Is America really Pakistan?

While our president was going around last May making nice about all those Arab revolutionaries bringing their governments down, guess what the Pentagon was up to? According to closely reasoned and evidenced reporting from Nick Turse at TomDispatch,

[a]s state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there.  During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations -- skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings...

Now, what exactly is up with that? Should we be applying our standard left-paranoid analysis to this? I.e., (1) the interests of our ruling class, the 1% if you like, are aligned with those of the familiar dictators Ben Ali and Mubarak and so on; (2) the U.S. government, as the "management committee of the bourgeoisie" or agency for carrying out ruling class interests, inevitably opposes the democratic revolutions; and (3) Obama does his job of expressing the natural pro-revolutionary sentiments of the 99% to distract us from what is really happening.

But I'd like to sketch out an alternative way of looking at it that might be a little less boring and a little smarter, and still "of the left"--and indeed the seeds of a whole bigfat theory of democracy and power.

Benevolent dictator Wotan figures it out: God can't give people free will, they have to take it. But won't that make trouble for the government? Hey, kid, why do you think they call it Götterdämmerung?

I call the round things "wheels"

Woke up to hear an echo of a Marketplace story I missed yesterday morning, about a new fear of European economists: It seems somebody is worried that all that austerity might inhibit growth. Golly, whoever imagined such an idea?*

In other news, I've figured out how to make sleds that work in the summer. Instead of mounting them on runners, you mount them on axles, one in the front and one in the back, and then each axle is propped up in turn on these round things, so that when you pull it it just rolls.

*I mean, other than most economists over the past 80 years or so.

Not only that, but then it would be true

Mitt Romney's "Look first upon this picture, then on this" tirade--

Newt Gingrich comes from the world where politicians are paid millions after they retire to influence their friends in Washington. Mitt Romney comes from the private sector, where the economy is built by hard work and entrepreneurial drive.

The first sentence is fine, but for classical parallel structure, the second one needs revision to something like, "Mitt Romney comes from the world where businessmen pay millions after they retire to become politicians under the influence of--their friends in Washington."

Wanker of the forever!

I think it was Atrios who pioneered the idea of nominating a metaphorical "wanker of the day", or week, or month. But do liberals ever give a thought to the wanker-for-real? Well, here's to Bill Johnson (link picked up from Daily Kos), once known as a Republican politician and foe of same-sex marriage, lately turned to good works in disaster recovery in Haiti and New Zealand, and now revealed as a wanker with a cause, supplying some good old Republican, Mensa-member sperm to a (fairly large) number of Kiwi ladies who want babies, including members of same-sex couples. I don't care if he's a Republican--well done, that man!

Update 12/13

A story in Gawker suggests that there may in fact have been no wanking involved: that he was donating that first-class pakeha* sperm in a more up-close and personal fashion, if you know what I mean; I mean, bluntly, that he was schtupping the clients in person, even the lesbians. This could explain, for one thing, why Mrs. Johnson objected to the procedures (she herself was not in New Zealand at the time). I refuse to believe it, though.

*Pakeha is Kiwi for "white", in the sense of "Belgian", or "colonialist".

Muslim traditional values voters?

Nicholas Kristof in today's Times, on the success of the Islamist parties in the Egyptian elections, brings up a supremely important point that we Americans seem utterly unaware of: a big part of the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist groups is in the way they provide real political value to the public long before they even consider getting elected:

[their] offices are social service agencies. Citizens dropped in to ask for blankets for the winter, and the party handed them out — along with campaign brochures. Several people asked for help paying medical bills, and they got it. In the evening, women arrived to take a free class about science.

But then he misinterprets his observations in a way that makes them less useful: 

¿Cuomo lo quieres?

Some have asked--actually, they haven't, but it's always good to be prepared--why I should display such hostility toward Governor Cuomo, given how skillful he has proven at getting our dreadful legislature to do things of which, as an unreconstructed liberal, I must approve. Well, here's why.

Newt Gingrich, plucky little imperialist

Image from http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/Newt_Gingrich

It all goes back to grad school. The most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Newt Gingrich. What if he is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Belgian, pro-colonialist behavior can you begin to piece together what he does? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.... This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now, umm.... What exactly is he?

Just another radical Belgian activist? Tintin, after the mussels and frites begin to take their toll, and with a Congressional hairdresser? The supremely evil twin of that other Tintin? Sadly, it seems unlikely.

Privateers

The Times coverage of the horrible hospital fire in Kolkata (olim Calcutta) suggests that one of its causes was the fact that the Advanced Medical Research Institute is a private hospital, which means apparently less heavily regulated than the public ones:

The blaze is sure to raise fresh questions about safety in India’s booming private hospital business, which, like much else in India, is poorly regulated.

The hospital had recently been named one of the city’s best by The Week, an Indian magazine that regularly ranks hospitals. Like many such hospitals in India, the Advanced Medical Research Institute offered expensive Western-style facilities to middle- and upper-middle-class Indians who have shunned government hospitals, which are crowded and less well equipped.

A great hospital in the aspects seen by its wealthy clientele, in other words, but not so much so in those seen by India's famously onerous, nitpicking regulators--like what are they storing in the basement (diesel fuel and motor oil), is the fire detection system regularly tested and the staff drilled,

Ectomorphic government

Also from NPR this morning, an example germane to the spurious debate of big government vs. small government and what makes it spurious, in a report (only the sound file, no text, available online so far) on the MSHA report on the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster. As the radio report (from Howard Berkes) makes clear, the agency report makes it clear that the agency shares reponsibility in a major way for the disaster with the company that ran the mine, but the agency never actually says it. That is, they knew all about the mine's problems with ventilation and gas buildup and danger of explosions well in advance of the explosion that killed 29 people, but they didn't succeed in doing anything about it. This is a case of government that is neither too big nor too little but too fat (apologies to anybody who feels that this line of metaphor is prejudicial to the plump, but I really need it). MSHA was clearly big enough, but it wasn't effective:

War is the immoral equivalent of...

...whatever you want to market as the moral equivalent of war. That's clearly what William James meant in 1906 in the first place, when he was talking about a "war against war" (the idea Woodrow Wilson would later blow up into the Thanksgiving parade balloon of a war to end war). If that isn't what you mean--if you don't mean to suggest that war is immoral, but something like "my idea is the equivalent of war in the moral, as opposed to practical or political or aesthetic, sense", you should stay away from the phrase altogether. So consider yourself warned. Incidentally, note (I saw it in the URL for James's essay) that it has a very cute algorithm* acronym: MEOW.

*Whoever looked at this today (October 2 2012), thanks, I never would have found this bit of aphasia without you.

Morning addition

A cool example of properly sourced evidence that the postulates of Republican geometry just don't correspond to reality surfaced on NPR this morning: the theory says a 2% surtax on personal income over a million dollars will prevent small businesspersons from hiring workers, but in fact you can't find a small businessperson who will be so prevented. Tamara Keith, the reporter, asked numerous senators and representatives and multiple business organizations for an appropriate example, then went on Facebook to look for themselves, but nobody could come up with a single one. NPR did find a couple of qualified millionaires, but they didn't think the tax would have any effect on hiring, and in fact they turned out to be Democrats. Okay, just because you don't know any black swans doesn't prove all swans are white, and this informal inquiry doesn't prove that no such millionaires exist, but I think we know where the burden of proof just went. The Republican theory applies basically to proprietors who report company profits as personal income, and I'm guessing that there really aren't any such people paying themselves a million-dollar salary--if you're picking up that kind of profit you'll surely prefer paying corporate taxes on it.

[edited to note the reporter by name, and then messed with some more because I can't keep my hands off it]

Very good evidence that your Republican brother-in-law is wrong

It often seems as if there isn't any public evidence for the dangerousness of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, like all those farmers whose kitchen sinks turned into torches got gagged as part of their settlement agreements.

One of the things I'd like to do with this blog is to use it as a kind of night depository for the carefully sourced demonstration that things your Republican brother-in-law "knows" to be the case actually aren't, like this story about polluted ground water in a heavily fracked district of Wyoming (a version published today in Bloomberg was picked up by Daily Kos, but it turns out Pro Publica put out a more detailed story three weeks ago):

EPA finds Fracking Fluid Chemicals in Wyoming drinking water

I mean, not for the coherent body of things one is "working on", that you'd want to keep in a properly bibliographical storage system like Zotero, but for those isolated facts of which you may suddenly wish you could remember where they came from.

Upon reconsideration...

I'm afraid I may have sounded a little snarky on the subject of Obama's speech yesterday, especially to anybody who knew that kickin' the gong around is smoking opium--as I certainly did not until I learned it from the inestimable Ricky Riccardi. So, to make up for it...

 This is how I really feel.

Produced by The Contemporary Classical Composers' Bullshit Generator:

The fact that tones tend to (at least in their unified state), tonally influence, even in the presence of a strong perception, is, you will agree, patently absurd. It has been said that those who premiere a device are unable to reject or layer dyads, at least not percussively, but I fundamentally disagree. I have found that extended systems, in combination with unaccompanied aesthetics enable me to fragmentarily perceive brand-new visions in a highly intra-transdisiplinary and extremely Expressionist way. The fact that developments tend to (at least in their microtonal state), semantically abandon, even in the presence of a strong piece, is, you will agree, patently absurd. My fanfare is the only one of its kind, due in part to the inclusion of highly-microtonal orchestration-oscillations, with a hint of so-called 'perception-sources'.

Land's sake, Edwina, you think it's something in the water?

And now Our Andrew appears to have discovered progressive taxation too! Though if you trust him, you might want to have yourself checked out for Williams Syndrome.

Cut off my legs and call me Shorty!

Or maybe "Hey la hey la, your boyfriend's back". I read through the Daily Kos prepared text of Obama's speech looking for the wing-to-wing equivalence part, like, "Nor will it help our nation to have seniors hogging all the health care before they turn 67," but it just wasn't there. I wanted to put up the 1940 Louis Armstrong Cut off my legs and call me Shorty, but YouTube doesn't have it, so I hope this communicates appropriate joy as well:

I say, Pickering, what do you suppose liberals really want?

This, by John Harwood, from back before Thanksgiving, clarified for me something I have never understood about self-denominated "centrists". It is about the meeting held at Tulane to game through the process of creating a deficit reduction plan under the guidance of Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici, representing the bourbon-drinking Ronald-Reagan-and-Tip-O'Neil wings of their respective parties, but it is printed in the ragged right style the Times adopts for things that are not intended to be a factual statement. Anyway, the setup is like this:

Democratic members, whose forebears created the entitlement programs that senior citizens cherish, really don’t want to cut them. But they fear that fiscal sanity requires it.

Han dynasty death trip

Playing chicken.

As it happens, the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin is nothing new in world history, as Francis Fukuyama recounts in his magisterial new book The Origins of Political Order. The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt. Nearly a millennium and a half later, the great Ming dynasty went into protracted decline in part for similar reasons: unable or unwilling to raise taxes on the landed gentry, the government couldn’t pay its soldiers and was overrun by Manchu invaders.

Except...

Except then they'd have to admit that spending is exactly what government is for.

Piece of (constituent) work

Matt Yglesias points out, quite correctly, on the subject of Republican House freshmen scrambling for just the kind of earmarks or lettermarks or fingermarks they have been denouncing with such Robespierrean fervor, that the projects they are trying to fund in their districts are mostly pretty decent ideas that deserve to be funded. Indeed, and let us go a tiny bit further and say that this is what your congresscritter is supposed to be doing for a living. I have never understood the horror expressed by a certain kind of reformist at your congressional earmark. I do understand why it is bad to fund the Bridge to Nowhere, or the project of the person who funds your campaign, with money that your voters are not going to see. But if your voters are going to see it, why not?