What Price Freedom?

$895, evidently.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow

Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More!

"Their hearts pounding, Explorers moved down alleys where there were hidden paper targets of people pointing guns, and made split-second decisions about when to shoot. In rescuing hostages from a bus taken over by terrorists, a baby-faced young girl screamed, “Separate your feet!” as she moved to handcuff her suspect."

Wow! As Barack says, it really does look like our best days our still to come. If this is any indication, quite soon, apparently. Tomorrow Belongs To Me!

shoveling it

Demoocratic "strategist" Paul Begala has just informed us that April 15th is Patriot's Day.

"Happy Patriots' Day. April 15 is the one day a year when our country asks something of us -- or at least the vast majority of us.

For those who wear a military uniform, those who serve the rest of us as policemen and firefighters and teachers and other public servants, every day is patriots' day. They work hard for our country; many risk their lives -- and some lose their lives.

But for the rest of us, the civilian majority, our government asks very little."

That's true. It doesn't "ask" anything. It doesn't need to. It simply takes what it wants, and orders us what to do.

"Except for April 15. On this day, our government asks that we pay our fair share of taxes . . . "

Again, it doesn't ask, it takes. And it's not just this one day. It takes regularly, every single payday. On this day, we are obligated, upon threat of civil penalty, -- not "asked" -- to file a report disclosing all of our income to the government, and to pay any tax additonal liablity that hasn't already been taken from our paychecks.

" . . . to keep our beloved country strong and safe."

An open-ended assignment that already consumes trillions more in funds than today's American taxpayers can provide, and which will have to be funded by generations to come.

Ah, but what grandeur, eh Paul? Paul continues in his article to wonder how anyone could be protesting taxes this day. His implication seems to be, who but someone who wasn't a Patriot or an ingrate could raise an objection?

The government's pundits: quelling dissent through rhetorical manipulation. Muddying the issues to shut people up.

Paul is one of the cunning shits that our "democracy" excels at producing. Their role, quite essential, is to propagate a party line, a sacred trope invested with elements of the national relgion, that makes people afraid to question their rulers and their actions, and to voice any dissent.

Paul's job is to shovel the shit and bury us in it.

Plus ça change you can believe in

Article on LewRockwell.com tomorrow.

making demands

"Why do I want these testimonies? Well, I shall tell you. According to what I have heard, the clergy are holding some conventions where the reverend brothers raise and answer the question: What to the times demand -- in the religious sense, of course, for otherwise such a convention would resemble a city council meeting. They say that now the convention is supposted to have come to the conclusion that this time it is a new hymnbook that the times demand. That the times demand it is, of course, very possible, but this still does not mean that they need it. Why should that which is the case with other moral characters not be the case with the times, as a moral character, although not exactly because the times are moral--namely, that they demand what they do not need, that all their many demands, even if they obtained them, would not satisfy their craving, because this is: to demand, to make claims."

-- Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

Rarely noticed is the status of being to which "the political process" reduces us: perpetual claimants issuing demands for fixing the broken something, the next new thing, a better this, more of that. There's a word for this state of being: infantile. We have to break free of this perpetual consumer, passive, recipient mode of being if we are ever to act.

In the words of Henley's beautiful song, we need to "learn to be still." This is very Taoistic, and people often misunderstand Taoism as counseling withdrawal and inaction but what is referred to is the turning away from this claimant, recipient frame of mind. The thrust of the Tao te Ching is counsel on how, truly, to be one who acts effectively or, in Christ's terms, how to come into life, bear fruit and cease being part of the endless go around in which the dead bury their dead.

If we reject our assigned role as voters, petitioners, supporters and campaigners, we will recover our own activity. Seek and root out the passive, save me protect me help me fix me give to me mindset in all of its forms. Stop conceiving of yourself as a recipient, a supporter, a follower or "member."

GAO blasts weapons procurement

"Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon's biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule."

Oh boy. Wait till Congress hears about this. I'll bet there'll really be hell to pay now.

justice as mutual assured destruction

"Master Bliful fell very short of his companion [Tom Jones] in the amiable quality of mercy; but he as greatly exceeded him in one of a much higher kind, namely, in justice, in which he followed both the precepts and example of Thwackum and Square; for though they would both make frequent use of the word mercy, yet it was plain that in reality Square held it to be inconsistent with the rule of right; and Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven. The two gentlemen did indeed somewhat differ in opinion concerning the objects of this sublime virtue; by which Thwackum would probably have destroyed one half of mankind, and Square the other half."

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)

Supreme Court rejects review of warrantless wiretapping

Surely as no surprise to anyone, the Supreme Court has refused to review the legality of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, thus more or less finishing the 4th Amendment. However, the problem here is not really the Supreme Court. As I once said in an interview discussing the concept of individual rights:

"In The Empire Strikes Back, when Luke is about to enter the cave that 'is strong with the dark side of the Force,' Yoda says to him, 'Your weapons, you will not need them.' I would like people to understand, 'Your rights, you will not need them.' Rights do not make you free; only by acting free can you become free. The knowledge of the prior existence of rights is useful, as reminders of what men once were, what they fought for, where they drew a line against compulsion by their King or government; it helps us perceive that men one time conceived themselves as possessing a core dignity and autonomy that they would not permit others to lay hands on – it helps us to perceive our baseline, which we would otherwise be blind to.
But to fight for the establishment of rights or for recognition of rights by one’s government involves tacit subordination to the state. The struggle to make a government recognize a right works in favor of the state, because it implicitly sets up government as the arbiter of the existence of the right. If one will not act within the scope of freedom delineated by the right unless or until the state concedes it lawful to do so, why of course then there is no right and the state controls your conduct."

The barons at Runnymede were not petitioning their government.

An early assessment

While it's still early in the campaign, it appears, after the results in Iowa and New Hampshire, that the theme song for the 2008 Republican Convention should be "Still Crazy After All These Years."

Apparently learning nothing from the last 6+ years, Republicans simply continue to lean on old familiar ways. And truly, despite what their ideology has visited upon the country and their fellow man, they would not be convicted by a jury of their peers.

It all so thoroughly confirms Vonnegut's Summation of Man: "So it goes;" "No one was saved".

Not mesmerized by the bullshit

I received two noteworthy e-mails from readers in response to my latest article, "Tortuous Justifications" that was published at LewRockwell.com on the 19th and Antiwar.com on the 22nd. The article addressed an apology of sorts for the administration's "enhanced" interrogation techniques that was published in the Wall Street Journal. I have obtained their permission to print their e-mails here.

David Martin points out that I should have referred to KSM as the alleged mastermind of of the 9/11 attacks, since we only have reports from our government of his coerced confessions to that effect and our government has not seen fit to prove it in a court of law on the basis of evidence satisfactory to a jury. He is correct about that. The points in my article remain valid even assuming that KSM is indeed a terrorist guilty as alleged, but the fact that the methods used to obtain this "information" do not provide us with any basis for trusting this information renders the arguments against these methods even stronger. I reprint most of his e-mail below:

Jeff,

I would like to commend you for your generally excellent article on the Bush torture regime at http://www.lewrockwell.com/snyder/snyder13.html. However, as a lawyer, you must realize that you slipped up in your treatment of the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After quoting the defender of Mohammed's torture, you say, "So it is noteworthy that [Bret] Stephens states his approval solely in terms of the specific case of the terrorist who confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks and
playing a role in numerous other atrocities."

Surely, you do not accept Mohammed's characterization as a wanton terrorist based upon his rather fantastic, belated "confession" after a protracted period of what even Stephens would concede was torture, do you? Should you not have inserted the adjective "alleged" in front of the word "terrorist" in that sentence? Furthermore, instead of conceding that Mohammed is a really bad and guilty man, as you appear to do, you should have, it seems to me, seized upon his case as one of the best examples of what's wrong with mixing torture and other forms of coercion with jurisprudence. I mention those other forms because the U.S. government has apparently even kidnapped his sons as a means of getting him to talk. See http://www.dcdave.com/article5/070318.htm. What an opportunity you missed in failing to mention that abominable act!

Mohammed has repeatedly been described in the press as the "mastermind of 9-11," but not the first bit of evidence other than a clearly coerced "confession" has ever been presented to the public that he had anything to do with that tragedy. As I suggest in the referenced article, accepting the charges against Mohammed as true requires a truly radical expansion of the definition of the term "mastermind."

Second, I received a very telling e-mail from a veteran who served in Vietnam, and had this to say in assessment of our nation:

Sir, It's a sad day for me when one such as yourself must write about why we should not torture. I served with the US Army in Vietnam (June 67-June 68) and stuff that we are now doing to prisoners were given as reasons for "Why we Fight" lectures by our commanders. We fought (or so I thought) because the Soviets and their ilk did this crap to POWs. Any torture is totally wrong. It drives me nuts to see bozos like Stephens try to define what is torture. I have a more simple standard. If what was done would be considered wrong if done to one's sister, brother, son or daughter, it's wrong done to ANYONE. If we are in a GWOT the operative word is War. If a person is captured in a war, then they ARE POWs not some screwy "Enemy Combatant" bullshit category.

How can GITMO be out of the reach of US Law??? If its truly out of the reach of US Law, then I guess if one US Service member there chooses to rape another one, it wouldn't be illegal as there is NO law there. Sheesh.

But one perhaps needs to consider that we as a nation have never admitted that vaporizing some 80,000 civilians at Hiroshima was wrong either. I'd like to pose this question having served in combat in Vietnam. If Hiroshima was right, why wasn't what Lt. Calley's troops did at My Lai right also. Those people in My Lai were as much the enemy as those citizens of Hiroshima. Personally I think both actions were totally wrong. But then I'm just a veteran with "quaint" ideas.

Oh, and thanks for fighting the good fight. Thank you ever so much.

Wade Kane
Served in 'Nam with
Company A, 228th ASHB (Crewed a Chinook)
1st Air Cav
APO 96490

Pop Music Now

I just rejoined the gym after being away for a few years. One of the large screens up in front of the treadmills was running music videos. Apparently, pop music is now about girls in underwear who are in love with themselves and who are completely occupied with the images of themselves that they are projecting.

As someone who grew up in the 60s, when musicians seemed to be musicians because they loved music, and would actually just stand there and perform as if you, too, were interested in the music, instead of persons who used music as a vehicle for solipsistic apotheosis on the assumption that you, too, were fascinated with their beautiful selves and wanted to vicariously experience the ecstasy of such utter self-absorption, this strikes me as frivolous, self-demeaning and sick. But I guess in fairness to the present age it's not like nowadays there's anything real to sing about. What could possibly be more fascinating, meaningful and rewarding than one's own beautiful body in underwear?

Talk Show Nation Built of Glass Houses

Rush Limbaugh calls soldiers who disagree with Bush's war policy "phony soldiers", Harry Reid seizes this opportunity to denounce Rush from the floor of the Senate, and Rush issues a challenge to Reid to "say it to my face."

If Rush's audience spent more time in thinking for themselves and less time Emoting With Rush, they would realize how disgustingly pathetic Rush's ploy is. His challenge to Reid is laughable on its face because Rush's ENTIRE CAREER consists precisely in NEVER saying anything to ANYONE'S face, but pontificating and hurling word bombs from behind a microphone in the safety of a secluded little studio.

Not that Reid is any any better. He, too, chooses to engage in symbolic word jousting to prove that the Democrats are simpatico with the troops and to play the game of Winning Elections Through Demonstrating That We Share Your Emotions, while he actually takes NO legislative action, literally DOES NOTHING, to stop Bush.

Americans and their representatives in Congress are now apparently so completely divorced from reality that 99% of their behavior consists in these Kabuki plays, these onanistic orgies of denunciation and outrage, that are never, ever based in or lead to any kind of action. Worse, few seem to have any idea how completely dysfunctional this is, how little integrity there is in saying or head-nodding to things that have no basis in any actual action on their parts, and how this game lets everyone off the hook and holds absolutely no one to account for anything, because it accords primacy to symbolism and shared emotions, that is, to group identification, over the reality of how we all actually live.

The listeners (both those who listen to talk radio and those who listen to their representatives) keep tuning in for more of the same, more politico-emotional onanism, convinced that this way forward leads -- to what, exactly? Voting for "change" in the next election?

There will be no change, however, unless and until we stop listening, stop the group head nodding and start acting.


Postscript 10/3: Thinking about this further I recalled one of Kierkegaard's sarcastic remarks that aptly captures how utterly frivolous we have become. After facetiously explaining how the idea occurred to him to become famous as an author, K wrote:

"Thus, I, too, am striving toward the lofty goal of being hailed with acclaim--unless I should be laughed to scorn or perhaps crucified, for it is probable that everyone who shouts bravo also shouts 'pereat[let him die]', item[also] 'crucify', and does so even without becoming untrue to his character, since on the contrary he remains essentially true to himself--- qua shouter."

the medium of ethics

A person can be both good and evil, just as it is quite simply said that a human being has a disposition to both good and evil, but one cannot simultaneously become good and evil. Esthetically, the poet has been required not to depict these abstract models of virtue or diabolical characters but to do as Goethe does, whose characters are both good and evil. And why is this a legitimate requirement? Because we want the poet to depict human beings as they are, and every human being is both good and evil, and because the poet's medium is the medium of imagination, is being but not becoming, at most is becoming in a very foreshortened perspective. But take the individual out of this medium of imagination, out of this being, and place him in existence--then ethics immediately confronts him with its requirement, whether he now deigns to become, and then he becomes--either good or evil. In the earnest moment of self-contemplation, in the sacred moment of confession, the individual removes himself from the process of becoming and in the realm of being inspects how he is. Alas, the result unfortunately is that he is both good and evil, but as soon as he is again in the process of becoming, he becomes either good or evil. This summa summarum, that all human beings are both good and evil, is of no concern at all to ethics, which does not have the medium of being but of becoming and therefore denounces every explanation of becoming that deceitfully wants to explain becoming within being, whereby the absolute decision of becoming is essentially revoked and all talk about it is essentially a false alarm. (pp. 420-421)

S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

using a relative standard for one's life

I have been reviewing some material for a book I am working on, and thought I would post some "quotes of the day" kind of material from what IMHO is one of the greatest works on ethics in western thought, Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Here are a few of his thoughts on using a comparative standard in relation to (as a guide to) one's life:

The snag, however, is that it is simply unethical to have one's life in the comparative, the relative, in the external, and to have the police court, the conciliation court, a newspaper, or some of Copenhagen's dignitaries, or the urban rabble, be the highest court with regard to oneself. (p. 530)

Everyone agrees that bourgeois-philistinism is comic. But what is bourgeois-philistinism? Can one not be a bourgeois-philistine in a large city? Why not? Bourgeois-philistinism always has its roots in the use of the relative as the absolute in relation to the essential. That many a person does not notice it when it is a manifest relativity that is being used only shows one's limitations in connection with the comic. It is the same with the conception of bourgeois-philistinism as with irony. Everyone, way down to the lowliest person, dabbles in being ironical, but there where irony actually begins, they all fall away, and this crowd, each one relatively ironic on a descending scale, turns embittered against the genuine ironist. In Copenhagen, people laugh at being the best man in Koge, but to be that in Copenhagen is just as ludicrous, because the ethical and the ethical-religious have nothing at all to do with the comparative. Every comparative criterion, be it that of Koge or Copenhagen or of our age or of this century, if it supposed to be the absolute, is bourgeois-philistinism. (p. 547)

In other words, the agonizing self-contradiction of worldly passion results from the individual's relating himself absolutely to a relative τέλος. Thus vanity, avarice, envy, etc. are essentially lunacy, because the most common expression of lunacy is just this——to relate oneself absolutely to the relative——and esthetically it is to be interpreted comically, since the comic always lies in contradiction. It is demented (viewed esthetically, it is comic) for a being who is eternally structured to apply all his power to grasp the perishable, to hold fast to the changeable, and to believe that he has won everything when he has won this nothing—— and is duped——to believe he has lost everything when he has lost this nothing——and is no longer duped. The perishable is nothing when it is past, and its essence is to be past, as swiftly as the moment of sensual pleasure, which is the furthest distance from the eternal——a moment in time filled with emptiness. (p 422)

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, S. Kierkegaard, Vol, 1, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1992)

Solzhnitsyn's Harvard Address, 1978

Back in 1978, Solzhnitsyn tried to put his finger on the wrong-headed idee fixe that has led our world to its present condition, noting that the same fundamental principle lay at the foundation of both the captialist/corporate consumer societies of the West and the socialist/communist societies of the East.

"How did the West decline from its triumphal march to its present sickness? Have there been fatal turns and losses of direction in its development? It does not seem so. The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological progress. And all of a sudden it found itself in its present state of weakness.

This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political expression from the period of the Enlightenment. It became the basis for government and social science and could be defined as rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above him. It could also be called anthropocentricity, with man seen as the center of everything that exists.

The turn introduced by the Renaissance evidently was inevitable historically. The Middle Ages had come to a natural end by exhaustion, becoming an intolerable despotic repression of man's physical nature in favor of the spiritual one. Then, however, we turned our backs upon the Spirit and embraced all that is material with excessive and unwarranted zeal. This new way of thinking, which had imposed on us its guidance, did not admit the existence of intrinsic evil in man nor did it see any higher task than the attainment of happiness on earth. It based modern Western civilization on the dangerous trend to worship man and his material needs. Everything beyond physical well-being and accumulation of material goods, all other human requirements and characteristics of a subtler and higher nature, were left outside the area of attention of state and social systems, as if human life did not have any superior sense. That provided access for evil, of which in our days there is a free and constant flow. Mere freedom does not in the least solve all the problems of human life and it even adds a number of new ones.

However, in early democracies, as in American democracy at the time of its birth, all individual human rights were granted because man is God's creature. That is, freedom was given to the individual conditionally, in the assumption of his constant religious responsibility. Such was the heritage of the preceding thousand years. Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally materialistic. The West ended up by truly enforcing human rights, sometimes even excessively, but man's sense of responsibility to God and society grew dimmer and dimmer. In the past decades, the legalistically selfish aspect of Western approach and thinking has reached its final dimension and the world wound up in a harsh spiritual crisis and a political impasse. All the glorified technological achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do not redeem the Twentieth century's moral poverty which no one could imagine even as late as in the Nineteenth Century.

As humanism in its development became more and more materialistic, it made itself increasingly accessible to speculation and manipulation at first by socialism and then by communism. So that Karl Marx was able to say in 1844 that "communism is naturalized humanism."

This statement turned out not to be entirely senseless. One does see the same stones in the foundations of a despiritualized humanism and of any type of socialism: endless materialism; freedom from religion and religious responsibility, which under communist regimes reach the stage of anti-religious dictatorship; concentration on social structures with a seemingly scientific approach. (This is typical of the Enlightenment in the Eighteenth Century and of Marxism). Not by coincidence all of communism's meaningless pledges and oaths are about Man, with a capital M, and his earthly happiness. At first glance it seems an ugly parallel: common traits in the thinking and way of life of today's West and today's East? But such is the logic of materialistic development.

The interrelationship is such, too, that the current of materialism which is most to the left always ends up by being stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries and especially in the past decades, on a world scale as the situation becomes increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism and socialism could never resist communism. The communist regime in the East could stand and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who felt a kinship and refused to see communism's crimes. When they no longer could do so, they tried to justify them. In our Eastern countries, communism has suffered a complete ideological defeat; it is zero and less than zero. But Western intellectuals still look at it with interest and with empathy, and this is precisely what makes it so immensely difficult for the West to withstand the East.

I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.

To such consciousness, man is the touchstone in judging and evaluating everything on earth. Imperfect man, who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now experiencing the consequences of mistakes which had not been noticed at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility. We have placed too much hope in political and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. In the East, it is destroyed by the dealings and machinations of the ruling party. In the West, commercial interests tend to suffocate it. This is the real crisis. The split in the world is less terrible than the similarity of the disease plaguing its main sections.

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot be unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.

It would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified formulas of the Enlightenment. Social dogmatism leaves us completely helpless in front of the trials of our times.

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but -- upward."

You can read the whole of it here.

Prez to Address Nation Wed. at 9 pm

Nation to attain satori at 9:01.

Happy Holidays!

noted, with sadness

A US soldier killed herself after objecting to participating in interrogation techniques.

jihad not unique to Islam

In his or her latest article, Spengler discusses the Pope's recent remarks about Islam and argues that

"Jihad is not merely the whim of a despotic divinity, as the pope implied. It is much more: jihad is the fundamental sacrament of Islam, the Muslim cognate of the Lord's Supper in Christianity, that is, the unique form of sacrifice by which the individual believer communes with the Transcendent. To denounce jihad on theological grounds is a blow at the foundations of Islam, in effect a papal call for the conversion of the Muslims. "

It's an interesting article worth reading, especially since, unlike news reports which seem to think their job is done when they simpy report there is a controversy and that some people are really really mad, the author actually read the speech and provided context for the Pope's remarks.

However, Spengler stops short in another manner by discussing jihad as if it were a reality (as distinct from a mere name for a reality) peculiar to Islam. Christianity certainly grasped and exercised politcal power for centuries. The Russian communists believed in pursuing worldwide communism. There are no lack of holy wars to spread the faith, whatever the faith may happen to be. How, in fact, would we describe Bush's crusade to forcibly bring democracy and freedom to the world? Bush requires and seeks authoritarianism and dictatorial powers at home so that he can spread freedom and democracy abroad, in order to protect freedom and democracy here. I have trouble following that logic, but it is not unique to Bush.

So jihad may not really be a unique threat or phenomonon, because we can find cognates and analogues to jihad for other faiths and ideologies, and the offense and outrage the word engenders may arise primarlily from the fact that we do not know or like Arabs or their mores and we do not want Islam. In that case, a more universal analysis, one that may ultimately prove more helpful in saving our lives as a species on this planet, would explore what is it about people, or the structure of their beliefs, that drives them, or creates a need, to forcibly impose those beliefs on others. What wars do people ever engage in which they think are NOT holy wars?

the president's 9/11 speech

Two things struck me about the Prez's fifth anniversary 9/11 speech. First, waning support for the war is forcing the president to ratchet up the rhetorical stakes. It used to be about fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here and preventing terrorists from linking with rogue governments to deliver suitcase nukes to The Homeland. In other words, it was about keeping us from being murdered by terrorists. This goal was, however, couched in terms of "preserving our freedom," because that is far more heroic and noble than announcing that our goal is to simply save our own asses. The latter comes too close to suggesting that we are nervous nellies perilously close to wetting ourselves. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Maybe I haven't been keeping up, but last night I heard for the first time that this struggle was for civilization itself:

"This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization."

So now it's the Romans against the barbarians and their barbarian ways all over again, with Muslims playing the role of barbarians, and Islam the barbarian religion. We all know how that turned out, so I guess we're being told to buck up and do our part, so we don't have a replay of The Dark Ages.

What I'm really wondering is, where does he go from here? What will be the next stop on the Presidential Rhetorical Express? If the public's support falls further, if things get worse in Iraq, will I soon find out that the very Fate of the Universe depends on What We Do Here Today, and who wins the Titanic Battle between Civilization and Muslim Extremists?

But the thing that irked me about the speech even more than playing the "civilization itself is at stake" card, was this:

"On 9/11, our nation saw the face of evil. Yet on that awful day, we also witnessed something distinctly American: ordinary citizens rising to the occasion, and responding with extraordinary acts of courage. We saw courage in office workers who were trapped on the high floors of burning skyscrapers -- and called home so that their last words to their families would be of comfort and love. We saw courage in passengers aboard Flight 93, who recited the 23rd Psalm -- and then charged the cockpit. And we saw courage in the Pentagon staff who made it out of the flames and smoke -- and ran back in to answer cries for help. " {emphasis supplied}

Now of course this follows the classic marketing dictate of flattering your audience by confirming the audience's own high opinion of itself. But as a haphazard student of history, I confess to missing all those examples where all peoples, excepting of course, our own amazing selves, just laid down and died in the face of horrendous historical events. Abandoned loved ones, utterly forgot and forsook the bonds of kinship and country, ran like frightened rabbits, did not help, did not fight back, were paralyzed by fear, curled up, stopped eating, drinking, loving, working and building, and just died. In fact, the Russians scorched their very earth, destroying land, buildings, livestock and crops in retreat to Stalingrad, in order to deprive the Germans of the means of supporting themselves. But I guess they were pikers, mere children, compared to us distinctly Amazing Ones. The Germans, with their cities and industrial facilities in rubble, and the Japanese, thus far the only victims of an actual nuclear holocaust, built world class economies within a generation after the end of WW2.

Pander away George, about how fucking incredible we Americans are, but the truth is less uplifiting but far more significant. And the truth is that there is nothing unique at all about how Americans responded to the events of that day. That is how anyone in that situation would act. This is how all peoples in all times act. All people will try to save, and do the utmost for, their loved ones. All people, seeing the end is near, will try to tell their families one last time that they love them, and say goodbye. All people will feel the bonds and requirements of kinship in such circumstances, and want to help. And all people will feel angry at the people who did this to them and be united in opposition. Far from being uniquely American, it is entirely ordinary.

And that is why it is important. Because if you once realize that everyone, everyone, is like you, you will have a far better key to evaluating Bush's plans to remake and transform the world than he and his advisors have or ever will have. Because all those things we did when we were attacked, and all those things we felt, THAT IS HOW THE IRAQIS FEEL, AND HOW THEY WILL ACT.

In selling fear, Bush makes the same mistake he made when he sold the war. He wants us to take the desire and the goal for the deed. That after all, is what prevention (pre-emption) is all about. In selling us the war, he expected us to seize upon the ultimate result and glory. In selling the fear and justification for continuing the war, he expects us to seize upon the goal of the militant Muslims - forced conversion to Islam, forced conversion to their sexual and religious mores, or death. In each case he simply presumes, or believes, that if those who seek the goal are determined, the goal will be achieved. In both cases he leaves out the actions and reactions of those who are the object of these pet social engineering projects.

He's vague on the details on how the militant Muslim extremists are going to accomplish their goal, and with good reason. He essentially has to present it as something that will just happen because if you get into details, it rapidly becomes ludicrous and far less threatening. First, these radical Muslims, hell-bent on converting the world to Islam or to killing us, have to be here in large enough numbers to implement that plan - successfully. How is that going to happen? Are they going to invade us? Will we just sit back and let their ships and airplanes land? How may Muslim troops do you suppose it will take to bring a country this large and with say 300 million people under the yoke of foreign rule? And what happens when they start trying to convert us to Islam? Last estimate I saw there were approximately 100 million firearms in private hands in this country. Are Americans incapable of learning to make and use IEDs or even more deadly devices? Or are we going to convert just because they blow up one of our cities?

In short, imagine how you will feel and how you will act if Muslims invaded our country and tried to run it, or force you to do something you don't want to do. Perhaps your response to that thought would be something like this: Over my dead body. And this, of course, is exactly the reaction in Iraq. What Bush left out in planning the war, he is hoping you won't notice he is also leaving out in trying to whip you up into a frenzy. Namely, he is leaving out you, and what you will do. As he left out the Iraqis, and what they would do.

What you feel, they also feel. How you would act, that is how they act. It is ordinary and utterly predictable. They cannot be forced, any more than you can be forced. You cannot be forced, any more than they can be forced.

So when Bush paints the picture of the mad schemes of Muslim radicals, I do not feel the fear. First of all, not knowing enough about the region, the peoples and the history, I have no idea whether the schemes of al Qaeda represent the desires of millions, or are as abberational and bear as little relationship to the lives and goals of everyday Muslims as our own nation's foreign policy bears to the lives and goals of everyday Americans. It seems to me that such fanciful plans bear closer relationship to the mad schemes of the megalomaniacal villains in James Bond movies or Marvel comics than they do to plans that have any possible chance of success. Of course, this is what I also think of Bush's plan to convert the peoples of the world to freedom and democracy using death, destruction and Halliburton.

But leaving that aside, I do not take their desire or their ultimate goal as the deed, because there is a chasm between them - the contrary desires of others. If George wants me to be afraid, he's going to have to spell out how Americans are going to crumble, how tens of millions of Arabs are going to come to our shores with the goal of taking us over, how they are then going to take over our government, force our women to wear veils, shut down Hollywood and convert us to Islam. And he's going to have to explain how the rest of us are going to sit back and let that happen or are going to be defeated when we resist it. But I suspect that that is not a speech I am likely to hear.

"We're a positivist wet dream."

Billmon engages in some political prognistication and along the way discourses on our inattention to politics:

"We're a positivist wet dream -- the most relentlessly practical people since the Romans. But our culture and economic incentives all tend to channel our intellectual energies away from subjects that have no immediate utilitarian value. And for most Americans, most of the time, that means away from politics and current affairs, which only rarely have any direct impact on or relevance to our daily lives.

"(That's not always true, of course. For some people -- Army reservists, the citizens of New Orleans, the workers in the twin towers -- the impact of politics can be immediate, enormous and lethal. But by then it's usually too late to learn about the issues.)

"All this helps create the sea of political ignorance and apathy on which Rovian admirals (and their less competent Democratic opponents) launch their attack vessels, armed with sales techniques borrowed from the advertising industry and the social psychology departments of the major research universities. "

He argues that nothing short of a massive political realignment, as occurred in 1932 or 1980, can really turn things around - this one devoted to "an authentically anti-imperialist foreign policy, " but believes that we haven't learned the lessons yet. Definitely worth a read. {link}

Lemmings for the Lord

In a news report that Southern women are deserting Bush, the reporter finds one soul who with true Bushian valor is staying the course:

"Still, some Southern women remain stalwart supporters of the president and the Republican Party. At a watermelon festival in Chickamauga, in the mountains of northwest Georgia, substitute teacher Clydeen Tomanio said she remains committed to the party she's called home for 43 years.

"'There are some people, and I'm one of them, that believe George Bush was placed where he is by the Lord,' Tomanio said. "I don't care how he governs, I will support him. I'm a Republican through and through." {link}

Nice epitaph for a nation, IMHO. And nice that she chooses to state that she is a Republican, rather than a Christian, through and through.

I confess to not being able to understand this absence of thought process. If I thought that the Lord placed George Bush where he is, I would also conclude that the Lord more than likely also placed me where I am, and that, accordingly, I owed it to the Lord to do what I can using the understanding He gave me, and not hide my light under a bushel. In other words, it does not logically follow from the belief that the Lord places each of us where we are that we owe unquestioning support and obedience to the Leader. This is so painfully obvious that you want to smash your head into a wall when you hear people claim that God requires obedience to the Authorities. So if I were a German circa 1940 I would owe unquestioning loyalty and support to Der Führer, because he was placed there by God? Some of us are called to mass murder and torture for Christ? This sick psychology goes all the way back to the nonsense penned by Paul {Romans 13: 1-5} (who, if he were being sly to avoid prosecution by the Romans as a danger to the government, was too clever by half, since almost none of his followers appear to have caught on). Contra Paul, it seems to me that if all Powers that Be are ordained of God, that's fine, but am not I also one of the Powers that Be? So if all men are subject to the Powers that Be, that would mean that the Leader is also subject to the Powers that Be, as even Bush surely experienced when Cindy Sheehan camped outside his ranch a while back. So I don't see how any of this translates into a commandment or requirement to obey anyone. But there are limits to the amount of brain-damage I am willing to incur trying to understand the mind-fucked or those who will go to almost any lengths to preserve their ego-identity at horrendous cost to the world around them. As in, "I'm a Republican through and through."

I have no doubt, though, that that identity is a source of pride you can carry with you to the grave. Many, many graves.

Franz Kafka, call your office

Looks like they've been working overtime in one of our wonderful "laboratories of democracy."

"An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they've never been charged with a crime. . . . .
"The person's name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live.
"A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years if there have been no new problems and the judge believes the person is unlikely to abuse again." {link}

Remembering George Harrison

I spent a little time this weekend re-listening to All Things Must Pass. Like any fogey, I enjoy listening to the songs that were new when I was young. It was a good time for songs. The songwriters who came of age in the sixties often wrote and sung about things other than love and love's woes, as if they actually lived in a world and there were things that mattered beyond the issue of whether they, personally, had found, and achieved mind and body melding with, the soul-mate and significant other of their dreams. George wrote songs based on some of the ideas he found in eastern religions. Lao Tzu is good, but George's song about death and taking leave of a loved one is more beautiful and poignant.

"To talk little is natural.
High winds do not last all morning.
Heavy rain does not last all day.
Why is this? Heaven and earth!
If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal,
How is it possible for man?"

--Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, from No. 23, the Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English translation


All Things Must Pass

Sunrise doesn't last all morning
A cloudburst doesn't last all day
Seems my love is up and has left you with no warning
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away

Sunset doesnt last all evening
A mind can blow those clouds away
After all this, my love is up and must be leaving
It's not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
None of life's strings can last
So, I must be on my way
And face another day

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
Its not always going to be this grey

All things must pass
All things must pass away
All things must pass
All things must pass away

The Damned

Excellent post by Wolcott on the horror unfolding in the Mideast and our role in it: The Damned

Anyone familiar with gun control should readily perceive the immorality of the Israeli action. In America, government cannot stop gun crime so it increasingly criminalizes innocent and law-abiding gun owner's activities in order to prevent criminals from obtaining or using guns. While not stated as the goal, the effect is nonethless to place legal responsiblility and accountability for the unlawful behavior of others on the backs of the innocent for, in effect, having failed to stop crime.

Hezbollah makes its home in Lebanon near the Israeli border. Lebanon cannot control them, nor, as Pat Buchanon has written, was Israel able to disarm them in 18 years of occupation, but Lebanon citizens must now pay the price, in blood and destruction of their cities and homes, because of Hezbollah's actions. In effect, the Lebanese are held responsible and accountable because they did not prevent Hezbollah's crimes. This of course is also the terrorist modus operandi. American citizens must pay the price because their government meddles in the affairs of others. Americans elected these meddlers and we do not stop them. It is our fault, just as the Lebanese people failed to provide a government that would rid the country of Hezbollah. There is no such thing as an innocent victim.

It's all part and parcel of the theory of safety by prevention, which by necessary implication always involves the use of excessive and disproportionate force because it acts in advance of the crime or the assault, that is while others are still innocent of deed, if not of thought or belief, a distinction that is also eradicated in the pursuit of prevention because preemption necessarily proceeds on the basis of signs and portents. This doctrine has been enshrined in American law now since at least the 1960s, was formerly enshrined in USSR law, as described in painful, mocking detail by Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, and has now achieved fruition in foreign affairs in Bushian wars of "preemption," a word less antiseptically expressed in the more vernacular phrase, "doing unto others before they do unto you."

As Bush's domestic spying and wars indicate, it is now the open official policy of the US government, both at home and abroad, that no one is innocent.

tuesday night painting

Arms, law and society. Here is one of my favorites -- The Charge (1901), by Andre Victor Edouard Devambez. A larger version may be seen here.

Well, we had to do something with all this money . . .

Pity the rich. Having so much money enables them to transform their exterior suroundings to more closely match their interior world. So that their souls, as it were, become more readily visible to the rest of us. Case in point: what is it that the Google founders decide to do with some of their vast wealth? Pimp their ride!

The Gitmo ruling and the Thomas standard

Apologies to my 5 or 6 loyal readers for my long absence.

It's no longer news that the Supreme Court ruled that Bush's ad hoc military trials for Gitmo detainees were illegal under U.S. and international law. What I found particularly galling, and wish to comment on here, were the dissenting remarks by Thomas. The AP news article reports thus:

"Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent from Thursday's ruling and took the unusual step of reading part of it from the bench - something he had never done before in his 15 years. He said the court's decision would 'sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy.'

This is mind-numbingly idiotic, although admittedly not unusal by Supreme Court standards. Clarence, EVERY restriction or limit on the President hampers his ability to confront and defeat the enemy. The "degree of soreness" by which a provision of the Constitution, a law, authority vested in others or a refusal or unwillingess by others to voluntarily cooperate with the President hampers his ability to confront enemies is not actually a constitutional standard. If it were, then by this standard, the President should have control over the Congressional appropriations process, since Congress might not fund his anti-terror and war activities to the level he needs. The President should make the laws he needs, and so forth. That is, the President should be a dictator, his will should be law, so that he faces no restrictions on his ability to confront the enemy.

"The court's willingness, Thomas wrote in the dissent, 'to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous.' "

Now with this remark the mental pain is ratcheted up to excruciating levels. Clarence, in case you haven't figured it out yet, the whole checks and balances system of the Constitution, and the entire existence of the judiciary, is precisely the institutionalization of the right and power in others to second guess. The President can second guess Congress by vetoing a law. Congress can second guess the President by overriding. The Supreme Court can second guess both by finding a law unconstitutional. And more pertinent to the case at hand, namely, Bush's desire to avoid holding actual trials for Gitmo detainees, the jury second guesses the prosecution and law enforcement. The name for the government that has no second guessers is -- you guessed it! A dictatorship!

Clarence's remark is even more idiotic because his criticism assumes precisely that which is to be determined by the trial, namely, that these people actually are conspirators who must be brought to justice rather than, say, goatherds who were turned in for the nice bounty paid by the Americans. His remark, therefore, is little more than an assertion that we should trust the President and let his determination be sufficient against all others.

Clarence thus eagerly serves as apologist for The American Pantswetter, so frightened by the prospect that he or his loved ones may fall victim to another attack, that he will sell out a process of law that took hundreds of years to build and other men died and suffered imprisonment to establish.

"Safety" is not a principle. It is a prescription for servitude.

when democracy just isn't enough

Apparently, not enough Americans love the "freedom" which, in Bushworld, equates to "democracy." The buggers just won't turn out to vote. In my cynical moments (yes, it's just about all of them), I suspect that it is not freedom that our Dear President wishes so fervently to replicate around the world, but the same degree of passivity and anomie that characterizes Americans, rendering us among the most servile tools the world has ever seen.

Now it appears that, in order to better turn out the vote, an Arizona ballot measure proposes making voting the equivalent of acquring a lottery ticket for a prize of $1 million. According to the news report,

"Under the plan, the $1 million awarded to one randomly selected voter after each election would come from unclaimed Arizona Lottery prize money. A voter could get one entry in the drawing for voting in the primary and another for the general election.

"An Arizona State University faculty member who specializes in voting topics was concerned about the proposal. The $1 million reward is a "gimmick" that could cause some people to vote without giving sufficient thought to how they're voting, said Kelly McDonald, an assistant professor of political communications." {Emphasis supplied}.

But Herr Professor, how would we ever tell if anyone is giving the matter "sufficient thought"? How much thought - as oppposed, say, to emotional reactions - do people give and how much is "sufficient"? Surely Herr Professor knows that, legally, there are NO intelligence, knowledge or other qualifications to voting, except citizenship, residency, age and absence of a felony conviction, none of which have anything to do with controlling the qualifications of politicians or the substance of what politicians do. Maybe he should let the significance of that sink in a bit more.

This story reminds me of something Henry David told us long ago which, not incidentally, also has never sunk in:

"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

"I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of this wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighbor says, has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your hand through!"

Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (1849)

the long goodbye

With every day it becomes increasingly clear that the fear engendered in Americans by the events of 9/11 and the corresponding desire for security is ending what little remained of the Bill of Rights. Following close on the heels of a report that AG Gonzales is seeking to criminally prosecute journalists that reveal secrets (even, or especially when, the activities revealed are illegal), see this news report of the free pass given Gen. Hayden thus far by the Senate on Hayden's domestic surveillance activities.

The key indicator, in my view, that will reveal whether this erosion of our rights is permanent will be whether any candidates in the 2006 and 2008 elections promise to repeal the Patriot Act and to end warrantless domestic surveillance. If not, don't get too carried away celebrating the Democrats' victory, because election day will be time to say a final goodbye to your rights.

Update 5/24: Repeal the Patriot Act; Gore Urges Repeal; Bill of Rights Defense Committee Analysis

NSA data mining: how to lose rights by substituting standards

There are feuding polls now over whether a majority of Americans are ok with the NSA obtaining their phone records. From the polls it seems clear that there is a pretty close division of opinion on this.

This seems to me like a good example of how we get into trouble in this country by our constant harping on the “right of privacy.” A large number of Americans evidently don’t care who sees their phone records and have no “expectation of privacy” regarding them. Voila! There is no 4th amendment violation because not enough people care about their privacy in this realm.

In an article several years ago I wrote about various means the Supreme Court employs to loosen the protections set forth in the Bill of Rights. Here is what I said:

“Another way in which rights are limited is to ‘interpret’ them in light of the purpose they are supposed to achieve. For example, . . . [t]he Supreme Court has discovered that the purpose of the Fourth Amendment is to protect people's "reasonable expectations of privacy," and so this has become the Court's standard for determining how far law enforcement can go in conducting searches and seizures.
Now, because people's expectations of privacy vary in different circumstances, the Court has concluded that our Fourth Amendment rights similarly vary. So, the law of the land now proclaims that your rights against search and seizure are stronger in your home than when you are in your car. They are better yet if you own rather than rent. They are stronger still if you build a solid privacy fence around your yard than if you put up a chain link fence. But you have virtually no rights if surveyed from above; since anyone can see what you're doing from up there, you cannot possibly have a reasonable expectation of privacy from snooping helicopters. Your rights are stronger if you are a passenger in a car than if you are the driver. Personal papers are more protected than business records. You essentially have no rights in the records of your phone calls or banking transactions. A different Fourth Amendment rule for every occasion! So the remarkable upshot of the Court's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment in light of its purpose is: never before in history has our government had so much power to search and seize your person, personal information and property without probable cause and without a warrant, and yet never before in history has the purpose of the Fourth Amendment been so perfectly and fully achieved!”

The Bill of Rights does not explicitly provide for a right of privacy. What it does state is that there shall be no searches or seizures except upon probable cause. THIS IS ACTUALLY A STRONGER PROTECTION, in that it employs a legal, and not a psychological, standard developed during a time when people actually valued their freedom. The probable cause requirement is essentially categorical. A search or seizure is “unreasonable” and impermissible unless there is probable cause sufficient to convince a magistrate. The probable cause requirement outlaws fishing expeditions - even when given the hi-tech name, “data mining” - PERIOD.

By substituting another standard, especially one as vague and subjective as “privacy,” and as dependent on our fellow Americans actually having any sense of personal dignity or valuing their freedom rather than being mindfucked lemmings who don't care how few rights they have, how low they go, how far they approach being reduced to the status of serfs, and who jump at every chance to show how eager they are to give up their rights and grovel before any promise of protection and safety, we WEAKEN the protection. By harping upon the “privacy” violation in order to mobilize outrage, we are actually weakening the right by inviting fellow mindfucked and well-trained Americans - who don't give a damn about privacy - to respond to this latest violation of the Constitution with an indifferent shrug.

Immigration "reform" considered as a tax scheme

A subject I have not yet seen addressed in MSM accounts of the illegal immigration issue is how the proposals dealing with treatment of the 11+ million illegal immigrants are being structured to provide tax revenues to the government without concomitant Social Security and Medicare payment obligations. While I have not seen or analyzed any bills from which I may safely or validly draw a conclusion on this issue, President Bush's announcement of his own guest worker program leads me to believe this is a subject that merits real attention, since his proposal appears to treat illegal aliens as pawns in a tax revenue scheme.

The existing situation is this. Employers who hire illegals who work "off the books" are not paying any income tax wage withholding or Social Security or Medicare excise taxes, nor are these underground employees paying their own share of Social Security and Medicare taxes. Clearly, this is a benefit to employers, whose labor costs are greatly reduced, but not to the government, as taxes are not being paid. Those who are hired "on the books" but have false SSN's are paying their share of the Social Security and Medicare excise taxes, and their employers are paying wage withholding and their share of the Social Security and Medicare excise taxes, but note, Social Security and Medicare will have no obligation to make any actual payments for these fictitious people down the road. Thus, from a tax revenue standpoint, it is a benefit to government that this "false" state of affairs continues, as it generates revenues without payment obligations. Note, the best possible scenario, strictly from a revenue point of view, is, to capture the taxes from the underground activity and avoid payouts of Social Security and Medicare following retirement.

Now consider what Bush said in announcing his temporary worker program:

"This program expects temporary workers to return permanently to their home countries after their period of work in the United States has expired. And there should be financial incentives for them to do so. I will work with foreign governments on a plan to give temporary workers credit, when they enter their own nation's retirement system, for the time they have worked in America. I also support making it easier for temporary workers to contribute a portion of their earnings to tax-preferred savings accounts, money they can collect as they return to their native countries. After all, in many of those countries, a small nest egg is what is necessary to start their own business, or buy some land for their family."

Here's what this appears to indicate. The illegals will have strong incentives to formally register and obtain a legitimate taxpayer ID number, as this will end their murky status and worries about deportation. Employers will be less able to hire illegals off the record, meaning that a large portion of the tax revenue stream from the underground economy will be captured. But note the twist when it comes to Social Security and Medicare. Undoubtedly, even though the temporary workers will be expected to return home after their usefulness to America's employers has ended (could the mercenary nature of this proposal be any more clear?), full Social Security and Medicare taxes will be collected. However, since most temporary workers will be eventually forced out, Social Security and Medicare will not have the same payout obligations. Instead, the Bush administration intends that the US negotiate agreements with the countries of origin to make contributions to those nation's retirement systems on behalf of our guest workers. Since the cost of living in, say, Mexico, is considerably lower than that in the US, it is a virtual certainty that these "contributions" to other nations retirement systems will be a small fraction of what the obligation to these people would be if they were citizens and remained here.

Thus, while research is needed to confirm that this is the plan, and it would be great if someone crunched the numbers to see what the magnitude of this tax scheme is, it seems possible, if not likely, that immigration "reform" is being structured with a goal of funding future retirement obligations to the nation's citizens off of the backs of illegals who are employed so long as useful and then discarded.

Bush:
"This new system will be more compassionate. Decent, hard-working people will now be protected by labor laws, with the right to change jobs, earn fair wages, and enjoy the same working conditions that the law requires for American workers. Temporary workers will be able to establish their identities by obtaining the legal documents we all take for granted. And they will be able to talk openly to authorities, to report crimes when they are harmed, without the fear of being deported."

But since the plan is that they will pay full taxes but not generate anywhere near the same payout obligations because we will force them out before retirement, I think for now I'll withhold judgment on just how compassionate this really is. I need a better account of why this treatment is just before I climb on board that train.

the right man for the job

Crooks and Liars links to Jon Stewart catching Bush using almost the same words to nominate Gen. Hayden as he used to nominate Porter Goss to head the CIA: "He's the right man--at this critical moment--in our nation's history."

Ignoring the sheer embarrassing stupidity and lunacy of Bush's use of virtually the same words, Bush's recommendation nevertheless does serve one important function: It implicitly and subconsciously perpetuates the belief, critical to the legitimacy of American government and the election process, that good government depends on having the right persons in positions of power, and that government acquires legitimacy by having the "right" persons in control. Note that it would be patently absurd to even suggest such a thing if power in this country were radically decentralized and a mere handful of men and women did not wield such absolute control over the lives and livelihoods of citizens. The Bushian form of recommendation implicitly depends on the fact that the citizenry at large accepts, if not embraces, this state of affairs, that is, that huge amounts of absolute, arbitrary and discretionary power are held by a few who, if they are good, have great power to do good (but, the necessary corrollary - if evil or incompetent, to do evil or cause great harm), and do in fact believe that damn near everything depends on having exactly the right people in positions of authority.

So keep on voting, and working hard to get the right man in position! It's not the fact that we have unlimited government with the power to regulate and control every aspect of existence, it's not the uncountable laws and regulations that have already been passed and are on the books conferring power to regulate and criminalize minute aspects of existence, it's not the concentration of all this power in the hands of a few people in the federal government -- no, it all comes down to getting the right person at the helm, who can be counted on to Do The Right Thing!

Is this not insane? Is working to insure that the "right person" is in authority really the goal we should be focused on, since that tacitly assumes we accept this absolute, centralized power, and insures that that power will be available for WHOEVER manages to obtain those positions?

We need to break with this paradigm, in order to create a new one.

A tree is known by its fruits

At one point in his work, On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer is describing various false philosophies and he has this to say:

"Everyone feels how precarious must be the truth of a doctrine that men try to uphold with such defiant and dogmatic rhetoric." (E.F.J. Payne translation, Hackett Publsihing Company, 1995, p. 78)

An equally apt description of so many of the articles penned and oral "arguments" made by the apologists for the Iraq war. Would that everyone did feel it.

This form of speech, however, is entirely appropriate to American style "democracy," which depends not on informed consent based on full disclosure, but on ideological appeals on the one hand and browbeating and intimidation on the other, to engender fervid support by the true believers and silent acquiescence in the rest.

Madonna "criticizes" Bush

and yet, strangely, it's still all about Madonna.

Yesterday, at the Coachella music festival, "[d]uring an energetic rendition of her song I Love New York, Madonna roared, 'Just go to Texas and suck George Bush's d**k.'"

This is classic Madonna. While ostensibly she is "attacking" the President and seemingly intends to receive audience kudos, and perhaps self-congratultory kudos, for her outspoken "criticism" or her moral "seriousness," and invites her audience to believe she is more than a mere pop artist and that they, too, by listening to her music, are serious people, the point of this statement is not to assault the named object, Bush, but the act's own outrageousness. Telling people to go suck the President's dick is not actually criticism of President Bush; that would require saying something with substance. Madonna's statement is completely juvenile, not to say imbecilic. But its sheer outrageousness insures that it makes Madonna herself the focal point. Accordingly, while nominally about Bush, it is an entirely self-referential action. Reduced to its essence it is simply a "Look at me!" She is simply using the medium of politics for self-apotheosis, just as she once used sex and religion for that purpose.

It is not a sign of anything, anything positive. Why Huffington Post and others chose to feed this woman's narcissism by reporting this is beyond me.

nations of pants-wetters

nice post re: observations of H.L. Mencken on the fearfulness of Americans and Brits over at the LRC blog.

decline of the progressive cause?

Drudge is currently reporting (gleefully, I suspect) that the Daily Kos book, Crashing the Gate, has sold only 3,000 plus copies since publication, and that there has been a significant decline in the Arbitron ratings for Air America in NYC.

As an occasional listener to Air America, I enjoy Randi Rhodes' when she skewers the Bush administration. I offer the following analysis of the cause of the decline, but note, it is pure speculation on my part.

I suspect the decline in ratings and the poor performance of the book is due, certainly not to a resurgence of love for conservativism in general or the Bush administration in particular, but to Daily Kos' and Air America's fascination with pushing Democratic candidates, and their endeavors to revitalize the Democrats and mobilize the troops for the upcoming mid-term elections.

The last 5 years have provided lots of painful evidence of the complete uselessness of the Democrats in checking the Republicans. I suspect that large numbers of Americans are utterly disgusted with the two party system and convinced the whole thing is a vile, corrupt sham. Based on the history of the W years, there is absolutely NO reason to believe that Democrats merit more power. Daily Kos and Air America's efforts to reanimate the dead have little appeal, but they continue nonetheless because that's the system we have and they perceive no other viable or realistic option.

I think people perceive that that is a sell out. What is needed is a paradigm shift, not a change in the ruling party. My own recommendation would be to just tell the truth, relentlessly, about the real nature of the whole political process - Democrats and Republicans. The only action to recommend is complete abstention from the whole process, which is corrupt from top to bottom. Massive withdrawal from participating in the election process, particularly if recommended and advanced as the most worthy course of action, would convey that huge numbers of Americans now believe that the system has no legitimacy. This is essential if any but cosmetic change is to occur.

Do you really mean that?

Sen. Rick Santorum came in for some criticism at a conference held for professional women yesterday in Washington. In his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, Santorum evidently criticizes working mothers for choosing a second income and personal satisfaction with a job over raising children.

Reportedly, one of the attendees who hails from Santorum's home state, had this to say:

"Women are entitled to their choice, whether they become professionals or stay home," she said after the forum. "I don't appreciate anyone, public figure or not, telling anyone what they can and cannot do."

Since government is precisely the business of telling everyone what they can and cannot do, why get hot under the collar over this one issue? Why not just say, "Senator, don't make any of your ideas an action item for the rest of us. Your job shouldn't exist!" I suspect, however, that Santorum's critic didn't really mean exactly what she said.

Side/Flip Side 2 - the Duke rape case

Since I don't know the facts of what happened at the Duke lacrosse team party where one of the hired exotic dancers alleges she was raped, I have no opinion on what happened or who is guilty and who is innocent.

But absence of facts does not stop the Talking Heads; to the contrary, it is the medium in which they thrive. Perhaps this is because these pundits, and the audiences that hang on their words, are consummate metaphysicians: they know what must have happened given the nature of things. Either that, or they are drawing on their own vast experience with exotic dancers. But in that case they should refer to the evidence they've accumulated in support of their conclusions so that we junior scientists can evaulate how authoritative their statements are.

Tucker Carlson offered the view that the dancer was a "cypto-hooker," and Rush Limbaugh volunteered the view that she was a "ho." In Carlson's case, the point of this observation was that her testimony about what happened should be looked at "differently" than that of an "ordinary person."

Now here is something I can comment on. By Carlson's and Limbaugh's characterizations, we are to understand that the exotic dancer is a bad person or at a minimum that her chosen means of employment undercuts her credibility. The unstated implication is that the Duke boys are good, just regular joes -- "ordinary" -- in Carlson's language, and are more credible.

But a different degree of moral worth between the dancer and her audience is precisely what cannot be. Women like the alleged victim provide exotic dances because men like the Duke boys want exotic dances. She is providing a service they want and answering a need they have.

Side, meet flip side. The front side of the coin cannot be good, but the back side evil. They are absolute correlatives -- one and the same phenomenon. It cannot be that she is "bad" but the boys "good," she untrustworthy because of what she does, but they trustworthy when they want what she does. Yes, I know this is not how many or most people proceed. How people proceed in their "moral" thinking is that the boys are just being ordinary boys, but the girl is a whore, so her testimony is suspect and there is a presumption of an ulterior motive. She's just doing it for the money. After all, look at what she's already doing for the money. But they do not go the next step, and consider, but look at what the people who are paying the money are doing with the money. She is not stealing it. They are commissioning her behavior.

Someone whose name many Americans borrow for their religion had a different standard for thinking about accountability and truthfulness about who and what one is. He indicated that if you had a hateful thought about someone, you were as guilty as if you had commited murder. So if you hired a stripper to provide you entertainment, I suppose on this standard you are no less guilty than the stripper for stripping.

So Tucker, so Rush, if I cannot believe the exotic dancer because she is a crypto-hooker, I cannot believe or give more credence to the Duke boys for being boys.

Fortunately for all of us, the legal system's rules of evidence are considerably more sane than the metaphysics of Messrs. Carlson and Limbaugh.

Side/Flip Side 1 -The Decider in Chief

For days now the folks at Huffington Post have been tittering over Bush's statement at a news conference that he's the decider and he decides what's best.

Frankly, I'm not sure what they find amusing about this. While the words betray Bush's usual bufoonery with the English language and his smart-aleck approach to dealing with others, the statement certainly indicates that the man completely grasps the true nature of his office.

This is in fact what he does. Worse, and perhaps this is what we would rather not be reminded of, this is in fact what Bush is chosen by us to do. In his usual sophomoric way, he simply lacks the sense to sugarcoat it for us. He should be saying the same thing in a more grandiose manner, cloaking it in words that bespeak selfless service to mankind. Things like: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilization," as Oliver Wendell Holmes once said. Or Bush should stick to his statements that the number one priority of government is to protect the American people. That kind of remark is not so naked a statement of what he is about, and is far more palatable.

Speaking so directly about what it is that he really does violates a taboo by coming too near to revealing that government depends on our acceptance of the pretense that people in government are somehow a different order of beings who, unlike us, genuinely want to look after and care about others, and violates the taboo that reminds us that government is really about ordering us around.

Side, meet flip side. If Bush's formulation of his role, which is in fact accurate, is embarrasing and too naked to be acceptable, revealing as it does the juvenile nature of the whole endeavor, what does that make us, who want to choose someone to do this for us? What does that make the need or desire in us to have someone fufill that role for us?

self-authorization = law?

News reports today that Scooter Libby has testified that President Bush authorized the leak of the Plame name in order to promote the war. The NYT and others are jumping to the conclusion that there is no crime here because the President has the legal authority to declassify information and that his authorization of disclosure to the press amounted to official declassification. Media Matters cites these examples of CNN and Fox News coverage:

"CNN's David Ensor, reporting on the revelation that President Bush "authorized" the disclosure of classified portions of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate pertaining to Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction, simply asserted without elaboration that unnamed "experts" say Bush's actions were "legal," and that the president has "the right" to declassify such information. Similarly, Fox News' Brit Hume said that both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney "have the legal authority under an executive order signed by the president to make public classified information. So that takes the unauthorized out of it." "

What I find interesting about this is not the unanalyzed leap that leaking to the press qualifies as an official act of declassification, but the notion that, because the President had earlier executed an executive order granting himself (and the VP) the authority to declassify, his subsequent disclosure was legal. So because he first authorized himself to do it, and then did it, it's legal.

Anyone troubled by the notion that the President's authority is sui generis? That he can grant himself powers? That a thing is legal just because he proclaims it is so?

If this is established "law," and is "constitutional," surely there is no such thing as law anymore. This is as much to say that the President is King and the King's wish is law. There may be more to the question of legality than the media is picking up on, but the fact that the NYT, CNN and Fox offer us, in apparent complete seriousness as a thoroughly legitimate explanation, that it's legal because he first said it was legal, indicates the sorry state we are now in.

P.S. 4/7: Trying to make sense of this and being too lazy to research the question, I can find some logic to it as follows: If Congress gives the President the discretion in the first instance to classify and to assign levels of classification to administration information, then there is certainly an implied discretion to reduce classification and declassify. Still, it seems a strange procedure to state that it becomes legitimate because the President self-proclaims it is legitimate by EO .

sunday night poetry

To Our Lady of Vicarious Atonement
by Ezra Pound

I
Who are you that the whole world's song
Is shaken out beneath your feet
Leaving you comfortless,
Who, that, as wheat
Is garnered, gather in
The blades of man's sin
And bear that sheaf?
Lady of wrong and grief,
Blameless!

II
All souls beneath the gloom
That pass with little flames,
All these till time be run
Pass one by one
As Christs to save, and die;
What wrong one sowed,
Behold, another reaps!
Where lips awake our joy
The sad heart sleeps
Within.

No man doth bear his sin,
But many sins
Are gathered as a cloud about man's way.

The Party of Death

My, what authors won't do to pander to an audience to sell books these days! Ramesh Ponnuru, an editor with the National Review, has a new book out explaining to us how the Democrats - or as one reviewer of the book waggishly suggested - the Demoncrats - are the Party of Death. Per Amazon.com, the inside flap lays it out for us:

"Is the Democratic Party the "Party of Death"?

If you look at their agenda they are.

IT’S NOT JUST abortion-on-demand. It’s euthanasia, embryo destruction, even infanticide—and a potentially deadly concern with "the quality of life" of disabled people. If you think these issues don’t concern you—guess again. The Party of Death could be roaring into the White House, as National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru shows, in the person of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In The Party of Death, Ponnuru details how left-wing radicals, using abortion as their lever, took over the Democratic Party—and how they have used their power to corrupt our law and politics, abolish our fundamental right to life, and push the envelope in ever more dangerous directions. In The Party of Death, Ponnuru reveals:

* How Hillary Clinton could use the abortion issue (but not in the way you think) to become president
* Why the conventional wisdom about Roe v.Wade is a lie
* How the party of death—a coalition of special interests ranging from Planned Parenthood to Hollywood—came to own the Democratic Party
* How the mainstream media promotes the party of death
* Why Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, and other leading liberals gave up being pro-life
* How liberals use animal rights to displace human rights
* The Democratic presidential candidate who said that infanticide is a mother’s "choice"
* How doctors—and other health care professionals—are being coerced, by law, into violating their consciences
* The ultrasound revolution: why there’s hope to stop the party of death.

Ponnuru’s shocking exposé shows just how extreme the Party of Death has become as they seek to destroy every inconvenient life, demand fealty to their radical agenda, and punish anyone who defies them. But he also shows how the tide is turning, how the Party of Death can be defeated, and why its last victim might be the Democratic Party itself."

Wow, are you feeling the hysteria yet?

Actually, there is no party of life in America. In fact, if you look at the implications of their values, Americans are not pro-life. Some may be anti-abortion, or anti-euthansia, but this is a far cry from saying they are a party of life or are pro-life. It's hard slogging, but I once wrote an essay on why the right of abortion is in fact the most emblemmatic right of our time, and how it is deeply consistent with our current mores and form of government. There is only a surface distinction between Republicans and Democrats here. Here's the essay if you're interested: The Right Right for Our Time.

and talk radio will show us the way . . .

Newsmax has a partial transcipt of the vitriolic name-calling fest that occurred between Alec Baldwin, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin on Sunday's WABC Brian Whitman show.

Baldwin began the fun by responding to Hannity's assertion that he, Baldwin, was supposed to appear on Hannity's show with this: "Why would I want to come on the show with a no-talent, former construction worker hack like you?"

Here was Levin's opening salvo in his penetrating deconstruction of Baldwin's prior assertions that Cheney is a terrorist and Bush is a mass murderer: "We've only just begun - are you 40 or 50 pounds overweight now?"

And here's an example Hannity's famed cut to the quick analysis of Baldwin's prior claims: "You're a third-rate Hollywood egomaniac."

I don't know about you, but personally, I just can't get enough of Talk Radio's preferred form of commentary and debate: You're an asshole; No, you're an asshole. 3 hours of Limbaugh, 3 hours of Hannity, 2 hours of Mark Levin and 2 hours of Laura Ingraham are barely enough for me. Because if anything is going to help us understand our problems and lead us out of our difficulties, it's going to be resolving just who the real assholes are, so we know who to listen to and follow.

oh, the irony

Approximately 500,000 people took to the streets of Los Angeles over the weekend to protest proposed legislation that would make it a felony to be in this country illegally. So we finally discover what will drive people into the streets in this country to protest the acts of our government and - here's the sweet part - they're NOT Americans! They're here illegally, or they are friends and family of people who are here illegally. So while "real" Americans spend their weekend shopping, watching television, generally catching up on their household chores and spending time with their kids, the non-Americans take to the streets to protest an outrage, because they actually have something to lose and for them it's not an issue that they think only affects other people.

Illegal wiretapping - no problem.
Starting a war based on lies - no problem.
Torture, holding people without trial - no problem.
Making it a felony to be here illegally - BIG problem, but, consistently, not with real Americans.

epithets are onanistic self-congratulation

not reasoned analysis or argument

"U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday rejected charges by Democrats that the Bush administration was mishandling Iraq and said: "If they are competent to fight this war, then I ought to be singing on American Idol."

Dick, that's real good for stroking your base, who will surely get a nice belly laugh out of it, but unfortunately it does not follow from the fact (if a fact it be) that the Dems are incompetent to wage the Iraq war, that you and Bush ARE competent to wage the war or that you have waged it either justly or competently. In fact, it is an ontological possiblity that no one is capable of waging the Iraq war successfully, that is, if waging the war successfully means achieving a specific goal of establishing a certain kind of pro-American and democratic government in Iraq. In fact, it is an ontological possiblity that whatever the goal of waging this war is, which is somewhat murky because, Dick, you and George don't really want to be pinned down on that, is not something that can really be achieved by the means you have chosen to employ: killing people and destroying things.

What's my motivation here?

This is what I ask myself these days in considering whether it is worth my while to see a movie. The sequel to Basic Instinct premiered in London last night. Sharon Stone, who reprises her role as Catherine Tramell, had this to say to the entertainment press:

"In America we tend to erase women after 40, and it's a period when women become their most interesting. They are sexual in a different and alluring way," added the star, who recently became the face of Dior skincare.
"This film expresses that sexual allure in an unabashed and provocative way - in a way that is gritty and dangerous and quite presumptive."

Isn't that great? Because if there's anything that can really save us, and really improve our lives, it's making sure we eliminate all the obstacles to, relish, and plumb all the the possibilities inherent in sex.

we pay people for this?

"In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans start storing canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds as the prospect of a deadly bird flu outbreak approaches the United States."

What I really appreciate about this is the use of "under the bed" as a literary device to communicate how dire the situation is. Under the bed?? Is that because, when bird flu comes, we will all be too sick to leave our beds and retrieve food from the cupboards in the kitchen? Or is that because wandering bands of marauders in search of food will only pillage our kitchens and won't find our secret stash of food under our beds? Or is that because when bird flu comes we will all be hiding under our beds in fear, so we will want our food there right with us?

The idiocy is just excrutiating.

the pesky problem of becoming more finite than we used to be

Like most people with an e-mail address, I occasionally receive e-mails offering viagra, cialis and levitra for "erectile dysfunction."

This strikes me as a funny term. Most advertising is based on flattery, that is, it appeals to the target's desire to flatter himself or to his self-flattering self-image. It can do this by providing a means of self-deception that is readily accepted because it is flattering. The use of "dysfunction" suggests that something's happening that shouldn't be happening but, no worries, mate, here's the drug to take the dis out of dysfunctional. But suppose that nothing is actually wrong, that what is happening is just a natural part of the aging process. You're 50, 60 or 70 now, mate, and certain body parts are not as spry as they used to be. Or suppose that part of the problem is the crazy life that we lead, working all the time, no exercise, the utterly passive nature of most forms of our "recreation," bad food, repression.

In any of those cases, the use of the term, "dysfunction," is not really a correct description, and to use it is to help hide from the target the fact that he is aging, to assist the target into sidestepping thinking about it and avoiding the necessity of dealing with one's perfectly normal and non-diseased body as it is. It also helps the target avoid facing issues about his life he'd rather not deal with and guilty feelings over not doing that which could in fact really help: better diet, increased exercise, learning how to elimiinate self-induced stress - in effect helps him avoid questioning the craziness of this life - by providing a fix couched in medical terms that will help him with just this one thing - because it's only this one thing that is the problem.

It's not "Better Living Through Modern Chemisty," it's "More of the Same Living Through Modern Chemistry." Let's all take our pills, and stay in the harness we've put on.

abortion and the kindness of strangers

I don't really have much to say about South Dakota's abortion ban, other than to express sadness that the tools that those who oppose abortion reach for to address the moral, social and personal problems that lead to abortion and to shape society's mores on this subject are: threat, fear, fines and imprisonment. Evidently, in light of the Christian right's support for these bans, this is also the Christian thing to do. But after all, we do have the example of a President who believes that American ideals of freedom, democracy, religious tolerance and equality for women may be kindled in others and advanced abroad through the use of the murder of enemies, M-16s, bombs, occupation, home invasions, and the sexual humiliation and torture of prisoners. It is amazing that so many can believe that these destructive and indiscriminate methods can create such marvelous, specific goods.

It is interesting, and genuinely eye-opening, to contemplate how people in Western societies handled the problem of children they did not want or could not provide for before we had the technical means of preventing pregnancy or terminating the life of the child before birth. Apparently, there was a wide-spread practice and custom of abandonning children, in the hope that some stranger would take the child in and rear it as part of his or her own family, or at least provide a better life than the parent thought he or she could. Apparently this worked out, after a fashion, but matters became worse for abandonned children when institutional "solutions" were offered to address the problem. This is all addressed in the book, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, by Professor John Boswell. I have not yet read the book, but there is a fairly detailed summary of its substance here, and the book seems well worth a read.

so it goes

“It appears, then, that the Eatanswill people, like the people of many other small towns, considered themselves of the utmost and most mighty importance, and that every man in Eatanswill, conscious of the weight that attached to his example, felt himself bound to unite, heart and soul, with one of the two great parties that divided the town – the Blues and the Buffs. Now the Blues lost no opportunity of opposing the Buffs, and the Buffs lost no opportunity of opposing the Blues; and the consequence was, that whenever the Buffs and Blues met together at public meeting, Town-Hall, fair, or market, disputes and high words arose between them. With these dissensions it is almost superfluous to say that everything in Eatanswill was made a party question. If the Buffs proposed to new sky-light the market-place, the Blues got up public meetings, and denounced the proceeding; if the Blues proposed the erection of an additional pump in the High Street, the Buffs rose as one man and stood aghast at the enormity. There were Blue shops and Buff shops, Blue inns and Buff inns; - there was a Blue aisle and a Buff aisle, in the very church itself.

Of course it was essentially and indispensably necessary that each of these powerful parties should have its chosen organ and representative; and, accordingly, there were two newspapers in the town – the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent; the former advocating Blue principles, and the latter conducted on grounds decidedly Buff. Fine newspapers they were. Such leading articles, and such spirited attacks! – ‘Our worthless contemporary, the Gazette' - ‘That disgraceful and dastardly journal, the Independent’ – ‘That false and scurrilous print, the Independent’ – ‘That vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette;’ these, and other spirit-stirring denunciations were strewn plentifully over the columns of each, in every number, and excited feelings of the most intense delight and indignation in the bosoms of the townspeople.

Mr. Pickwick, with his usual foresight and sagacity, had chosen a peculiarly desirable moment for his visit to the borough. Never was such a contest known. The Honourable Samuel Slumkey, of Slumkey Hall, was the Blue candidate; and Horatio Fizkin, Esq., of Fizkin Lodge, near Eatanswill, had been prevailed upon by his friends to stand forward on the Buff interest. The Gazette warned the electors of Eatanswill that the eyes not only of England, but of the whole civilized world, were upon them; and the Independent imperatively demanded to know, whether the constituency of Eatanswill were the grand fellows they had always taken them for, or base and servile tools, undeserving alike of the name of Englishmen and the blessings of freedom.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837)

saccharine triumphalism in rhetorical overdrive

Here's what happens when a man with talent and brains reaches for self-congratulatory triumphalism instead of honest analysis.

If you're willing to risk your head exploding, George Will's latest column re: why conservatives are happier than liberals is the greatest concentration of unsupported mush and nonsense I have seen in a long, long time. The statements are all completely unverifiable and virtually meaningless because neither "happiness," "conservatism" nor "liberalism" are defined, have no specific content, and are completely left to individual, self-evident self-identification. Thus, self-proclaimed liberals can rage that it's a lie or that the so-called "happiness" of conservatives is dim-witted contentment of those who fail to see that they are walking on the edge of a precipice, or some such reaction. And self-proclaimed conservatives can flatter themselves at the news that they are happier than liberals. (What the hell is happiness, and more to the point, why, exactly, should I care who's winning the happiness race? Tell me, please, is there anything in this society that is not us vs. them? Is there anything in this society that is not a competition? Are we capable of enjoying a thing only when we both have it and are "winning," i.e, only when having it has added piquancy from knowing, and celebrating, that someone else doesn't have it?)

Virtually every line is a howler, but this one, in particular, caught my attention: "The right to pursue happiness is the essential right that government exists to protect."

Wow, do we, and are we really able to, pursue happiness only because government is there to protect that activity? Do we really need a "right" to pursue happiness in order to actually pursue it? Would we be stymied, and cease pursuing happiness, if government didn't exist, or didn't work too well?

Far from needing government in order to pursue happiness, isn't the question, rather, what would ever stop us from pursuing happiness? In fact, isn't it the case that the force of government is needed precisely to prevent us from pursuing happiness, or rather, so that government can prevent some people from pursuing happiness in the way they see fit so that others can have their happiness? For example, banning peanut imports so that American consumers have to pay higher prices for American peanuts, thereby increasing the happiness of American peanut farmers but decreasing the happiness of peanut butter lovers.

And finally, who are these demi-gods in government that are capable of determining what constitutes the maximum happiness and satisfaction of the maximum number of people by this global balancing of pleasures and pains? Is this really what they are doing? Or are they just selling legislation to maximize their happiness - e.g., their longevity in office and their power?

here's a view we don't hear often

The Marines - hedonists with guns.

the chickens' homecoming: Dubai port deal

The White House seems to have been surprised at the response of the administration's approval of the Dubai port deal. What did it expect? Having tutored the American people relentlessly since 9/11 in the art of collective guilt by association on the most tenuous of grounds (I speak of their public arguments floated as sufficient "evidence" for purposes of manufacturing support for the war) - Saddam once met with bin Laden, some terrorists were living in Iraq, blah blah blah - how can the administration now feign outrage when Congresspersons and Americans use the self-same technique (9/11 money was laundered through banks in the UAE, some of the terrorists came from the UAE, q.e.d) to conclude that handing port operations over to a UAE company is insanity?

Bush is outraged nonetheless, but that is because his principal expectation in all things is that people are supposed to go along with whatever he says without question, because he's the President. He doesn't need to explain himself, he doesn't need to share information or build consensus or open a dialogue with those affected by his decision before making a decision.

And in fact, this is the rule for power and hierarchy in human society: the more power, the less one has to account for or explain oneself, the less one is accountable for his own actions, the less one will ever experience any adverse consequences for his own behavior.

P.S. 2/23: Turns out the Prez was surprised for a much simpler reason: He had no idea his adminstration had approved the deal until he heard Sen Schumer railing against it. However, while wrong on the particulars, my assessment seems spot on insofar as it describes the Prez's attitude about such things. See, e.g., this post.

some poems by Akhmatova

The most beautiful translations of Akhmatova's poems I have ever read are those by Stanley Kunitz. Surprisingly, almost none of them are on the web. So here are three, from the out of print book.


How can you look at the Neva,
how can you stand on the bridges? . . .
No wonder people think I grieve;
his image will not let me go.
Black angels' wings can cut one down,
I count the days till Judgment Day.
The streets are stained with lurid fires,
bonfires of roses in the snow.

- 1914


All has been taken away; strength and love.
My body, cast into an unloved city,
is not glad of the sun. I feel my blood
has gone quite cold in me.

I'm baffled by the Muse's state of mind;
she looks at me and doesn't say a word,
and lays her head, in its dark wreath,
exhausted, on my breast.

And only conscience, more terribly each day
rages, demanding vast tribute.
For answer I hide my face in my hands . . .
but I have run out of tears and excuses.

-- Sevastopol, 24 October 1916


Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

-- 1919

the powerless satisfied vicariously

According to Batman's creator, Batman is going after Osama bin Laden. Finally, we'll get the satisfaction we've been waiting for, when Batman kicks al Qaeda's ass!

This is pretty pathetic, no? Our military and political establishment can't -- or won't -- get the job done, so we're turning to Batman. How else will we get the release we seek, the justice we deserve?

Unfortunately, this is par for the course. President Clinton's administration was mired down in the Lewinsky affair, going nowhere, losing vast opportunities for great and noble deeds because it was completely preoccupied with impeachment proceedings. Like the cavalry arriving in the nick of time, Hollywood saves the day by giving us The West Wing, the presidency we wish we had, and surely, the presidency we deserve. Ah yes, if only. What sweet catharsis, what sweet fulfillment.

Television is filled with the counter-terorist units, police, lawyers and doctors we wish we had, who provide us with the satisfaction we need! The real world does not live up to our expectations or wishes; we are powerless to do anything about it; we have no desire to understand why things are the way they are or evaluate our own desires and to take action; better simply to retreat into an alternate, unreal but far more satisfying universe where our longings are satisfied vicariously.

Since so much of our popular art and entertainment serves this purpose, the questions should be asked: What's so great about catharsis? Doesn't the catharis achieved vicariously through art simply reconcile people to their own impotence, to the status quo?

I recommend that the following observation be appended to Aristotle's Poetics, as a warning for future storytellers: Catharsis may be a tool of social control.

Response to Tolstoy article over at LRC

LewRockwell.com posted a letter written by Leo Tolstoy in which Tolstoy argues that the only way to stop war is for men to refuse to serve as soldiers. I submitted it to Lew because I believe it is a message that needs to be heard, and I wrote a brief introduction. Surprisingly, I received only one e-mail that took me to task for it. This was the essence of the writer's critique:

"As for me, I have found that the generality of soldiers are possessed of character superior to the generality of their critics."

My response to this e-mail, leaving out the sender's name and with one minor modification, is below:

"Thanks for your e-mail.

Unfortunately for the world, it is possible to be of great character, and still be wrong. It is possible to be very brave, very loyal, very upright, very dutiful, very intelligent, and still labor on behalf of a wrong idea, and use all of one's finest qualities on behalf of a morally wrong action. In fact, every government in the world depends precisely on just that - that men of fine character will devote themselves to its service, because they believe in its stated ideals. Unfortunately, those same fine qualities also permit such men to be manipulated into serving other, unstated, goals carried out in the name of those fine ideals. Pledging oneself to act on the commands of others is, therefore, a treacherous undertaking.

The fact that an activity is enaged in by men of fine character does not make that activity right. The fact that 98% of all people throughout all of history believe it to be moral and right does not make it right. The fact that men of low character recognize that a scam is under way, does not mean that they are wrong.

Tolstoy proceeds from the moral position that, based on Christ's teachings, it is wrong to murder others. Christ taught "Love your enemies" and love others as you love yourself. Since men who love themselves do not go around killing themselves, these standards imply that you do not ever kill others. Despite the fact that he obviously knew how to use words, he did not say, love your enemies, except if Caesar tells you you have to go kick ass," or "unless they mean you harm." They're your enemies; of course they mean you harm. Now, if you believe that's all BS, and that men are completely capable of making up their own minds about when its right and wrong to kill others and that it's ok to kill others, including innocents ("collateral damage"), because it's for one's country, then obviously you've "answered" Tolstoy, and you can dismiss his arguments. In that case, your country, your hatred, or your own hide, not Christ, is your god.

Regards,
JS"

I wrote an article about this "character issue" once.

nice quote

saw this on the Antiwar.com banner today:

"Killing a man in defense of an idea is not defending an idea; it is killing a man."
– Jean -Luc Godard

And it may equally be said: Killing a man to advance an idea is not advancing an idea; it is killing a man.

The peace of complete conformity to our will

According to Bush's SOTU speech last night, US world leadership "is the only way to secure the peace."

This is always the king's definition of peace: complete obedience to, and immediate compliance with, his will. That is certainly the king's peace.

stick close to your desks and never go to sea . . .

Spring and whimsy are in the air here today in New York, with sun, balmy breezes and temperatures expected to reach close to 60. Reading the pre-State of the Union speech coverage this morning and thinking about the Bush administration, I could not help recalling this Gilbert and Sullivan gem:

The First Lord's Song
[HMS Pinafore]

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an attorney's firm
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor
And I polished up the handle of the big front door
I polished up that handle so carefully
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy

As office boy I made such a mark
That they gave me the post of a junior clerk
I served the writs with a smile so bland
And I copied all the letters in a big round hand
I copied all the letters in a hand so free
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy

In serving writs I made such a name
That an articled clerk I soon became
I wore clean collars and a brand-new suit
For the Pass Examination at the Institute
And that Pass Examination did so well for me
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy

Of legal knowledge I acquired such a grip
That they took me into the partnership
And that junior partnership I ween
Was the only ship that I ever had seen
But that kind of ship so suited me
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navy

I grew so rich that I was sent
By a pocket borough into Parliament
I always voted at my Party's call
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all
I thought so little, they rewarded me
By making me the Ruler of the Queen's Navy

Now, landsmen all, whoever you may be
If you want to rise to the top of the tree
If your soul isn't fettered to an office stool
Be careful to be guided by this golden rule
Stick close to your desks and never go to sea
And you all may be Rulers of the Queen's Navy

wait, I thought democracies were peaceful

The Bush administration is surprised that Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group dedicated to the eradication of the State of Israel, won the Palestinian elections, and is considering refusing to deal with it at all.

But wait, what's the problem here? I thought that Bushian foreign policy was founded on the Lesson from History that free nations with democratic institutions are peaceful, which is why it was so essential to create a democratic Iraq. How can there be a problem? You mean this is not, like, a law of nature? With the election of Hamas, am I to believe that it is completely possible that there can be a democracy that is devoted to terrorism? Does this mean that making Iraq a democracy will not insure that it does not engage in or support terrorism? Uh, why are we there, again? Please, President Bush, send Scott McLellan out to explain this to me. Inquiring minds want to know.

Today I write in support of unsupported breasts

Flipping through the NY Daily News this morning, I see that the "Thersday" supplement is a two page photo extravaganza featuring the "Worst Supported Actresses," from the Golden Globes, meaning, those who failed greviously to provide sufficient support or uplift for their breasts. The color commentary accompanying the pictures was provided by two men who run shops that specialize in selling bras. Not only did they point out the shortcomings in the womens' dress or breasts, they most kindly added their recommendations of the bras the women could have worn that would have solved their particular beauty problems (all reasonably priced from $35 - $85).

Now, much could be said here about the obvious (i) manipulation of female insecurity to induce the purchase of "corrective" or "life enhancing" products, and (ii) American fear and self-loathing of the actual, natural body. But what I find more amazing, and grating, is the freedom with which we make comments about another's person in this society. Apparently, one need have no compunction about commenting on anyone's dress or appearance, or presumably any other aspect of their person, least of all if that person is a celebrity. This is ill-mannered and boorish in the extreme. While I have no especial love for the centrality of celebrities in American life, these women are individuals like you or me and do not deserve this. What people wear, and the way they wear it, especially when they self-consciously select "an outfit" for a special occasion, deserves a well-mannered response or, if this is not possible, no comment while one remains in all other respects friendly and polite. You are dealing with that person, an actual human being. It is even lower to exploit this sort of thing for commercial gain, whether that be to sell bras, magazines or television shows.

The question is not how low the breasts go, it's how low we go to make ourselves feel better at the expense of others and to make money. And here in America, there is apparently no bottom to how low we can go.

more reform coming our way

From HuffingtonPost.com:

"On Wednesday, Jan 18, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will unveil a set of reforms in an Honest Leadership Act to be introduced jointly by Senate and House Democrats. The Honest Leadership Act is intended to clean out the corruption and cronyism in government, and prevent abuses of power in the future.
A key proposal in the Act is known as “The Jack Abramoff Rule.” It bans members and staff from receiving gifts, meals and travel from lobbyists. Current Ethics Committee rules allow gifts and meals under $50 for members and staff and require full disclosure of lobbyist-related travel."

Government: Reformed from time immemorial; still not reformed. Why do you suppose that is?

Have Opinion, Will Coerce

An ABC News poll reports that a majority of Americans want Alito on the court. The unquestioning manner in which news companies believe they are reporting actual "facts" in reports like this always astounds me. On what basis did a majority of Americans come to this conclusion? It's safe to assume they have no personal acquaintance with Mr. Altio that would permit them to come to this conclusion, and it seems safe to assume that a majority of Americans have not spent any significant time reading and analyzing Mr. Alito's opinions, thereby providing themselves with an informed basis to evaluate the matter. It seems to me that a true and honest answer to the pollster's question whether Mr. Alito should be on the Court would, for nearly everyone, be, "I do not know," even if they said "yea" or "nay." In the absence or real personal knowledge or real analysis based on Alito's past opinions, what the poll really measures is the degree to which some Americans trust Bush to appoint the right person, or the faith they put in pundits who have opined (with or without foundation) on the subject, or the extent to which they liked the look and deportment of the man when they saw him on TV. It cannot possibly be an opinion that is held by over one hundred million Americans about the actual fitness of the acutal man, Alito, to serve as a Supreme Court judge.

The greater significance of these polls, though, is that they show that our fellow citizens have extremely little reluctance to voice opinions on who should rule us, despite a near complete absence of information, knowledge or understanding on which to base any such decision. Yes, of course, this is precisely what "democracy," is, the kingship of unvetted, unqualified, unconditional and absolutely evanescent opinion. It astounds, nonethless, that, simply as a moral matter, a great many, possibly most, of our fellow citizens do not believe there is some necessary quantum of knowledge or understanding that is required before they feel they have a "right" to impose their will on others.

I mention this not because people would have a right to impose their will on others if only they knew enough, but to emphasize how little compunction there is in the desire, and to emphasize that those who voice their plans for the rest of us apparently hold themselves to no standard whatsoever.

Aside: A key component of the Alito battle will be Alito's stance on abortion. I wrote an article many years ago about why a judicial nominee's stance on abortion is, rightly, viewed by the public as the key to understanding the kind of judge he will be, and why a belief in a right of abortion really does indicate the degree of fitness the nominee has to serve in public office and to rule over others. If interested, you can find it here.

If safety is your highest priority, you are a slave

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Bush's illegal wiretapping has opened a further divide within Republican ranks, further alienating the portion of the Republican base that still believes in individual rights and Constitutionalism.

While some "top Republicans," like Olympia Snowe, have criticized the surveillance, the WSJ reports that "[s]ome other top Republicans have defended the president's right to conduct surveillance outside congressionally mandated rules. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi summarized the argument: 'I want my security first,' he told reporters when news of the program broke last week. 'I will deal with all the details after that.'

As the War on Terror should have made plain to anyone with functioning neurons by now, if security and preserving your life or those of your loved ones is your highest value, you will be a slave. If you "want your security first," if saving your physical life is your highest value, there is nothing you won't give up short of that to preserve that life. By making your life your highest value, you are implicitly granting eveyone who would threaten to take that life, and every self-styled "protector" who runs a protection racket (government, in case you didn't catch the drift) the power to control you. Nor is there one qualitative aspect of that life that you will be able hold onto. You have transformed the entire content of your life into mere "details."

Congratulations, you have made yourself a slave. And there will be no end to your degradation.

"L'homme vivant sous la servitude des lois prend sans s'en douter une âme d'esclave."
"The man who lives under the servitude of laws takes, without suspecting it, the soul of a slave."
-- Georges Ripert, Le Déclin du Droit - Etude sur la législation contemporaine (1949)

Brokeback Mountain

At the risk of being ridiculous by commenting on a movie I have not seen and will not likely ever see, my idea of the cultural significance of this movie runs counter to that thus far offered in reviews or comments I have seen.

The movie has been characterized as a romance, and based on the trailer I saw and reviews I have read I don't doubt it for a second. In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont explored the development and meaning of the modern western notion of love between the sexes, which he saw as a rejection of the Christian notion of love. One of his key points, as I recall, is that romantic love, and the intense passion of romantic love, could not and did not exist without obstacles preventing its consummation. This love was love thwarted, was a love fundamentally in love with an ideal of love. So it is that in the standard romance movie, the story ends with successful consummation, because that is the end of the passion itself. Remove the obstacles and there is no more passion. De Rougemont, who was a Catholic, had little trouble demonstrating that such love was more obsession with self and self-love than actual love of another, in the Christian sense.

In this light, Brokeback Mountain perhaps signifies, not so much the normalizing and increasing acceptance of homosexuality, or stereotype-busting deconstruction of masculinity represented in traditional Westerns, as the death of romantic love between men and women. There being no real class, cultural or moral obstacles these days to "true love" between men and women, Hollywood and our writers of fiction must now have recourse to historical eras and to the few remaining taboos that exist, albeit in ever tenuous form, in order to create a romance.

If this is correct, the significance of Brokeback Mountain is that romance, in the modern western world, is on its last legs.

No. 24

"He who stands on tiptoe is not steady.
He who strides cannot maintain the pace.
He who makes a show is not enlightened.
He who is self-righteous is not respected.
He who boasts achieves nothing.
He who brags will not endure.
According to followers of the Tao,
'These are extra food and unnecessary luggage.'
They do not bring happiness.
Therefore followers of the Tao avoid them."

-- Lao Tzu, from the beautiful translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English

the sanctity - or is it sanctimoniousness? - of our Way of Life

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace spoke December 1 at the National Defense University of at Fort McNair, to follow up on Bush's Plan for Victory. According to an AP article by Robert Burns that appears in December 2nd's edition of AM New York, he said that he is often asked if the United States would be better off ending the fight and leaving Iraq. "There is no option other than victory," he said. "You need to get out and read what our enemies have said . . . Their goal is to destroy our way of life."

Assuming arguendo that our enemies' goal is indeed to "destroy our way of life," rather than the somewhat less grandiose, but nonetheless damn near impossible to achieve, goal of getting us to stop meddling in their affairs, then it really needs to be said that: no one, and no country, has a right to a way of life. There is no right to murder others in order to preserve a way of life. There is not even a lesser right to engineer or control the way that others live, that is, to manipulate others' ways of life, in order to bolster or preserve our own way of life.

In fact, if everyone has a right to a "way of life," which depends implicitly on others having certain other kinds of ways of life (say, e.g., slave or cheap labor, far lower standards of living and corresponding low costs for the production of goods or extraction of their natural resources), then obviously preserving a "way of life," is essentially a coercive and violent undertaking that implicitly depends on keeping people in their place. A right to a way of life is, therefore, permission and a prescription for eternal warfare. You need not be a Kantian to appreciate the fact that a universal right to "a way of life" and a universal right to the "pursuit of happiness" are inherently unstable, contradictory and cannot coexist.

There are a few other problems with the General's comment that prevent me from jumping on the war bandwagon out of fear that I may lose my way of life.

First, it is hard to become exercised over the possibliity that certain foreigners seek to end our way of life when it is increasingly clear that the predatory free for all and plunderfest we call Democracy seems itself destined to result in self destruction. See, e.g., the comments of Bill Bonner on the debt burden we are imposing on generations still unborn:

"George W. Bush will go down in history not as a great war president, we recall predicting earlier this week, but as the greatest debt-beat president the country has ever had. In his few years in office, the feds have borrowed more than $1.05 trillion from foreign governments and banks. This is more than all the rest of the nation’s administrations put together, from 1776 to 2000.
Last month, the U.S. national debt passed the $8 trillion mark. This year’s budget deficit alone added $319 billion to the country’s obligations. According to the feds themselves, deficits will rise to $873 billion per year within 10 years. Two years more and they will be at $1 trillion per year, with a national debt edging up to $20 trillion. By 2017, annual deficits are supposed to reach $2 trillion per year."

Second, the dread intended to be evoked by the General's warning assumes that the inherent nature of our way of life does not already possess an internal logic and impulse that will result in its destruction, that, left to our own devices free from terrorism, we will preserve what we value in the way we live. This is quite a laugh. We preserve nothing. On this point, see the brilliant comments on dialectical materialism by John Laughland.

Finally, the General, like his President, fails to explain the mechanism by which, short of a mass land invasion and takeover of our government and possibly a forced conversion to Islam, the terrorists are going to end our way of life. It seems far more likely, and clear, that it is our own reaction to the terrorists that is effectively ending our way of life - through the formation of a police state and the bankrupting of ourselves to conduct a "War on Terror" - all thanks to our own fear, desire for revenge, and the quick American eye for opportunities to line one's pockets by simultaneously stoking and answering those new needs.

Show others the errors of their ways, o lord!

and let the world know that I was right.

Two recent stories in which a desire to be vindicated, and proven right, makes an easy transition into wishing death and destruction on others.

First, Pat Robertson warns Pennsylvania voters who voted out their shcool board for supporting "intelligent design" not to be surprised if a natural disaster soon befalls them and advises them to not bother calling upon God when it does, because they just voted Him out of their city.

Next, Bill O'Reilly loses it when San Franciscans vote to prohibit military recruiting at public high schools and campuses, and lets us know that if he were president, he would tell San Franciscans that "if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. Wer're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit tower? Go ahead."

Clearly, it is more important to Pat and Bill that God and Al Qaeda prove to the world that they are right by insuring that these people learn their lesson and get what is coming to them, than it is that Pat and Bill, Christians and Americans, actually do what is right by people who, on Pat's and Bill's premises, are in error.

Am I wrong to suppose that this is NOT how someone who was motivated principally by bonds of love or kinship would act? If you discovered that your adolescent son was taking drugs, would the proper response be to tell him that he is being an idiot and should stop and if he doesn't listen to you, you hope that he gets a really bad batch that fries his brain and really messes him up and maybe kills him? Wouldn't your one and only concern, if you were a flesh-and-blood human being instead of a man who pretends to be the President or a man who pretends to Walk With God, be to help him, and not to secure bragging rights to say, "I told him so, I told him so", when he dies of an overdose or ends up a vegetable?

Robertson's latest jeremiad is but another indication that Robertson's Christianity not only has nothing to do with, but is actually opposed to, Christ. See, e.g., Luke 9: 51-56.

O'Reilly's invective illuminates the nature of his, and his devoted audience's, idea of "patriotism" or "love of country." There is no real feeling of kinship in it, for if there were, and if they really believed that San Franciscans were wrong, horribly wrong, O'Reilly and his audience would be far more worried about saving San Franciscans than sending wishes for their hasty demise. O'Reilly's form of "love of country" is all us versus them, crushing opposition, delight in downfall. "America" and "country" are just aggrandizing ideas through which O'Reilly and his audience's souls are magnified and are granted free reign, and the only love they truly feel is love of self.

So it appears to me, at any rate.

What is to be done?

The best answer to this question I have ever read is by far Leo Tolstoy's "Letter to Russian Liberals," which I have added to the sidebar today. In his letter, Tolstoy argues that "reflection and experience alike show me that both the means of combating Government used heretofore [revolution and gradual reform], are not only ineffectual, but actually tend to strengthen the power and irresponsibility of the Government," and that the "gradual conquest of rights" that reformers seek in entering government is not only "a self-deception which suits the Government admirably," but is actually harmful:

"It is harmful because enlightened, good, and honest people by entering the ranks of the Government give it a moral authority which but for them it would not possess. If the Government were made up entirely of that coarse element-- the men of violence, self-seekers, and flatterers -- who form its core, it could not continue to exist. The fact that honest and enlightened people are found participating in the affairs of the Government gives Government whatever moral prestige it possesses."

The letter is available a few places on the web, and may be found in the out of print, Tolstoy's Writings On Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence, Bergman Publishers, New York (1967), pp. 141-154. The translator notes that the circumstances of the letter are as follows:

"This letter was addressed to a Russian lady who wrote to Tolstoy asking his advice or assistance when the "Literature Committee," Komitet Gramotnosti, in which she was actively engaged, was closed. The circumstances were as follows: A "Voluntary Economic Society" (founded in the reign of Catherine the Great) existed, and was allowed to debate economic problems within certain limits. Its existence was sanctioned by, and it was under the control of, the Ministry of the Interior. A branch of this society was formed called the "Literature Committee." This branch aimed at spreading good and wholesome literature among the people and in the schools, by establishing libraries or in other ways. However, their views as to what books it is good for people to read did not tally with those of the government, and in 1896 it was decreed that the "Voluntary Economic Society" should be transferred from the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior to that of the Ministry of Education. This sounded harmless, but translated into unofficial language it meant that the activity of the Committee was to terminate, and the proceeding of the whole Society was to be reduced to a formality. "

The book is well worth it, containing not only writings that are very difficult to obtain elsewhere, including the letter containing a Tolstoy analogy cited and employed by Solzhenitsyn in Gulag Archipelago, but also contains excellent footnotes by the translator that explain many of Tolstoy's historical references.

To me, this letter is most interesting because, in 1896, at the dawn of fervent movements to reform governments, we have a fairly compelling case being made that governments cannot be reformed, and that the efforts to do so are in fact self-defeating.

Amerikan Gulag

Looks like we miss the old USSR so much we decided to become it. Apparently, so much so that we are even using former gulag camps in eastern Europe.

Cheney Plan Exempts CIA from Bill Barring Abuse of Detainees (Wash. Post)
CIA Plane Spirits Terror Suspects to Torturing Countries (AFP)
Secret World of US Jails (The Observer)
CIA Holds terror suspects in secret prisons (Wash. Post)
Alleged secret detention camp in eastern Europe sparks MEPs' outrage (EU Observer)
Policies on Terrorism Suspects Come Under Fire (Wash. Post)

"THE White House has refused to confirm or deny reports that the CIA operates secret prisons, known as "black sites," for Al-Qaeda suspects in Eastern Europe and other places around the world. President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said the United States will do what is necessary to fight and win the war on terrorism." (Herald Sun)

"We will do what is necessary to win."
I can think of only one other sentence that so clearly indicates that he who utters it has sold his soul, but it is a sentence that is never spoken, only the implicit basis on which people act:
"We have no king but Caesar."

God, the Author of all Evil?

In Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will (first published , 1841), Schopenhauer argues that men do not possess a "free will," but that each man has an immutable character from birth, and that all his actions spring necessarily from the interaction of his motives (external objects, or perhaps, the desires prompted by external objects) with that character. There is no "freedom of choice;" instead, our actions are but the outcome of the interplay or war of diverse motives and our character, and we do not know what we will do until we have done it. We have no power to have done otherwise.

This of course means that while each of us is responsible for our own actions, in the sense that we performed them and they are our acts, we are not blameworthy for our own actions, i.e., they are not rightfully the subject of moral censure by others or guilt (self-censure), because there was no choice; we could not have acted otherwise.

But this also means that our Creator, in creating each of us and stamping upon us our immutable character, is the one who is ultimately responsible for everything that occurs - including all the evil in the world. Schopenhauer argues that "free will" was invented to avoid the difficulty of ascribing evil to God - to make men responsible, so that God would not be. He goes further, however, than simply arguing that "free will" does not exist and that all actions are completely determined, without any element of "freedom of choice." (His argument also implies there is no "self" that controls itself and the actions of "its" body, but that is a subject for another day.) He also argues that the concept of free will, describing as it does merely a negative state (an absence of compulsion), cannot explain how the person possessing such a will could ever take any action at all. In other words, if such a will existed, it would be impotent! Speaking strictly philosophically, you have to admire someone who is this hard core. Let's see what he says:

"Thus, if a bad action springs from the nature, i.e., from the inborn constitution of a human being, then the guilt obviously lies on the author and creator of that nature. Therefore free will was invented. But on its assumption, it is absolutely impossible to see from what that bad action is supposed to spring, since free will is at bottom a merely negative quality and simply states that nothing compels the human being to act in such-and-such a way or prevents him from so acting. But in this way it never comes clear from whence the action ultimately springs, for it is not supposed to proceed from the inborn or implanted dispostion of the human being, since the guilt would then fall upon his Creator. Nor is the guilt to proceed from the external circumstances alone, since it would then be attributable to chance, and so the human being would in any case remain innocent - though he is nevertheless made responsible for it. the natural image of a free will is an empty set of scales. It hangs there at rest and will never lose its equilibrium unless something is laid on one of the pans. Free will can no more produce an action out of itself than the scale can produce a movement of itself, since nothing comes from nothing. If the set of scales is to go down to one side, a foreign body must be laid on it, and this is then the source of the movement. In the same way, human action must be brought forth by something that operates positively and is more than a mere negative freedom. But this can happen only two ways: either it is done by motives in and by themselves, i.e., by the external circumstances; the human being is then obviously not repsonsoble for the action, and moreover all human beings in the same circumstances would then inevitably act in precisely the same way; or it springs from his susceptibilty to such motives and thus from the inborn character, i.e., from the inclination originally inherent in the human being. These inclinations may be different in individuals, and by virtue of them the motives operate. But then the will is no longer free, for these inclinations are the weight laid on the pan. The responsibility falls on him who laid them there, i.e., on him whose work is the human being with such inclinations. And so the human being is responsible for his doing only in the case where he himself is his own work, i.e., where he has aseity."

I have two observations about S's argument. One, continuing in traditional Aristotelian and Christian theological fashion, it implicitly treats God as a determinate, existant Being outside of Nature (or the universe), and as such, as First Mover or Creator. If God is not that, then He would not necessarily be the Supreme Author of all evil. Spinoza, for example, avoids the moral difficulties created by the concept of God as a First Mover by having a quite different conception of God, defining "him" more or less as the totality of all actuality and possibility. Every thing that is, is then an attribute of God - even evil things. This may not be a great consolation for anyone who wants the solace of faith in an omnipotent being that "cares" about him, but there is, under this view, no Divine Person responsible for evil. In other words, while there may be no Beneficent Spirit that loves you, there is also no Malevolent Spirit that seeks to destroy you.

The other line of thought proceeds by accepting S's fundamental analysis as true, but letting it be a point of departure to question what we mean by "good" and "evil," and what our response to such things ought to be.

Enough for now.

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi

It may be too early to know for certain, but it appears that Bush has re-invigorated his base with his selection of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. Mr. Alito's mother tells reporters that "of course he is opposed to abortion," Air America is already documenting the horrors of this man's philosophy and character as revealed in his decisions and dissenting opinions, and it appears we can look forward to a Battle Royale over his judicial philosophy.

I cannot get too exercised about this fight, believing, as I do, that the aggregate state of spirtual development of the American people (see prior post) will be far more determinative of how things go in this country than whether or not Mr. Alito becomes the new Great White Conservative Christian Hope. Help us, Obi-wan Kenobi, you are are only hope to restore the Constitution! I cannot live with such delusions.

By coincidence, I have just finished reading Adin Ballou's Christian Non-Resistance (1846). In the final chapter, Ballou explains why a person who adheres to Christ's teaching about not returning injury for injury cannot participate in government, as currently constituted. He also answers the question why good men should not particpate in order to reform the government. I found his observation about voting battles (in paragraph numbered two in the selection below) quite thought provoking:

"Many people seem to take for granted that legal and political action afford to good men indispensable instrumentalities for the promotion of moral reform, or at least for the maintenance of wholesome order in society. Hence we hear much said of the duty of enforcing certain penal laws, of voting for just rulers, and of rendering government 'a terror to evil-doers.' Now I make no objection to any kind of legal or political action, which is truly Christian action. Nor do I deny that some local and temporary good has been done by prosecutions at law, voting in our popular elections, and exercising the functions of magistracy, under the prevailing system of human government. But I contend that there is very little legal and political action under this system, which is strictly Christian action. And I deny that professedly good men do half as much to promote as they do to subvert moral reform and wholesome order in society, by legal and political action. The common notions respecting these matters are extremely superficial, delusive and mischievous. Look at facts:

1. Is it not a fact, that men strenuous for legal coercion, who devote themselves to the prosecution of lawbreakers as an important duty, generally become incapable of benevolent, patient, suasory moral action? Do they not become mere compulsionists? Do they not become disagreeable to humble minds, and objects of defiance to the lawless? Is not this generally the case? I am sure it is. Reliance on injurious penal force costs more than it comes to, as an instrumentality for the promotion of moral reform. It works only a little less mischievously in morals than in religion.

2. Is it not a fact, that equally good men are divided among all the rival political parties, and that, under pretence of doing their duty to God and humanity, they vote point blank for and against the same men and measures, mutually thwarting, as far as possible, each others' preferences? Every man knows this. Does God make it their duty to practice this sheer contradiction and hostility of effort at the ballot-box! Does enlightened humanity prompt it! No; there must be a cheat somewhere in the game. The Holy Ghost does not blaspheme the Holy Ghost; nor Satan cast out Satan. Either the men are not good, or their notions of duty are false."

(Emphasis supplied.) See the whole of his argument here.

Who We Are

More from Adin Ballou:

"Governments are correct exponents of the aggregate religious light, moral sentiment and intellectual development of the people living under them. People with a false and low religion, a false and low morality, a low and undeveloped intellect, will have a corresponding false and low organization of society, false and low government! An Esquimaux, Hottentot, or New Hollander, would devise and administer an Esquimaux, Hottenton, or New Holland government. The reason why we have not a Christian government is, that our people are not in the aggregate a Christian people. The aggregate religion is far below the Christian standard. The aggregate conscience and moral sentiment of the people is semi barbarous. And their aggregate intellect is not yet sufficiently improved by knowledge and discipline to see how low their religion and morality is. They are, therefore, not even ashamed of war and slavery. They do not see that these gross abominations are their disgrace and curse. "

Christian Non Resistance

Christian non-resistance

Adin Ballou on Christian non-resistance:

"The almost universal opinion and practice of mankind has been on the side of resistance of injury with injury. It has been held justifiable and necessary, for individuals and nations to inflict any amount of injury which would effectually resist a supposed greater injury. The consequence has been universal suspicion, defiance, armament, violence, torture and bloodshed. The earth has been rendered a vast slaughter-field - a theater of reciprocal cruelty and vengeance - strewn with human skulls, reeking with human blood, resounding with human groans, and steeped with human tears. Men have become drunk with mutual revenge; and they who could inflict the greatest amount of injury, in pretended defense of life, honor, rights, property, institutions and laws, have been idolized as the heroes and rightful sovereigns of the world. Non-resistance explodes this horrible delusion; announces the impossibility of overcoming evil with evil; and, making its appeal directly to all the injured of the human race, enjoins on them, in the name of God, never more to resist injury with injury, assuring them that by adhering to the law of love under all provocations, and scrupulously suffering wrong, rather than inflicting it, they shall gloriously 'overcome evil with good,' and exterminate all their enemies by turning them into faithful friends."

Christian Non-Resistance (internet)
Christian Non-Resistance (book)

free yourself (somewhat) from manipulation

When my son, Peter, took logic a few years ago, the professor spent a week having the students read op-ed pieces to identify any logical fallacies. What Peter found is that there often were no logical fallacies, for the particular reason that there were usually no arguments at all being made. Many opinion pieces, he soon discovered, were simply strings of unconnected and unsupported statements. [To add my own characterization here, as such, they serve more as a kind of flag to rally round for the already convinced ("Yeah, that's right!") than an illuminating discourse].

Through the study of logic, one can help free one's mind from verbal manipulation by others by understanding how and why various rhetorical tricks used in public discourse are logical fallacies, that is, do not in fact establish the truth of the proposition they purport to maintain or destroy the truth of the proposition they purport to assail. Today I have added a new link on the sideboard, "The Logical Fallacies Index." Kudos to LewRockwell.com for bringing this site to our collective attention. It is a useful site worth bookmarking and returning to from time to time for review and self-education.

a poet's observation

In "Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will," which I have just finished reading, Schopenhauer is ripping apart a bit of fraud by Schelling, when he uses a line from Goethe to express his disdain for a characteristic of the (then) contemporary age: "the boys are masters of the course."

A footnote states that the line is from Parabolic, poem no. 7. Not having read the poem, I do not know if S's use of the line is consistent with Goethe's intended meaning. However, considering those who now rule this country, and certain others in positions of great authority or power, perhaps Goethe's observation, or S's manner of applying it, truthfully expresses a sorry predicament in the natural order of things.

How to acquire a RKBA in Amerika

I remember a time as a lad listening to Jerzy Kosinski telling one of his stories on the Dick Cavett show. (Yes, youngsters! There was a time in America when authors appeared on talk shows!) The story also appears in one of his novels, though for the life of me I can't remember which one. Jerzy's wife was dying of cancer, and he wanted to find a way to make her time in public as smooth as possible. He went to a tailor and ask him to design a high ranking officer military uniform but it could not look exactly like any existing military uniform (since impersonating an officer would be illegal). After much back and forth with the tailor, the tailor finally succeeded in making a military looking uniform to Kosinski's liking. Kosiniski then wore it when he went out with his wife (this was in Europe). After that they never had to wait to be seated at a restaurant, and were always given preference in attending any public establishment. In addition, everyone was unfailingly polite.

On the basis of what happened in New Orleans, it appears that those who want to have a right to keep and bear arms may have to adopt a similar approach. Best to plan for it now, no? Have yourself a security personnel uniform made up, very crisp and professional looking, with a classy logo. If you really want to go all out, form a corporation with the security company's name, so that it is in the state's database, and have an ID card made showing your status as a security guard for this corporation. Then, when the emergency occurs, you may don your snazzy uniform and freely carry your sidearm or, better yet, your M-16. IF you are questioned by police, you can say you're protecting Wal-Mart or Sony goods. No need to volunteer that they're the ones that are in your home. Or maybe you've been assigned by the company to protect the company's CEO (who happens to be your wife - no need to volunteer that!), who is on the scene to rebuild the company's business asap!

Plan now to discover the joys and privileges of being part of a (legal) fictional entity!

Clothes for when you need to tell the world how great it is to be White

I took my daughter clothes shopping at the mall this weekend and was simply astounded at the large pictures in the windows of Abercrombie & Fitch. Why is Abercrombie using the photo technique and style of Leni Riefenstahl and Aryan Supremacy agitprop?



What morons are buying this stuff because they want this self-image? Oh, wait. Maybe I know the answer. Like most of the music videos consumed by Abercrombie's target audience, it's all about apotheosis. Maybe it's advertising genius to come up with stuff like this, but then again maybe finding this sort of way of manipulating the teenage mind to buy, buy, buy is a sickness.

the terrorists have won

And how easy it was.

This is what destroying a way of life in order to preserve it looks like.

The pic was featured in both yesterday's and today's NY Daily News. Five British citizens, all Sikhs, were handcuffed and made to kneel while police investigated a double decker tourist bus bomb scare in NYC.

if we are Xns, what then is God?

Sorry for the absence. I was busy moving, so I was otherwise occupied, and exhausted. Let's ease back into the swing of things with a selection from K.

No one, not Voltaire, Diderot or any other enlightenment thinker, nor any modern atheist debunker, has ever made a critique of Christianity as scathing as Kierkegaard's Attack Upon 'Christendom'. Here is a characteristic excerpt:

". . . if what we mean by being a Christian really is being a Christian--what then is God?

He is the most comical being that ever lived, His Word the most comical book that ever has come to light: to set heaven and earth in motion (as He does in His Word), so threaten with hell, with eternal punishment...in order to attain what we understand by being Christians (and we indeed are true Christians)-- no, nothing so comical ever occurred! Imagine that a man with a loaded pistol stepped up to a person and said to him, 'I'll shoot you dead,' or imagine something still more terrible, that he were to say, 'I'll seize upon your person and torture you to death in the most dreadful manner, if you do not (now be on the watch, for here it comes)... make your own life here on earth as profitable and enjoyable as you possibly can.' This surely is the most comical speech; for to bring that about one does not need to threaten with a loaded pistol and the most agonizing kind of death; perhaps neither the loaded pistol nor the most agonizing kind of death would avail to prevent it. And so it is here: by the dread of eternal punishment (frightful menace!), by the hope of an eternal blessedness, to want to bring about...yes, to bring about what we are (for what we call a Christian is indeed to be a Christian), so then to want to bring about what we are: that we may live as we most like to live-- for to refrain from civil crimes is nothing but plain shrewdness."

it's so damn easy

The heat is on and it's time to distract the dems from calls for troop withdrawals, Gitmo and the Downing Street Memos.

Amazing. They take the bait every time.

Dear dems: see prior post.

the strutting cock and the fighting cock

I've always found this parable from Chuang Tzu (as translated by Thomas Merton) instructive, esp. in terms of distinguishing the real from the swaggering and the hyperactive. It applies to so many things, including, e.g., to tough talking, bring it on commanders in chief.

Chi Hsing Tzu was a trainer of fighting cocks
for King Hsuan.
He was training a fine bird.
The King kept asking if the bird were
Ready for combat.
"Not yet," said the trainer.
"He is full of fire.
He is ready to pick a fight
With every other bird. He is vain and confident
Of his own strength."
After ten days, he answered again:
"Not yet. He flares up
When he hears another bird crow."
After ten more days:
"Not yet. He still gets
That angry look
and ruffles his feathers."
Again ten days:
The trainer said, "Now he is nearly ready.
When another bird crows, his eye
does not even flicker.
He stands immobile
Like a cock of wood.
He is a mature fighter.
Other birds
will take one look at him
And run."

(The Way of Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton, 1965)

Lying and misrepresentation as a way of life

Back in 1979 I was sitting in my Corporations class at law school, then taught by Morgan Shipman, a visiting professor from Texas, when he asked us to think about how, consistent with the First Amendment, the SEC could require corporations to talk about certain things in their public stock offering materials.

The basic SEC disclosure rule for public offering materials is that a company cannot say anything that is false or misleading, or omit to say something material if to omit it would be misleading or have a material effect on an investor's decision. Prof. Shipman wondered how the Supreme Court would rule under the First Amendment if such a requirement were imposed on political, rather than commercial, speech - if Congress and the administration had to adhere to such a requirement. He thought that the Court would never permit such a standard to apply - "My God," he said, think what a 'chilling effect' it would have on the political process!"

As if that would be a bad thing.

Well, it's no surprise that laws are not for the law-makers or law-enforcers, so yes, there's no prohibition against, and no penalty for, politicians and bureaucrats lying or making misrepresentations to the public, or for leaving out material information that would affect a decision. But the fact that politicians are held to no such standard, despite the fact that their actions and laws affect, and may destroy, people's lives, pretty well indicates the nature of "government." And the fact that they are supposedly our "agents", but may lie to us and manipulate us with impunity, pretty well shows us what our real status is.

I mention this in light of the brouhaha over Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) supposedly calling Gitmo a death camp. It is at times like these that I thank God I can actually read with understanding. Because, contrary to the headline of the Washington Times article linked above, Sen. Durbin did not actually call Gitmo a death camp. What he actually said was, that if he didn't tell you that he was reading a report of an FBI agent which discussed the kind of treatment a prisoner at Gitmo received, at American hands, and just read the description of the treatment of this prisoner, his fellow Senators would assume he was describing a scene out of Stalin's gulag, or some other death camp. In other words, what Sen. Durbin said was that a prisoner at Gitmo had received the sort of treatment we associate with death camps. As a note for the reading or logic-impaired, this is something actually different from saying that Gitmo is a death camp. Making that wholesale characterization would require forming a conclusion about how systemic the abuse was, and I failed to see anything in Durbin's reported remarks that indicates he was willing to go that far - at least yet. His point was - we should be disturbed about this because it is Americans who are doing this. He has rightfully refused to apologize, because the demands for an apology rest on either a deliberate or idiotic misunderstanding of what he said.

The Washington Times article reports: "It's reprehensible, as Defense Secretary [Donald H.] Rumsfeld said, to suggest that the Guantanamo Bay facility is anything like a gulag or a mad regime or Pol Pot," White House spokesman Trent Duffy told The Washington Times. "It is reprehensible, has no place in the current debate, and as we've seen over several years, the detainees in Guantanamo Bay are being treated humanely," he said. "What this is is a disservice to any man and woman serving in the U.S. military who's putting their life on the line each day, because they're trying to paint all military with a broad brush because of the actions of perhaps a few bad apples, who are being punished severely."

We see here that the administration deals with Sen Durbin's apostasy by deliberately mischaracterizing what he said in a manner that makes it appear that Sen. Durbin is assaulting American exceptionalism. Instead of people being rightfully disturbed that any American soldier treats a prisoner this way, and rightfully questioning whether or not such was done under orders or with a wink and a nod from up the command chain, the Senator's remarks are deliberately mischaracterized so that they appear as a beyond-the-pale affront to the idea that Amercians are the most moral and most-kind-to-prisoners nation that ever existed in world history, and thus a threat to one of our most treasured opinions about ourselves. The focus is shifted from the horror inflicted on the prisoner at our hands to a reaffirmation of how humane and moral and great we are - generally speaking of course, and leaving out the "bad apples."

Nice redirection, Rumsy, and your pals at the Washington Times, but some of us actually see you pulling the levers behind the curtain.

spare me

Ever notice that whenever Bush gets in trouble (most recently, public opinion shifting against the war, Downing Street Memo not going away), we get another "news" report about how close we are to finding bin Laden?

50 bonus points to anyone who can answer this epistomological puzzler: if we don't actuallly know where bin Laden is, how can we know we are "close" to finding him?

stranger in a strange land

There are two posts over at the LRC blog discussing the effects of travel on perception of one's native land -- seeing one's country with new eyes after returning from an extended trip abroad. It's a variation of the "travel extends one's horizons" idea.

Would that travel did broaden horizons. It seems that many, perhaps most, derive little from it other than a photo collection. I came, I saw, I had my picture taken while standing there.

The one thing you can be sure of when you are talking about people is that there is no such thing as a direct cause for a desired or feared behavior, despite the common wishful thinking or presumption otherwise. You know the drill, it appears in innumerable variations: violence in video games or television leads to personal violence; keep a gun in your home and it will kill someone you love; (during the McCarthy era it was presumed that) if you read Marx you must be a Marxist. Certain "Christians" seem particularly susceptible to this sort of thing: watch R rated movies, dance, drink or play cards, engage in premarital sex and you are sinning and will become the Devil's plaything.

The general formula is, "Do X and you'll be (you must be) Y." Paradoxically, or more accurately, nonsensically, even though this common form of human judgment essentially presumes that we're little more than stimulus-response automatons, we somehow have "souls" or "selves" that are the subject of earnest warnings or condemnations for the "choices" we make, or are the subject of earnest social engineering projects, like bussing. If you go to school with racially/ethnically diverse peoples, you won't be prejudiced! Yes, it's sad but true: if only Bush could have been bussed to school with Iraqis, we wouldn't be in this mess.

But I've digressed.

I have not done much traveling, but a trip to France my wife and I took in 1994 really did change my life and my outlook on America, and I owe that to my friend Pierre Lemieux, who invited me to attend a Liberty Fund conference there on the right to keep and bear arms.

The French are far more formal and polite than Americans, and what a revelation how delightful that was. We endeavored to speak French as well as we could, were polite as befits a guest, and save for one nasty person at the airport, all of our encounters with the French were smooth and pleasant. We found the French very friendly and helpful. In a small village north of Paris, one lady took easily full three minutes of her time patiently explaining to me over and over, until I finally understood, that the traffic ticket on my car's windshield was simply a warning, an "avertissement," and that if I placed some coins in a meter and deposited the receipt with the ticket, I would have no problem.

One time traveling on a major road south we stopped at a rest area at the same time that a bus full of French high school students was stopping. We all made our way into the facility for food and bathrooms. Now you can easily imagine this scene of the students suddenly bursting free of their confines in America. High spirits, running, shouting, cursing, no regard for others (adults) in the vicinity, the teachers with that harried look trying to maintain a semblance of order, control and regard for safety.

Well, the French are different. None of these things occurred. The students were indeed happy. But there was no running, no shouting, no cursing; students simply walked toward their destination together, conscientiously making sure they were not pushing in front of any adults, and with regard for others who were there. In line for food they were similarly happy, but kept their voices at normal conversation levels, with no rowdiness. In short, they comported themselves with far more maturity and dignity than one associates with American public high school students. The teachers were happy, and conversed with one another; they did not spend their time "maintaining order" or barking orders at the children.

I returned from that trip to learn that the law firm I was working at was dissolving. Based on little more than how much I had enjoyed Paris, I decided to return to New York rather than seek another position in Washington D.C. I was suddenly sick to death of Washington, and wanted to live somewhere with more of a European sensibility. New York, where I had attended law school and practiced for the first three years after graduating law school, suddenly felt more like home, and less "American." I don't think I ever would have felt that way if I hadn't taken that trip.

Neglecting to mention the one threat to the family actually mentioned by X

"Pope Benedict, in his first clear pronouncement on gay marriages since his election, on Monday condemned same-sex unions as fake and expressions of "anarchic freedom" that threatened the future of the family."

If you're going to make an argument from authority, don't you at least need to be able to cite to the authority?

Here are the passages in which Christ condemns homosexuality:
Here are the passages in which Christ mentions homosexuality:
Here are the passages in which Christ proclaims the sanctity of the family, esp. as an institution ordained of God to be adhered to and preserved among Man:

Did I miss any?

Actually, X did say a few things pertinent to the subject of family life, but none too friendly. Before we just leap to that famous passage, though, let's present it in logical order, so that at least the possiblity will exist that members of the Mod God Squad ("Righteous!") can follow it.

1. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment."

2. "No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other." Please note, as Kierkegaard observed, that X said no man can serve two masters, i.e., it is impossible to serve two masters.

3. Now, from these principles (along with the view that X models a life lived in accord with God's will for Man) it straight away follows: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

If I read and reason aright, it appears to me that God Himself is not on board with this concept of the quasi-divinity, the sanctity of marriage and the family, let alone one's own life. To make an idol of one's spouse or one's family would be to fail to love God with all one's heart or soul, to fail to place Him first. So while the new Pope rails against homosexuality and other forms of "anarchic freedom" as threats to the family, he completely fails to mention this rather more important threat, made by Christ himself, to the sanctity of marriage and the family.

Is it possible that X never mentioned or discussed homosexuality because that trait or aspect of human being has, in and of itself, nothing to do with how one is supposed to relate to one's fellow man, through God, anymore than the trait of heterosexuality does?

On Memorial Day, the Neocon Anthem

Memorial Day can be a day for triumphalism, something being necesssary to crowd out the the thought that so many, young and old, died - were murdered really - for no good reason. Every once in a while I wonder if there's some song that captures the Neocon agenda or worldview, that expresses just how twisted it is. So far, I've found nothing better than Tomorrow Belongs to Me, from Cabaret. Just change Rhine to Mississippi and Fatherland to Homeland, and we're there.

The picture of the Volk in this song, hungry, eager for the Leader to give them supreme purpose and their lives meaning, the utter vacuity, and therefore infinite malleability, of the "glory" to be won, and the complete subjugation of the world to will expressed in the refrain, is just classic.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The sun on the meadow is summery warm
The stag in the forest runs free
But gathered together to greet the storm
Tomorrow belongs to me

The branch on the linden is leafy and green
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea (Gold to the sea)
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen
Tomorrow belongs to me

The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon says the whisper, arise, arise
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me

Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come
When the world is mine
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me
Tomorrow belongs to me

that pillar of freedom, democracy

Additional evidence, if any be needed, that "democracy" or "representative government" is just a sop thrown to the masses to secure their cooperation and passivity, a trompe l'oeil wherein the eye perceives legitimacy in what is really no more than thuggery through the illusion that "the people" control their rulers and "have a voice" in government. The London Times reports that Chirac plans to disregard the French people's expected "non"vote on the EU treaty and end run the people's vote by having a vote again next year - but this time by the French Parliament. If the people don't provide the "right" decision, the rulers just end run it.

Taibbi on the Newsweek "scandal"

Good article by Taibbi in the New York Press:

"As is almost always the case when our population works itself into an indignant furor over some fresh moral atrocity, virtually every respected commentator in the country leaped onto the soapbox once it became clear which way the wind was blowing. Windbag after windbag lined up to denounce the use of unnamed sources as a crime roughly equivalent to the buggering of orphans. . . .

It's funny. The only time anyone thinks to blast the use of "unnamed sources" is when the mistake occurs in that rarest of phenomena in mainstream journalism: the dissenting piece of investigative journalism.

The reality is that unnamed sources are used about 10,000 times a day by the more patriotic and upstanding members of our working press, only they're not used to wonder about the goings-on at places like Guantanamo Bay. Instead, they're used to kiss ass and make icons out of morons—to turn George Bush into Winston Churchill, Dick Gephardt into Eugene Debs, Tom Clancy into Tolstoy."

can't we stop pretending that he means it?

Press Release from the Arms Trade Resouce Center: "A new report by the New York-based World Policy Institute finds that a majority of U.S. arms sales to the developing world go to regimes defined as undemocratic by our own State Department. Furthermore, U.S.-supplied arms are involved in a majority of the world’s active conflicts.
'Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe,' notes report co-author William D. Hartung. 'Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments.'
'Perhaps no single policy is more at odds with President Bush’s pledge to ‘end tyranny in our world’ than the United States’ role as the world’s leading arms exporting nation,' said Frida Berrigan, the report’s co-author." [emphasis added by me.]

Argh! Bush's "pledge" is rhetorical pablum for the masses! Do we have to pretend he means it and that this is really a goal of the United States?

Geez, do you think Bush will thank the Arms Trade Resource Center for bringing this inconsistency to his attention?

people who live in glass houses etc.

The Tillman Scandal: 'Newsweek' Error Bad, Pentagon Lying OK?
"Where is a Scott McClellan lecture on ethics and credibility?"

Star Wars III, on good and evil

[Story spolier alert - this post mentions events in the movie.]

Many have already commented on the political implications of this movie, and indeed much can be said about that. I thought that in this post I'd mention some of the interesting aspects of the movie that relate to Lucas' take on the relationship of power to good and evil.

In Episode III we learn that the Sith, who are masters of the Dark Side of the Force, use their emotions as guides or keys to the exercise of the Force, and use the Force to serve their passions and personal desires. The Jedi, on the other hand, use the Force for the sake of others or the general good. It is not clear whether this defines "evil" and "good" in the Star Wars ethic, or whether this is simply how, operationally speaking, those who are evil or are good use their power. I'll leave that aside.

Within this context, however, it is clear that Anakin is already on the path of the Dark Side. While it might seem that Anakin wants to gain additional or "unnatural" power in order to save his wife, Padme, from the death he foresees, presumptively for her benefit (and therefore "other motivated"), in reality his desire to save her is driven by his own fear of loss and what she means to him (and is therefore self-motivated). He seeks the power principally to serve his desires or needs. This is consistent with Yoda's counsel to Anakin that fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side. Anakin's love of Padme is, or at any rate is ruled by, self-love. Whether, in light of this and the fact that the Jedi are celibate, Lucas believes that all love is self-love or merely that personal love can prove a strong temptation to the Dark Side, is a question that I believe is left unanswered by the films.

Regardless, the end state of the Sith philosophy is well illustrated in Episode III, when Darth Vader entices Padme, with words that echo his invitation in Episode V to his son, Luke (Vader evidently having learned nothing in the intervening years), "Join me, and together we will rule the galaxy. We can make things be the way we want them to be."

Anakin seeks power to eliminate or control the uncertainty of existence, to overcome his own finitude, in short, to be as God. Only when the world is completely remade in the image of the desirer can the desirer find fulfillment, satisfaction and rest. As de Jouvenel notes somewhere in On Sovereignty, liberty, conceived as the absence or elimination of impediments to one's will, is not liberty, but imperialism, a consequence of the Hobbesian conception of man as appetite and desire.

Whether or not the good are defined by "selflessness" or it is possible for the good truly to wield power selflessly for the greater good, the good in Star Wars do offer a contrast to Anakin's/Vader's approach. They do not seek supreme power or seek to use power to make the world an image of their desire or to fulfill their desires but trust in the imperfect realization of any single person's or group's desires that is achieved in compromise through "democracy" and "diplomacy." They do not seek "unnatural" power to salve the self's finitude, but are able to renounce their self-interest and able to recognize and accept their limits, trusting that the inherent goodness and nature of the Force will prevail, though they may have reached their personal end.

Padme will not follow her husband along his dark path, and to see what Anakin has become breaks her heart and kills her. In what is clearly meant as a lesson and metaphor for those who seek absolute power for protection of those - or what - they love, it is Anakin himself, and his transformation into Vader, that causes Padme's death.

When Obi-Wan, as an old man, faces Vader, he knows he cannot "beat" him, for Vader is too powerful, but he has recourse to the Force to leave his physical self behind and thereby become "more powerful than [Vader] can possibly imagine." When Luke disarms Vader, he sees his father's mechanical arm, looks to his own machine hand, tosses his light saber down, and refuses to join the emperor, knowing that he cannot destroy him without becoming like him (the allegory of the Tree on Dagobah). He calls out to his father to save him, believing that his father still has some goodness in him that can yet be appealed to to save him, and is otherwise prepared to die doing, literally, nothing to fight the emperor.

After seeing Episode III, that moment in the Return of the Jedi when Vader looks to his son and to the emperor and Anakin returns now seems far more moving and powerful than before. Despite the weaknesses of Episodes I and II, Lucas has created a great mythology for modern times.

Bush to graduates: please direct your boundless energy and enthusiasm into some really safe, circumscribed and well worn channels

In his address on Saturday at Calvin Coolidge University, Bush urged the graduates to not be mere spectators of life but to make their own contributions to "the story of American freedom":

"Bush encouraged involvement in places of worship as well as in groups like the PTA, the Jaycees and the Rotary Club, even gardening or book clubs. 'All of these organizations promote the spirit of community.'"

What a vision! How great is it that the existing order of things contains all that we need to make such meaningful contributions to our lives and our world!

No word in the news article whether any of the graduates, upon hearing news of the great possibilites that awaited them, went out and slit their throats.

No, I don't "support the troops"

because it's not a good idea to issue a moral blank check, let alone a collective moral blank check. Maybe, just maybe, it would be better (not just for us as a nation, but for our soldiers' souls) if they had to wonder whether they had our support, if they had to worry about whether they would have to justify and account for their actions in order to receive our support. Possibly, just possibly, if they didn't keep hearing our reflexive admiration, commendation and support, some would think, what would the people back home think of us if they knew what we were doing here?

I mention these thoughts in light of the sickening tale of prisoner abuse and murder by our soldiers in Afghanistan recounted in today's NYT.

And yet as if this tale of abuse and murder were not bad enough, the Times' manner of reporting it is itself disturbing. At one point the article departs from a simple presentation of the facts to gratuitously editorialize: "l]ike a narrative counterpart to the digital images from Abu Ghraib, the Bagram file depicts young, poorly trained soldiers in repeated incidents of abuse."

Is that it? The sadistic torture and brutality resulted from a failure of the Army brass to instruct the soldiers that they had to discipline and restrain their natural impulses? They had to be trained to know what constituted humane treatment, because it is not something they would have learned from civilian life?

Here's what I suspect: This sort of mealy-mouthed excuse comes from someone who is tyring real hard to "support the troops." Of course it's not our soldiers' faults, the dears, no one told them.

So there it is: moral bankruptcy here and in the field! The Army has a problem coming out with the truth about what happened, and the NYT, even while telling it, can't face it.

Here's what I'm thinking: Maybe if we want our politicians to end the war sooner rather than later, we're going to have to cancel the blank check.

4th Amendment RIP

Sen. Pat Roberts is working on a bill to renew the Patriot Act and "to give the FBI new power to issue administrative subpoenas, which are not reviewed by a judge or grand jury, for quickly obtaining records, electronic data or other evidence in terrorism investigations."

I am not one for eliminating what's left of the 4th Amendment because of terrizm, but it's clear to me that if the proponents of the Patriot Act were sincere in their desire to have special powers to combat terrizm while respecting our rights, they would avail themselves of the painfully obvious expedient of providing that evidence obtained with this expansive power could be used only in connection with prosecutions for terrizm. I.e., an exclusionary rule would be in place so that evidence thus obtained could not be used for any other crimes. This would insure that the newly granted power was not abused, that administrative subpoenas would not be issued willy nilly under pretexts of investigating terrizm or simply at will - because what's the downside if you can still use the evidence to convict? - Congress might yell at you? If they can focus? Wow, that's some pretty amazing accountability.

The fact that this simple accommodation is not proposed clearly demonstrates to me that this is not, as represented, an extraordinary measure for an extraordinary threat that requires a minor modification of the existing safeguards against government abuse, but simply a naked power grab that completely eliminates the requirement for independent judicial review from the 4th Amendment.

Nation of Bravehearts

"'I think it's serious. I think it makes people uncomfortable and intimidates them,' Massey said."

Intimidates??

Apparently, few things are as unnerving to Americans as nakedness as an expression of high spirits. Half the country damn near lost it when Mia Hamm ripped off her jersey and ran around the soccer field in her sports bra back in 1996 after the US team won the gold medal.

By all means, let's keep nakedness where it belongs, as an expression of, and tool for, the degredation and humiliation of prisoners.

The quality of mercy is not strained

but man's ability to grant it is evidently extremely limited. Drudge links to a news report about an owner of two theaters in KY who refuses to show the new Jane Fonda movie, because of her Hanoi stunt. Ms. Fonda has apologized for her actions numerous times, most recently, in her autobiography, in which she makes it clear she was played by Hanoi and that she allowed her antiwar zeal to set her up for the trick. Ms. Fonda has thus achieved some self-understanding and knowledge about her weaknesses, learning in a very hard way that politicians can easily use your beliefs and emotions to manipulate you for their own ends. This is something that, admittedly, may be diffcult for people to learn in this country because politicians here are so upright and sincere. The Bush administration, for example, would never use people's emotions and beliefs to manipulate them.

The owner of the KY theater sees it differently: "'I think when people do something, they need to be held responsible for their actions,' Boutwell said." Apparently, and preferably, forever. So while Ms. Fonda now displays contrition, Mr. Boutwell puts on public display his own, and evidence of man's, very limited capacity to forgive.