What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy.
He then presents an economic model in which the optimum capital taxation rate is as high as possible - slipping a banana peel under Laffer's heal - such that "If the state can tax at will, it will immediately seize half of initial wealth and give it to the poor and then never do anything again." That last part does rather have its appeal.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-30 16:33:29 CST |
link
math is hard:
On the one hand, says Beltway Establishment, we must drill every last drop of crude and process every metric ton of shale oil, forever, damn the consequences. On the other the government is supposed to intervene in the free market and chase the speculators out of the temple, promising that if we do so the price of oil will crash back down to 50 dollars a barrel. Meanwhile, the producers who are supposed to invest in the increasingly expensive exploration and extraction operations will apparently do more and better for $50 what they haven't done for $140.
If this makes sense to you, then you have the depth of experience and commitment to free markets necessary to be the Chief Executive of the United States of America.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-27 12:31:54 CST |
link
normative postulate:
A good idea that is traced back to its source will be found to have been conjured by someone with reprehensible or offensive views about something else.
Corollary A: This utterly discredits the idea.
Corollary B: There are no good ideas with a personal history.
Lemma: If a good idea should tragically happen to you, bury it someplace safe, destroy all records of your connection to the idea, then take a cash-only vacation as a consolation prize before euthanizing yourself. Try not to get so wasted that you spill the beans to some reprehensible or offensive stranger that might later take the credit, thus destroying all that's good in the world.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 23:34:17 CST |
link
Launchpad McCain's Lexington - A future of dependence on powerful, nuclear armed industrial giants we're not going to be able to just invade when the moment strikes us, willy-nilly:
"In a world of hostile and unstable suppliers of oil, this nation will achieve strategic independence by 2025", said McCain, promising to double our nuclear power capacity by, uh, 2030. Except our nuclear power capacity is already dependent on foreign uranium imports. The entire industry has the same problem as oil: it's a finite extractable resource that will be exhausted faster the larger the industry becomes. Uranium prices have doubled since 2003 and we run about a 5 billion dollar annual trade deficit importing the stuff - 42 million pounds a year at over $100 a pound. This is only going to go up in the long run.
For extra points, McQuack "invokes nuclear power initiatives in China, Russia and India" as a selling point for his "Lexington" plan, which has at it's heart the goal of declaring American energy dependence. He did say he was no good at economics. As those developing economies rapidly expand their own nuclear production they're going to be causing uranium prices to increase just like their growing demand has driven a nearly 500% increase in the price of oil in the past decade. What's he think is going to happen to the price of nuclear fuel? By the time his first 45 plants are miraculously completed in 2030 we'll shortly find ourselves just as dependent on foreign energy as ever.
Promises of $2 billion a year for coal carbon sequesterization would be a good idea in so far as it'd represent a 400% reduction in coal subsidies, but - like Barrack Obama - there's no talk of the generous federal incentives already in place for fossil energy.
That along with the massive public financing and investor guarantees that will be required to double nuclear production in 20 years basically amounts to handing the public treasury to the nuclear, gas, and coal giants. McQuacks Big Plan for renewable alternatives that, you know, become exhausted on a time scale of billions of years rather than a hundred, is to... normalize the tax code.
Leaving these decisions up to an unregulated, speculation fueled market would be a holiday compared to putting this crank in charge.
Much the same could be said of the plan McCain quite obviously cribbed: Obama's. Barrack promises to increase the public subsidies for biofuels and... coal. While Obama reasonably intends to actually fund his infrastructure upgrades ("Digital Smart Grid" for Obama, "SmartMeter" for McCain), aside stricter demands for cap and trade I'm not sure it's altogether much of an improvement.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 15:13:32 CST |
link
Nearly every hospital screens infants for the genetic disease phenylketonuria, but only two states require screening for toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection passed from mother to child at birth. Both diseases cause mental retardation. Toxoplasmosis affects 10 times as many newborns as phenylketonuria does, but toxoplasmosis is mostly limited to inner cities and poor Southern areas.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 14:16:32 CST |
link
short term memory:
This plan that answers a question the International Press Services says "has never been coherently answered" - that is, how to get the fuck out of Iraq without being dicks about it - was coherently answered a year and a half ago. Not that it was ever some kind of big mystery.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-26 14:03:26 CST |
link
cancer is a gateway to death:
Thanks to modern pharmaceutical technologies and corporate research and development efforts, funded by massive patent rents extorted from the sick and dying, a radical new miracle oncology drug could slam the door on cancer mortality. What? Oh, nevermind:
The first experiment documenting pot's potent anti-cancer effects took place in 1974 at the Medical College of Virginia at the behest federal bureaucrats. The results of that study, reported in an Aug. 18, 1974, Washington Post newspaper feature, were that marijuana's primary psychoactive component, THC, "slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent."
Despite these favorable preliminary findings (eventually published the following year in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute), U.S. government officials refused to authorize any follow-up research until conducting a similar -- though secret -- preclinical trial in the mid-1990s. That study, conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program to the tune of $2 million, concluded that mice and rats administered high doses of THC over long periods had greater protection against malignant tumors than untreated controls.
However, rather than publicize their findings, the U.S. government shelved the results, which only became public after a draft copy of its findings were leaked to the medical journal AIDS Treatment News, which in turn forwarded the story to the national media.
via somebody who reads the huffpo so I don't have to.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-25 12:18:07 CST |
link
can't quite put it into words:
this really just boggles my mind:
JAMES GLASSMAN, Undersecretary of State: I think Al Hurra is meeting its goals. What Al Hurra was conceived to do was to bring to the Arab-speaking world -- in this case 22 countries -- a free press, to show them what a free press is like.
Yes, that's why it's forbidden under the Smith-Mundt Act from broadcasting in the US. It's just a nutty foreign version of PBS.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-25 08:02:17 CST |
link
The National Transportation Safety Board has blamed the crash on [Blackwater contractor] Presidential Airways for its "failure to require its flight crews to file and fly a defined route," and for not providing oversight to make sure its crews followed company policies and Pentagon and FAA safety regulations.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-25 06:38:21 CST |
link
speculation:
I thought I'd try to figure out just what the fuck a futures market is, so I can the more enjoy long stupid arguments about whether the rise in commodities prices is the nefarious work
of speculators, or a more mundane price response to rising demand and inelastic supply. Far as I can figure, the story goes like this:
George the Oilman sells a contract for the future delivery of a barrel of oil to Clyde the Commodities Trader, of Eats Young Lambs & Partners. George likes this because the price of oil is volatile, and if you're in the drilling business
it's best to have some idea of whether you'll be in the black at the end of the year. George wants to finance a deep water drilling rig his conservatives friends insist are just floating around in marinas, waiting to be bought up on a low introductory rate APR. He's just seeking price stability so he can stick to the business plan. Good for George.
Clyde on the other hand is just seeking a quick buck. He's not like Rick, who is a refinery operator. Rick runs Magic Consumer Goo Inc., and is shopping to buy futures contracts so that he, too, knows down the road how
much he's going to pay for the barrel of oil he pours into his Magic Consumer Goo Producer. Normally, the volatility of commodities is enough to
keep most people like Clyde away from the slips of paper George is selling and Rick is buying. Up today, down tomorrow. A 30 year long bear market. Times had been hard on guys like Clyde.
But something has changed and now Clyde is selling his slips of paper to Joyce, of Bigass Wallstreet Institutional Fund. And Joyce of BWIF is selling to Dick of Raping American Butt Fund. And Dick of RAB
is surrounded by other Dicks of every kind and sort, who sell their slips of paper back and forth, and pretty soon it's like they're at the water park, all riding the same fat wave of Fun for Everybody
at the Waterpark. Clyde is having more fun than anybody. Good for Clyde.
Joyce and Dick and all the little Dicks were all afraid of the falling dollar, real estate backed mortgages, the recession, and the imminent collapse of tulips. While it's always speculative to speculate about the
motives of speculators, let's say that Joyce and Dick got the idea it'd be better to save their piles of money in the form of George and Clyde's little slips of paper instead of other financial
instruments, because at least they'd own the exchange traded derivative equivalent of Something That Really Exists and People Really Need. Now speculate that Joyce and Dick and all the other
little Dicks had a really Big Pile of Money, and that their Big Pile of Money was some multiplier of the combined worth of George and Clyde and Ricks' little slips of paper, which they buy and sell amongst themselves before passing the realized futures contract on to the refinery, after which
the slips of paper George sold to Clyde for $32 are costing Slick $140 a mere 8 years later.
That seems to be
the gist of the story here, and if only Jimmy Jackboots comes
in and waves his mean stick around at Joyce and Dick and all the little Dicks, they'll take their Big Pile of Money and go home, and gas will be $2 again, because the rising costs of discovering,
drilling (or mining and producing) then shipping the fulfillment of these futures contracts are figments of our collective imagination, as must be the not-insignificant possibility - people at one or the other end of the water park like to make great hay dickering about whose numbers you can believe - of demand oustripping supply.
I can see how a Big Pile of Money demanding ever more commodity contract derivatives as a hedge against Everything Else
might pile onto something like oil and double prices in the space of one year. I don't know how they'd do it without ending up with some inventory somewhere bound for nowhere, but if such a Big Pile of Money really exists, it might be more economically fruitful to just bury it under a windmill than leave it out in the markets, drifting from one asset bubble to the next.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-23 18:43:13 CST |
link
what are you gonna do, a resurrection?:
George Carlin's soul finally got stuck on the roof:
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-23 05:07:05 CST |
link
"Al [Herman] has shown the kind of approach that we celebrate," said Gen. David Petraeus, the commanding general of coalition forces in Iraq, "a complete impatience for bureaucracy, a willingness to do whatever it takes to accomplish a mission, tremendous initiative and capacity for independent action, and a selflessness that has led him to volunteer again and again to stay on to see the task to completion."
Petraeus said he personally experienced the gruff effectiveness of the Prince.
"I did," said Petraeus, who presented Herman with two commanding general coins for his work in Iraq, "and I told him to keep it up if it got things done."
Effective! Doing whatever it takes to get things done!
Despite the effort and success, and regardless of booming demand, Iraq hasn't been able to add 2,000 megawatts of generation to reach the 6,000 megawatt goal it was to meet nearly four years ago, which would still be more than 2,000 shy of today's demand.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-19 14:01:45 CST |
link
to decrease our dependence on foreign oil McCain proposes increasing our dependence on foreign uranium:
Like most people, McCain complains about Jimmy Carter a lot. The terrible things ascribed to him have become part of our national mythos, whether or not he did it, and usually especially if he didn't, and especially not if it was something that he really did do wrong. Whatever happens, it couldn't be worse than the Carter years. Quite often they're right.
MCCAIN: I think the biggest problems with nuclear power are of our own making. Jimmy Carter decided back in '77 or '78, I don't remember exactly what year it was, but he said that we wouldn't reprocess spent nuclear fuel. That was a huge setback.
But the credit for this one goes to the other favorite national scapegoat, Gerald Ford. With his trusty Chief of Staff Dick Cheney at his side, he issued a statement suspending reprocessing programs, explaining that it was a major proliferation risk. Indeed, a whee risk to the entire species. As the Ford Administration noted back then, "the reprocessing and recycling of plutonium should not proceed unless there is sound reason to conclude that the world community can effectively overcome the associated risks of proliferation".
What passes for McQuack's energy policy isn't just incomprehensible (subsidies for wind and solar: market distortions. subsidies for coal and nuclear: the free market.), it's dangerous.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-18 23:16:30 CST |
link
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-18 17:01:17 CST |
link
the flap-dive, the float-plunge:
It's incredible how the GOP's anti-Kerry messaging of 2004 so perfectly described the Launchpad McCain campaign of 2008.
The only alteration required is that John McCain needs his own personal brand of flip-flop. John Kerry's foppish, unhealed wingtips were evocative of his famous windsurfing antics, followed by a sad bellyflop into the immaterial ocean of his emulsive campaign platform. Senator McQuack would seem to require some equivalent for his repeated flights of utter fancy, seizing on positions one moment only to let them crash and burn the next day.
Will he flameout on the flight to the game, again? A trademark fumble that evokes his training mission that ended at the muddy bottom of Corpus Christi Bay, perhaps, or of his creation of a small Spanish energy crisis when he was
"flying too low for no good reason" and severed their powerlines with his plane.
He goes up, he goes down, he's never sure how he'll meet the ground. It's John 'Launchpad' McCain's signature "flutter-tumble".
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-18 15:05:15 CST |
link
post toasty to the bitter, you dig?:
this story in this 1974 documentary about Vietnam - about 40 minutes in - rather made me laugh and lurch simultaneously, in a way I had not experienced before. Did not see that coming, what with Walter Rostow always jumping out and shouting absurd things with his best Dick Cheney impression at inopportune times.
Whoever did the editing ought to write a textbook on ’pataphysics. Watch the whole thing, if you haven't taken the opportunity in the past 34 years. At around 1:08 our man explains why.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-17 23:07:09 CST |
link
curveball: "Everything that's been written about me isn't true":
CIA and Pentagon biological warfare analysts embraced [Curveball]'s account without corroborating evidence or directly questioning the informant.
Maybe we should contract our intelligence services out to fast food workers from now on. They probably have more experience smelling rats.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-17 21:12:11 CST |
link
if it flies, he can crash it:
Before John McCain ever started leveling a poor agricultural society in Southeast Asia to the dirt, before he enjoyed repasts of complaining about not being allowed to target more peasants with his scrupulous bombs, he'd already trashed a plane during flight training in 1958, ran a second through some inconveniently placed powerlines while deployed to the Mediterranean, and lost a third on his way to a football game in Philadelphia. When he finally got to Vietnam - whining about his commander in chief in the messhall of the USS Forrestal - his A-4 Skyhawk was struck by a misfired rocket on deck, taking the carrier out with it. And of course he managed to lose a fifth when he was shot down while bombing Hanoi, turning him into the hero we know and love today.
Between his flight record, his cartoonish attitude toward violence, and a certain similarity about the name, I'm now about half convinced that John McCain was the original inspiration for the Disney character Launchpad McQuack:
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-15 19:39:19 CST |
link
redlines in the sand:
The National Security Archives has released documents revealing some of the early planning for the current US
negotiations with Iraq over a long term security agreement. Like emails between CPA senior security advisor Frederick Smith and the CPA's general counsel Edwin S. Castle:
A note of caution was raised in the correspondence: the U.S. did not know "how much we should expect from the Iraqi side. The GC members will be running for elections and will not want to appear to be appeasing the Coalition on tough issues such as jurisdiction." (The U.S.-appointed Governing Council (GC) had been set up in July 2003 to create the impression that sovereignty would soon be restored to Iraq.)
On December 3 State Department lawyers disseminated an information memo on the agreement, to be used the next day for Bremer's briefing. It outlined "CPA's own current strategic vision for Iraq's transition to full sovereignty," utilizing three "basic documents": the "Fundamental Law," "Treaty Restoring Sovereignty", and "Security Agreement", the last comprising a military technical assistance agreement, an acquisition and cross-servicing agreement, and a status of forces agreement (SOFA).
[... Long list of violations of Iraqi sovereignty demanded by the US ... ]
On December 11, 2003, prior to CPA lawyer Castle's planned visit to Washington, he received a memo from CJTF-7, conveying its "requirements for what we would like to see reflected in the final agreement." Attached were PowerPoint slides from CentCom listing its objectives, key provisions, and "redlines" (elements that in its opinion had to be, or could not be, in the agreement.)
The first of the CJTF-7 requirements was "authority for the Coalition Force, without interference or permission", to, in order: "fight the GWOT, fight anti-coalition forces" and "ensure a safe and secure environment in Iraq."
Other requirements in CJTF-7's list included a defined status for Coalition forces under international and Iraqi law; command authority; detention and interrogation rights; their own definition of the rules of engagement; complete freedom of movement; exemption from passport and visa requirements; exclusive criminal jurisdiction; use of public utilities; exemption from taxes and duties, and full diplomatic immunity for both Coalition personnel and contractors.
According to its PowerPoint slides, the Central Command's objectives and "Key Provisions" were similar to those of CJTF-7, including unlimited authority to conduct military operations; exclusive use of facilities at no cost; freedom of movement over land and through air, space, and territorial waters; immunity for contractors from legal process; and exemption for contractors from visa requirements, vehicle and aircraft registration, and income taxes.
Central Command's "red lines" included immunity for both U.S. personnel and contractors from international tribunals and foreign courts; priority use of public utilities; and exemption of U.S. contracts for goods, services, and construction from Iraqi jurisdiction.
...opposition from some politicians could be a facade intended to defuse public anger... If Iraq does acquiesce...
More important: what if they don't? I don't want to cast aspersions on good ole American bribery and brute force,
but there is a remote chance that what passes for an Iraqi government will cross one of those redlines.
We're bribing even the Mahdi Army at this point - remember
when amnesty was a redline? - if it all goes according to
the less idiotic plan of just buying off
armed resistance the only Iraqis we'll be having to "detain, intern, and interrogate" are the ones the do-gooding loyal opposition convinced themselves we were going there to
save.
It's nonsense either way: if the Iraqi government signs off it just goes to show that they don't represent Iraq - big surprise - and amount to a dearly purchased kleptocratic puppet state,
and those militias on our payroll will be needing another amnesty somewhere further down the road.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-15 16:39:10 CST |
link
Jason Furman's appointment allies Obama's campaign with leading economic centrists in the Democratic Party, foremost among them is Robert Rubin, 69, who helped found the Hamilton Project in 2006 and is on the group's advisory council.
Now, maybe I'm just angry about deeper historical resentments over naming their economic policy wonker circle the "Hamilton Project", or confused by dedicated "free-traders" invoking the name of the first US protectionist - which will in turn confuse us the more when we ponder their continued dedication to protectionism.
But to cut one run-on incomplete sentence for an old saw, perhaps change is all you'll have left.
Then it occurs to me that this trainwreck is just deja-vu. Hello again.
More to the point one might bemoan another era of markets-for-thee-socialism-for-we hypocrisy, if we're depending on blind geriatrics like Rubin to set us all back to the course we're more or less already on, while he and his friends run crying to Washington for their welfare checks.
So, to stick it in Galbraith's ear, forty more:
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-10 20:05:02 CST |
link
| comment (1)
we kept tripping on the way to the printer, and by the time we got there it'd have burst into mysterious flames:
I suppose now that Clinton is out of the campaign it would be a good time to hit that print button, since it's no use to anybody in the Clinton-Lied-Too game and has become politically meaningless. Promises were made, afterall.
So there it is. In case there was any mystery to the delay:
In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and of cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Rockefeller.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-06-05 21:05:12 CST |
link
The recently-deported-from-Israel Norman Finklestein thrashes Jeffrey Goldberg so soundly it's downright sad:
When the guards needed "someone to go solitary" for a
minor infraction of prison rules, [Jeffrey] Goldberg
recalls at one point , "twenty Arabs immediately
volunteered." He processes this not as a demonstration of
their solidarity and courage but rather as vindication that
the "Arabs want to be our victim" and "the Geneva
Conventionsaid nothing about prisoners who asked to be
punished."
...
[Goldberg's] new-found hero is Ari Ben Canaan of Leon Uris's Exodus, a "Hebrew (not, somehow, Jewish) warrior, brave and cold-eyed, who defended Jewish honor." The "lesson of the Shoah," Goldberg comes to realize, is that "it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face," while during target practice at IDF boot camp he relishes the prospect of avenging the anti-Semites who had ravaged the Jewish people and humiliated him in his youth. None of these ruminations, however, prevents Goldberg from expressing revulsion at the teachings of Muslim fanatics, who "build self-esteem" through bloody vengeance and for whom the virtue of Islam was its being a "warrior religion" that rejected the Christian value of "passive surrender" because "Muhammad would never have allowed himself to be humiliated". It is hard to make out the difference between this warrior religion and the one Goldberg worshipped after discovering Israel.
...
Were Palestinians to practice nonviolence, Goldberg contends, Israel would quickly enough be forced to negotiate. This is because, like Britons but unlike Germans, Israelis "could not sustain such one-sided violence, especially in front of television cameras." The basis of Goldberg's faith, however, is unclear. The first intifada was a "mass civil uprising," Schiff and Yaari recalled, "not a war fought with tanks, planes, and artillery or a border skirmish with armed men, but a challenge posed without weapons, a contest against bottles, stones, and firebombs." One of Israel's early acts of retaliation was to deport the Palestinian-American pacifist Mubarak Awad of the Center for the Study for Non-violence. ...
For the nonviolent civil disobedience Goldberg counsels to succeed, its practice and the violence being used to crush it must be made widely known. It is a supreme irony lost on Goldberg that it is his manner of ignoring Palestinian civil disobedience and airbrushing Israeli violence that has doomed this tactic to failure.
via donald johnson, I think.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-25 10:05:59 CST |
link
HEY RED!:
There are men and
plenty of them
whose heads resemble
nothing so much as
the head of a dick --
color and form --
America is full
of them, a kind of
brains I suppose
at that . Thick .
William Carlos Williams, back in '46, must have been seeing something like this. I can't find any where he denounces bongo drums so well, unhappily.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-22 11:06:12 CST |
link
the war that keeps on giving:
CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified "secret" and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide "thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks" by the South Koreans.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-19 08:16:11 CST |
link
Is it time to bomb 1 Time Warner Center, New York, NY 10019?:
Time Magazine - which has quite possibly never seen a war that it wasn't one of the first to promote, with
the record to prove it -
bears no small share of the blame for the invasion of Iraq. In the week to week comings and goings of one or another country we must invade, most of their promotional
efforts work as simple mouthbreathing pieces of administrative propaganda, or old fashioned eight minute hates about this or that dictator's
nefarious past. And if it's a slow news day there's always denouncing elected leaders
for volatile oil prices because this or that US-backed coup against them failed. 'He's out, he's back, he's exacerbating the volatility in oil prices, oh no!' There's no treasured human value
they're not willing to stab in the back for the right price.
That's why I appreciate it when Time just let their fangs hang out, like
they haven't had enough fresh blood lately, and publish straight advocacy.
Not just any invasion, either. It's not enough that the country was just hit by a devastating cyclone killing a hundred thousand people - no, Time's editors thought to themselves - rather than watching the ruling SLORC regime enact a US government-like response to a natural disaster a more serious option would be to publish a piece about how the US government should invade Burma. That would surely fix everything.
The disaster of Time Magazine presents Americans with perhaps their most routine moral crisis since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. By most reliable estimates, over one million people are dead. Refusals to acknowledge the millions of displaced Iraqis have lead to hundred million dollar shortfalls in basic elementary relief for the victims, the inaccessibility of neighboring countries for asylum and non-existent state of Iraq's infrastructure and health systems mean that number is sure to rise. With as many as 5 million people still at risk, it is conceivable that the death toll, will, within years, exceed the numbers of any genocide you could name since World War II.
The cold truth is that Time magazine is almost entirely incapable of producing hard news that isn't just soul-sucking warmongering; news meant to produce news; a supply that creates its own demand. With thousands of years of the written record, or our own national history of nearly annual military adventures, or just our most recent episodes in Afghanistan, Somalia, and our universally acclaimed
humanitarian failure in Iraq, apparently the lesson that military force is not a humanitarian enterprise is apparently too complex for some institutions. Instead the lesson is that war improves the quality of our lives by giving us meaning, or at least stale neologisms like "give war a chance".
That's why it's time to consider a more serious option: bombing Time Warner. As its response to the Iraq war proved, the magazine's capacity for promoting violence is limitless, and the only time it ever denounces it seems to be when the subjects of its own media empire become the victims. In an effort to promote peace, then, perhaps it has become necessary to routinely subject them to the opposite.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-10 15:09:41 CST |
link
shamelessly defending himself...:
Northwestern University == sissies. I suppose the "controversy" piled on top of Rev. Wright might have hindered Henry Beinen's otherwise salutary ability to shamelessly beg for money. I mean, hey, he gets some of mine every year.
Has anybody looked at the qualifications for being a preacher lately? I'm pretty sure "narcissist, egotist, provocateur, and a shameless self-promoter" is at the top of the job description. But we're shocked! Shocked I tell you! How did he get in the pulpit!?
I watched that shit, and yeah, obviously the dude is qualified to do what he did for the past 30 odd years. Go figure. Unlike all these fifth rate hacks in the national press corps who've apparently got nothing better to do than gleefully lie about what anybody can just, like, watch him say. Slow campaign season I guess.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-05-01 17:17:16 CST |
link
| comment (2)
suckers:
the media's response to the latest reveal of the Pentagon's PR program notes - the only new news seems to be the access to the script - with "retired" Generals is really something, just take Rick Sanchez whining towards the end of this, like he's the poor betrayed mook:
Couple things. Asking "who is your current employer?" and thinking for a second whether there's a conflict of interest between military analysis and an employed defense contractor (ret) isn't what we call a "failure to vet", it's a failure to glance at a resume. These "retired" generals were employed by the firms that would wage the war, how did the interview process work?
CNN Human Resources: Welcome to CNN. It looks like you're applying for the independent military analyst contract we've recently made available. Why don't we sit down and discuss your relevant experience. Tell me about your last position in a military role?
GENERALLY RETIRED: Here's my name, rank, some parentheses, and my letter of recommendation from the Pentagon's public relations department.
CNN HR: Hired!
Nevermind that the networks would announce on air that these guys were at Pentagon "briefings", granting them the inner-sanctum authority of having sat in on a PR bull session with military spokesmen. Had they thought one second about what kind of information they were getting they could have done the legal thing and simply asked the Pentagon to provide an official spokesman.
For that matter, if you hire a military analyst for military analysis you've aleady introduced an implicit conflict of interest favoring armed conflict: dur, if there's no war Mr. Retired doesn't keep his illustrious media gig. Let's get our roles straight: CNN isn't a welfare program, it's a for-profit propaganda organ.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-24 14:48:29 CST |
link
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-11 02:49:09 CST |
link
"If attacked on some vulnerable point by anyone or anything or any organization, always find or manufacture enough threat against them to cause them to sue for peace":
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-04-07 09:15:06 CST |
link
the etiquette-o-fascists have gone too far:
I hold no more brief against civil discourse than I do archaic double negatives, but sometimes generous language and amiable unagreement can push the capacity of the language to conform to fact past the breaking point:
