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it's great that there is now a consensus on people like rosa parks. but as george bush nominates sam alito and then stares at parks's casket he might want to ask himself: what did people of my political orientation think and say about people like her when there was actually something at stake?
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i hate the idiotic rhetoric around the supreme court. if i hear one more brainless fuck chanting "a judge that won't legislate from the bench" etc. i will harm someone. even better is this idea that we need judges who know that their "personal beliefs and opinions" are irrelevant to their decisions. truly amazing. for example, when i reach the opinion, based on the evidence. that you committed murder, i will ignore that. my religion teaches that murder is wrong. but i ignore that as i sentence you. i have transcended mere humanness: my opinions are not my opinions but the opinions of the cosmos, of the sky itself. oh do shut up and get to work.
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ok: a few clarifications on susan lindauer, who a couple of readers suggested i check out after my recent piece on administration attempts to destroy their critics. seems that she was a distant relation of andy card, and (supposedly for a payment of $10,000 from the iraq government) she delivered a letter to him shortly before the iraq war urging the admin to give inspections more time etc. the indictment charged her with "trying to influence united states foreign policy," which is perhaps the most bizarre crime ever conceived. but maybe it is time to arrest every single lobbyist on espionage charges. she seemed to be a sincere peacenik. consider, before you imprison someone for taking money to try to stop a war, the recent lobbying efforts of the lovely government of the scenic sudan.
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ok i have been taking care of many small children, lecturing to college students etc all day but let me do a few things on the libby indictment.
i just heard david brooks on the news hour basically claiming this as vindication. since such a good prosecutor (and if you saw that performance by fitzgerald today you know that part's right) could only indict one person rather than fingering a large scale conspiracy, there's no "cancer on the presidency," etc. well now. a few facts: the indictment does actually describe another person (presumably rove) leaking plame's identity. and the conversations described indicate that libby first heard plame's name from cheney. get that? so i suppose the idea is that it was just a casual conversation where cheney was saying: hey i met this nice cia agent at a cocktail party last night.
no. this comes in the context of an operation to discredit joe wilson directed by cheney and/or rove. isn't that obvious? everyone keeps saying that libby lied (over and over) in order to protect cheney. yo: protect him from what?: from being identified as the ultimate source of the leak. of course it does not follow that cheney or even rove can be directly connected to a crime at this point, though rove probably saved himself from a perjury charge only by going into the room and changing his testimony just before the grand jury disbanded. whether they committed a crime is probably best answered by the iraq body count.
now: fitgerald was charged with the task of investigating the plame leak, not (of course) the effort by cheney/rumsfeld to "believe" any forgery that brought us to war, while repressing every non-forgery that would refute their case. this operation obviously extended to efforts to discredit, among others, hans blix , scott ritter, and mohamed elbaredei. one other place you might look: susan lindauer , accused fairly vaguely of spying for saddam, the case apparently revealed by...andy card. it may be that her offense was insisting on the truth about saddam's weapons programs, though i am not ruling out that she went beyond that, either.
at any rate, you've got to see that (a) plamethrower is part of a huge vicious disinformation campaign run by cheney, (b) that fitzgerald hasn't indicted them does not mean that he (and we) haven';t cottoned on to the fact that cheney and rove specifically directed the leak of valerie plame's identity
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ok. so kansas is probably going to institute a high school science curriculum critical of evolution. the national academy of sciences and a science teachers' organization say that they won't allow use of their copyrighted material. you'd think maybe this would be based on questions of truth, critical reasoning, scientific method etc. har har har! we are far beyond such trivial, obsolete approaches. here's what they say:
"Kansas students will not be well-prepared for the rigors of higher education or the demands of an increasingly complex and technologically-driven world if their science education is based on these standards," Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy, and Michael J. Padilla, president of the teachers' group, said in a joint written statement today. "Instead, they will put the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as they take their place in the world."
there really is only one reason to be interested in science: to prepare for standardized tests so you can go to a college that takes people with high standardized tests so you can "compete in the global marketplace," outshining those crafty chinese etc. it is a little-known fact that these are precisely the motivations that drove darwin to develop the theory in the first place. these people have no idea what education is or what it's for or what it's worth. they can take their copyrighted materials and stick em.
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the first latino and the first dirty bomb suspect to serve on the high court. anyway, this is why you don't want the white house counsel to be a supreme court justice (though abviously you don't want alberto gonzales either). anyone who believes that the executive branch has the right to arrest people and hold them forever with no trial or representation simply cannot tolerate the american constitution.
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the way microsoft does business, over and over, is it steals other people's ideas and then bludgeons the market with them. i heard some techie on the radio enthusing about the next windows (due out 2007?): more or less: "it's excellent! it has many of the features of mac os10!" amazing. and amazingly, windows was a bad copy of the mac to begin with. what i love is that they'll absolutely kill you if you swipe their code or distribute or imitate their shit, that is, if you adopt their business model. they're the very picture of the very worst of capitalism: lumbering, gigantic, slow, stupid, absolutely lacking any semblance of creativity, parasitic, and vicious. that this is the most successful software company in the world means...what?
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the rolling stones math piece retains its awesome potency. dozens of emails, mostly of course calling me an idiot etc. or quibbling with the obvious fact that the quality of music can be precisely quantified. i can't even read much less reply to them at this rate. back the first time around, i actually got a couple of death threats from ravening john lennon fans. imagine!
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so why does it matter that it was cheney who revealed plame's identity to libby? it ain't illegel to talk about this kind of thing in the white house, though libby's having a hard time keeping his story straight, which could be a problem. but one pictures the conversation like this:
cheney: i think i've got a way to nail joe wilson.
libby: do tell.
cheney: his wife's a cia agent, and maybe she got him the niger gig. maybe she has an agenda. start calling reporters and feeding them this.
after which libby starts speed-dialing. now that makes cheney the primary criminal. and you might also ask yourself what happened before this, where cheney talks to intel-type people and says: get me something on joe wilson; i don't care what it is. just get me something i can use. and you might ask yourself too who else bad things happened to.
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my old classic proof that the rolling stones are the greatest rock band ever is in the sf chronicle today. it was originally published in the philly inquirer in 1997 and gave me my first (only?) 15 mins.
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i do want to draw attention to nicholas kristof's bizarre review of the new mao book.
some quotes:
this magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao's claim to sympathy or legitimacy.
Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin.
This is an extraordinary portrait of a monster, who the authors say was responsible for more than 70 million deaths.
and then he comes out with this:
But Mao's legacy is not all bad.
um. yeah! we all have our little faults, but you can't make an omelet without breaking people: millions upon millions of them. oh yeah: and enjoying it immensely. but among the genocidal monsters of the twentieth century, he wrote some of the best limericks.
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ok so i've been on the road the last 4 days taking my emma to visit some colleges (oberlin seemed to score well), so that's why no blog. my judith miller column is in the philly inquirer today.
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Crusader Mike was somewhat dismayed by the move to Times Select, the Pay-per-View portion of the NY Times website. However, I signed up, expecting that it would at least allow me access to the stuff I normally devoured free. Well, it's worth the money, and I'm happy. The columnists sort of have semi-blogs and write additional stuff with a bit more detail, for one thing...and with minds like Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman and Bob Herbert, that is kinda cool.
Krugman's in great form. "Revenue is still low by historical standards, but it’s not as low as it was last year. And as a result, the budget deficit actually came down in fiscal 2005, albeit to a level that would have seemed shockingly high a few years ago.
"Is this a good basis for claiming success? Well, put it this way: if a student gets a D after a string of F’s, his performance has improved – but that doesn’t put him at the top of the class."
As an adjunct professor of management, I have to read economics and make sense of it to my students. Krugman actually makes sense. This discussion from Oct 18 of the Bush Tax cuts is an example of analysis that is crystal clear and sharp. Things are marginally better than in 2003 due in small part to the administration; they are much worse than in 1999 largely because of the administration. If I recall my Cicero, the type of argument propter hoc, ergo hoc is a logical fallacy that attributes an effect to a cause without any real connection. If Dick Cheney takes a shit and the deficit decreases, then Cheney's colon effected the change. The solution to the deficit is thus to give Cheney Exlax...propter hoc, ergo hoc!
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Crusader Mike has always wondered about this guy, but Bob Herbert's lithium must have kicked in, and he is writing some great stuff with no hysteria. Or, maybe he re-read Aristotle's rhetoric...regardless, he is killing the Bush administration, if anyone is bothering to read his stuff. Substantive, systems thinking and cutting to the core -- the stuff we expect the Times to do, instead of contemplating the aspens out west where they vacation...
"But the story with the gravest implications for the U.S. and the world
is the overall dysfunction of the Bush regime. This is a bomb going
"Tick, tick, tick . . ." What is the next disaster that this crowd will
be unprepared to cope with? Or the next lunatic idea that will spring
from its ideological bag of tricks?" His analysis of Lawrence Wilkerson's speech about the cabal that is running our so-called government is worth reading and putting on a t-shirt!
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ok i am posting my creators column for this week:
Plamethrower Again
By Crispin Sartwell
Patrick Fitgerald's investigation into the Valerie Plame case is winding down, and he will perhaps indict a few people for the crime of revealing the identity of a CIA agent. I would like, however, to issue a broader indictment.
It is obvious that the Bush administration, and specifically Dick Cheney, was intent on invading Iraq under almost any conditions. They did not, probably, simply manufacture intelligence to justify the invasion; rather, they purported to take seriously any flimsy rumor or doctored document that lent support to the case for war, while attempting to discredit all information that tended to undermine that case.
A key aspect of this disinformation campaign was the manipulation of press coverage of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs. Among the reporters who were turned was Judith Miller of the New York Times. Like many reporters and new organizations, Miller had been essentially annexed by power: whatever she may have thought she was doing, she traded independence for access.
Before the war, Miller's articles uncritically reflected the administration's claims. After the war, Cheney's office tried to annex her in the task of discrediting Joseph Wilson, who was in a position to show how flimsy the case was, and how irresponsible or rather mendacious the administration was in making it.
Miller is an extremely poor First Amendment heroine, because her refusal to name her sources was in effect just a way of continuing to participate in the administration's campaign to manipulate public opinion. There have been comparisons to Deep Throat and Watergate. The Plamethrower scandal is more like this: imagine that Deep Throat was Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon's press secretary. Then imagine that Woodward and Bernstein's revelations consisted entirely of Nixon administration press releases and that the scandal came to nothing.
Plamethrower ought immediately to make you think: alright: who other than Joseph Wilson had information damaging to the administration? And what became of these people and that information? Rove and Libby were essentially willing to commit felonies to discredit substantive criticisms. Who else - besides thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis - were their victims?
The chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, accused the Bush administration of "leaning on" his inspectors to produce more damning reports in the run-up to war: essentially insisting that they falsify their results. When he refused, he told the Guardian in June 2003, the administration engaged in a wholesale smear campaign against him, up to and including planting the claim that Blix - by all accounts a happily married man - was a homosexual.
The former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who insisted - accurately - that inspections had shown Saddam had disarmed in the nineties, was caught up in a scandal about cybersex, news of which was leaked to the press a week before the State of the Union Address wherein President Bush made his trumped-up case for war.
Mohamed ElBaradei has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the International Atomic Energy Agency. In 2002 and '03, he had been critical of the administration's fictional construction of Iraq's nuclear program. For his trouble, he was subjected to a campaign to discredit him and remove him from office spearheaded by current UN Ambassador John Bolton. This campaign included tapping ElBaredei's phone.
Meanwhile those who helped create evidence and suppress dissent have been rewarded handsomely. For his loyal failure to say the truth, CIA Director George Tenet was given the Medal of Freedom. Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi "dissident" and Shia warlord whose disinformation succeeded in luring the US into war, is now Deputy Prime Minister of the New Iraq.
The truly disturbing cases in this schedule of rewards and punishments are likely to be those about whom we know nothing. We need not more Judith Millers but reporters with more critical intelligence and less "access."
Plamethrower is in a way not such a big deal: neither Valerie Plame nor the nation were greatly harmed by Plame being named as an agent. But the administration's viciousness, its pettiness, and its dishonesty in the service of death are, though neither unique nor particularly surprising, nevertheless terrifying.
The connivance of the American press in the process - up to and including the idea that it is their solemn First Amendment right to protect the administration in its manipulation of the American people - is just sad.
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ok : no child left behind hasn't transformed american education, as if anything could that did not transform the culture from the ground up. but you have to understand that nclb defines the terms in which its own success is measured; if only each of us could do the same. and of course the only measure - the only understanding of knowledge, teaching, truth - is performance on standardized tests. that it's not a ringing success by this measure is interesting. but it's important to understand that the measure itself is idiotic.
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Sipping his mint tea and bowing to the east, Crusader Mike remembers --
" At least it wasn't a sandicane. That's a hurricane with sand -- really stings the cheeks." As Ed Helms talked about the elections in Iraq last night against a green screen backdrop of fog, volcanos, and giant ants devouring the country side, he responded to a Jon Stewart question about the ants, " Damn. They weren't due until the end of the month. Not my favorite place, Jon." So, maybe The Daily Show got it right...again.
It's been fairly common for the press to indicate that the Sunni opposition to the Constitution has been based solely on the regional autonomy issue. This oped from this morning's NY Times indicates perhaps something else is happening here and we don't know what it is, do we Ms. Rice? Referring to the possibility of each province having it's own diplomatic relations and the need for each provincial Parliament to agree to a national declaration of war, it has to make me wonder. Madison was initially opposed to the Bill of Rights on procedural grounds until he became convinced that they needed to get it right from the start...
Of course, if DEVO continues to provide the soundtrack to this movie, it'll stay fun, or as Ed said at the final frame when the screen blacked out, "That'll really enrage the Giant Ants..." or, as the author concludes:
First, we need a new government whose officials are in power based on qualifications rather than loyalty to a certain sect, political party or ethnic group. This government needs to give the ordinary Iraqi a tangible positive change: better electricity; more jobs; more security.
We must also reassemble the Iraqi Army and disband all ethnic and religious militias; and this military must end the current wave of reprisals against those who fought on the Iraqi side in the Iran-Iraq war.
In addition, we have to re-establish the judicial system that Iraq had before it was corrupted by the Baathists. Last, we need to control the graft that pervades every level of government, and gain better control of the economy, including fashioning a system that shares the nation's oil wealth with all citizens.
As Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, "The Americans will always do the right thing - after they've exhausted all the alternatives." Let's hope that this will prove to be true about Iraq; it is the only way to avoid converting the liberation of Iraq into an Iraqnam.
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When Crusader Mike should be doing something else, he reflects...
Entirely too long ago, I was in Latin Class when the teacher, Fr. Eckermann, aka Charlie the Tuna, started to teach us some rhetoric and logic. Caesar had just thrashed out some bunch of Gauls, and we were pretty sure he was going to do so in the next chapter. At that time, circa 1966, things were heating up on the Vietnam/anti-Vietnam front. So, Tuna got us thinking. If we are at war to preserve peace, then the best way to get peace is to kill more people. If we kill all the people, we'll have peace. (In addition to Latin, he was Dean of Discipline...so, there were multiple levels of irony here.) Kind of like today -- Bush's theory that in order to not have American lives spent in vain, we need to vainly spend more American lives. If they kill all of us, then...
Fast forward to this morning. Most of us noticed that when El Baradei won the Nobel, there was kind of a not so-subtle shot taken at our Iraq policy on the whole WMD thing. However, Joe Conason has some really telling points. By invading Iraq over nucs when they didn't have any, and whining impotently at North Korea, Iran and Pakistan over their Deli/Nuc Bourse, we've made it pretty clear...talk about Nuclear Weapons, and you'll get screwed. Build Nuclear weapons and we'll tiptoe around you.
When the history of this administration is written, the problem will be deciding if GWB was Claudius to Dad's Tiberius, or worse...
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When Crusader Mike should be doing something else, he reflects...
Entirely too long ago, I was in Latin Class when the teacher, Fr. Eckermann, aka Charlie the Tuna, started to teach us some rhetoric and logic. Caesar had just thrashed out some bunch of Gauls, and we were pretty sure he was going to do so in the next chapter. At that time, circa 1966, things were heating up on the Vietnam/anti-Vietnam front. So, Tuna got us thinking. If we are at war to preserve peace, then the best way to get peace is to kill more people. If we kill all the people, we'll have peace. (In addition to Latin, he was Dean of Discipline...so, there were multiple levels of irony here.) Kind of like today -- Bush's theory that in order to not have American lives spent in vain, we need to vainly spend more American lives. If they kill all of us, then...
Fast forward to this morning. Most of us noticed that when El Baradei won the Nobel, there was kind of a not so-subtle shot taken at our Iraq policy on the whole WMD thing. However, Joe Conason has some really telling points. By invading Iraq over nucs when they didn't have any, and whining impotently at North Korea, Iran and Pakistan over their Deli/Nuc Bourse, we've made it pretty clear...talk about Nuclear Weapons, and you'll get screwed. Build Nuclear weapons and we'll tiptoe around you.
When the history of this administration is written, the problem will be deciding if GWB was Claudius to Dad's Tiberius, or worse...
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Crusader Mike sighs...
Clarence Thomas and I are alums of the same big house, the College of the Holy Cross. Us, Chris Matthews and a cast of several thousand. One thing the Jesuits did do was force us to think; their strategy has always been to shape the movers and shakers in the community. Well, obviously with me they went horribly wrong; CT was undoubtedly a far better investment, move and shaker and flunky to the rich and powerful strategy-wise.
I didn't like the guy because I thought he was a jerk. However, I believe that he is generally true to his principles; I remember being in a room where only two folks weren't taking the joint, our future "justice" and moi. On the other hand, he was an affirmative action recepient both at the Cross and at Yale and in government and on and on and on. He morphed very quickly from black radical to fascist tool for the elite. However, he did lackey up to John Danforth, a principled man, rather than to our former and largely unlamented attorney-general whashisname...the guy who covered up the statues because the sight of a nude, blind woman with a scale made him erotically inclined and therefore unable to function; the guy who told Freeh to keep him free of info on terrorism; that guy...altho, CT did annoint him with Crisco before he took his oath. "Crisco...a priest forever of the brotherhood of Malkeisadech." (Go ahead, look it up...) Ashcroft, yeah that's the guy.
So, this saddens me. I am deeply conflicted as I believe all rational people who are not ideologues are about abortion. I feel very fortunate that it has yet to intrude directly into my life so that I have not had to deal with it as a brother, uncle or any other role I might find myself in save friend. I must say, I have never met anyone who has had the procedure and found it an enriching and positive experience. In this case, though, I see a lot of problems. The child is really being set up for a great future; Mom a felon, wanted to abort and Clarence Thomas stopped it.
Fine. I can even see a legal reason for doing so; what I can't see is the consequence for the child. If we are arguing about personal responsibility, then Justice Thomas needs to look long and hard at his responsibility in this one and act accordingly based not on the decision but on the outcome.
You see, laws impact people beyond the present and that's where originalism is pretty close to original sin.
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leave it to the diabolical mind of charles krauthammer to wise us up to an extreme unnoticed emergency: that osama is about to release the 1918 flu, creating the final pandemic, the end of the glory that is america. this is how a neocon thinks: here's an interesting event, essentially irrelevant to my worldview: how can i fold, spindle, and mutilate it until it becomes a motivation for increasing the power of america abroad and the power of the executive branch at home?
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sometimes you do get the money quote. this from manuel miranda, chair of the thirs branch conference, a conservative legal group:
If Miers does not withdraw, Miranda predicted the confirmation hearings will become a "dog killing" if she "does not appear braver and bolder than John Roberts, and as brilliant."
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good news for your head .
i always hate to quibble with rigorous scientific methodology, but this result does rest on the somewhat questionable inference that a bad case of the munchies is evidence that a rat's anxiety has lifted. spelling out the various possibly unwarranted assumptions impacted into this result would mess up my high.
Zhang's team suspected the new brain cells also might be associated with a reduction in anxiety and depression, because previous studies had indicated medications used to treat anxiety and depression achieve their effect this way.
To find out, they treated rats with HU210 for 10 days and then tested them one month later. When placed in a new environment, the rats were quicker to eat their food than rats that did not receive the compound, which suggested there was a reduction in anxiety behaviors.
Another group of rats treated with HU210 showed a reduction in the duration of immobility in a forced swimming test, which is an indication the compound had an anti-depressant effect.
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Hey, Crispin, there is good news. Granted, there are more important things, like Scott McClellan saying that the press is concentrating on side issues like religion, but still, the news that Fox is cancelling The Simple Life should mean something. Of course, they cancelled Titus because that was too edgy. They cancelled Briscoe County because they didn't have a plot. They cancelled Space Precinct because it was British. They cancelled Family Guy and that space robot mutant thing because they are mutants. They haven't cancelled The 70s Show because Murdock thinks its about him...so, maybe there is a nefarious reason for cancelling this show.
Or, maybe Paris and Nicole proved to vacuous even for Fox. Unfortunately, somebody else might pick up the option. At some point, we know that Paris will start hugging land mine victims and looking sad instead of stoned and then...St Paris will join St Diana and St Mother Teresa and St Elvis Presley in the pantheon of role models.
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one way you can tell that russia is a totalitarian state: check out the "coverage" from itar-tass or pravda.
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coverage is sure sketchy with regard to the astonishing events in kabardino-balkaria, but that link is a dispatch from the times of london's moscow guy. i'm going to go digging a little. seems like maybe it was an extreme prison break?
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have y'all seen this story ? time for a few home truths: russia is a dictatorship that is still prosecuting genocide in chechnya. there are resistance movements in several corners, in particular the southwest. one thing i would immediately expect: a vicious wave of repression directed against non-combatants in the region.
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Crusader Mike seldom reads David Brooks easily. He writes well and lucidly and without the blowhardness of the WSJ editorial board or some of his fellow conservative Times editorial page colleagues.(Opps, there's only one. Sorry...) I just disagree with the idea that conservatism in this country is a philosophical system of thought. Unthought, in most cases. However, in a very gentlemanly fashion, he guts Harriet like a fish, and then tosses her back, an oddly effective form of catch and release.
The crap about conservative thought in the Republican party can go, but the rest of it is wonderful. Right up there with "The question is, Is our Children learning?"
Link: In Her Own Words - New York Times.
I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers's prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It's not that Miers didn't attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.
Or as she puts it, "There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law." And yet, "Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority."
Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers's columns provide no evidence of that.
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christ, you people don't think i'd appoint someone to the supreme court who wasn't a religious fanatic? jesus fuck, y'all.
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Crusader Mike has seen the light, and realizes that Farrellism is really a subsect of Dischordianism - the Zen for Round Eyes! How can you not get behind a religion like this --
Discordians who do not form their own sects, whether they belong to someone else's sect or not, make up the Legion of Dynamic Discord, and may be referred to as Legionnaires. Would-be Discordians are told on page 00032,
- If you want in on the Discordian Society
- then declare yourself what you wish
- do what you like
- and tell us about it
- or
- if you prefer
- don't.
- There are no rules anywhere.
The Goddess Prevails.
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