For Easter Weekend......

America's appetite for military hardware and (to a lesser extent) military intervention seems to track a similar pattern as an individual addicted to drugs or alcohol. The more one consumes, the less effective it is at solving the problem it attempts to address but the only choice that seems open is to simply consume more. We need at some point to break the cycle.

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It's now clear that anyone who thought that a vote for Obama could accomplish that was seriously mistaken.

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Salon Letters

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(link provided as evidence that I harbored no such expectations....)

Fermilab Makes Major Find: Shuts Down in September

This:

Fermilab Makes Major Find: Shuts Down Sept.

Reminded me of this:

Robert R. Wilson


In 1969, Wilson was called to justify the multimillion-dollar machine to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Bucking the trend of the day, Wilson emphasized it had nothing at all to do with national security, rather:

It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

Sad but True

I happen to think that the mental machinery that drives schoolyard antics and the one that drives Statecraft happens to be identical. Thats why watching Statecraft play out so often resembles a slow-moving train-wreck. You can see clear as day what is happening but remain powerless to stop it.

The Business of Business

I've always held that the fundamental problem with the US economy is that all the manufacturers who moved their operations overseas and the Big Box retailers who drove small businesses out of business by offering cheap products produced overseas utterly failed to realize that the same people they were avoiding paying labor costs to were their customer base! Easy Consumer credit only managed to mask the problem long enough for everyone to fail to see the direct cause and effect.

That's why the pathetic attempts to blame public sector Unions are so lame. We're all in this together and the failure to recognize this simple fact is leading to quite avoidable tragedy.

Until then

As soon as we've amassed 150 thousand troops in Tunisia, let me know. Then we can begin comparing Libya to Iraq. Until then............

Deficit? What Deficit?

I happened to see 10 minutes of CNN today (Bank line). They spent all sorts of time speculating on what effect turning over operations to NATO would have on the odds of the USA getting stuck in a long term conflict. Not one word was spent on odds of the USA getting stuck with the bill.

Reposted where I can find it

Interestingly Meltdown provided us with a perfect example of how Fox news cherrypicks research results to come to precisely the opposite conclusion as the study's authors.

Compare:

Muslim Americans reject Islamic extremism by larger margins than do Muslim minorities in Western European countries. However, there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others. Fewer native-born African American Muslims than others completely condemn al Qaeda. In addition, younger Muslims in the U.S. are much more likely than older Muslim Americans to say that suicide bombing in the defense of Islam can be at least sometimes justified. Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world.

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With:

The study found that among the nation's younger Muslims, 26 percent say homicide bombings can at least rarely be justified "in order to defend Islam from its enemies."

So a subset of a subset of the sample answered the question wrong.

Specifically:

Overall, 8% of Muslim Americans say
suicide bombings against civilian targets tactics
are often (1%) or sometimes (7%) justified in the
defense of Islam.

Troubling? Indeed.

A reason to attack Islam as a religion and spend hours in public forums explaining how evil it's practitioners are? Not so much.......

Perspective

One of the things I've noticed as I've grown older is that events happened in the distant past, counterintuitively seem more recent and pertinent. When i was in high school, it seemed that anything happened before the Kennedy assasination was in a different world. Now I can not only see clearly the ways we're still "fighting the civil war" but, in the current populations of the western Hemishpere, see the results of migration patterns that were laid out in the fifteen hundreds.

This perspective is helpful because it helps remind us that things we now all agree are "unthinkable" like slavery and naziism are really NOT all that far removed from our current era. We're still nowhere near as civilized as we give oursleves credit for.

Wisconsin

It pays to remember that we are just now witnessing the second shoe dropping on the long-term 'starve the beast' strategy. All the whining you hear about "there's no money", "We're broke" and "the spending is unsustainable" are a direct result of the decade long mantra of 'cutting taxes will grow the economy" and "It doesn't make sense to punish our most productive sector". The fact that cutting taxes didn't grow the economy and that corporations have been particularly stingy in the "job creation" even though profits are at pre-recession levels reminds us that if we let the Republicans get their way, we'll be right back to the stagnation that marked the Bush years (only with a higher baseline of unemployment.)

Blaming public sector workers for what's wrong with our economy is a particularly brazen crock but apparently there's no shortage of people willing to play along.

On Religion:

The number of Creators of The Universe is somewhere between zero and one. At some point we're all going to have to learn to share..........

Someone somwhere.

It never ceases to amaze me how much the notion that someone somwhere is getting something they don't deserve drives 90% of our discourse.

Re: Iraq

For me, the number 1 lesson of Iraq remains, "A large number of people believing something to be true does not constitute evidence in its favor"
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Any time anyone defends a propostion based on it's popularity, we can point to Saddam's WMD's for instant refutation.

On a discussion about the "Ground Zero Mosque"

It's threads like these that remind me that for many people, religion isn't about worshiping the Creator of the Universe but rather just identifying who you're supposed to hate. I have news. The number of Creators of the Universe is somewhere between zero and one. At some point, we're going to have to learn to share.

Original link has gone bad.

I've always kept a link to John Ashcroft's diatribe against the clipper chip, because it serves as a healthy reminder that the desire to spy on people is a fully bipartisan impulse. That link no longer works but here's a copy:

http://www.badattitudes.com/AshWeb.html

Re: any time Israel/Palastine comes up.......

I just enjoy how the same entity can be a fierce aggressor with no moral compunction whatsoever and a whimpering powerless victim cowering before it's enemies simultaneously. (Notice that I don't even need to specify which entity I could be referring to)
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Just another demonstration of the irrelevance of reality when it comes to tribal/political debates.

Re: BP CEO "I Want My Life Back"

Just as I ask those who insist that "the government is inherently inefficient" to look at the lines of accountability to determine why they might think that and to identify where the real problems lie, we can perform the same exercise on BP. There were problems with the well that caused significant concerns among personnel there. But the lines of accountability, the determination of what sort of behavior is rewarded and what sort of behavior is punished, determined that the best course of action was to shove the problems under the rug.
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The nature of Corporate organization almost guarantees the response. Would the CEO have approved had he been informed? Probably not. That's why he wasn't informed

Regarding Arizona

Everyone arguing about the law, pretends that it only affects resident aliens. This is simply false. The law as written (yes, I've read it) creates unequal treatment under the law for Hispanic citizens. This is directly counter to the forteenth amendment which guarantees equal protection under the law for all citizens regardless of race. Simply stating that the cops can't use race to base their targeting decisions when they in fact have no other basis BUT race to do so, is to deny simple reality.

Thought For The Day

The only people who participate in deciding whether a certain Military action was "worth it" are the people who survived the result. Sort of a skewed dataset if you ask me!

One of the problems with "Centrism"

One of the problems with "Centrism" as currently practiced is that you end up with either the worst of both worlds or an absolutely incoherent and unprincipled position.

To take an obvious example. Many liberals think that torturing prisoners is wrong and should be treated as a war crime pursuant to laws currently on the books in this country. Many conservatives think that torture is AOK because obviously anyone who 'wants to kill us' deserves every moment of agony that can be managed. Centrists on the other hand agree that torture is wrong and illegal but that nevertheless the people who actually did it should be rewarded for their service.

Not much in the way of moral clarity in THAT neighborhood....

Evolving thinking

Back when debate among Swamplanders revolved around whether insisting on the public option was worth holding the entire HCR effort hostage, I spent a lot of time defending Insurance companies against what I saw as a knee-jerk anti-business attitude among my fellow commenters.

Now that I have seen how Blue dog Democrats have aquired a well-honed ability to absolutely lie about their concerns and actually hold out to vote AGAINST reducing Federal outlays for health care, I now see that my loyalty was severely misdirected.

These guys really ARE in the pocket of Aetna and really ARE willing to screw their constituents in order to placate their sponsors.