexual problems. The socialistic society abolishes the economic dependence of woman which results from the fact that woman is dependent on the income of her husband. Man and woman have the same economic rights and the same duties, as far as motherhood does not demand special consideration for the woman. Public funds provide for the maintenance and education of the children, which are no longer the affairs of the parents but of society. Thus the relations between the sexes are no longer influenced by social and economic conditions…

Just as the pseudo-democratic movement endeavours by decrees to efface natural and socially conditioned inequalities, just as it wants to make the strong equal to the weak, the talented to the untalented, and the healthy to the sick, so the radical wing of the women’s movement seeks to make women the equal of men….But the difference between sexual character and sexual destiny can no more be decreed away than other inequalities of mankind.

So you see everybody should be free, but some of us aren't really as equipped by nature and society for having quite as much freedom as the rest—like women. And any artificial attempt to level these inequalities is doomed to fail; the same goes for economic socialism, threatening the natural inequality between those who own property and those who don't.

Thus, when they're talking about the importance of freedom, they're only talking about those to whom it is important: the masters, the men of property. (And when they start talking to you about the "ownership society", watch your wallet, because their plan isn't for you to actually own anything, but to think you do, while you will really be bound to your house-and-mortgage like a serf to the soil...)

Hamburg Staatsoper 1970; Bruno Maderna conducting.

Maud, says here Medicare comes from the Government!

2012-02-13T15:23:00.000-05:00

Holiday collage by the Chicago Imagist Don Baum. From Archives of American Art Blog.

I haven't seen much response to yesterday's Times report about the poor but conservative and their dependence on government money, but it's pretty extraordinary reading. It's not your Tea Party clowns who really think Medicare isn't a government program, it's people [jump]
who know they wouldn't be able to get by without government help, but also think their greed is bankrupting future generations. It's literally enough to make grown men cry to think of themselves living helplessly with this situation.

When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed [in Chisago, Minnesota] hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears. It is much easier to promise future restraint than to deny present needs.

“How do you tell someone that you deserve to have heart surgery and you can’t?” Mr. Gulbranson said.

He paused.

“You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing.”

He paused again, unable to resolve the dilemma.

“I feel bad for my children.”

So they express their feeling by voting from Republicans, who will force them to sacrifice but won't raise their taxes.

One of the oldest criticisms of democracy is that the people will inevitably drain the treasury by demanding more spending than taxes. The theory is that citizens who get more than they pay for will vote for politicians who promise to increase spending.

But Dean P. Lacy, a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.

Conversely, states that pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits tend to support Democratic candidates. And Professor Lacy found that the pattern could not be explained by demographics or social issues.

You can check it out county by county at the interactive map.

How can we tell them that it really isn't their taxes that have to go up, but those of people who can afford it? How do we explain that the national debt never needs to be paid as long as we keep up on the interest? They may not be very well informed, but they deserve to be taken seriously.

It's not about contraception, it's about over (but it'll be back!)

2012-02-13T13:23:00.000-05:00

Noting Minority Leader McConnell's plans to push the Roy Blunt bill to permit any employer to deny family planning coverage in their employees' health insurance plans, John Cole is reduced to sputtering:

I’m simply speechless. I honestly can not believe that in this day and age, the GOP is going to go all out and wage this war. This has nothing to do with religious liberty, and this is just a war on women. They are just done pretending they are anything but religious zealots and fanatics.

With all respect and affection for this great blog artist, I don't think so—not "just" a war on women, thought women are clearly the primary targets. I think [jump]

Bishops are very concerned about blogs. From Abbey Roads.

there's a clue in this little eruption to what this war is really "about", which is not what any of us has been thinking, though many have groped in the right direction.

"It's not about contraception, it's about freedom."

Have you been tempted to think this slogan doesn't actually mean anything at all? That it's just dog whistle nonsense meant to rouse the listeners' emotions? How on earth is it not about contraception? How is it about the freedom of conscience of a few dozen bishops but not about the freedom of choice of many thousands of women?

Well, one thing is—if it's about contraception, why do you suppose Mitch McConnell, or Willard Mitt Romney, would be getting excited about it? Do you think they care about contraception? Do think Episcopalian atheist Karl Rove cares about contraception, for goodness' sake? Of course these people could be using the issue, the way they have traditionally used abortion, as a decoy for attracting all those poor what's-the-matter-with-Kansas voters, but they hardly need any more of those, and this one is especially weak, given that virtually all sexually active straight women practice family planning, and few of their menfolk are crazy enough to object.

No, look at the text of Blunt's current proposal: it is written to allow any plan that

declines to provide coverage of specific items or services because —
“(i) providing coverage (or, in the case of a sponsor of a group health plan, paying for coverage) of such specific items or services is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan; or
“(ii) such coverage (in the case of individual coverage) is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions of the purchaser or beneficiary of the coverage.

It really isn't about contraception—that is, it could be contraception but it could equally be anything else that a sponsor, issuer, or other entity might object or claim to object to; and it's not about bishops, either, but any sponsor, issuer, or other entity (do corporations have religious beliefs and moral convictions?)—it's about freedom, but not freedom for everybody: freedom for the 1%, for the haute bourgeoisie, for the so-called "job creators". (Ignore that second clause about the employee—do you think they'd really let you demand a policy that doesn't cover blood transfusions, or vaccinations, or HIV screening?)

It's about the retroactionary redefinition of freedom as something that means something different to people of different classes. The working stiff is free to choose between ABC and Fox, PlayStation and WII, Disneyland and Universal Studios, quitting the job or carrying on (but don't expect any assistance when you quit), give me a transfusion or let me die. The CEO is free to have an exquisitely precise sense of what his conscience requires in his relationships with the members of the proletariat. Maybe he'll find he has grave moral concerns with paid maternity leave, or accessibility for the handicapped, or paying the minimum wage!

And the Karl Roves play for the long term, you know. They know the whole so-called controversy is a joke and the Blunt bill has no chance of getting signed. What they want is to get this language into the discourse, to make it start seeming like a normal way of looking at things; and then one day it might be part of a congressional deal, as with school vouchers, or drilling in ANWR, or hanging unfeasible work requirements on the welfare recipient. It's about restoring the ancien régime, and let's not forget that the Bishops were one of the three estates.

Awakening of the Third Estate. From website La Révolution Française by Martine Lopez.

Federalism and "Federalism"

2012-02-12T22:51:00.000-05:00

Cadenette wig. From Probert Encyclopedia.

This is a Rectification issue that makes me really crazy; today's trigger is a perfectly goodhearted and well-written and useful Kos diary by DemFromCt on the Great Contraception Crisis story that happens to quote a Republicanish opinion piece by one Alan Weil in the New England Journal of Medicine to the effect that

Under the principles of federalism that have guided the development and implementation of policy in this country since it was founded, there are three potential benefits associated with permitting states to make these decisions with respect to the EHBs...

And then DemFromCt goes on to use "federalism" in this sense through the rest of the piece. Which is by no means an unusual occurrence.

But it isn't right. The word "federalism" as it was used by the Founding Fathers who [jump]
named the first American political party the "Federalists" and the word "federalism" as it is used by American conservatives today mean pretty nearly the exact opposite from each other. Namely:

The first American Federalists were the ones who determined to replace the weak national government under the Articles of Confederation with a strong new one, under a new constitution, by taking away the rights of states to levy tariffs and issue currency, and assuming all their Revolutionary War debts into one big National Debt—to be the big investment magnet that would fund a nationwide industrialization and development policy.

The Republican federalists of our time would be better called confederalists; they get their ideas not from Jay, Hamilton, and Madison but from Switzerland—the Confoederatio Helvetica of cantons that are largely crustily independent of one another, in language, religion, geography, and economy—and their big idea of devolving power from the capital to the states is a retroactionary fantasy of going back from federalism in the traditional American sense to those same Articles of Confederation, or to the Confederated States of America (which grew out of the same kind of fantasy, that they could prevent Washington from taking away their "states' rights" to traffic in human beings as long as the human beings were black).

When they use the word, they are arrogating to themselves the respect and reverence we give to Washington and Adams, Hamilton and Jay, Jefferson and Madison, implying that these guys were in some sense "conservative" when the American Revolution was in fact progressive in every sense, and it is simply false (you can say that Adams and Washington turned somewhat conservative at the end of the 1790s, with the Alien and Sedition Acts and the cultivation of a British alliance against the French, leading Jefferson and Madison to form a new party, but you'll note that they didn't call that party "anti-Federalist" but variously "Republican", stressing the unity of the nation over its parts, or "Democratic", celebrating its anti-oligarchic nature). You can say that Jefferson and Adams had important disagreements over what constituted progress, but you can't say they weren't revolutionaries—it wasn't the states they intended should rule but the People.

We really shouldn't let them get away with it, either—with their "Federalist" Society and all the rest. Can we just start putting it in scare quotes? Can't we start claiming the Revolutionary tradition for ourselves?

Farmers' Market Sunday

2012-02-12T11:40:00.000-05:00

Photo by Harry.

Normally I go to Union Square on Saturdays for my locovore fruits and vegetables, but yesterday I was at the opera-at-the-movies for the Götterdämmerung marathon, so today I trucked down to the Natural History Museum, where I can go on foot. Pickings were not unexpectedly slim (animal foods and breads are way too expensive), although I left behind some very photogenic kale because I didn't feel like cooking it.

But the guys who were selling the kale (and the broccoli rabe and red onions, pictured) had another treat, which was the music they were playing in their little white pavilion. I thought I'd pass it on. They had much better sound, but I've got video:

Queen's bishop to mate in two

2012-02-11T23:23:00.001-05:00

Jizo statue—representing an unborn child—at the Hasedera temple in Kamakura, Japan. By Don Lee, from the website Sacred Destinations.

I think I may have the crude outlines of a solution to the problems of America's Catholic bishops, currently facing potential martyrdom in that they may be forced by an unfeeling government to buy insurance that covers the abomination of birth control pills, with no co-payment, for the employees of Catholic institutions that have a lot of non-Catholic employees, such as church-owned universities, hospitals, and charitable foundations.

An unfeeling federal government, I should say, because as we have repeatedly noted [jump]
28 equally unfeeling state governments already force them to do this, as certified legal and not an impedance to the free exercise of religion in Catholic Charities et al. v. New York State, whose last appeal the Supreme Court declined to hear in 2007. The bishops have managed to reconcile this with their tender consciences for reasons they have not revealed. They haven't, say, relocated Fordham University to Florida.

Then again, they have also learned to live with a federal mandate from 2000 requiring employers to offer birth control as part of preventive care for women—Joan McCarter thinks they may be OK with this because you can force the employee to pay for the benefits, whereas those provided by the Affordable Care Act must be free to employees.

Like some "primitive" peoples or, say, small children who are afraid to let somebody else use their spoon for fear the somebody else will infect them backwards in time with their germs, the bishops are afraid they will be retroactively polluted by the pollution of their money as it flows into the hands of the merchants of destruction who supply contraceptive agents, "some of which may be abortifacients" especially if you define abortion in the very special R.C. way to mean anything that works at a point in time when Mr. Sperm and Ms. Egg may already have been introduced.

I now have access to some data, thanks to Balloon Juice, on how and how much money is actually involved, from a Guttmacher Institute study:

the addition of the full range of contraceptive services and supplies without cost-sharing to a plan that currently includes no coverage at all would cost about $37 per member per year for an HMO and $41 for a PPO. Notably, the study estimates that PPO enrollees today pay about one-third of this amount in cost-sharing.

But this is not clearly related to how much money the insurance company has to spend. For instance,

every dollar invested by the government for contraception saves $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures for pregnancy-related care related to births from unintended pregnancies. In total, the services provided at publicly funded family planning clinics resulted in a net savings of $5.1 billion in 2008.

while for private insurers,

it costs employers 15–17% more to not provide contraceptive coverage in employee health plans than to provide such coverage, after accounting for both the direct medical costs of pregnancy and indirect costs such as employee absence and reduced productivity.

If premiums reflected these differences, as insurance premiums are supposed to do according to the theory we all learned in high school, then a policy that did not cover contraception would be more expensive than one that did; and in that case the amount the bishops could be said to contributing to pay for contraception would be a negative number.

Thus if the bishops wanted not to pay for these Satanic devices, all they would have to do is pony up the larger amount that a program without the Satanic devices would cost; i.e., if the savings of a family planning program add up to $4 a year (a conservative estimate), the R.C. hierarchy could pay $4 more, deducting minus-$4 from their charges.

What's that you say? That employees might go ahead and get contraception anyway? No doubt they might! But not a penny of the Church's minus-$4 would go to paying for it, would it? Everybody would be happy.

Freedom of independence!

2012-02-10T22:57:00.002-05:00

Album cover by Micah Buzan.

I just want to keep savoring that bit of word salad for a while as created in a collaborative effort by Rick Santorum, reporter Michael D. Shear, and a shamefully inattentive Times copy editor:

“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of liberty. It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got to stop.” [In fact, as noted in the previous post, the Times report is incorrect: Santorum said "freedom of religion", not "freedom of liberty".]

In the first place, if "it" is the government proposal for having health insurance plans cover contraception, exactly how is it not about contraception but is about freedom of speech?

Is it a new definition of speech, like the way in Buckley v. Valeo money is speech, [jump]
so that here spermatozoa would be speech, transmitting a message of some kind that the barrier method prevents them from completing? But then that would be about contraception too.

Or is the freedom of speech that of the bishops, who want to tell everybody they can't use contraception? But surely they can say whatever they want—they just can't enforce it. Or is enforcement yet another kind of speech, peculiar to bishops?

Or is it the bishops' money that talks? But in that case being forced to pay for contraception would be a violation of their Fifth Amendment rights, not First, the right to keep financially silent... And I still haven't thought of an account that doesn't have the word "contraception" in it. Any suggestions?

And then "freedom of liberty". Santorum did not actually say it, but amazingly enough (thanks, Professor Google!), it's been used before.

Wikipedia uses it as the key element in the definition of "detention":

Detention is the process when a state, government or citizen lawfully holds a person by removing their freedom of liberty at that time.

You can see straight away that this is not your finest Wikipedia prose—indeed the editors have some complaints, and I could suggest some more, like, is it really only detention if it's lawful? (Sounds like a Dick Cheney theory: Detention is always lawful.) And what on earth is that "at that time" doing there? Is this a cop's report? I did learn something sort of cool—that the Obama administration has eliminated the term "unlawful enemy combatant" (in favor of "alien unprivileged enemy belligerents", which is admittedly far from ringing—naturally, as a liberal, I find it draws me to worrying about underprivileged enemy belligerents, but that's another story, or not a story at all). But I don't feel I have to sit down and work out what the author meant.

"The Freedom of Liberty" is the title of a paper by one Stein Ringen (Society 42/4, 2006) whose abstract (Ebsco doesn't give access to the whole paper) says among other things that

There are two ways that a person's choices may not be his own. One is that they are dictated to him by someone else who has the power to oblige him to obey. The other is that choices, although not imposed upon him or forbidden to him by an outside dictator, emerge through psychological processes which are for him a mystery so that what he do in life is to satisfy desires he just happen to have.

This just suggests that Society's editor has trouble saying no.

A "conservative blogger, a part time writer and a frequent 'letter to the editor guy'" rejoicing in the nom de blogue of Utah frequently quotes himself as having once written that

Modern conservatism is about “freedom of“, as in freedom of opportunity, freedom of self-determination, freedom of liberty, freedom of religion. “Progressives” define it as “freedom from“, freedom from economic, political and social risk and freedom from religion. The conservative approach requires minimal regulation and control, the “progressive” requires maximum regulation and control.

This is authentically the same impulse as that which animates Santorum, and you know what? I don't think it means anything at all. Which doesn't mean, by the way, that it isn't dangerous: indeed it could be the most meaningless phrases that cause the greatest harm.