Cogitamus

The Issue of Torture is not about its Efficacy

I never really imagined in all of my 49 years on the planet that there would seriously be a debate in the United States about whether it is alright to torture a prisoner.  I don't think of myself as naive or unjaded, but it just always seemed pretty clear to me that American political culture would not sanction the overt use of torture as a legitimate means of intelligence gathering or war fighting.  I can just imagine what the reaction would have been among Americans if the North Vietnamese had said during the Vietnam War -- "of course we are torturing POWs like John McCain.  They are conducting an illegal, undeclared war of aggression on the Vietnamese people, a people that has done them no harm whatsoever; they are using chemical weapons on our citizens, they are indiscriminately dropping massive quantities of ordnance such as cluster bombs in civilian areas -- we need to know everything we can about America's war plans so as to minimize our already horrific civilian casualties."  How well do you think that rationale would have gone over with the American people generally and right wingers specifically?  Well, of course, the wingers would have frothed at the mouth in rage -- but not it turns out over principle, merely over accidents of birth.

Today the Washington Post features yet another screed by the aggressively stupid, disingenuous, and immoral  Marc Thiessen arguing that the torturing (once again using the Orwellian term "enhanced interrogation techniques") of prisoners has been so effective that we cannot possibly give up this weapon in our arsenal.  Thiessen asserts self-justifying, unverifiable McCarthyite claims regarding the efficacy of torture.  Now I am highly skeptical about this -- nothing written by professionals in the field suggests to me that this is true.  (And although markedly different, nothing in my questioning of hundreds of witnesses over the years in legal proceedings leads me to believe that coercive or bullying approaches elicit much useful or truthful information).

But in the end, I think this is not an avenue worthy of argument.  I actually don't give a shit if it's effective.  It's wrong, barbaric, dehumanizing, and altogether unworthy of how a great people and great nation would act.  We don't eschew torture for utilitarian reasons -- we do it based on our deeply held belief in our principles, in the rule of law, the dignity of man, and our shared common humanity.  We don't resist the use of torture because it is the easy thing to do or because we are not under threat or not afraid.  We resist it because we believe at a core level that some principles are sacrosanct even if we may face risk or even death at the hands of fanatics -- we stand by the essential tenet that we mustn't become monsters in order to defeat a monster.

It sickens me at heart that we even have to engage in this discussion. .   .           

Um, Islamic Terrorism Is Right Wing, You Know

Al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization whose members think that homosexualtiy is a sin, that women should not be able to show their faces in public, drive, hold jobs or even venture outside without being accompanied by a close male relative, let alone make their own reproductive choices.  Islamic terrorists want governments to conform to their holy scriptures.  And none of them are ever communists.  In fact, Osama bin Ladin is somewhat of a successful capitalist, is he not?

So it seems to me that not only is it entirely appropriate for the DHS to release a report about the dangers of American right wing extremism, it's entirely appropriate to suggest that almost all terrorism practiced in the world today is right wing terrorism.  Given the damage that the right wing Islamic factions have been able to accomplish, it only makes sense to keep an eye on their ideologically similar Christian counterparts.

And if the country insists upon becoming more secular, Christian extremists will increasingly turn to terrorism.  It's the tool of the alienated and disaffected, and that so many Christian extremists can remember first-hand when their views held sway over the entire country, plus that many millions more of their fellow right wingers are sympathetic to their views and their cause, will only make it that much worse when they do start to lash out in earnest.

Despair Is A Strong Enemy

This post is going to be somewhat fractured.  That's because it's going to reflect my thoughts ever since the torture memos were released and the White House quickly set about proclaiming, by executive order, the official start of the Accountability-Free Era. 

Marc A. Thiessen, yet another former speechwriter for George Bush, has a piece in todays WaPo that sets out to justify US-sponsored terrorism torture on the basis of how those people just believe the cah-rayziest things!

Critics claim that enhanced techniques do not produce good intelligence because people will say anything to get the techniques to stop. But the memos note that, "as Abu Zubaydah himself explained with respect to enhanced techniques, 'brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship." In other words, the terrorists are called by their faith to resist as far as they can -- and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know. This is because of their belief that "Islam will ultimately dominate the world and that this victory is inevitable." The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely.

This is the secret to the program's success. And the Obama administration's decision to share this secret with the terrorists threatens our national security.

"The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely."  Give Thiessen credit for knowing exactly how to tap into and reinforce the belief that all terrorists are Muslims, as well as create an image of a CIA torturer, jumper cables at the hip and towing an Iron Maiden behind him, pausing to help a little old lady cross the street.

The European elections: road-testing new names in French politics

I mentioned the headwind French President Sarkozy is currently experiencing in my post about Chirac below. It is illustrated in the opinion polls about the upcoming elections of the European Parliament in June. I could find two - an Ipsos poll for Le Point conducted on March 13-14, and a poll by Opinionway for Le Figaro, TF1 and LCI that was conducted just last week.

Mind, the actual results of the elections might well diverge from any opinion poll, because the low and volatile turnout usually marking European elections makes predictions precarious. For pollsters, figuring in the erratic turnout is a minefield, and in the end the result might just reflect more which constituencies are most dutiful regarding their civic obligations than any current ups and downs of a party's popularity. This at least is the case in Holland, where Christian-Democrats and the Christian Union far outperform, and the leftwing parties and the far right fall far short of, their support among the overall electorate.

As a measure of which way the public mood is leaning, however, the opinion polls are interesting - for the above reason perhaps even more interesting than the actual result. For the record, though, the two polls do reflect the opinion of those who say they are certain to vote, who in both polls make up 49% of the electorate. (The actual turnout will almost certainly fall significantly short of this number). These are the findings, with the parties arranged by political leanings from (far) left to (far) right:

The primary trait of this political landscape is fragmentation - but what else is new. The polls are especially interesting, however, because so many of the entities vying for the popular vote are new and, in a manner of speaking, using the European elections as a test run for their new, revamped identity. As Le Point, um, pointed out last month:*

[T]he stakes of the upcoming European elections paradoxically have more to do with Paris than Brussels. The European Parliament still has little power, and the French delegates will not fundamentally change the configuration of political groups in the parliamentary body. In France, on the other hand, the vote will have important consequences: for each of the parties, the result of the list it is backing might lead to new power struggles in the future.

The most interesting horse race is not necessarily that between the two big parties, the UMP [President Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement] and the PS [Socialist Party]. Certainly the score of the presidential party [..] will impact the credibility of Nicolas Sarkozy. If he falls victim to a massively negative vote like the Raffarin government suffered in 2004 [..], his ability to continue his reform politics [will be] hamstrung. [Socialist Party leader] Martine Aubry also plays with high stakes. The vote [..] is her first electoral test. If she does much less well than the party's dream score from last time (29%), "comrades" in search for revenge will make sure to question her legitimacy. But as always in the run-up to the European elections, it's the "little" parties who will attract the attention, as they play all or nothing.

[T]hree medium-sized forces are competing with each other around the 10% mark: the New Anti-Capitalist Party of Olivier Besancenot, the Greens of Daniel Cohn-Bendit [and] the MoDem of François Bayrou. Those three will not just take votes away from the UMP and especially the PS, but shape the landscape of the next presidential elections.

Most of the action, in this regard, plays out on the left and in the centre.

Private industry trumps government fail

I was listening to a report on NPR tonight where they let Newt Gingrich whinge about using statistical sampling methods to determine population demographics for the census. His problem is that they're not counting every single head but using time-tested methods of estimation. The reporter says that it really wouldn't be worth sending a census worker to every single doorstop (or very feasible), and Newt replies that private companies like FedEx go to every single address in the nation. Okay, well, so? If FedEx could keep a satisfied customer base without delivering all of the packages it's paid to, wouldn't market forces obligate them to let a few packages slip through the cracks? Newt can't make a satisfying argument against good sampling methods, so he plays on fears about non-white minorities as an increasing proportion of the American population. The Republican argument against efficient and accurate sampling methods clearly says, "But by God, if you miss one white family, you'll mischaracterize the entire nation!" I'm pretty sure that Newt's been through high school, and that he damn well knows he's being disingenuous. The wide-eyed Republican who doesn't trust your high-falutin' expertise is getting pretty old, and totally transparent.

Impeach (and Disbar) Jay Bybee

I sat at my desk and did my work - Adolph Eichmann

I was pleased to see that the New York Times is calling for the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee of the United States Court of Appeals for the NInth Circuit.   Bybee is a former Assistant Attorney General under George W. Bush who authored memos justifying the torturing of prisoners in the "war on terror." I've just read one of the memos in its entirety and it is truly appalling -- classic amoral, sanitized, legal bureaucratese, utterly removed from its human consequences and deliberately obtuse with respect to the actual practices being engaged in and the state of the law governing them.

Waterboarding is torture plain and simple and has been so held by clear American legal authority.  Mr. Bybee's memo makes no mention of this fact nor does it in any way indicate that there is precedent to consider the practice torture, something he could have discovered with a rudimentary google search. 

He was rewarded for being a good and loyal soldier to the regime with a lifetime sinecure on what has long been characterized as America's most liberal federal court of appeals.   (No doubt another fuck you to liberals by George W.)

Government lawyers have an ethical duty to uphold the law and to serve the American people and Constitution, not simply the wishes of their political masters.  A judge has the even higher duty of administering justice impartially, without fear or favor.  It is apparent that Mr. Bybee lacks the minimum level of integrity or basic human decency necessary to sit on the bench. 

The Times is correct - Congress should take immediate steps to impeach him and a complaint should be filed against him with the bar to have his license revoked.  It is time for people other than low level enlisted service personnel to be held to account for these crimes committed in our collectve name. . 

Don't speak ill of the retired - Jacques Chirac is finally popular

Jacques Chirac was always a less than wholly embraced President.

He arrived to the office only after a sharp and protracted intraparty fight with Edouard Balladur. He was plagued by a succession of revelations and legal cases that identified him as the chief force behind elaborate kickback schemes and widespread corruption during his terms as mayor of Paris. Cases that he dealt with by simply refusing to testify, invoking the harm it would do to the Presidency (he was eventually granted presidential immunity from prosecution).

His ambitiously conservative program of tax cuts and austerity measures stranded on massive strikes in the first year of his Presidency. They were buried when he called early parliamentary elections two years into his first term to provide a bigger mandate for the reforms, and they were instead won by the left.

The relative weakness of his Presidencies was reflected in his election results. Both in 1995 and in 2002, he achieved his goal only after an anemic performance in the first round. In fact, his first-round results were the worst two performances by any elected President in the Fifth Republic.

In 1995 he barely made it into the run-off with 21% of the first-round vote. While the various right-wing candidates pooled 59% in the first round, Chirac defeated his socialist opponent with just 53% of the vote in the run-off.

His reelection in 2002 was even more lackluster. Running as incumbent, Chirac received just 20% of the vote in the first round. He might have vindicated himself with a persuasive victory in a one-on-one battle with the left, but he never got the chance. With the leftwing vote splintering among eight candidates, it was instead the far-right demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen who made it into the run-off. Chirac won it with an overwhelming margin, but with left-wing and centrist voters turning out en masse to vote for him with revulsion only to stop Le Pen, the lasting image was that of a flawed candidate who was elected merely as the lesser evil.

Language is the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl

Via comments on different Reddit threads, a delightful and hilarious double bill on language - if you're into that kind of thing. (I am.)

This video, mocking the "meaningless, guttural sounds" of the Danish language, is (the YouTube description says) from a Norwegian TV show called Uti Vår Hage:

This video, meanwhile, is from a somewhat ancient A Bit of Fry and Laurie episode - recall that bygone fixture on the evening program? The visual quality is admittedly shopworn, but the words still string together like a caravanserai of radioactive fava beans on the prowl:

They Are To Be Pitied. And Mocked, Don't Forget Mocked.

Nate Silver is currently estimating the total number of teabaggers on Wednesday at somewhere over 300,000 people.  Ezra is a bit impressed by this, saying

My sense of the Tea Parties is that they were really about the conservative opposition standing up and defining itself as such. That's a strange transition to make after eight years of power and this seemed like an almost ritualized method of accepting it.

This is, I think, more of what conservative media and interest groups are trying to sell than actual reality.  The problem is that 300,000 can sound like a lot, and we can be sure that Nate's estimate will be much lower than those proffered by the teabaggers themselves. 

So let's have some context, shall we:

• 1,800,000 Americans think the moon landing was faked.
• 54,000,000 Americans think the sun revolves around the earth.
• From the same poll, 72,000,000 Americans think that the US won its independence from France or another country, or had no answer at all.
• Back in 2002, 21,000,000 Americans still believed that Elvis is alive.

America has 300,000,000 people in it.  The 300,000 people who may have attended these silly teabaggings represent 1/10 of 1 percent of the American population.  Pick any belief, any activity, no matter how far-fetched, how exotic or fringe it may be, and you'll be able to find more than 300,000 people who subscribe to it.  Since protests are a regular occurrence every single April 15th, and since these top-down organized events had more than their fair share of politicians and paid staffers from conservative organizations, the number of people who can be described as newly outraged at their government's profligacy with their taxes is an even more pathetic number.

These teabaggings were not the moment that the conservative movement found its message or unifying cause.  They were not the point at which opposition to Obama finally coalesced into a real movement.  Instead, they were just another failed attempt by out-of-touch consultants and other corporate types to manufacture a grassroots movement.  If all they can manage is a little over 300,000 people - a significant portion of whom were going to turn out to protest anyway because that's just what they do on April 15th - then the message here is that the GOP is still completely rudderless, leaderless and without vision of any kind.  Their moneyed interests and consultants still have no clue about what resonates with the overwhelming majority of Americans. 

It does, however, make me look forward to their next stunt.  If this didn't work, after all, they'll have to up the ante and make it even sillier.

My turn as a patriot

Pity the poor tea-bag patriots of America. All they want to do is protest Obama's policies in a totally reasonable and not-at-all-racist way, but the liberal media won't give them a fair chance.

I know exactly how they feel. You see, not too long ago me and some friends decided to organize a nationwide day of action against the Harper government's telecom policies. Because we feel that the current policies are hurting Canadian companies like Research in Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, we were going to call it "RIM Day". But, some of my compatriots use iPhones too, so to honour the ailing CEO of Apple we decided on "RIM-Jobs day". Pamphlets were printed, faxes were sent.

And the reaction of the MSM? Silence where there wasn't ridicule. Clearly, the Canwest-CTV conspiracy to support Harper extends far and wide.

I tried to explain how serious we RIM-Jobsers are, and a reporter at a major daily wouldn't even stop laughing to hear me out. I tell you, the rise of the Army of Davids can't come soon enough.

So I'm not surprised you didn't hear about the RIM-Jobs day of action -- the media blackout was pretty complete. But we're still here, waiting for the right moment to really stick it to the man. And we will.

********

Shit, my parents are going to read this.

North Korea Does This All The Time

North Korea's government is not erratic.  It is not irrational.  It knows exactly what it's doing, and contra the standard take on their actions, their goal is not "hoping that wild gambits will provoke wild counteractions that disrupt the coalition against it."

Their recent missile test is entirely predictable, and I can only hope that the response from the White House, UN and other usual players was just moving the plot along.

First, the USA has a new president.  It's expected that North Korea would shoot off a missile or do some other provocative act.  I moved to South Korea in August 1998, two days before North Korea tested the first of its long-range missiles.  It too flew over Japan before falling into the Pacific, and the resulting panic cost me around $100 in a less-advantageous exchange rate because I waited a few days to deposit a reimbursement check.  In February of that year, Kim Dae Jung had started his term as President of South Korea.

Second, they're probably hungry.  Whenever the latest shipments of food start to run out, North Korea gets aggressive.  It's a way to get all the players back at the negotiating table.  Getting everyone into a tizzy is just North Korea's way of making sure that negotiations happen according to their timetable. 

Everyone plays along with it because North Korea does present a danger to South Korea and to lesser extents Japan and China.  In addition, the inevitable backing down and concessions from their belligerent pose can be spun as diplomatic success in each of the six nations - North Korea, Japan, China, South Korea, Russia and the USA - giving political cover for shipments of food and technological aid.  Since I know that sanctions tend to only punish the nation's poorest and most vulnerable while giving its government a rallying cry, I fully support this sequence of events, at least until someone figures out how to topple the North Korean government and (truly) liberate its people. 

It's All Connected

Two articles:  one is about the effects of this recession on workers without college or high-school degrees, and the other is about the amount of pollution caused by commercial shipping.

The first article shows how, despite media coverage which might give a different impression, this recession is affecting the lower end of the education and economic scale far more than other groups - just like every other recession.  While the Wall Street Journal doesn't give precious op-ed inches for high-school dropouts and construction workers to throw pity parties, the plain fact is that

despite Wall Street’s woes, financial service industry professionals remain among the most employed sectors of the economy, which makes it easy to understand popular anger at the financial industry bailout. The unemployment rate for people who work in finance is 6.8 percent, substantially below the national average.

In addition,

The overall unemployment rate for the more educated is only 4.3 percent. Individuals with a high school degree, but no college, have a 10 percent unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted). The unemployment rate for high school dropouts is 15.5 percent. Moreover, the unemployment rate gap between the most- and least-skilled is widening, not narrowing. Between February and March, the unemployment rate for college graduates increased by one-tenth of a percentage point. Among high school dropouts, the unemployment rate increased by four-tenths of a point.

 Occupational patterns tell the same story. The unemployment rate for professionals is 3.9 percent. The unemployment rate for “production occupations” is 14.9 percent.

Let's hold on to these figures for a moment.  The second article details how commercial shipping contributes far more pollution than was previously thought, almost twice earlier estimates.  According to a recent NOAA study,

Globally, commercial ships emit almost half as much particulate matter pollutants into the air as the total amount released by the world’s cars. . .Since more than 70 percent of shipping traffic takes place within 250 miles of the coastline, this is a significant health concern for coastal communities.

According to an earlier article about this study, commercial shipping is expected to grow between two and six percent each year.  This is actually in line with expected growth in the number of vehicles.  What this means is that we need to be worried about commercial shipping in similar measure to how worried we are about cars. 

There is a definite link between the disproportionate economic hardship suffered by unskilled workers and the huge amount of pollution created by worldwide commercial shipping.  The United States is not a nation of producers, it's a nation of consumers.  We don't make much of anything, at least not compared to what we used to do.  We've turned into a nation where those without college degrees have fewer and fewer opportunities to find decent-paying jobs for good, honest labor.  There should be no stigma to working with one's hands.  There should be no expectation that those who don't, or who can't go to college - or increasingly, graduate school - will need to be satisfied with living in poverty until they finally die at their jobs. 

If we want to build a solid economy, we need to reopen our factories and start making things again.  We need to stop importing cheap garbage disguised as shiny electronics and durable goods.  The factories owned by American companies in foreign countries are guilty of double crimes; they take away good jobs from Americans and they exploit corrupt and/or ineffective governments and their lack of safety and wage laws. 

American corporations - which have the privileges of individuals but, it seems, none of the responsibilities - use peasant laborers in dictatorships to make things and then ship them here in huge ships spewing soot and sludge the entire way.  Then they load those goods onto diesel trucks and trains and ship them all over the country to be sold to and by people who are being conditioned to think that $10/hr with no benefits is a good job.  At every step of the way people are abused and exploited and the environment suffers.  At every step of the way the executives and shareholders are the only considerations, the only ones that matter. 

It's gotten so bad that call-centers are being outsourced and people see that as a bad thing.  As if working at a call-center wasn't such an exercise in hellish torture that Dante would have thrown his pens and manuscripts away.  As if sitting in a cubicle getting abused by bosses and customers alike for 8 hours a day - often for 8 bucks an hour - isn't a sign of the complete breakdown of civilization.  No, we've found people willing to put up with such torture for even less money, so now call-centers are treated like good jobs.  How far we've fallen that we used to worry about factory jobs at which people could make $50K, $60K or more being lost to foreign workers, and now we worry about jobs being lost which pay less than $20K a year.

And every recession becomes just another excuse to put the squeeze on American workers.  Never mind that reducing our reliance on people's ability to buy poorly-made and toxic knick-knacks from China and increasing our ability to provide for ourselves would help to insulate our economy from the fevered schemes of Wall Street crooks.  No, the recession caused by moneyed interests will be used by moneyed interests to drive the wedge between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, skilled and unskilled ever deeper. 

It's the hedge fund managers, the Wall Street traders, the CEOs that outsource and union bust, the consultants who time how long people should use the bathroom, everyone that thinks salaries are unfortunate, perhaps even unnecessary expenses, these are the people who are doing this to us.  They're killing us economically and killing the environment almost as a side hobby. 

The thing is, I get it when the right wingers call for revolution.  In fact, I'd say things are almost bad enough to justify their feelings, and for those on the right wing whose lives have been destroyed by the current recession I'd say there is full justification.  What I don't get and cannot endorse is how they've convinced themselves that the problem is blacks on welfare and in the White House.  They think gay marriage and dildos and rainbow parties are the cause of our economic woes.  Matt Taibbi calls this the peasant mentality, and he's exactly right.

You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish… can’t be mad at AIG, can’t be mad at Citi or Goldman Sachs. The real villains have to be the anti-AIG protesters! After all, those people earned those bonuses! If ever there was a textbook case of peasant thinking, it’s struggling middle-class Americans burned up in defense of taxpayer-funded bonuses to millionaires. It’s really weird stuff. And bound to get weirder, I imagine, as this crisis gets worse and more complicated.

Of course the teabag parties are choreographed by rightwing media and organizations.  The members of the economic elite aren't going to just hope that Americans will keep attacking all the wrong targets.  They're going to invest some of their billions in making sure that around 30-50% of the country is in a complete tizzy about other things - anything, be it sharks, missing white women, gays in the military or France.

Someday, though, it won't work anymore.  And as cowardly as this may be, on that day I hope I'm far away or long gone.

Teabaggers: Idiots, Wastes Of Perfectly Good Oxygen

Not real teabaggers, mind you; that's not anyone's business.  It's you vapid, oblivious morons who don't even get the joke that I'm talking about.

You're stupid.  The original Boston Tea Party was about taxation without representation.  You not only have representation at the local, county, state and federal levels, most of today's dumb little demonstrations will have a couple of those representatives in attendance.  For blithering idiots like you, though, it's not about representation or democracy.  It's about getting what you want when you want it, no matter what anyone else in the country wants. 

You're protesting federal income taxes, but, drooling idiots that you are, you don't even have the intellectual capacity to understand that your federal income tax "burden" isn't very much at all.  If you pay more than 5-8% of your annual income in federal income tax, you deserve it.  And since the truly rich in this country won't be bothered to rub shoulders with people who have the intelligence and social graces of boiled slugs, it's a sucker's bet that the federal government gets 15% of your income in FICA taxes.  If you're old enough to have been adults during Reagan's disastrous tenure in the White House - and it's indeed an accomplishment that you've managed to remember how to breathe this long - then it's all but guaranteed that you cheered on his tax "cuts" while completely ignoring how he orchestrated the most massive tax increase in American history, which is why you pay so much in Social Security.  That you still get visibly aroused at the mention of that bastard's name is just another in a long, sad line of reasons why it would be a blessing to the universe if you simply ceased to exist.

Oh, and Reagan had higher tax rates than Obama's, too, you pitiful collection of mental deficients with the brain power of particularly low-grade gravel. 

I've been looking at the schedules for these stupid tax protests, and most of them are this evening.  Which means that after you knock off from your office job, you'll get into your SUV, pick up the kids and get some McDonald's on the way to the protest.  You might stop off at one of the 15 different grocery or 20 different drugstores you're sure to pass on your way to the protest.  Most of you will drive alone, and some of you will have one parent go protest the complete destruction of our economy by Obama while the other one takes the kids to their dance or karate lessons.  And after you get done waving signs that make no sense while protesting something that's a better deal than any Republican president or Congress has ever given you, you'll head off to Starbucks or someplace to get coffee and dessert and commiserate with your fellow protesters at how bad off you all are for having to pay any taxes at all.

You're so pathetic that normal stupid people make fun of you.  Any success you've ever had is just an anomaly, the result of your idiot-savant-like ability to be good at one or perhaps two things while failing miserably at every other standard of what it means to be a human being.   I swear to God, Agent Smith was right:  you are a virus.  You're a particularly bad lower-intestinal bug that makes everyone with whom you come in contact to curse their very existence.  You contribute nothing valuable or positive to this world.  You consume everything you come in contact with and quite a bit you never even see.  You leave a trail of destruction stretching back to the dismal day on which you slithered out of the womb. 

At least with viruses, though, after they wreck my gastrointestinal system they have the good graces to not audibly complain about how the situation is somehow all my fault when they finally circle the drain in the toilet bowl.  Good graces, it must be said, that you lack in spades.

I wish we could have a searchable database of everyone dumb enough to non-ironically attend one of these farces today.  That way I could see if anyone in my circle of friends is actually too stupid, too self-centered, too bent on getting ahead at the expense of everyone else to actually be counted as an acquaintance, or worse, a friend of mine. 

Most of all, I wish that for the first time in your sad lives you would actually show some courage.  I wish you'd suddenly find the ability to shut your damn mouths for one minute and take concrete action that was in line with your supposed convictions.  I wish to God that you would actually take your ball and go home.  Leave.  Form utopias that are completely unconnected to the rest of us.  Take a state - hell, take Kansas.  I don't mind moving, and I'll even help build the wall you'll mistakenly think will be necessary to keep the riffraff out.  It's a pretty rectangular state, so the wall would be straightforward.  And I would even mind giving you free passage through the real world whenever you need it, so long as you promise to not stay, you don't drive 50 in the fast lane, and you keep your mouths shut while you spend your decreasing supplies of money.

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litbrit adds:

 

Get me Peggy Noonan, Stat!

I need Our Lady of the Dolphins to explain why our cute little bottle-nosed friends are coming to the aid of them heathen Red Chinese instead of rescuing American ships crewed by God fearing Americans from the pirates. 

Little Of This, Little Of That

Here's a couple of not-very-deep thoughts. . .

- It's sadly typical that conservatives are trying to make the hostage situation near Somalia into an issue.  At first Obama was being too weak and encouraging the pirates - here's a good post explaining why it's dumb to call them "terrorists" - but after the situation was resolved using military force, Obama was accused of trying to wrongly claim credit.

The thing is, though, that hostage rescue operations happen all over the world every single day.  FARC in Columbia is especially prolific, holding hundreds of hostages at any one time, and hostage-taking is a problem in Mexico and several other Central and South American nations.  Same thing all across Africa, Asia, the Middle East.  It's part of life in developing nations, which makes the big deal we've made out of this one incident another example of how insulated Americans are from the hardships the majority of the world faces every day.

At any rate, there's plenty of practice for American soldiers to do this type of thing.  They cooperate with soldiers from other governments all the time, which is precisely why we don't hear about it.  The soldiers who freed Captain Phillips are to be congratulated, but it's for a job well done, not for becoming superheroes all of the sudden.

- I don't like to blame people for the nuts that show up uninvited to protests and vigils.  But I also don't think the white supremacist movement is wrong for noticing that the public teabaggings of recent weeks are attended by almost exclusively white people.  Hey, I report, you decide, right?

- Ezra has some nifty tax graphs and explanations that can help you understand what people are talking about when they try to stick up for those poor little rich people who pay so much to the government.  I used to try to think of good reasons for a progressive tax code.  Now I just figure that the rich should pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes because Fuck You, Assholes.

"United by a Shared Intolerance, to Protect Dual-Sex Marriage."

Awesome. Via Watertiger.

Teabagging The Taxman Doesn't Make Him Shoot You A Bigger Refund

I need to do my taxes today.  Or tomorrow.  Hell, the post office is open until 11:59pm on Wednesday, amiright?  I mostly did them back in January to see what the damages were, and I'm damn proud of the result:  we owe $95 to the feds.  Last year we got a $3400 refund.  It's fun to get a big refund, but it's more fun to not give interest-free loans.

I wonder how many teabaggers brag about the size of their refunds each year, considering them to be free money?  Anyway, anyone else still need to do their taxes?  Got any stories you want to share?

Yay Us

Today brings two excellent examples of why liberal blogs matter:

1. Paul Krugman has column fodder.  If you've held any doubt that Krugman is an avid blog reader, today's NYT column should put that to rest.  It's possible that he would have been able to find out so much about the GOP's public teabagging fetish, and it's possible that he would care enough about them to write a column about it.  But ISTM that it's unlikely for both to occur without the influence of the liberal blogosphere. 
2. Rick Warren bailed on ABC's This Week due to "exhaustion."  The problem with that excuse is that it's usually employed when publicists don't want to openly admit their client is on the tail end of a 3-day drug-n-booze bender.  In Reverend Warren's case, I'll be gracious and just assume that he's simply not smart enough to wriggle his way out of the mess he put himself in with his lies.  Without the liberal blogosphere, no one would care enough to make sure that things such as Warren's public endorsement of Proposition 8 are arhived on YouTube.  Nor would anyone care enough to make a stink about Warren's attempt to bring hypocrisy to new and daring heights.  I'd be remiss to not congratulate fundamentalist Christian bloggers and organizations; they're purveyors of hate, but at least they expect a little bit of integrity from those who belong to their Hate Caucus.  Ultimately that makes our job easier.

All Religion Is Plagiarized From Oog And Ugg

Look, Christianity has been around for 2,000 years.  At some point it would be nice if people would stop trying to suggest it's a Johnny-come-lately.

Further, while I have no problem talking about myth in relation to Christianity - it's merely a technical term, after all - there are fundamental differences between Christianity and those religions which are more commonly referred to as "myths."  Simply being able to say that some other religious belief that predates Jesus also has a resurrection story doesn't mean that a group of people got together and decided to cobble together a super-religion so they could take over the Roman Empire and ultimately spit out an army of James Dobsons.

With Ishtar, or Osiris -  or really, with Baal and Asherah, those two making much more sense as precursers to the Christian resurrection story because the Baal/Asherah worshipers became part of the people we call the ancient Hebrews - people looked at the world and used religious imagery to explain what they saw.  Baal and Asherah have lots of sex, the rain being Baal's semen.  If you piss him off, he's going to get kinky with Asherah and start bringing lightning and such into the bedroom, and we don't want to be around when that climax happens, so let's get on with the chanting and the sacrifices and such.

With Jesus, people said that they saw him.  You can say that they were trying to understand special feelings they felt about Jesus and a sense of a continued presence or you can say they were a bunch of liars.  But what you can't say is that they were religious scholars - or scholars of any kind - who used their vast knowledge of world religions to pick and choose what they thought were the best parts in order to create a new religion out of whole cloth.  Pretty much no religion, not even a cult, starts this way.  It's also important to understand that we have a much better understanding of what the Babylonians believed than a bunch of semi-literate Jewish peasants in the middle of the 1st century CE.  It's well established that Judaism's response to its exposure to the aforesaid Babylonians was to become extremely insular and, for the first time in their history, wholly monotheistic as we understand the term.  And that happened a few centuries before Jesus came around.  The Jews of that period would have a passing knowledge of the Greek/Roman religions, but that's it.

As for the timing of Easter, it coincides with Passover.  The main imagery for Jesus at Easter is as the sacrificial lamb.  None of that has anything to do with fertility myths at all, and if Easter doesn't count as old enough, perhaps Passover can lend it a few millennia of legitimacy.

As for the resurrection taking the oomph out of the sacrifice, that's only if you believe that it was a foregone conclusion.  If you take seriously the idea that Jesus didn't intend to die on the cross, but that we human beings murdered the Son of God without it being God's plan from the very beginning, then Easter weekend gets a little tense.  God wasn't finishing the final acts of his little play, he was spending some time wondering what to do with to us. 

Elements of fertility myths have found their way into Easter celebrations - though Christians were coloring eggs red because of traditions about Mary Magdalene long before rabbits ever got involved. It is not, however, based on fertility myths or even other resurrection stories, because that would require us to read back into the history of Christianity knowledge and sophistication the early Christians simply didn't have.

Something cute to go with the whole bunnies-and-easter eggs holiday spirit

"The Most Adorable Social Experiment Ever", as the HuPo bills it, may be something of an overstatement, but it's certainly cute.

Tisch School of the Arts student Kacie Kinzer decides to "create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it"; builds a small, cute robot (or "tweenbot") that can only move forward; and releases it in Washington Square Park with a flag on its head saying "help" and announcing its intended destination. Result: "whether or not the tweenbot got there depended upon strangers guiding it past obstacles like trash ditches, guard rails, and other NYU students."

Did it work?

Of course, if you're more into dark humour for the holidays, you can always just go for The Easter Bunny Hates You ("the Easter Bunny in all his violent glory").

Easter

Jesus told a story:

There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country. When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.” So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They said to him, ‘He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.

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Five days later, Church officials acting in concert with cynical and indifferent government officials had Jesus put to death.  The miracle and message of Easter is that the people who heard Jesus tell the above story got it completely wrong.

Ask any two Cogitamus authors and/or commenters what they believe and you'll get three answers.  But I think I can safely say that we are all fans of redemption stories.  We all think love is a better choice than either hate or apathy, no matter how good we may be at choosing it.  We all think that the world not only needs to be redeemed, but that it's worth it.  So whether you do your redemption work in the name of Jesus, some other deity or none at all, the point is to do it.  The good news is that you don't have to do it alone.

Happy Easter.

Saturday Night Something or Other

"This Year" - The Mountain Goats

One of my favorites by one of my favorites.  Slightly bizarre video is fun too.   

Stuck between some very huge rocks and a hard place

Nepalis, Manjushree Thapa reports for openDemocracy, are stuck in an uncomfortable, chaotic transition, a year after the country's ruling monarchy was toppled and democratic elections took place. They are grappling with "a cynical Maoist government, disarrayed parties, rival armies, a racked economy [and] ethnic and caste divisions" rending the country apart.

The article is well worth the read, nuanced and meaty. (Even if it takes a moment to realise that a party called the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) is actually the moderate force in government.)

Some of the forces driving the development seem unnervingly familiar. The struggle for authority between the state's official Nepal army and the governing Maoists' own Liberation Army is vaguely reminiscent of the "dual power" in Kerensky's Russia in 1917, when the Provisional Government and the Soviets existed and governed alongside each other. But the closer parallel seems to be with the years directly after the end of WW2, in those Central-European countries where the communists were not immediately able to establish a dictatorship.

The bark and the bite: random roundup

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili has gotten himself in some hot water over his use of an unusual celebrity masseuse. The NYT's news blog covers all angles, serious and less serious.

They include the use of the controversy by Saakashvili's plentiful opponents, both domestically and abroad - the video from the Russian government's mouthpiece Russia Today is a treat of sorts - but also the particulars of Dr. Dot's specialties and her outspoken blog.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi keeps puzzling and aggravating his colleagues abroad, Alexander Stille notes at TNR:

Only a few days after the "Meester Obama" episode, Berlusconi embarrassed German Chancellor Angela Merkel by emerging from his limousine for an official visit while talking on his cell phone as she waited on a red carpet to greet him. He turned his back on her and talked for several minutes as she stood there with her hand out, until, finally, with obvious annoyance, she gave up and went inside.

"What makes Silvio Berlusconi say the ridiculous things he says?," asks Stille, and provides a colourful yet concise introduction to Berlusconi the phenomenon, his personality and his place in Italian politics. Those who have followed Berlusconi's rise and dogged persistence as Italy's powerful prima donna won't find anything new, but it's a good read for anyone who could do with a refresher.

Commenter Teplukhin adds a good characterisation too: "Berlusconi was the first of our era's northern hemisphere oligarchs. He represents, in almost ideal type fashion, the haute 1990s fusion of state power and arbitraging of state assets and pseudo-free markets for personal economic gain that became the model for Russia under Yeltsin".

On a final, sad random note, these kids deserve hellfire. What a maddening story. Life has a way of doling out immeasurable suffering - and human beings have a way of then twisting the knife. For the sheer heck of it.

Many people have no idea how hard life is on a day-to-day basis when your head is messed up; and the callous cruelty with which people are willing to torpedo whatever fragile grip you have comes in endless manifestations. In this case, in the form of two kids in their early 20s shooting random neighbourhood dogs:

[Marcus Luttrell] is the lone SEAL team member to survive a June 2005 firefight with the Taliban in Afghanistan and was given a puppy  to help him heal after he returned from the war. He named it Dasy as an acronym for his SEAL team members lost in that battle.

Luttrell [..] heard a gunshot on the night of April 1, checked on his mom inside the house and then went outside where he saw Dasy. "I could tell she tried to get away because there was a blood trail," Luttrell said. "When I saw she was dead, the only thing that popped into my head was, 'I’ve got to take these guys out.'" [..]

In his phone interview, Luttrell said he had left his Huntsville home and was in "the middle of nowhere." He added that Dasy's killing was a huge setback in his life. "I was trying to talk myself out of being who I am," he told the Chronicle. "Talking to myself about not doing the one thing I am good at."

And yes she said yes I will Yes

Amanda has one of those posts up at TPM that is both obvious, necessary, and all too rare.  She makes the simple case for those of us on the left to remember to talk about sex and the pleasure it brings as a good in and of itself, not simply in terms of sound public health measures or something that needs to be discussed as a (slightly negative) inevitability.  One of the casualties of having to fight against the essential craziness of right wingers and neo-puritans over the last twenty or so years has been the case for hedonism, the pursuit of non-commodified pleasure unrelated to human profit or productivity (or reproductivity for that matter).  The quest for consensual, mutual erotic pleasure, be it in a relationship, a one night stand, or a particularly fortuitous lunch hour, is something we should not fear to endorse and embrace. 

(As opposed say to celebrations of non-consensual sex with the unconscious - ugh.)