In Defense of Jack Murtha

Just kidding. You’ve come to the wrong place.

Seriously – there are very few differences between the kind of corruption that Jack Murtha is being accused of and the corruption that Conrad Burns was accused of before the 2006 elections.

Here’s the corruption that we should be concerned about: Both of them were acting not only within the bounds of accepted Washington practices – but within the bounds of the law.  It turns out that neither of them has done anything illegal.

So what’s really wrong with this picture?

Update: This just brings to mind the wonderful case of Ted Stevens – the Senator from Alaska who did not get brought down for accepting gifts from companies whose causes he had clearly helped through the legislative process – but was brought down instead for not properly disclosing said gifts.  Washington D.C. is a truly disgusting place.  It’s the kind of place that can elevate a scumbag like Tom Daschle to the point of being the “best man for the job” of fixing our broken healthcare system.

Once again:  What’s really wrong with this picture?

Wanted for Hire: Evildoers

This article, from Angelo M. Codevilla and the March 2009 issue of the American Spectator, posits something I have long suspected and written about. Osama bin Laden, while he was alive, was a rich and spoiled ideologue, but no great mastermind. He was at best an uninspiring leader to whom people flocked for money, but not much else. He was useful.

He’s been dead for years now. But he is still useful.

There’s a reason Bush couldn’t “catch” him, hiding out in those elaborately-furnished terrorist caves in Afghanistan. He wasn’t really looking for him.

The concept of an “Osama”-like character is an important part of public opinion management for our government. It is hard for us to hate an abstraction, like “terrorism”. The enemy needs to have a face. Obama’s was inserted into our consciousness in the late 1990’s, as the alleged mastermind of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, and again in a 2001 New York trial wherein the U.S. gave his organization the formal name “Al Qaeda”. (In order to pin the crime on bin Laden, they needed to prove that he was head of a Mafia-type organization. This allowed a RICO-type prosecution, wherein proof of an organization incriminates everyone involved.)

Osama bin Laden was a Wahhabist, an extreme Muslim sect that wanted the U.S. to remove itself from Saudi Arabia, the host country to the sacred sites of Mecca and Medina. 9/11 stemmed from this movement – most of the participants were Saudis. That effort, apparently well-financed and well-planned (possibly indicating some sort of state involvement), is now the raison d’État for a host of U.S. activities, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, new bases in Central Asia, a new initiative to restore our military presence in the Philippines, and even to put a new face on our Colombian counterinsurgency.

The U.S. was very quick to pin the crime on bin Laden. But he denied involvement.

On September 16, 2001, on Al Jazeera, Osama said of 9/11: “I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation.” Again, in the October interview with Tayseer Alouni, he limited his connection with 9/11 to ideology: “If they mean, or if you mean, that there is a link as a result of our incitement, then it is true. We incite…”

Along comes a stream of supposed Obama videos, including the (painfully) obviously planted December, 2001 “confession” video.

In 2007 Switzerland’s Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which does computer voice recognition for bank security, compared the voices on 15 undisputed recordings of Osama with the voices on 15 subsequent ones attributed to Osama, to which they added two by native Arab speakers who had trained to imitate him and were reading his writings. All of the purported Osama recordings (with one falling into a gray area) differed clearly from one another as well as from the genuine ones. By contrast, the CIA found all the recordings authentic. It is hard to imagine what methodology might support this conclusion.

The Osama bin Laden who has appeared in the various videos has had different shaped noses, beard colors. and has worn jewelery.

in 2007, Professor Bruce Lawrence, who heads Duke University’s religious studies program, argued in a book on Osama’s messages that their increasingly secular language is inconsistent with Osama’s Wahhabism. Lawrence noted as well that the Osama figure in the December 2001 video, which many have taken as his assumption of responsibility for 9/11, wears golden rings—decidedly un-Wahhabi. He also writes with the wrong hand. Lawrence concluded that the messages are fakes, and not very good ones. The CIA has judged them all good.

Noted above on our banner head above, as Mr. Mencken said so many years ago, governments have to scare people to carry out their nefarious plans. That’s fundamental – what changes are the various faces. But evil people are a unifying force. 9/11 happened. The U.S. used it as justification to invade two countries it wanted to invade anyway. If, by chance, the evil person who might have been at the center of the crime has died, it might be wise to keep him alive anyway. So, CIA has validated every tape put forth by “Osama” as being the real thing.

The question now is, with a new administration in place, and understanding that foreign policy does not change as we make our routine wind shifts back and forth between parties – what to do with Osama? They might need to formally “kill” him. But there can be no body. I expect, with President Obama’s ’surprising’ surge in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that there will be a small village where several dozen perfectly innocent people are killed, and that, surprise surprise, one of them will turn out to have been Osama. CIA, after extensive testing, will assure us this is the case. No one else will see the body.

And finally, we can end the nightmare. But remember, like Jason and Freddy, he can appear again in a future movie. We might call him Saddam, or Slobodan, or Noriega. Without evildoers, we cannot do our own evil.

BUSH + GEITHNER – PAULSON = OBAMA

Here’s a cute little web site that practices the art of reducing life’s complexities down to mathematical formulas. A few examples:

PONZI SCHEME = ROI – R – I

CRAZY = TALKING TO ONESELF – (CELL PHONE + EAR PIECE)

BRUNCH = BREAKFAST + LUNCH + CANTALOUPE

DOGGIE DAYCARE = KENNEL – GUILT

You get the idea.

Here’s a blog piece by Paul Krugman that analyzes the financial policy of the Obama Administration, captive as it is of Wall Street. He claims that Obama is basically trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again – that is, securitization failed to spread risk, but instead intensified it. Now they want ot go back, pick up the pieces, and try securitization of risk, one more time.

Underlying the glamorous new world of finance was the process of securitization. Loans no longer stayed with the lender. Instead, they were sold on to others, who sliced, diced and puréed individual debts to synthesize new assets. Subprime mortgages, credit card debts, car loans — all went into the financial system’s juicer. Out the other end, supposedly, came sweet-tasting AAA investments. And financial wizards were lavishly rewarded for overseeing the process.

But the wizards were frauds, whether they knew it or not, and their magic turned out to be no more than a collection of cheap stage tricks. Above all, the key promise of securitization — that it would make the financial system more robust by spreading risk more widely — turned out to be a lie. Banks used securitization to increase their risk, not reduce it, and in the process they made the economy more, not less, vulnerable to financial disruption.

But if Wall Street has spent $5 billion over the last ten years to influence policy, Wall Street is pretty well going to get its way, and forget for a moment whether a “D” (45% of contributions) or an “R” (55%) is in power, because that person is not really in power anyway.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good. I don’t think the Obama administration can bring securitization back to life, and I don’t believe it should try.

But try they will. Wall Street, I mean. Obama is merely a conduit, as McCain would have been. Two parties is nonsense. It’s one party – the capitalist party, with two right wings, one of which flaps harder than the other, meaning we go in circles.

But who knows the future? Well, one person does – here’s the tail end of a blog comment by Dave Budge at Electric City Web Log, 3/26/09 11:49am:

In other words, we’re screwed. The only thing that can save us is to reduce spending as a percentage of GDP. But for at least the next two years that ain’t gunna happen.

I think what he is saying there is that change is in store, two years down the road. Mid-terms. Restoration of financial sanity. ‘R’s (55% of $5 billion) take over from ‘D’s (45%), and we’ll have a change of course. Of course.

He’s also saying that the government should not be spending money like it is – in fact, many R’s are saying this – that we should be cutting spending, reducing tax rates for the wealthy once more – you know – all of these people who did not see this coming now know how to get us out of it. It’s pure insanity.

Here’s some more formulas:

TRICK OR TREAT = EXTORTION + “OH – ISN’T THAT CUTE!”

MIME = JUGGLER – BALLS

BUSH + GEITHNER – PAULSON = OBAMA

It’s All Up To Steve

Steve and I are going back and forth now on our upcoming post #1,000. This one is #996, so we get to do three more of no consequence, and then have to deliver profundity. I suggested that we do something on this TV phenomenon called The Hills, but Steve says it is “painfully shallow.”

Who knew? I presumed that pop culture would contain elements of self awareness and would embed a deeper message, perhaps satirizing our consumer-driven wealth-crazed existence.

Not so. It’s just a show. The actresses are simple, stupid, pretty people. Totally.

Here’s something interesting I learned from that: It turns out that beautiful people don’t have to work as hard for success as the rest of us, and so end up in professions like modeling and acting, where looks trump everything else. So people in those professions tend to be shallow.

But that makes me wonder – I like this TV show called “House”, but can’t help but notice that everyone involved in that show is stunning and beautiful. At our local hospital, nurses tend to be a little frumpy and stressed – the medical profession in general attracts people who work very hard. Pretty people can make a living without working hard. So most doctors and nurses are pretty ordinary looking.

Could it be that TV is peddling a fake bill of goods? Could it be that ordinary people lacking in extraordinary beauty and charm are worthy too? Could it be that Jennifer Aniston will never marry again, and that it will not matter? Could it be that Brad and Angelina are really just very shallow and self-absorbed people, so much so that they think their own public ‘caring’ for others is just another form a narcissism?

I’m leaving #1,000 to Steve. I’m out of ideas. I don’t know what is profound, what is shallow. I mean, if Brad Pitt is just another pretty boy, if George Clooney is not really a deep thinker, if Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are just paper mache, then all I have left to guide my thoughts is Jon Stewart. And when I listen to him when he is not scripted, he doesn’t seem to know very much.

I am lost. Where to go for guidance? How to know what to think? I’m calling on Steve now to use post #1,000 to help me out. It will be a doozy – maybe the best blog post ever. No pressure.

A Quick Question

Does it really count as outrage if the only reason people are mad at something Obama does is because liberals would be equally mad if Bush had done or said something similar?

Dmitry Orlav’s Visions of Collapse

Closing the Collapse Gap is a wry and wonderfully witty talk by Dmitry Orlav, an expatriate Russian living in America. Since it is a slide show/lecture from 2006, I am probably miles behind the curve. I just discovered him.

Orlav observes in 2006 that a collapse in the U.S. is inevitable, and will probably occur within the near future. He was prescient. But he’s not a pessimist by any means – just a sardonic observer with some useful experience for us as we stumble through it.

A few samples:

Many of the problems that sunk the Soviet Union are now endangering the United States as well. Such as a huge, well-equipped, very expensive military, with no clear mission, bogged down in fighting Muslim insurgents. Such as energy shortfalls linked to peaking oil production. Such as a persistently unfavorable trade balance, resulting in runaway foreign debt. Add to that a delusional self-image, an inflexible ideology, and an unresponsive political system.

Then there is our dependence on foreign oil – something that did not trouble the Soviets:

… [an] untenable arrangement rests on the notion that it is possible to perpetually borrow more and more money from abroad, to pay for more and more energy imports, while the price of these imports continues to double every few years. Free money with which to buy energy equals free energy, and free energy does not occur in nature. This must therefore be a transient condition. When the flow of energy snaps back toward equilibrium, much of the US economy will be forced to shut down.

Americans don’t like being compared to Russians, since we are exceptional people. But Orlav does the comparisons, and finds Americans coming up short in the survival of the fittest game. And then there is the American holiday season … We live miles apart for a reason. We don’t like each other.

When confronting hardship, people usually fall back on their families for support. The Soviet Union experienced chronic housing shortages, which often resulted in three generations living together under one roof. This didn’t make them happy, but at least they were used to each other. The usual expectation was that they would stick it out together, come what may.

In the United States, families tend to be atomized, spread out over several states. They sometimes have trouble tolerating each other when they come together for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, even during the best of times. They might find it difficult to get along, in bad times. There is already too much loneliness in this country, and I doubt that economic collapse will cure it.

Then there is our food system, with “organic” meat and vegetables shipped to various Whole Foods in refrigerated diesel trucks:

[Americans] don’t even bother to shop and just eat fast food. When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect on the nation’s girth, is visible, clear across the parking lot. A lot of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared for what comes next. If they suddenly had to start living like the Russians, they would blow out their knees.

Perhaps the greatest efficiency of the Soviet Union was its incredible inefficiency. Things that benefit humans, like day care, paid vacations, pensions and health care, are not so conducive to “efficiency” as are fear of job loss, loss of home and savings.

A private sector solution is not impossible; just very, very unlikely. Certain Soviet state enterprises were basically states within states. They controlled what amounted to an entire economic system, and could go on even without the larger economy. They kept to this arrangement even after they were privatized. They drove Western management consultants mad, with their endless kindergartens, retirement homes, laundries, and free clinics. These weren’t part of their core competency, you see. They needed to divest and to streamline their operations. The Western management gurus overlooked the most important thing: the core competency of these enterprises lay in their ability to survive economic collapse. Maybe the young geniuses at Google can wrap their heads around this one, but I doubt that their stockholders will.

Then there is American “democracy” with our switches back and forth between two parties who are more alike than different. We can’t even get rid of the worst president in our short history for eight long years. That’s dysfunction junction.

Perestroika and Glasnost were all about democracy, and in my opinion it had the same chance of success as the hopelessly gerrymandered system that passes for democracy in the US, (although much less than any proper, modern democracy, in which the Bush regime would have been put out of power quite a while ago, after a simple parliamentary vote of no confidence and early elections). The problem is that, in a collapse scenario, democracy is the least effective system of government one can possibly think of (think Weimar, or the Russian Interim Government)…

Collapse is here, it seems. Are we prepared? My wife and I occupy a small patch of land, and use it to grow trees (currently being eaten by pine beetles) and flowers. Maybe we will convert it to a food coop. Maybe our neighbors will shoot us and steal it from us.

If you have a few minutes, read the whole talk. For me, it was rewarding and well-spent time.

Britain Forgets That Bush is Gone

This is a little too juicy to pass up:

From BBC News: British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is warning Brits that the threat of “terrorists” attacking Brits with a “dirty bomb” is “severe” – meaning an attack is “highly likely” and “could happen without warning”. In addition …

The BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Daniel Sandford, said chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons “have always been something al-Qaeda have aspired to” but the report warns they are now within terrorists’ grasp.

“There is a concern now among officials in the Home Office that the chances of them getting hold of this material have increased in a world of failed states, in a world of easy availability of radiological material in hospitals and in a world of greatly increased smuggling of these kinds of materials.”

He added that the greatest concern was not over an attack by a nuclear warhead, but with a so-called dirty bomb which could contaminate a wide area and trigger panic.

Here’s from Wikipedia on the so-called “dirty bomb”:

The term dirty bomb is primarily used to refer to a radiological dispersal device (RDD), a speculative radiological weapon which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. Though an RDD would be designed to disperse radioactive material over a large area, a bomb that uses conventional explosives would likely have more immediate lethal effect than the radioactive material. At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be “fairly high”, but not fatal. Recent analysis of the Chernobyl accident fallout confirms this, showing that the effect on many people in the surrounding area, although not those in close proximity, was almost negligible.

If they did not clean it up for a year, radiation exposure would be fairly high, but not fatal. And this assumes, of course, a year’s worth of exposure. And note that traditional explosives, which are freely available, are far more dangerous.

The Brits are still at it, doing Bushlike fear mongering. And it’s interesting, because even they say that the worst result would be that a dirty bomb could “trigger panic”. And here are Smith and Sandford, doing their best to help out.

Footnote 1: There are people who deliberately set out to hurt other people for political reasons, and some of these people are not American. But there is no such thing as “Al Qaeda”. That’s an American invention designed to make us fearful and to justify government intrusions into our lives and to shred our constitution.

Footnote 2: Who was it said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”?

Footnote 3: The late Tim Russert, supposedly one of the toughest interviewers in American media, once provided Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a platform so that Rumsfeld could talk about the Tora Bora Complex, supposedly an impregnable fortress that housed Osama bin Laden and thousands of his dedicated soldiers. It was all a lie. A very big lie. There are bases in Afghanistan where soldiers trained – the U.S. military knows about these bases – where they are, how big they are, etc. The U.S. military built them during the 1980’s.

And Free Speech Means STFU

“War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.” The Party Slogan, Orwell’s 1984

Ward Churchill took the stand yesterday to defend himself. He was a University of Colorado professor who was removed from his position after he made impolitic comments in the wake of 9/11. He said some of the victims were, apparently, worthy of death

because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.”

Offensive? Yes. Quite. It’s not that he isn’t on to something, however. The U.S. has rained hell on various countries around the world, leaving a trail of corpses that would reach to the moon if stacked. It seems to bother no one here that we bomb cities, starve children, torture and use chemical warfare on other countries.

But 9/11 happened to us , and that’s not right. The outpouring of victimhood was sad to watch – people so blind as to not be capable of seeing suffering in others, yet wanting vindication and revenge when it happens to them. Americans are an insulated people, kept ignorant by a pliable news media, and distracted by games and TV while our soldiers are off committing atrocities in our name.

It was blowback. Churchill said as much. The University people, of course, acknowledged his free speech rights. He could, as a citizen and a professor, make offensive remarks.

Then they railroaded him out of town. His scholarly work underwent scrutiny none could withstand, and sure enough, they found some alleged incidents of plagiarism and an unsourced conclusion regarding the U.S. Army infecting native Americans with smallpox way back when. (Churchill is Native American.)

Something very similar happened to Norman Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at DePaul for his controversial stands on Israel. His real crime was to expose Harvard Professor Alan Dershowitz as a fraud. He got the Dixie Chicks treatment, as did Churchill.

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech. (Chomsky)

I have commented elsewhere at this blog on the seeming contradiction that the people of East Germany and Russia could bring about meaningful change. They overthrew oppressive governments thought to be intractable. Here in the United States we don’t seem to be able to affect much change, no matter what.

Oh yeah – and freedom of speech … it’s kind of an illusion. Isn’t it.

Traffic Is Down

Bring on the cougar …

h/t: ECW

Canada Forgets that Bush is Gone

In a bold effort to keep all right-thinking Canadians from being exposed to people who might hold a different point of view than some of their leaders, Canada has stopped terrorism at its border. It has banned George Galloway from entering the country.

Galloway, it should be remembered, took a strong stance against the Clinton/Blair sanctions on Iraq in the 1990’s, against the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and the attack on Iraq in 2003.

The man’s obviously a terrorist.