Dark Studies

Our Long National Nightmare is Over . . .

2009-01-24T22:23:00.003-05:00

And so is this blog. I'm going to leave this up here as a memorial to the Bush Administration in all of its horror and glory, but for now it's time to regroup and retool. Rest assured that I will resume writing again shortly, though these days I really need to figure out how to get paid doing it.

Perhaps I'll begin by writing some cover letters.

To recap: We're fucked and I told you so.

Maybe this Obama guy can turn things around. I sure hope so, but I for one am hedging my bets.

Anyway, thanks for reading and good luck out there.

Markets don't care if you believe in them or not.

2008-01-24T23:59:00.000-05:00

My own vision. . .is that the forces of the market are just that: They are forces; they are like the wind and the tides; they are things that if you want to try to ignore them, you ignore them at your peril, and if you understand that they are there, working their way, if you find a way of ordering your life that is compatible with these forces, indeed which harnesses these forces to the benefit of your society, that's the way to go. - Al Harberger, University of Chicago

The unhappy coincidence of a presidential election and an economic downturn has resulted in more than the usual share of public idiocy. I feel it is my duty once again to point the accusatory finger at our leaders in the hope that they will be so ashamed that they quit public office without delay and take up lives as wandering ascetics, begging forgiveness and small morsels of food from the people they have wronged.

THE STIMULUS PACKAGE
The idea behind this proposal, which, I should note, has received broad bipartisan support, is that $600 in my pocket is going to somehow restore confidence in the American economy. This is a silly idea. The federal government has proved itself to be an incompetent regulator, millions of Americans hold underwater mortgages, stagflation is in the air, and our record high deficits are only going to get worse when the baby boomer entitlement bomb goes off. . . but don't worry about all that, Best Buy is having a sale on embarrassingly large televisions! Act now, before you're broke again!

Even sillier than the idea itself is Hillary's assertion that "This stimulus shouldn't be paid for," an utterance so devoid of basic economic reasoning that it makes my head hurt. Let me 'splain you something Hillary. Either that $600 is funded by a loan or the government is running a printing press in the basement of the treasury and creating dollars. Whether I fund this policy by repaying a government debt at some future date or watch the value of my savings evaporate today is irrelevant. My future consumption will be reduced. It is lovely of the government to permit me to borrow from myself at such a comparably low rate, BUT I DON'T ACTUALLY NEED THE CASH.

THE HEALTH CARE PROPOSALS
I think we can all agree that it would be a better, happier, more awesome world if the price of healthcare were lower and there were more of it available. Even a basic acquaintance with market theory suggests a simple and obvious avenue for government action: attempt to shift the healthcare supply curve outward.

Unfortunately, all of the reform proposals with which I am acquainted propose the exact opposite. Our wise presidential candidates imply that we should enact massive demand subsidies while imposing price controls on suppliers. The predictable result will be a shortage.

I point these things out not to whine about socialized medicine or government intervention. To the extent that I believe the government should be involved in promoting social welfare at all, I believe that public health and economic stability are at the core of its mission.

I raise these issues because our leaders seem to view markets as somehow optional. In the same way that walking down a railroad track with your eyes closed wont keep you from getting hit by a train, and ignoring markets in the design of policy doesn't makes them go away.

Restore your faith in democracy by watching this video.

2007-12-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

More Obscure Books: The Open Society and its Enemies- Plato

2007-10-25T22:54:00.000-04:00

In another time by another author, the subject of this book, the emptiness of Plato's moral-political philosophy, could have been a dull and depressing piece of dead white male bashing. In fact, Karl Popper's dig into the minutia of classical philosophy reveals important truths about the irreconcilable differences that tear at our modern democracies. He views the human condition after the rupture of the tribal bubble as an ongoing conflict between our need to belong and our need to reform, our desire for predictability and the social upheaval of the open society that benefits us in so many ways. These dueling needs mean that our societies always hang in the balance between tyranny and liberty, never safe from the extremes of total disintegration or totalitarian "unity."

Popper takes pains to shatter the idealized and very popular vision of Plato as a deeply moral and fundamentally righteous crusader against the excesses of a democracy run wild. He does this by examining Plato's own social context, his place within the intellectual movements that go unnamed in his dialogs but had to be in the mind of so educated and politically engaged an author. Moreover, he turns Plato's own words against him, citing familiar passages and delivering plainspoken critiques that cut past Plato's clever tricks.

Plato's subtle but seductive war on the notions of egalitarianism, democracy, and openness that had exploded during Athens' golden age, his betrayal of Socratic notions of Justice, and his own sordid political and pedagogical experiments leave little room for doubt about his intentions. His work, particularly the Republic and the Laws where his political program is most explicitly revealed represent an unabashed embrace of social control and collectivism. The search for the "best state" is shown to reflect a tribalistic and totalitarian impulse to establish the unchallenged rule of the master race by eliminating all vestiges of openness and freedom from the society.

That Plato's program purports to answer the very basic human needs for happiness and justice is little consolation when these terms are defined as "knowing and staying in one's place" and "that which is in the interest of the state."

Here are some choice quotes from Karl Popper's book:

... Of much greater merit, although it too is inspired by hatred is Plato's description of tyranny and especially of the transition to it. He insists that he describes things which he has seen himself; no doubt the allusion is to his experience at the court of the older Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse. The transition from a democracy to tyranny, Plato says is most easily brought about by a popular leader who knows how to exploit the class antagonism between the rich and the poor within the democratic state, and who succeeds in building up a bodyguard or a private army of his own. The people who have hailed him first as the champion of freedom are soon enslaved; and then they must fight for him, in "one war after another which he must stir up...because he must make the people feel the need of a general." With tyranny, the most abject state is reached.

...[Plato] insists that only internal sedition within the ruling class itself can weaken [the state] so much that its rule can be overthrown.

...Most people in civilized countries nowadays [1944] admit racial superiority to be a myth; but even if it were an established fact, it should not create special political rights, though it might create special moral responsibilities for the superior persons. Analogous demands should be made of those who are intellectually and morally and educationally superior; and I cannot help feeling that the opposite claims of certain intellectualists and moralists only show how little successful their education has been, since it failed to make them aware of their own limitations, and of their Pharisaism.

...All theories of soveriegnty are paradoxical...We may distinguish two main types of government. The first type consists of governments of which we can get rid without bloodshed - for example by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide a means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not easily be destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of except by way of a successful revolution - that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term 'democracy' as a short hand label for a government of the first type, and the term 'tyranny' or 'dictatorship' for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to the traditional usage. But I wish to make it clear that no part of my argument depends on these labels; and should anybody reverse this usage (as is frequently done nowadays), then I should simply say that I am in favor of what he calls "tyranny" and object to what he calls "democracy;" and I should reject as irrelevant to any attempt to discover what "democracy" "really" or "essentially" means, for example by translating the term into "the rule of the people." (For although 'the people' may influence the actions of their rulers by the threat of dismissal, they never rule themselves in any concrete, practical sense)...He who accepts the principle of democracy in this sense is therefore not bound to look upon the result of a democratic vote as an authoritative expression of what is right. Although he will accept a decision of the majority, for the sake of making the democratic institutions work, he will feel free to combat it by democratic means, and to work for its revision. And should he live to see the day when the majority vote destroys the democratic institutions, then this sad experience will tell him only that there does not exist a foolproof method of avoiding tyranny. But it need not weaken his decision to fight tyranny, nor will it expose his theory as inconsistent.

...Democracy (using his label in the sense suggested above) provides the institutional framework for the reform of political institutions without using violence, and thereby the use of reason in the designing of new institutions and the adjusting of old ones. It cannot provide reason.

...The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. I we turn back, then we must go the whole way - we must return to the beasts. . . We can return to the beasts. But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.

Godwin's Law Comes to the Mainstream Media

2007-10-22T12:16:00.000-04:00

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." ~Mike Godwin

Ms. Wolf is probably justified in her invocation of the Evil One on this occasion, but this is the first time I had seen it done successfully by a serious journalist. This is because her use of "fascism" is not rhetorical and hyperbolic but is on the other hand highly technical and descriptive. The trends she identifies in American political life and the parallels she draws to past instances of democratic collapse have concerned me for some time. Her contribution to the ongoing discussion is much needed because, as she says, the window permitting a peaceful democratic counter-movement is being closed. Take a look.

How to Steal a Country

2007-09-28T12:09:00.000-04:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I wouldn't trust most politicians to work on my car much less run my country.

Our elected legislators are running around like a bunch of unsupervised children. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, I knew that staffers often voted on behalf of their senile and doddering bosses who probably don't know what city they're in half the time, but these guys are really brazen about stealing each other's votes.

Stuck Pigs

2007-09-24T17:31:00.000-04:00

A new youtube channel dedicated to monitoring and documenting police brutality. Check it out any time you feel like getting angry.

That Isn't News

2007-09-17T11:58:00.000-04:00

If you’re reading this, you probably already know that the mainstream media is a smoldering wasteland of celebrity gossip, stories about sex offenders, and senseless economic hysteria. I contend that it’s worse than you think.

The problem is not so much that people watch and care about these things, that they are entertained by Britney’s blurred out cooch and amused by O’Reilly’s angry rants. We all indulge in such guilty pleasures on occasion.

The challenge facing serious people in America today is that the events that have come to fill the typical news cycle deliberately distract viewers from the developments most likely to shape their lives in the future.

American news organizations of all political slants religiously avoid discussing in any depth science and technological innovation, and avoid giving audience to powerful new ideas of any kind. Economic trends receive a great deal of coverage, but the discussion leaves no lingering understanding of the dynamics at work. International confrontations cause editors to trot out the usual cast of xenophobes and apologists, but any discussions of the historical context or the roots of the conflict are ridiculed as the kind of mushy intellectualism that has no place on the foreign policy battlefield.

Consuming such disposable media is worse than a waste of time. It actually erodes our ability to distinguish between the sensational and the significant.

I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that this is deliberate. To extract lasting information about the general from the specific of current events would be to make punditry unnecessary. If these organizations were truly educating people about the world, they would be furnishing viewers with the tools necessary to learn about and judge the importance of events independently. This is evidently one of the cardinal sins of the modern newsman.

Thou shalt not challenge, thou shalt not offend, thou shalt not empower.

In the long run we're all dead

2007-07-24T14:04:00.000-04:00

While many of us have suspected for some time that the leaders of this country were coming unglued, it is increasingly apparent that the American Empire is fraying at the edges. As much as part of me wants to pour a glass fine bourbon and drink to its demise, I fear that the transformation we are witnessing will not be a happy one for us.

Let us review the facts:

The President and VP of the United States have lost the support of all but a radical fringe of the Republican party, and have even succeeded in alienating the traditional base in the last six weeks. The White House has gone into siege mode, and is increasingly desperate to redeem the Bush legacy - even if it means bringing the ominous predictions of a generation long battle for the Middle East to fruition. This administration has demonstrated its willingness to exploit terrorism and war to increase its political power, and there is no reason to believe that they will not attempt to do so again. Their record of restricting freedoms and trampling the constitution in the name of security may precipitate a confrontation in the event of intervention in Iran or Pakistan.

Congress has abysmal approval ratings, and cannot enforce the cooperation or obedience of the White House given a highly politicized Justice Department and the culture of loyalty fostered within it and the rest of the Executive. The Supreme Court is packed with Bush followers as well, and it is unlikely to provide any significant check on executive power even if it becomes obvious that the President is acting outside his constitutionally limited role. The mainstream media has been effectively neutered by the Bush Administration's overt carrot and stick policy of offering unprecedented access to compliant reporters but mercilessly freezing out the opposition.

Spaces for popular protest are being closed by widely publicized yet continuing surveillance programs that may allow government access to highly personal data and the communications of any American citizen. Knowledge of this capability combined with a well executed crack down on a few classes of social deviant could produce the kind of self censorship upon which true authoritarianism depends. Moreover, many Americans are still in the dark about the nature of the economic and political crisis facing this country, and can be easily manipulated by demagogues as a result. Since the 60's, Americans have lost faith in the efficacy of protest and street action to bring about lasting change, and participants in such acts of resistance are viewed as hopeless radicals or dreamers.

The immense quantity and diversity of information available on the Internet has resulted in a sort of ideological fragmentation, and without filters and mediators of culture, it becomes impossible to mobilize new coalitions that will have impact on the democratic process. The Web 2.0 phenomenon and the rise of social networking may permit a true political dialog to resume in time, but for the moment these forums are underdeveloped and lack the kind of cross cutting participation that would make them viable vehicles for change.

Despite the lull in terrorism at home during the last few years, it is still quite likely that we will be attacked again. Given that the stated goal of our enemies is to turn us against each other by exploiting the tendency of our government to overreact to perceived threats, we have done a poor job of sticking together. In an atmosphere of fear an uncertainty and absent a real alternative to Republicrat orthodoxy, the path of least resistance for politicians is more redistributive populism, more deficit spending, and more war. However, military power cannot solve our essentially political foreign policy problems, our country is already committed to entitlements it cannot afford, and increased government intervention in the economy is likely to undermine our few remaining competitive advantages.

While this all sounds quite bleak, even to a bleak prediction aficionado like myself, it is important to point out that all my short term pessimism is tempered by a firmly held belief that in the long run I will be dead as fried chicken along with all the the sons of bitches that got us into this mess. With any luck they'll go before we do and we'll have a chance to clean the place up a bit before its time to go.

But seriously, what I was going to say before the black wave came over me is that in the long run, it really doesn't matter if the federal government implodes and America becomes a pitiable backwater. Those of us that can flee will do so as people have done for all of recorded history, and we will carry with us the ideas, the information, and the drive that made this country a great place to live. In other words, lets give the reform thing the old college try, but if it doesn't work, well, keep practicing that Spanish.

This Guy's an Army of One

2007-07-11T15:22:00.000-04:00

War: Are we still that fucking stupid?

2007-06-25T15:39:00.000-04:00

Repeat after me:
. . .
I solemnly swear that I will never initiate the use of force, nor will I allow political representatives to do so on my behalf. I reject the use or threat of violence as a political tool both because it is morally indefensible and practically ineffective.
. . .

A victory in battle cannot settle the great questions of human life, and furthermore such questions are not meant to be buried.

To be human is to be in error. This condition has the makings of a great comedy or a great tragedy; so far we have chosen the latter.

Banish borders, not immigrants.

2007-06-20T17:02:00.000-04:00

Your ancestors were migrants.

Indeed, you could even say we are a species of nomads. Though few modern peoples bear resemblance to the original low-speed nomads - walking across the wilderness from water source to water source, following the big game that was their livelihood - the churning flow of human populations and the reasons compelling our motion have changed very little.

We still roam the earth searching for what we need.

You've lived in one place your whole life you say? Well, if you're like most Americans, you commute about 25 minutes to work each day. You set out from the place where one vital resource is located to acquire another that you need to survive. That you return to the same shelter each night and the same job each morning makes you an adept and speedy migrant, but a migrant none the less.

Imagine how difficult your life would become if arbitrary but impenetrable man-made boundaries were drawn across the landscape in such a way that the many resources necessary for your survival were separated from one another.

This is the situation created by states that erect barriers to peaceful migrants and their goods. Our governments have closed down the natural and vital flows people and resources in a foolish and ill devised effort to protect a few enclaves of wealth.

The irony is, the only reason these enclaves, the very estates of intrepid migrants, might now be threatened is that many years of holding back the trickle of humans has turned them into an angry flood. We should stop blaming the people who follow their fortunes as all of us must. The border is the crime, not the crossing of it.

Proxy War: still the best bang for your buck!

2007-06-15T09:53:00.002-04:00

Take a look at the photographs of the Fatah-Hamas battle filtering out of Gaza and the West Bank. Pay close attention to the guns they are carrying. What do you notice?

If you answered that ALL the Fatah militants were carrying U.S. made M-16 rifles, the standard duty rifle for U.S. troops since Vietnam, you win today's grand prize.

This weapon is the hallmark of U.S. involvement in a war. Go to the Bay of Pigs and you will still find their spent shells in the sand. They are too expensive, require too much maintenance, and are too difficult to acquire for most would be guerrillas. Quite simply, our government had to supply them to these fighters.

By contrast, look at the weapons wielded by Hamas fighters. They all carry the ubiquitous AK-47, the dirt cheap and extremely reliable Soviet assault rifle faced by U.S. troops in so many conflicts over the years.

Just because no U.S. troops are fighting in Palestine at the moment doesn't mean we don't have a dog in this fight. We need only listen to the smug statements of our representatives in the region to know that this violence is part of the larger War of Terror. We have opposed Hamas since the beginning of their ascendancy, needling them with the economic sanctions and silent treatment so characteristic of the Bush Administration. Now we fund their enemies in a feeble attempt to topple the democratically elected government. Do we expect them to behave better now that they have routed our proxies?

More on secrecy.

2007-06-11T10:08:00.000-04:00

From the Washington Post.

The author would seem to agree:

For the past six years, I've been exploring the resurgent culture of secrecy. What I've found is a confluence of causes behind it, among them the chill wrought by 9/11, industry deregulation, the long dominance of a single political party, fear of litigation and liability and the threat of the Internet. But perhaps most alarming to me was the public's increasing tolerance of secrecy. Without timely information, citizens are reduced to mere residents, and representative government atrophies into a representational image of democracy as illusory as a hologram.

Shhh! It's a Secret.

2007-05-29T18:20:00.000-04:00

Achieving information control is the fundamental first step of any authoritarian regime. In the absence of informed dissent, the taxpayer-funded noise machine lets leaders do what they want while most of us are so confused about the actual facts that we are incapable of articulating any policy demands at all.

As we become less capable of confronting the world in a coherent way, we are increasingly dependent on politicians to tell us what to think. Even though their "information" may conflict with realities that slap us in the face every day, the cognitive dissonance causes paralysis.

The fundamental crisis facing our government is that most of its actions are so highly classified even other officials can't and don't know what's going on. How can they plan complex operations? How can they coordinate policy? The Iraq debacle makes it obvious that they cannot.

If a government can't even trust its own employees, we must assume that it's up to some seriously twisted shit.

Forget about media bias for a moment and consider the impact of secrecy on our society. True information is the blood of democracy. We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help us God. Without it our political discourse is starved of air. We become captive to "experts," pundits and smooth talkers, insiders who can claim privileged access and special information. We are no longer participant citizens but subjects.

Insane Campaing Clips: Volume 3

2007-05-22T11:48:00.000-04:00

Ron Paul taking on the GOP and trying to get himself banned from future debates. Apparently his warmongering isn't keeping pace with the rest of his party.

And as it turns out . . .

2007-05-17T17:20:00.000-04:00

. . . Al Gore agrees.

Page 3:

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.
The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.
The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy.

Network Rule: The “Lesser of Two Evils” Fallacy

2007-05-15T16:53:00.000-04:00

In this country, we often find ourselves presented with a short menu of distasteful political choices, but this situation need not persist. “Choose the lesser of two evils,” we are told, as if having an only mildly evil politician in office is some kind of comfort. Let me suggest that we may be approaching this problem all wrong.

At the risk of revealing too much about my views on “good and evil” (I might as well say “choice and no choice” or “freedom and coercion”) I should note that the political history of the world demonstrates an endless and cyclical opening and narrowing of real options, pendulum swings from tyranny to liberty.

I confess that I, like millenarian Christians and assorted other cultists, believe that we are approaching a sort of inflection point past which things are going to get much better or much worse for most of humanity, very quickly and dramatically. We may be on the verge of a political renaissance, and not just in this country but across the world . . . and by that I of course mean that things have gotten very bad, many people have started to notice, and we have the tools to fight.

I do not believe in necessary evils, only evils we have not yet reasoned a way around. When we appear constrained by bad political options, options we would not choose if we were truly free, we must put aside the questions of the moment to restructure the underlying institutions that constrain our choice.

The Westphalian state has decayed, too long a tool of personal enrichment, racial oppression, nationalist violence, and moral crusade. It is tainted by the blood of “criminals” without victims, stained by the acts of its torturers and mercenaries, a monster behind the shroud of triumphalist mythology.

Our leaders, children of the state that they are, cannot be expected to point out its flaws. Even those who struggle against the state, the Bin Ladens of the world are little more than power seekers, thugs who differ from politicians only in their location and willingness to engage directly in the killing of people who oppose them. Even when these types embrace the cause of reforming the state, their actions only expand its power and reach, never reduce it.

And yet I am hopeful, principally because we have the element of surprise. Our leaders have refused to see the writing on the wall, failed to carry the diffusion of information technology across the globe to its logical conclusion.

In a world where participation in the political process is practically cost free, where ideas can cross barriers of language and geography instantly, notions of representation and sovereignty may become anachronisms, literally obsolete.

The ethical and technical foundations of network-based government are being laid right now. The presumption of freedom, total transparency, decentralized participation, and natural rights guide this new movement, and promise to inject a good dose of reason as antidote to the demagoguery and hatred of the past. Network rule, this elusive webocracy is not something that can be completed during the next presidential term, or even the next generation. It will operate first in parallel with the current system and then come to supplant it as people discover that their shared problems are better and more cheaply addressed by a politics stripped of its mythology, its money whoring and its absurd violence.

In the domestic context, we may only have two evils to choose from now, but with a bit of luck the donkey and the elephant will be distant and amusing memories to our children.

Insane Campaign Videos: Volume 2

2007-04-24T16:45:00.000-04:00

That's it! We need MORE war to get us out of this mess.

Why didn't I think of that?

Insane Campaign Clips Volume 1

2007-04-20T10:51:00.000-04:00

Edwards, you are pretty.

Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre

2007-04-16T20:40:00.000-04:00

The worst shooting rampage in American history took place this morning at the Virginia Tech campus in sleepy Blacksburg. Families across the country have received the grim news of a dead or wounded child, and countless more have stopped to question the safety of their loved ones studying at far off universities.

I am sure the scars to the community and the families will be deep. For many, today’s events will redefine the word “tragedy.”

Already the news media has politicized the killings, using the deaths as a rallying cry for gun control or as a call to arms. “If only the killer hadn’t had access to a firearm” they say. Or conversely, “If only the victims had been packing, none of this would have happened.” Sorry, but getting tough on crime isn’t the answer to this problem.

This is a time when we should be mourning the frailty of human beings, not just in Virginia but across the world. When something truly terrible and disturbing happens, we cannot stand to look it in the face. We either speak of it as “incomprehensible” and “senseless” or we reduce it to the coldly pragmatic and political. We ask what kind of metal detectors we need to buy, what kind of laws we need to pass to keep this from happening ever again.

What we cannot admit is that this sort of violence is perfectly understandable and in fact quite common.

When he pulled the trigger, the students were just animals in his gun sights. Like countless killers, soldiers, and criminals before him, he had disregarded the rights of his victims.

A lone gunman has turned a safe place, a happy place, a place of learning and friendship into a slaughterhouse. The indelible marks of his cruelty will cause future generations of students to shudder as they pass the spot where he died.

While I would take comfort in the belief that the Virginia Tech killer is somewhere underground being poked by demons, it’s probably not true. His hell was standing there in that classroom full of bodies, putting the hot barrel of a gun into his mouth, and in that moment realizing how irreparably fucked and irretrievably wasted his life was.

If we go by the calculus, there will always be balance in the universe. The number of human births will exactly equal the number of human deaths. However each time we ignore the humanity of others, we contribute to the sum total of our suffering, building in the world around us new infernos. Our capacity for this evil is matched only by our capacity for the opposite, our ability to transcend the bullshit of the day-to-day to create those heavenly moments of peace and love. If you want to see heaven or avoid the torments of hell you don’t have to wait for God to choose for you. If you paid attention you’ll notice that you made one or the other today.

Kurt Vonnegut Expires

2007-04-12T14:48:00.000-04:00

Kurt Vonnegut, the archetypical dirty old man and author of some of my favorite books, has just passed away. This weekend we will raise a cold glass of fine gin in his honor.

I'm Learning for Free, Suckers.

2007-04-06T13:34:00.000-04:00

Why go to college when you can get all the classes online for nothing? That is a question students of the future will be forced to answer, but more urgently, a question applicants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology must ask themselves right now . . . especially considering the six figure price tag of an undergraduate degree there.

MIT, as part of its OpenCourseWare project has decided to make hundreds of classes – video lectures, homeworks, tests and quizzes – available online to the public. The OCW project began as an attempt to make course materials available for students to review or make up for missed lectures. As the site was developing, rising tuition at the university (now one of the most expensive in the country) had become a contentious political issue on campus. Students and professors argued that low income applicants were being priced out of top universities, and foreigners unable to get visas or travel to the United States often did not have access to quality instruction.

To combat these trends and renew the philanthropic mission of the university, MIT, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are cooperating to host the university’s materials and disseminate them for free to anybody who wants to learn.

Not only is this very nice of them, I believe it is the wave of the future for education. Why take a class from some local loser who has no background in the field and no interest in what he is teaching when you can learn from a leader in the discipline? Why even leave your room to sit in a big lecture hall when you can have a front row seat at your computer?

I started a linear algebra course the other day and it was surprisingly painless. This really is the only way to fly. No need to take notes because you have the whole lecture right in front of you whenever you want it. No falling asleep in class because you can pause your professor and come back whenever you like. The site also includes a forum so you and other students can get your questions answered and work through the trickiest problems.

Perhaps the best part it that there is no risk to exploring new subjects. You don’t have to worry about flubbing your GPA or winding up in a course that you hate. Don’t take to a class? Switch to another one with no add/drop forms to fill out and no missed sessions.

Oh yeah, did I mention it’s free?

Check it out here.

I Like Ike

2007-03-26T18:51:00.000-04:00

I have come across references to this speech many times but I had never read it in full. As we wait with fingers crossed and breath held for the end of the present Administration, I am struck by the merits of this older mode of political discourse. Eisenhower shows morality without dogmatism and clarity of thought without the venom dispensed by our sharpest politicians and pundits. Here is a man who not only watched but carried out the most destructive war the world has ever seen, yet in the horror he never lost sight of the purpose: preserving a space for peace, prosperity, and freedom. How different this true "warrior president" sounds from the chickenhawk whose only answer to conflict between nations is more violence, more war.

Ike in '61:

My fellow Americans:

Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.

Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.

My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.

II.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

III.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

IV.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present

and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

V.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

VI.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

VII.

So -- in this my last good night to you as your President -- I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

You and I -- my fellow citizens -- need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.

If only pork were explosive we’d have been done with all this years ago.

2007-03-23T16:05:00.000-04:00

With Bush delaying the oversight game by refusing to submit his staff to a thorough probing, Democrats are keeping themselves erect and well lubricated with $21 billion dollars of fresh pork.

By hiding these provisions in the emergency war spending bill, Congress hopes to sidestep its own discretionary spending caps and force the President to play along with its theft of your money.

It seems that once they get a taste, the bloodsuckers come back for more every session. The parade of crooks looks about the same as it has for generations: farms, fisheries, the fucking congressmen themselves, idiotic projects run by somebody’s wife’s cousin, and floats of feel-good social experiments.

We may have reformed welfare, but some people are certainly getting well. Did you know the average income of the farmers you subsidize is over $80,000? Do they pass the savings on to you when they get fat checks from the government? Oh no, actually they are subject to a variety of controls that keep food in short supply, extract contributions for ridiculously expensive ad campaigns (Got Milk?), and drive up the prices paid by us consumers. Not only that, but any foods that are produced “too cheaply” abroad are slapped with a quotas or tariffs to protect our precious agribusiness conglomerates.

Enjoy your high fructose corn syrup sucker.

Bush Visits My Neighborhood

2007-03-05T14:06:00.000-05:00

That's right, last night the President the First Lady of the United States were mere blocks from my home. Apparently they were having dinner at Karl Rove's house, totally unaware that I was lurking in the dark just beyond the limos, the 30 unmarked black Suburbans, the uniformed secret service cars, the press vans and the ambulance.

And by lurking I of course mean driving past and rubbernecking as I tried to figure out what the fuck was going on. If I had known at the time that the Maximum Leader were inside, I might have stopped to yell my latest treatise on foreign policy at the windows of the Roves' very ugly home. I hear he likes it when you question his decisions.

This Just In: Castro Not Dead

2007-02-28T15:26:00.000-05:00

Surprising and angering the United States Government once again, Fidel Castro has refused to croak for what is perhaps the 100^th time. Scholars in the audience may note that Castro has a long history of not dying. Since the early days of his revolutionary career, people have been trying to off him, and he has time and again refused.

During his ill fated attempt to topple the government of the Dominican Republic, his boat was shot out of the water and his fellow guerillas were captured and killed. Fidel, evidently unwilling to die even at such a young age, turned around and swam the 12 miles back to the southern coast of Cuba.

Later, he and a group of 160 rebels attacked the well-guarded Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and were met by 400 soldiers. Under the withering machine gun fire, Fidel and his lieutenants made a hasty retreat, leaving most of the men to be tortured and killed in the dungeons of the compound. Castro was captured by the police, tried, and sentenced to death for his role in the attack, but just at that time, Batista, the profoundly unlucky U.S. backed dictator outlawed the death penalty and Castro’s sentence was commuted to imprisonment.

After being freed and exiled from Cuba, Castro made the crossing from Mexico in a leaky and overloaded luxury yacht filled with guns and 81 other revolutionaries. After being decimated by the air force and abandoning most of their supplies, 12 of the 81 including Fidel, Raul, and Che made it to the Sierra Maestra mountains. They spent the next years in the jungle, building up the armed movement and skirmishing in the surrounding countryside, eventually overthrowing the Batista government with the help of urban revolutionaries.

Once in power after the 1959, Castro had to contend with constant challenges from within, some of them from fellow communists and some from counterrevolutionaries hoping to reverse the changes he had instituted. Armed resistance organizations operated in the mountains and cities of Cuba well into the 1970’s, and all of them hoped to end Castro’s long streak of not being killed.

The Kennedy administration was also vexed by Castro’s unwillingness to die, and his CIA trained and deployed a force of some 3000 Cuban exiles to overthrow the regime. Castro himself met them at the beach, and he and some 75,000 regular army and militiamen expressed their desire to live to the arriving invaders. The 2000 or so who survived were apparently quite convinced by the sincerity of Castro’s explanation.

Kennedy’s successors having evidently forgotten this forceful exposition continued their attempts to bury Castro. For decades, he successfully dodged a barrage of assassins’ bullets, bombs, and exploding cigars while going about his business.

In recent years, his principal enemies have been uneven staircases and old age. With Castro’s increasing senility many assumed that he would one day forget not to die.

When he took a header during a public appearance and was immobilized for several months, many in Miami and Washington were hopeful that his injuries would prove fatal. Fidel did not cooperate however.

Just this year when Castro’s health took a turn for the worse, the whole world held its breath with the expectation that he would soon expire. That he has not is a continuing disappointment to the Bush Administration which hopes to be allowed to fuck Cuba up as badly as it has fucked up Iraq.

Tearful prayers and expansive “Transition Plans” may all go to waste if the Bearded One does not hurry his departure to the great sugar plantation in the sky. I for one would hope he holds out until we have somebody competent in the White House, but the possibility of Fidel living forever makes me careful what I wish for. With any luck, two years will be enough.

Warning: Don't Believe Me

2007-02-19T18:31:00.000-05:00

Alright, I’ll admit it. I am biased.

But so are you, and more importantly, so are all the pundits you watch on TV and read in the newspaper.

At the most basic level, we are all biased in our own favor. I don’t go around saying that I should be taxed more heavily or that my civil liberties should be suspended for the sake of the state. People may believe that others should pay more taxes, that others shouldn’t be allowed to say and do certain things, but very few of us are stupid enough to explicitly attack our own economic or political status.

In the same way, media outlets and journalists don’t go around saying that their information collection is deeply flawed or that people shouldn't trust them as their only source of news. In fact, they say just the opposite. They make themselves out to be credible, unbiased, and authoritative.

OK, let’s take those one at a time.

Credible? Well, that depends. Do you like unidentified sources? How about reporters who fake stories or play up sensational but irrelevant details (see astronaut in diapers)?

Unbiased? Raise your hand if you know which 24 hour news channel is the Republican channel. The Democratic outlets are less aggressive in their ideological evangelism, but they are no less stubborn when it comes time to pound certain “truths” into our brains.

Authoritative? The “all the news that’s fit to print” attitude of most news outlets is betrayed by their clearly selective reporting. A cute white girls getting kidnapped is a story for days, but the thousands being gang raped and murdered in African civil wars count themselves lucky to receive a moment of silence on the evening news.

The media is an information filter. If you are a passive consumer of media, it chooses what information you receive and what you do not. This in turn affects what you believe about the world and how you identify your place in it.

As a result of our continued reliance on too few sources of information, our understanding of the intentions and policies of our leaders is hopelessly muddled.

Consider that the vast majority of Americans believe that they are in the “middle class.” That is to say, people with incomes from $30,000 to $300,000 a year identify as part of the same socioeconomic group. That they are incorrect from a sociological standpoint is no matter. Their beliefs and identities have been shaped by a standard social perspective beamed into their homes and classrooms since childhood.

This confusion, what the communists might call a breakdown of class consciousness, allows modern politicians to make appeals to the “middle class” (meaning you) advocating policies that favor the elite (meaning them) in the guise of helping the poor (meaning the people you look down on). Insane drug policy, excessive regulation, wars, poorly targeted foreign aid, and the general ossification of our political system can all be viewed through this lens.

Until all media comes with warning labels like packs of cigarettes ("Warning: Viewing this program may result in smallmindedness, the inability to distinguish truth and lies, and cancer)it’s our job as responsible citizens and consumers of media to challenge their assertions of impartiality and with them the doctored images of the world we’ve been given.

The Economics of Empire: Why nobody really cared when Bremer lost $9,000,000,000.

2007-02-07T15:07:00.000-05:00

If a private company noticed that 363 tons of U.S. currency had gone missing, they would be alarmed right? Not so with the government. It can just print some more.

Everybody remembers the images of U.S. troops passing out greenbacks in Baghdad back in 2003. It turns out these were not just isolated incidents, but part of a concerted effort to buy the “hearts and minds” of the Iraqi people. All across the country, U.S. soldiers and CPA officials were handing out hundreds like party favors, paying people for lost property and relatives, and using cash to compensate contractors submitting bills into the millions of dollars.

What we would consider outrageous waste and criminally negligent accounting back home are just part of running an empire.

You see, in Iraq the greenback is nothing but monopoly money. Their price system and domestic markets are sufficiently insulated from world currency exchanges that the Treasury is actually quite free to run the printing press. The important part for you future emperors to remember is that the increase in money supply is accompanied by a corresponding increase in the number of people who do business in dollars. So long as Iraqi markets operate in dollars and keep it out of the U.S. there is no problem. Money for nothing.

Money printing is horribly inflationary under normal circumstances, but due to Iraq’s economic isolation, the effect is distributed over a longer period of time as cash slowly filters back into the international market.

The so-called “inflation tax,” the gradual erosion in the value of the dollars we all hold, allows the Bush administration to come out in favor of tax cuts while still shoveling cash into the Sunni Triangle. That Congress is cut out of the deal is just gravy for the administration.

The effects will be felt for years, but the extra nickel you pay every time you go to the grocery story will be impossible to trace back to the Commander in Thief.

Brilliant.

Tinfoil Hat Alert

2007-01-30T13:15:00.000-05:00

The FBI, taking a page from our friends at the NSA, has expanded its domestic snooping to include monitoring and recording huge amounts of Internet traffic without specific warrants. The technique, known as "full pipe recording," is an expansion of a program called Carnivore that was discontinued as a result of its constitutionally questionable techniques.

Apparently, rather than abandoning the illegal approach embodied in the old program, the FBI has chosen a new more innocuous name (DCS1000) and expanded its capture of non-criminal Internet traffic. The creation of its new database - and the network analysis and data mining it allows - may enable "lawmen" to go after people who discuss drug use, for instance, after they get done investigating the ostensible target of the original wiretap.

I have also recently learned that the FBI submitted as evidence recordings made from the cellular phones of mobsters while the phones were NOT IN USE. Combined with the GPS and triangulation capabilities of the cell network, this means that law enforcement can precisely determine your location and then listen to any conversations within a 15 foot radius of the cell phone sitting in your pocket. There is no way to tell if somebody is listening and no way to stop it short of removing the batteries. Experts believe that this technique can be employed even when the phone is turned off, and the government may even have access to images in view of the phone's camera lens.

Your own personal telescreen!

The Long History of Allied Torture

2007-01-23T16:39:00.000-05:00

To follow up on the "Letter from Gitmo," I just thought I'd take a moment to point out some resources for people interested in the illustrious history of Allied torture. Leaving aside the alleged war crimes of our troops in the field, there are many examples of systematic and deliberate torture to obtain intelligence or simply to intimidate would be adversaries.

In the aftermath of World War II, the British operated their own concentration camps for German POWs and later for Communists captured on the continent or trying to enter Britain. Torture methods included starvation, beatings, exposure to extreme cold, sleep deprivation, and the use of torture implements captured from old German prisons.

In 1946, the US established a school in Panama dedicated to training military and secret police forces in Latin America. Among its graduates, you will find an infamous list of strong men and dictators who operated death squads, detention centers, and torture chambers across the continent. They were known for "disappearing," torturing, dismembering and murdering labor organizers, university professors and students, opposition members, indigenous leaders, and suspected communists. Methods include the usual beatings, burning, and broken bones, but the school's specialty seems to be the use of powerful electric shocks, especially to the genitals. The School of the Americas continues to operate in Fort Benning Georgia to this day, although the name has been changed.

In 2006, major news outlets reported on the existence of secret CIA torture prisons in Europe and the Middle East, and the practice of exporting detainees to third countries for some softening up before interrogation by Americans is well documented. The CIA and other American intelligence agencies have long practiced "coercive interrogation," but the large scale operations we see today are probably new. New less messy torture methods include "simulated drowning," sensory deprivation, exposure to extreme heat and cold, use of loud music, sleep deprivation, dogs, beatings, verbal attacks and sexual humiliation, a tactic found to be especially effective in the Muslim world.

I could go on about specific cases I've unearthed, but I can't decide if I want to drink whiskey or throw up first. Maybe I'll just drink whiskey till I throw up.

Poverty and Politics

2007-01-23T00:09:00.000-05:00

Persistent poverty is a political problem.

It is the result of decades of irresponsible regulation, spending, and legislation which have imposed unacceptable costs on the majority of developing societies while conferring enormous rents on the people who have access to power.

Everywhere we go in the developing world, we see convoluted legal systems, arbitrary and manifestly unjust allocations of rights, and a middle class that is totally dependent on the state for its high living standards. This dependency and the enormous gap between the haves and the have nots creates pervasive fear of change and a systemic inability to reform, even in the face of hard economic facts.

The result is that most of the world’s poor “opt out” of the decaying formal legal structure, falling back on alternate forms of self-governance that can protect their assets and their lives. The central government’s power to enact policy often extends little beyond the center of the capital city, although as gate keeper to the outside world and the owner of many guns, it can play an incredibly disruptive role in the lives of its citizens.

The governments of the world are increasingly at odds with the independent structures that have sprung up around them. Violent clashes with police aside, proof of this adversarial relationship comes from the fact that the people who occupy these new spaces go by all sorts of dirty names in the press. The proletariat, informals, tax evaders, drug users, punks, anarchists, hustlers, squatters, criminals, illegal immigrants, smugglers, narco-terrorists, and insurgents are all part of the counterstate array.

The complexity, diversity, and extent of these alternative societies should not be underestimated. Even in countries with apparently liberal political systems, these extralegal forces often represent the majority, not some fringe of radicals and nonconformists. They represent the three quarters of the world that remains “unglobalized” in the sense that their political, social, and economic structures are unrecognized and even deliberately excluded by the global elite.

It should be noted that their attempts at nonparticipation in the formal economies of their countries does not necessarily signify resistance to globalization. In fact, they often work to bypass state institutions that are themselves obstacles to integration and commerce. Most of these people just want what everyone in the developed world wants: to work, to learn, and to prosper, to exert some control over their lives, and to provide more for their children than they were afforded.

With that said, the environment of inequality and exclusion can foster radical and violent ideologies that cut across national borders and attack the state system at its weakest points. It is important to remember that while the leaders may have a clear vision of their political objectives, the cannon fodder does not. The rank-and-file of the revolution is not likely to have read Marx.

As Claude Bowers noted in June 1945,

"The danger of communism comes from the misery of the masses, and where governments show no disposition to alleviate the economic condition, or even to hold forth hope of a higher standard of living. I venture to say that not one “communist” in ten knows what communism is. He understands it is something extremely opposite to the system under which he suffers and he joins the communists as a protest striking blindly and stupidly. He is convinced that nothing could be worse than his present state. Here again, as all through history, we encounter the stupidity of the over-privileged in refusing to concede anything to the man bellow."

The “rank and file” extralegals of the world are not the enemies of civilization, they are the enemies of their particular oppressors. It would be a shame if they destroyed the one to get at the other. We have already seen the consequences of ignoring their plight.

The crisis of state legitimacy has reached proportions that many in the developed world can scarcely imagine. We wring our hands about the handful of “failed” states, places where government has utterly collapsed or where war has reshuffled communities so many times that people are in a permanent state of flight. We are right to be concerned with these places, but the much larger problem is that all but a handful of states in the world are failed or failing if we apply any sort of objective standards to their performance.

The essence of democracy is not in written constitutions or ballot boxes, and it is not unique to western culture. It has to do with the idea that the just government must conform to the people, not the other way around.

The rise of economic informality shows how most people have voted with their feet against the regimes that profess to "represent" them.

Letter From Gitmo

2007-01-19T13:31:00.000-05:00

The LA Times prints a letter by a current prisoner in Guantanamo Bay.

After you read this letter, you may also want to find this book, Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon."

I'll let Jumah al-Dossari speak for himself.

Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba — I AM WRITING from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the hope that I can make our voices heard by the world. My hand quivers as I hold the pen. In January 2002, I was picked up in Pakistan, blindfolded, shackled, drugged and loaded onto a plane flown to Cuba. When we got off the plane in Guantanamo, we did not know where we were. They took us to Camp X-Ray and locked us in cages with two buckets — one empty and one filled with water. We were to urinate in one and wash in the other. At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life. They have deprived me of sleep, forced me to listen to extremely loud music and shined intense lights in my face. They have placed me in cold rooms for hours without food, drink or the ability to go to the bathroom or wash for prayers. They have wrapped me in the Israeli flag and told me there is a holy war between the Cross and the Star of David on one hand and the Crescent on the other. They have beaten me unconscious. What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen. I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? For how long will fathers, mothers, wives, siblings and children cry for their imprisoned loved ones? For how long will my daughter have to ask about my return? The answers can only be found with the fair-minded people of America.I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center. If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States. Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.

You don't have to pay income taxes!

2007-01-14T14:57:00.000-05:00

"America: Freedom to Fascism."

If you can ignore the crummy filming and apparent lunacy of the producers, this documentary has some interesting information. The interviews when Rasso is not himself speaking are quite good. Just watch it with an eye for the moments when the gears slip and he launches into his own little dream world. Even if it weren't about a topic close to my heart, his delightfully paranoid conclusions would be worth a view.

Also, to my LA associates, you will notice that much of the documentary is shot at a corner in Venice Beach that has perhaps the highest concentration of crackpots and conspiracy theorists in the in lower 48 states. Way to build credibility.

100 Hour Orgy

2007-01-04T15:38:00.000-05:00

As the Democrats take control of Congress, the Washington scandal clock is reset by the ceremonial placing of hands on books and the mouthing of oaths.

This majority swept in on a reform platform, promising to ram new laws through to correct the excesses of their Republican colleagues. Unfortunately for us, this “hundred hour orgy” is nothing but a publicity stunt and a thinly veiled loyalty test for incoming members. The issues at stake are decidedly trivial, and are unlikely to change the way things are done in Washington.

The leadership wants to know who will play ball, who will bow to the party and vote the way they want - regardless of the details of a given bill - when it is required of them. Am I the only one to notice that Pelosi and the Democrats are taking pages from the notorious playbook of Tom “The Hammer” Delay?

Boxing out the opposition, demanding lock-step party discipline, and passing legislation with no time for consideration or debate? As the oaths of office fade in their minds and Congress settles back into "business as usual," the precedent is set for the kind of one-sided Democratic circle jerk that can only produce a new and deeper round of corruption, graft, and incompetence.

The clock is ticking.

The Silver Parachute

2006-12-28T20:28:00.000-05:00

For many years, executives being laid off from major corporations have been offered so-called golden parachutes, generous severance packages designed to ensure that no management personnel goes away angry or impoverished because the company has fallen on hard times. These multi-million dollar arrangements drew widespread criticism because rank and file workers were often given little more than 2 weeks notice when their contracts were terminated.

Those days are over.

The Ford Motor Company - since its creation a pioneer in labor relations - has once again bucked the trend, this time by offering generous optional buyouts to some 75,000 hourly workers as it downsizes.

Ford has been hit hard by competition in the U.S. market, and in an effort to cut costs and slough off unneeded capacity, it has started closing plants. Many feared that these firings would mean financial ruin for thousands of workers, particularly those who were approaching retirement and were too old to relocate and find new work. Without getting into the structure of the buyout program, the bottom line is that Ford has been able to significantly downsize without leaving families in the gutter. In fact, many workers were positively ecstatic about the opportunity to go back to school or start their own business with the money and support they received from Ford.

Downsizing is a serous challenge for any large organization. People plan their lives around their jobs, and pulling the rug out from under thousands of families can have effects that ripple across the economy. Moreover, the political and commercial consequences of such decisions are such that many organizations continue to operate with large numbers of obsolete or unnecessary workers rather than face the media firestorm.

In my opinion, our beloved government is one such organization. It is the nation’s largest employer with something like 20 million Americans on the payroll at the local state and federal levels. Despite labor saving information technologies and the rise of private firms offering to perform traditional government services for profit, the size of the government has continued to swell.

Even the most “small government” administrations have proved incapable of popping this pimple because firing people is just plain unpopular. We have entered an era when government not only provides public goods but also secure jobs paid with public funds. This “make work” mission, largely a product of the New Deal, has infected our civil service corps with a sense of entitlement instead of a sense of responsibility.

I believe that job security and just compensation are important to attract the best people to government, but when it becomes impossible restructure the public workforce, political reform itself becomes impossible.

This idea of the “silver parachute,” selective, attractive, optional buyouts that leave both workers and taxpayers better off, may be a powerful tool to enact the kinds of public sector reforms that our country so obviously needs.

When it comes to governments, that which does not evolve is dying.

History II

2006-12-15T17:39:00.000-05:00

The document posted below was found in stack of papers from the U.S. Army General Staff, and although it was probably written sometime during 1944, I rather wish it had been circulated in 2003 as the country prepared to invade Iraq. Many of the observations could apply verbatim to our current ill-fated war.

I challenge you, oh my loyal readers, to provide a single historical example of a foreign army conquering another on its home soil only to be greeted as liberators. I don't care how bad the regime was, that's just not how human beings work, particularly when you consider that a sizeable group profited enormously from the corrupt regime. Most of Iraq may be happy the old bastard is gone, but to believe that they would treat us as anything but the occupying force we are is insane.

We were simply unprepared for the demands of a full scale occupation. The initial disorder, looting, reprisals and the subsequent insurgency were utterly foreseeable, and in fact were foreseen by the planners that Rumsfeld and his deputies dutifully ignored.

As I stood in the audience of a rock concert last week and turned to notice Paul Wolfowitz standing beside me in all his portly glory, I was torn between the desire to engage him in a knock down drag out debate on foreign policy or give him a big sloppy Wet Willy for his foolishness. Then I remembered that he probably had security with him.

What was that thing about history repeating itself?

2006-12-13T14:28:00.000-05:00

My weekly trip to the National Archive in College Park, MD turned up this document:

SECRET

The Secretary of War after reading the following memo commented "this is a remarkably good paper" and directed that it be circulated.

Memorandum For:

Subject: Observations on Post Hostilities Policy Toward Japan

1. To be realistic, post hostilities policy toward Japan must be based upon:

a. Recognition of the probable reaction of the American public over a period of time. A policy which does not win the continuing support of the American public is doomed to failure.
b. Recognition of the lessons taught by history with respect to relations between the conqueror and the conquered.

2. The most important points to be noted in connection with a and b above would appear to be the following:

a. The American public will unquestionably become restive under a prolonged occupation of Japan by American forces. It will not wish to assume the burdens of governing Japan over an extended period. Demands for withdrawal are likely to begin within 6 months after the surrender of Japan and thereafter to build up increasing political pressure to that end.
b. Even under the most just and equitable administration, resentment against a conquering nation exercising direct political and military control over a vanquished nation inevitably tends to increase over a period of time. Difficulties arise which present the ruling nation with the alternative of either EXTENDING AND TIGHTENING CONTROL OR WITHDRAWING WITHOUT accomplishing THE DESIRED OBJECTIVES.
c. The conquering nation CANNOT IMPOSE ITS FORM OF GOVERNMENT, IDEALS OR WAY OF LIFE EXCEPT BY PERMANENT MILITARY OCCUPATION AND IMMIGRATION.

3. The formulation of our policies toward post hostilities Japan, therefore, requires the highest degree of statesmanship. We must look forward as well as backward. We must:

a. Avoid to the maximum extent possible policies dictated by current war hysteria which subsequently the American public will repudiate or which will involve commitments which the American public will be unwilling to fulfill.

b. Attempt to accomplish the maximum degree of progress towards the regeneration of Japan in the minimum amount of time. Our degree of success in accomplishing this objective will depend upon the intelligence with which we approach the problem of the relations between victor and vanquished.

...

5.b. Allied Mlitary Gvernment is bound to be bungling, undiplomatic, and inefficient. We must give full recognition to the fact that we do not have sufficient personnel with the proper vision training and ability to carry out the task effectively.

(caps mine)

The Lost Generation

2006-11-28T22:48:00.000-05:00

I fear that my generation, a cohort still struggling to define itself, is paralyzed by the hugeness of the changes we have witnessed. In our short lives, the tidy if dangerous geopolitical landscape of our fathers has simply decomposed. How are we to make sense of the world when all we have known is the deepening confusion of the people in charge? How are we to move with any sort of resolve through the shifting sands of this new era?

We came into a world shadowy with the communist threat, the biggest arms race in history peaking as we put away our first memories. At the tender age of 7, we were introduced to a newly democratic and capitalist world without war. At 8, we watched “smart bombs” turn Iraqi tanks inside out for the first time.

Our parents struggled through recession amid talks of decline. Just a few years later, they were building big houses in the suburbs with the dividends from their stock portfolios.

We were the first children to use the internet, the first students for whom its resources were indispensable. We have watched it evolve from a formless free-for-all of nerds and hackers to the most useful tool since fire.

At 17, the towers came down and the new nightmare began. We were just old enough to form ourselves under the image of Old America, the strong and beneficent champion of freedom. As a result, we felt most keenly what was lost when we were forced to accept the New American Empire and the security apparatus that accompanied it.

As we sat glued to the television news through the attack, the invasions, and the insurgency, we asked ourselves, who are these people and why do they want to destroy us? In the subsequent months and years, we would learn the answer to that question and many more we would never have thought to ask.

Our view of the world as a friendly and open place is shattered, yet with each year it becomes more important for us to be good global citizens. If we retreat within ourselves and the fortified borders of our state, we will never reverse the tide of provincialism and violence.

Though deeply flawed, our country still contains within it the seeds of something great. The revolutionary ideas that we embody as a nation – that we try to embody, pretend to embody – will outlast our corrupt politicians and our drowning bureaucracies if our generation can keep the ideas vibrant.

The intellectual will required to renew the world’s governments is not a simple thing to muster however. Repeating the tired words of the founding fathers as if they were gods is not enough anymore. New scholarship, new writing, and new compromises are necessary to make freedom, peace and prosperity real in this world. We the youth of America have the power to resist the agonizing slide into mediocrity, the power to resist the temptations of apathy, the power to resist those who would make us free people in name only.

Our generation is engaged in a struggle for clarity and understanding in a world of mixed messages and bad data. The battle for the future begins in our minds, and so far we are losing.

Well, the Votes Are In

2006-11-16T16:16:00.000-05:00

Nothing to say I haven't said already, but everyone keep your fingers crossed for an uneventful lame duck session.

The Roll of the Dice

2006-11-07T01:29:00.000-05:00

On the eve of the election, let’s take a moment to consider the possibilities and what they would mean for the country.

Scenario 1: The Republicans get destroyed.

All the truly contested districts go to the Democrats, who will now hold majorities in both houses of Congress.

As they have argued to the public, these incoming representatives and senators view the election as a referendum on President Bush. In order to satisfy their constituents, they will issue a wave of subpoenas to key Administration officials. If the gritty details of the country at war are half as interesting as I expect, the resulting media circus and the opportunity for windbaggery it provides will keep the Democrat-controlled Congress from doing anything but talk. They may enact some punitive and purely symbolic legislation aimed at taxing rich people more heavily or regulating drug prices, but these measures will be unhesitatingly vetoed by the President.

If all this comes to pass, I believe the Republican Party will actually emerge stronger. Americans will get a snoot full of the Democrats and they won’t like it. The leadership will look mean when they yell at the administration officials, and they certainly won’t have any legislative accomplishments to speak of in 2008. The Republican Party will be renewed and motivated by its defeat as the election will serve as a purge for the corrupt and worn out members who have allowed the party to drift away from genuine conservatism. I have placed this possibility first because it holds my great hope: that the libertarians and traditional conservatives will realign against the Neocons and the crazy Christians to articulate a more sensible and measured policy than the “permanent revolution” of today’s leaders.

Scenario 2: The Democrats get destroyed.

All the seats that were in play go to the Republicans, and they maintain control of both houses.

This will come as a surprise for Republican lawmakers who have been dodging a new scandal every 2 weeks since summer. If the Democrats are unable to take at least one house of Congress tomorrow, they are finished. It shows that they will never be able to shake the caricature of them drawn by Newt Gingrich and his new Republicans during the 90’s. If they can’t win now, they can’t win ever.

With that said, the Republican party will not be invigorated by a victory, and will face determined obstructionism from the other side of the aisle. There will be no momentum conferred because the same old guard with the same old ideas will remain in Congress. They may attempt some legislative reforms, they may take a stab at some oversight, but the acts will be half-hearted and unconvincing. There will be nothing to talk about but the presidential race, a prospect that I find quite depressing. However, a contest between two utterly bankrupt parties offers the first real opportunity for a third party candidate in many many years.

Scenario 3: It’s a toss up.

This one is the tricky one. The Democrats capture one or both houses of Congress by a slim margin, have no clear mandate, and are forced to govern in cooperation with the Republicans or not at all.

This outcome signals continuing dissatisfaction with both parties and very little slack for political games.

In this case, there are two possibilities. If the leadership of both parties is stupid, there will be total gridlock, daily wild accusations from one corner or the other, and a 2 year period so totally enraging that the American people will be ready to elect anybody, provided he can make Congress shut up. Dissatisfaction not with the politicians of the moment but with politics in general has historically preceded the emergence of authoritarian leaders, and if another large scale terrorist attack takes place the polity will be in a very dangerous position.

If the leaders of Congress asses the situation with some uncharacteristic sobriety, they will realize that the price of continued partisan bickering will be felt in ’08 by the party deemed most responsible. In this case, they will come to negotiating table and play nice. The Republicans will have no choice but to distance themselves from Bush and agree to sideline their more inflammatory social legislation. In return, the Democrats will leave the tax cuts alone and try to refocus the populism that made them a national party in the first place by “doing something for the middle class.”

Predictions anyone?

My Television Has Betrayed Me

2006-11-02T01:33:00.000-05:00

If I see one more trashy, poorly shot, lying, weasel faced attack ad I will throw my television out a window. I am seriously considering unplugging it for the next week just so I don’t have to hear any more about how Webb is a misogynist or Allen is a racist or Joe Smith is a dirty terrorist-loving spendthrift who will kick your granny off Social Security and give Bush weekly blowjobs.

I DON'T CARE! IF I DIDN’T KNOW ALREADY I CERTAINLY SUSPECTED AS MUCH.

Tell me why I should elect YOU, Candidate X. Tell me, in 100 words or less, how your presence in Washington will do anything but maintain the status quo. Tell me how you will evict the money changers from the temple of democracy. Tell me how you are nice to your pets and enjoy reading erotic fiction. Tell me anything that demonstrates that you are a real human being and not an animatronic doll being operated from off-screen by some Karl Rove wannabe.

But enough of this.

I’m going to let you all in on a secret, oh my loyal readers: I am a conscientious objector in this fight. That’s right, I don’t vote. And do you want to know why?

I have yet to see a candidate for national office that I would trust to fix my car much less run my country. Not in my district anyway.

I refuse to cast the “lesser of two evils” vote because it gives the impression that I support somebody whose character I find flawed and whose platform I abhor. That vote just contributes to the myth that we live in a functioning republic.

Now call me naïve, but I define a functioning republic as an institutional structure that selects the best and most capable people for public office. Our political system fails in this regard not because good people cannot get elected. It fails because the best people realize the senselessness of going into politics.

Who would make a career of banging his head against a wall? Who would willingly undergo the public scrutiny? Who would submit to the financial and psychological punishment entailed in running for office?

People who make this leap fall into three categories: hopeless idealists, remorseless profiteers, and shameless megalomaniacs. The truly successful ones are a bit of each. They cling to the camera, make friends with everyone who has deep pockets, and decry with convincing vocal tremors the injustices perpetrated by the Other Guy.

With each catastrophe that our leaders prove unprepared to confront, they confirm that we live in a demagoguery not a democracy.

Accountability Anyone?

2006-10-23T18:43:00.000-04:00

As the November election approaches, it is tempting to believe that we can simply “throw the bums out” to make everything right in Washington. Unfortunately for America, the root of our political trouble is much deeper than a Republican Congress that has been in power a few terms too long.

Putting these people out of jobs may flush the toilet, so to speak, but it’s not going to stop the next Congress from leaving more steaming floaters for us to deal with next January.

The legislative process itself - the unwritten laws of doing business in Washington - are untouched by a change of party. The powerbrokers may be new, the channels of influence flowing through different K Street offices, but the culture of patronage remains intact.

The fate of a bill still depends not on its implications for American society but on the personalities of its proponents. Good law cannot be produced by such a system because legislators have no incentive to pay attention to the text of the bills they pass. In fact, they couldn’t even if they wanted to.

Congress frequently resorts to the use of omnibus bills that are hundreds of pages long, contain amendments added without debate, and remain unavailable in final form to rank-and-file member and the public until after the voting is done.

It should be no surprise that these votes split along party lines and that the bills themselves are incoherent, vague, and riddled with custom made loopholes and special appropriations.

Regardless of party affiliation, Americans can unite behind initiatives that make the legislative process more transparent and that compel Congressmen to review the laws they pass. Only clear and unambiguous legislative reform can return Congress to its rightful place as a respected deliberative and representative body.

To this end, an organization called Downsize DC has drafted a proposal for a new law called the “Read the Bills Act.” This bill would require that each piece of legislation, with all its amendments, must be read aloud to a quorum of physically assembled Congressmen. This would also apply to all bills up for renewal and to the full text of bills being amended. In addition, the final text of the bills along with the list of members in attendance for their reading would be published on the websites of the House and Senate for public review one week before a scheduled vote.

This delay would allow time for careful consideration of new legislation and for the public to voice its concerns before bills become law. It would also make it more difficult to pass the convoluted and nonsensical bills that currently tie up legions of lawyers and judges in a vain attempt to determine what exactly Congress intended.

The only intention I can make out from today’s Congress is the intention to look busy when election time rolls around. Well, the act isn’t working.

As President Bush tells us, “We are a nation of laws, and we must enforce our laws.” Fair enough, but that old saying would be much more comforting if somebody, somewhere could tell us what those laws are.

On What Authority?

2006-10-16T21:04:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: I have never gambled online, nor do I enjoy gambling in general.

This week, Congress passed and the President signed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006, a bill that has already caused several publicly traded companies to pull out of the U.S. market. This bill was slipped in as an amendment to some unrelated port security legislation without serious debate and without a chance for the people impacted to make a case to their representatives. Before the bill, the industry generated $12 billion dollars a year worldwide, half of that in the U.S. Assuming the courts uphold the ban, that revenue will disappear.

The stocks of internet gambling companies are held by law abiding Americans, and millions have chosen to wager their hard-earned money on the websites.

On what legal basis were these people denied their income and entertainment? What is it about internet gambling as a transaction that makes it uniquely subject to regulation and prohibition? I can think of no meaningful distinction.

The prohibition of gambling, like the prohibition of drugs and alcohol and pornography and prostitution before it, is another example of Congress trying to impose its distinctly prudish, sober, straight-laced morality on the rest of us. Apparently this morality is good for us proles, its stiff confines shaping us in to productive citizens, but it obviously does not apply to Congressmen themselves who feel free to fuck children and fill their pockets.

I ask again, where does the authority to enact such legislation come from? What makes legislators believe they have the right to tinker with our lives?

This is the heart of authoritarianism: legislators claim the right to enact any legislation they choose because they are legislators. This logic is circular; it is not the truth and we must ban it from our brains.

This bill has nothing to do with gambling, everything to do with power. It is about the “law and order” types reasserting control over the internet and control over our lives.

To keep us paying our exorbitant taxes and believing that their control is necessary, the government must root out all eccentricity, it must attack at the source all things exciting, risky, bohemian and addictive. Where will we be if too many people start to think “I don’t believe I want 2.3 children, a house in the suburbs, and an 8-6 job working for some asshole”? The racy, sexy and utterly satisfying acts of life must remain taboo, denied to us (so they say) because they are dangerous.

It is your duty as Americans on this week marking yet another defeat for human freedom to do something boldly reckless and senselessly destructive, just for kicks. Go out to the street and feel the blood in your veins. Such action is the only antidote for the stupefying fog being pumped into you living room. I’ll see you out there.

The Moderate Revolution

2006-10-10T15:44:00.000-04:00

Why is it that being a moderate in this country has become a radical position? People who know me or read this site will also know that my views about government tend to be anti-establishment, anti-bullshit, and anti-war. Is that really so out there?

While my personal feelings tend toward the anarcho-capitalist/libertarian end of the spectrum, I am the first to admit that if the U.S. Government put up a “Sorry We’re Closed” sign tomorrow morning there would be blood in the streets. As much as I think the occasional revolution might be good for keeping the politicos in line, chaos and widespread violence are not among my political goals.

I do not think that massive dislocations, the destruction of old modes of life and production, or the extermination of whole classes of people are necessary or desirable.

I do not favor a sudden inversion of the social hierarchy, merely its evolution toward a more just one.

I oppose the exercise of coercive power over innocent individuals, whatever its source. I respect the freedom of my fellow men to live whatever lifestyle they choose. I refuse to be brainwashed by politicians, academic institutions and the media when they try to spread hate and fear.

Are these radical ideas? Respect for human rights, a suspicion of authority, and desire to exercise control over my own life?

The parties that have shared power for the last century are the true radicals, committed to violent expansionism outside the country and state control of everything within. They are the ones with grandiose plans and visions for reforming humankind in the image of gods or “good citizens.” They are the big government “progressives,” the big business shills, the secret inheritors of Marx and Trotsky and Machiavelli and Rousseau.

Find me a true liberal in today’s government, a person of moderation, learning, and reason, a person dedicated to public service above his own career. They have been driven out by the hyenas.

The American center has been hung out to dry for too long. The 12% at either political extreme is the most important base for each party, but the vast majority of us are neither socialists nor oligarchs. We are interested in a government that is responsive and responsible, that respects us enough to ignore our most ill-conceived demands, that acts with deliberation and caution in times of peace, power and persistence when attacked.

We demand good government, reasoned reform, safe streets, and the opportunity to make a living. These are the demands of the silent majority across the globe, but the radicals are louder, angrier, and sharper in their rhetoric. How long will we let them dominate the debate before we reclaim the radical centrism of our fathers?

This Party is Boring

2006-10-04T01:58:00.000-04:00

Everyone bitches about the partisanship here in Washington, and while the “red team blue team” game gets old fast, the real problem is not so much that people have strongly partisan policy preferences. It’s rather that most have no beliefs at all other than the bone-deep conviction that the other party is evil and wrong. Politicians and voters alike suffer from this syndrome.

Surveys of the American electorate show that, while opinions are nearly impossible to change, most people have stunted political ideologies that extend little beyond party preference. The sad fact is most Americans don’t even know what their own parties stand for. Party preference has almost nothing to do with objective self interest, nothing to do with reasoned assessments of evidence. It has everything to do with how your parents voted and what they told you as a child.

This is not to say that the Average Joe is stupid for not knowing all about political economy or the things his representatives do in office. This information is actually quite boring and difficult to obtain. Far from stupid, Americans are by and large skilled and knowledgeable people who hold highly specialized jobs that other Average Joes would be totally incapable of doing.

Making thoughtful judgments about complex policy issues takes time that people don’t have, energy that they can’t spare. Anybody see where this argument goes yet?

Why don’t we just let the worker bees be worker bees and us natural born leaders will make sure the hive keeps humming along. Most people can’t be expected to know what’s best for them. Just leave it to the experts.

Ok, so every totalitarian movement in the history of the world has made this argument. Politics are dirty. What’s the solution? We’re going to do away with them!

I only go down this intellectual road because the totalitarians, however wacky, really are responding to a fundamental human need. All of us need to be guided and mentored and formed; we are incomplete and incompetent in so many ways.

However the state is just another group of people with all the corresponding flaws – only these people declare their own infallibility and claim the right to shape us as they see fit.

Now we don’t live in a single party totalitarian state (yet) but take a look at the current political parties and try to sort out their philosophies of government, the values that define them. Look inside the cardboard boxes labeled Republican and Democrat and there are lots of odds and ends, but one artifact dominates the jumble.

Both ruling parties (and the bureaucracies and the mainstream media) are absolutely and totally committed to the preservation of the institutional framework of the U.S. Government. It sends them paychecks, it confers power and prestige, it is their forum, their life, their air.

Any group, coalition, person or organization that seriously questions “business as usual” will be crushed from all sides as a traitor or a madman.

While the status quo has always been powerful and there are good arguments for not rocking the boat without a reason, the status quo tendencies of any party are reinforced the longer it stays in power. If the result were mere stasis, I wouldn’t have such a problem.

However, the result of firmly entrenched and evenly opposed parties is much more insidious. It is a sort of decay, both in the quality of policy and in the ability of the population to think critically about it.

I fear our polity is inching toward its demise so slowly that we won’t even be able to identify the moment when it was definitively screwed. We need new parties, fresh blood, clear thinking, and for GOD SAKE some people in office who aren’t career politicians.

Rant off.

"Winning the Long War" and Effective Counterterrorism

2006-09-27T13:36:00.000-04:00

I attended a panel discussion at the Heritage Foundation this morning, and while normally these events are filled with uber-conservative bobble head dolls, this talk was actually pretty good. It had to do with the emerging intellectual effort intended to balance the needs of homeland security with those of the people who must actually live in the homeland.

James Carafano, author of the recent book "Winning the Long War" moderated the session and gave short pitch for his work. His basic thesis is that, in the early years of the Cold War, the academy and government cooperated closely to create the toolbox necessary to defeat the Soviet Union.

The only problem is, we're still fighting that war; we didn't win it. The third world was and continues to be the battleground between western liberalism and a variety of frighteningly radical political movements. We managed to beat back the Soviets, but once we asserted our hegemony we didn't really know what to do with the billions of people who were now looking to us for hope and help. Throughout the Cold War, we kept telling everyone we had the answers. Unfortunately, our answers were the same ones the Soviets had: huge cash transfers to friendly states and a huge troop presence in the unfriendly ones.

Oops.

The panelists this morning came from military and civilian backgrounds, but their primary gripe was the "stovepipe" problem. This is the notion that solutions, plans, ideas and knowledge about the world are contained within distinct and often antagonistic organizations that are unable to cooperate with one another to achieve shared goals. Department of State, Department of Defense, USAID, Department of Agriculture, FBI, CIA, NSA, state and local law enforcement, the university system, the think tank system, these people typically hate each other and address problems in fundamentally different ways. There is no coordinating body capable of bringing their diffuse information together and making it usable. The National Security Council is supposed to do this job, but in recent years it has simply become its own mini agency, taking part just as aggressively as the others in petty turf wars and interagency bickering.

The panelists believe that new legislation and an overhaul of the executive are needed to fix this problem, but in the meantime, they suggested an extension of professional training in "homeland security" at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These programs would combine training in terrorism, counterinsurgency, human rights, intelligence, conflict resolution, and law enforcement in an effort to create a new generation of thinkers and bureaucrats wrestling with the most important issues in the field.

There's just one problem. The panelists did not seem conscious of the fact that the biggest gap in our knowledge about terrorism is HOW TO KEEP PEOPLE FROM BECOMING TERRORISTS. We know how to kill people really really well. We are so much better at it than they are it's not even funny. What we don't know how to do is save ourselves from the necessity of killing them. We don't know how to actually keep them from wanting to kill us. Until we figure that out, there will still be attacks, there will still be suicide bombings, and there will still be lines of disillusioned young people lining up to be killed until we run out of bullets or our trigger fingers get tired.

That is not how anybody wants this conflict to work out, so put your thinking caps on.

It Could Be Worse

2006-09-25T01:38:00.000-04:00

I realize that my posts in the last few weeks have painted a somewhat dark picture of the world. I would like to take a moment to pull my loyal readers back from the brink of suicide.

We’re not all sheep:
A survey conducted in North Carolina during the fall of 2002, the golden age of W’s approval ratings, asked respondents “How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right - just about always, most of the time, only some of the time, or almost never?”

Nearly 2/3 replied “only some of the time” or “almost never.” Approval ratings for the President hover near their all time low, and Americans trust in Congress has been on a downward slide for a generation. In other words, people do notice when their government is corrupt, inept, and – dare I say it – evil. The question is how to channel this dissatisfaction into a meaningful reform movement. Good ideas and good marketing have historically and can still change the world. The revolution is not dead.

We’re in this together:
Somalia, one of the poorest places in the world and a country without an officially recognized government had some 500000 cell phone users in 2004. As borders are broken down by satellite media, the internet, and cellular phones, people all over the world become instantly aware of distant events and act to shape their outcomes. The power of information can help move resources where they are needed both through charity and through commerce. Person to person contact, even mediated by our gadgetry, forces us to recognize that people are people wherever they are.

When a tsunami hits South Asia, video feeds from survivors hit our screens in a matter of hours. In a few hours more the flow of money and relief supplies is already underway.

In ages past, genocides and atrocities went unnoticed by all but the killers and the killed. Today, few despots can afford to ignore the court of international public opinion.

The worse the better:
As much as it pains me to borrow an observation from Lenin, it seems that real political change is only possible at times of crisis. We don’t have to go communist though. In a recent panel at the Cato Institute, Jim Gwartney and Simeon Djankov, both noted economists and advocates of political reform in the developing world were asked to describe the background conditions most favorable to successful reform. Their nearly simultaneous answer: desperation.

Politicians just seem to work better with a mob banging at the door.

While the pep-talk is an art form I have not yet mastered, I think we still have reason to refrain from slitting our wrists. There are millions upon millions of scary brilliant people running around this globe; we just have to get them talking to each other.

Truth, Justice and the American Way

2006-09-19T17:54:00.000-04:00

The United States Government has a fetish for large political communities. Its actions in the world demonstrate a belief that big is beautiful; we cajole our friends and enemies alike to align in ever larger groupings, federations, unions, blocs.

This is perhaps a consequence of our attachment to the highly profitable status quo. Large and established groupings almost necessarily abandon radicalism, they are less costly to negotiate with or deter, and the U.S. still believes that it can maintain economic and military primacy in a world of great powers.

These explanations do not go far enough to explain our obsession however. The real reason has to do with the core functions of the state, functions that are at odds with the political philosophy that shapes American thought on so many issues.

We can talk abstractly about the state as a guarantor of rights, a purveyor of public goods, a benevolent and civilizing force in the world, but these noble goals ignore the reality that the primary tool of the state is violence or the threat thereof. The cognitive dissonance that results from these facts – particularly under an American government founded on the idea of natural rights and which selectively and consistently ignores them – can only be calmed by a “great cause,” a purpose more important than the hopelessly violent rat race of human existence.

Call this mythical purpose God, call it Manifest Destiny, call it Democracy or the American Way, it is psychologically necessary if the nation is to persist. The large state and its great cause reinforce one another, they are complementary and inseparable.

And yet, stripped of its regional coloring and ideological twists, the nationalist lie is essentially the belief that “we” are different from “them.” That is to say, it is right and just and good that certain freedoms are exercised by patriots but denied to non-believers.

A political community is a responsible (justice must be left aside for this discussion) user of coercive power only to the extent that respect for natural human rights is central to decision-making and that its institutions provide for transparency and accountability when abuse invariably takes place.

Large political communities like the United States become dangerous on all three accounts when they begin to believe their own propaganda. The grand lie is used to justify widespread use of force and coercion. The fiction of the homogeneous and unified nation is used to silence dissent. The distance between the people and their agents obscures responsibility.

Individual citizens of the United States are carefully insulated from the violence committed on their behalf. Our television anchor men drone on about the trials and tribulations of war, but the networks are practically forbidden from showing glimpses of its true horror. We see cannons firing into the air, we see bombs explode from a distance, we see tanks rolling through the street. All very impressive, all calculated induce the catatonia of trust and security.

What we do not see however is where the shells land, the scene after the smoke clears, the human faces crushed beneath the tracks of the M-1. We do not see the smoking piles of human meat, we do not smell blood spray in the air, we do not watch the howling families tearing at mangled corpses.

When we hear of “bad guys” being tortured, we are not permitted to watch as the masked and ghoulish men that WE EMPLOY attach car batteries to their screaming victims.

We cannot see, we do not kill, our hands our clean . . . or so our government tells us.

The truth is at your fingertips if you can bear to look.

The Legitimacy Problem

2006-09-06T02:11:00.000-04:00

It is amazing to me that a country called into being by cries of “no taxation without representation” can be so oblivious to the international implications of its actions.

The central contradiction facing western democracies, particularly the United States with its global presence and neo-imperial pretensions, is the fact that the people who vote a particular government into office represent a tiny minority of the people directly impacted by the resulting policy change. Taxes do not need to be paid by personal check to the Internal Revenue Service to be very real.

A commitment to democracy, to true rule by the governed, would seem to make our situation untenable, but the west continues to simultaneously argue in favor of democracy and increase its coercive power over non-citizens.

The ability to sustain such a glaring logical inconsistency is almost impressive. It represents a feat of doublethink on par with the old favorites “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.”

Launching wars against distant peoples not just with democratic approval but in the name of democracy itself is perhaps the height of such absurdity, but countless other examples present themselves if we begin to scrutinize the actions of our state.

Even policies that appear purely domestic, subsidies to farmers for instance, have measurable and dramatic effects on non-represented people across the globe. Quotas and restrictions on the flow of goods, people, and money are even more destructive. The provision of foreign aid through multilateral organizations and bilateral arrangements is overtly and obviously an effort to shape policy outcomes abroad, to govern by remote control, if you will.

These actions are usually justified with the following traditional realist argument: because certain states are able to exercise power in the world and because this exertion seems to be of material benefit the states and their citizens, it would be irresponsible not to act. It would be a serious violation of the public trust. These theorists truly believe that “might makes right.” Take the argument or leave it; their consistency at least is admirable.

The new and more insidious face of this old position is shaped by a belief that western democracies are so manifestly and completely correct in their method of government that whatever policy they choose to pursue is necessarily a just one. I will let my previous postings make the argument that this view is incorrect.

To justify a policy by the mechanism which produced it is to go against the skeptical rationalism of the Enlightenment and to cast aside the notion of a limited sphere of legitimate state action. The very core of our democracy is the idea that certain rights are fundamental and inherent in human beings regardless of their class or location.

The fact that people happen to reside outside the borders of the United States makes them no less human, no less deserving of protection, no less qualified to claim their rights. How then can we justify the exercise of coercive power over them?

Although it may be practically difficult to extend equal rights to the people of the world, we can certainly refrain from actions that have demonstrable negative consequences for them.

We cannot yet afford to forget what the liberal mission was about.

If we accept that our power confers license to act as we please, we do not just profane the name of democracy. We may also discover to our great misfortune that power used is power lost.

Truth and Politics

2006-08-27T01:40:00.000-04:00

A professor of mine, an avowed anarchist and 1960’s activist, once said to me “politics is the battle over the definition of reality.” At the time, this struck me as a profound observation, but years and experience have changed my understanding of the matter.

As a description of the way some idealistic political agents view their careers, I think Professor Ward was quite right. As a description of fact, an epistemological theory if you will, I can think of few things more disturbing than the idea that the political process itself is a truth-producing enterprise. Collective bargaining, dispute resolution, mobilization of resources, these are problems which can be solved through politicking.

To suggest for even a moment that politicians are or should be engaged with defining reality strikes me as not only incorrect but terrifying in its implications. Political acts are by definition divorced from the truth; they are inherently deceitful.

To make themselves palatable to diverse audiences, politicians abuse our language and our psychological weaknesses to make us believe that we share their opinions; on the basis of this “popular consensus,” they claim a mandate to wield power.

Upon closer inspection, the apparent consensus dissolves immediately.

Political agents not only do but must conceal their true beliefs from the pubic at large to attain and maintain power. Even if their parties did not openly demand it of them, the subjective nature of most political questions renders true consensus technically impossible. National consensus is a convenient fiction that has propped up the governments of the world for generations.

Asserting true national unity is akin to claiming in philosophical debate that one has once and for all proved the triumph of free will over determinism. Both assertions are usually accompanied by appeals to some deity or other and arguments that loop back on themselves with dizzying speed.

Truth is the result of conflict only in the sense that it is arrived at when the exhausted combatants see the absurdity of their battle and lay down their arms. Far from troubling, I find voter apathy in the U.S. a heartening sign that most people have noticed just how petty and pointless the political discourse in this country has become.

Now if everybody would just stop paying their taxes as well we might get somewhere. . .

Fun with Crack

2006-08-08T20:25:00.002-04:00

Hey Crackhead

While this rant is set in San Fran rather than DC, it is still hillarious.

Enjoy.

A Kinder, Gentler Fascism

2006-08-07T21:25:00.000-04:00

http://bureaucrash.com/blog/could_it_be_true

The Next World War

2006-08-07T18:54:00.000-04:00

With people like Newt Gingrich announcing the beginning of World War III, the current conflict in the Middle East deserves at least some comment.

Let us for a moment concede that World War III is real. None the less, the interpretation of the conflict that America’s Republicans advance is all backwards and upside down.

What we are seeing is not the “Islamo-Fascists” against the “Free World.” These terms themselves are devoid of content; the vocabulary is purely persuasive rather than descriptive.

Fascists evil. Terror bad. Islamists wrong.

Freedom good. War necessary. America great.

Ya, ya, we all get it already.

The forces arrayed against the United States Government certainly do reject the “U.S. model,” but this rejection has very little to do with rejecting the values that supposedly define us. For some time now, our politicians have paid lip service to the values of market capitalism and representative democracy while increasing the role of the state both at home and abroad in allocating resources and directing economic activity. The state does these things poorly, and as a result, most of the world has stayed poor.

U.S. policy both assumes and attempts to create stable and sovereign states with fixed borders and the capacity to control their territory. These states are viewed as the only legitimate intermediaries between the populations they represent, the only legitimate conduits for goods and services, the eyes, ears, and voices of the people. This view has been bypassed by reality. The world is increasingly integrated and interdependent despite the best efforts of nationalists everywhere to maintain the provincial system that they inherited.

The statist/nationalist bent that infects the U.S. policy community is incompatible with true freedom because it implies that there is a legitimate role for the state in restricting the flow of goods, people, and ideas. The state as we know it is conservative and repressive by definition. Its employs violence and coercion as it sees fit, and maintains itself as sovereign to the exclusion of other goals.

U.S. policy is schizophrenic because it claims to want both strong states and individual rights. The tension between these goals is evident in the history of our policy toward the developing world.

We have toppled stable sovereign states because they were not sufficiently free, yet for decades we refused to approve of freedom-augmenting reforms across the developing world because they might have upset the highly profitable status-quo.

This is a vulnerable and hypocritical position. The problem as I see it is not that the “U.S. model” is under siege. In fact, our foreign and domestic policy demand immediate reform. Rather, the problem is that the opposition so far has come from the wrong direction.

The most serious and dedicated critics of U.S. policy in the modern world believe that the problem with the U.S. model is not that it advocates structures that are inimical to human freedom. Rather, they criticize it on the grounds that it does not permit the sort of centralized command and control they deem necessary to overcome poverty and resist foreign influence. They see the strengthening of the nation state, the augmentation of its ability to coerce its citizens and mediate their interaction with the outside world, as the objective of their resistance to the U.S.

The hyper-nationalists have dominated the world stage in part because their tactics and rhetoric are hyper-dramatic (martial parades, fiery speeches, and shiny new government programs). Unfortunately for the vast majority of humankind, the humanists of the world have been asleep at the wheel, unwilling since the 1960’s to say anything truly radical and unable to frame their objections in terms that capture the imagination of the silent majority. Unless we humanists wake up and make ourselves heard, the nationalists may succeed in carving up the globe once again.

This all too seductive path is one of ignorance, war, and decline. The current international order is dysfunctional and will be reformed or replaced one way or another, but we must decide now if we will push forward with the integration of the world or fall back into the comfortable and deadly provincialism that dominated for some many millennia. This is the next World War, and we are losing it already.

Can You Say Gerrymandering Boys and Girls? There, I Knew That You Could.

2006-08-03T20:09:00.000-04:00

In this era of shrill partisan bickering, the one issue that draws the politicians of this country together, the one task that is confronted with true bipartisan effort, with sustained and focused attention is not securing the nation’s borders, not Medicare reform, not even increasing Congressional salaries.

No, it is Congressional redistricting that brings our legislators to the bargaining table sober and calm, their wind bags safely at home, their discourse respectful and honest.

Why, you might ask, would something so mundane create this reaction when the threats of economic decline and catastrophic war do nothing to halt the ceaseless point-scoring and self aggrandizement?

The answer is quite simple. However much any individual Congressman might wish to dance on the ashes of the other party’s delegation, the imperative he faces is to preserve his own place in the legislature.

The only way to do this – short of changing one’s views to align with the interests of the district that one represents of course – is for Congressmen to exchange opposition strongholds in their own districts for pieces of territory in their neighbor’s districts that consistently vote against their representatives. This is a true win-win situation for the Congressmen involved.

Even more than the complex problem of campaign finance reform, gerrymandering is responsible for the fact that it is almost impossible to oust incumbent legislators or to win on a third-party ticket in this country.

As one unusually candid and responsible congressman friend commented when asked if he though he would win reelection, “Well, unless they find me in bed with a live boy or a dead girl...”

The terrifying fact is, gross incompetence and bold disregard for the most pressing issues facing the nation are no longer enough to merit removal from state’s highest assembly. Our lawmakers lead long and illustrious careers based on character traits that would have a 7-11 clerk pounding the pavement in a week.

The vast majority of our politicians are not legal scholars, not skilled statesmen, not even wise observers of human nature. Most lack even the most basic understanding of economics, and habitually avoid philosophical debates about the proper role of the state they command. The dirty secret of Congress is that, after all the schmoozing, pandering, kissing babies, and being taken to lunch, representatives haven’t the time to even read legislation before voting on it (much less make solemn deliberations about its merits).

They have become professional election winners who are qualified to do little else.

Allow me to propose a very simple constitutional amendment that will never ever be put into law but which would solve our incumbency problem overnight. Rather than allowing congressmen to carve up the country however they like, the law would state that all congressional districts must approximate contiguous squares with the precise boundaries determined only by state boundaries, major roads, bodies of water, and topographical contours.

These districts would be sufficiently diverse to put the traditional political class out of business. This would allow the return of true representatives, citizens who take a few years from their real careers to serve their fellow men.

This was the idea of a house of representatives in the first place, but without proper control and oversight, the temptation was too strong for our Congressmen to resist.

Mysticism and "The Light at the Center"

2006-07-26T15:05:00.000-04:00

As reported by Fox News and others last week, a recent study conducted at Johns Hopkins University found that psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in some types of mushrooms, induces profound mystical experiences in certain takers. I for one am happy that the American academy has made this “discovery” even though people have known it for thousands of years. This recognition by the scientific community - and the federal funding that made it possible - are a huge departure from the beliefs and practices of the last 30 years. The “War on Drugs” made the therapeutic use of these drugs and detailed research about their effects impossible, and that's a damn shame.

Bharati’s book, while at times dry and hyper-academic, is the most lucid analysis of mysticism and altered consciousness I have come across; it represents the pinnacle of such research before it was pushed out of the mainstream. Even as a professor in the hippy era, he took considerable professional risk by tackling such topics. He takes even more risk by freely admitting his experimentation with LSD and his initiation into a Tantric cult. This sort of participant observation is frowned upon in the academy; anthropologists are expected to remain at a safe distance from the people they study, to handle with rubber gloves the traditions of other civilizations.

However, his book is as much a critique of the typical academic’s unwillingness to dive completely into his subject as it is a critique of the modern view of mysticism.

Bharati challenges the idea that the mystical experience is ennobling, that it confers upon us special powers or skills, that it makes us into different people. Bharati calls bullshit on the swamis and mystics who, for selfish or political reasons, try to claim privilege on the basis of their experiences.

He does however assert and explain the existence of a true mystical state, the “zero-experience” as he calls it. This experience consists of temporary ego death, a profound feeling of identification with the fundamental ground of being. In the wake of these episodes, people report them in vocabularies conditioned by their cultures and religious beliefs, but he argues that despite these rhetorical differences, the raw content of the experience is much the same across time and place. Large numbers of people everywhere and for all of recorded history have had the zero experience. Some have sought its recurrence, made careers of discussing it, spent their lives proselytizing. Most have remained silent.

True Conspiracy: You Could Go To Jail For Googling Certain Keywords. It Almost Happened Before

2006-07-25T22:12:00.000-04:00

Another blog points out more ways to be watched by the government. Sweet.

My Favorite Obscure Books - Installment 1

2006-07-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

I will now quote from The Light at the Center by Agehananda Bharati:

"For our purpose, one theme in [R.D] Laing's work is central: that the true schizophrenic, or more widely, the person labeled mentally ill by any clinical terminology, can make a recovery in clinical terms not by the various professional therapies, but by dismantling his whole person and recreating it from scratch. We have a notable parallel to this in the successful LSD experience. A good trip may not be a strong trip; but trips that are good and strong do just this to the perceptive taker - he casts off all he is, his cognitive, affective, orectic "personality;" his persona, his "mask" or masks are shed one by one. If he sustains the process without capitulating to the alternative, horror and pain, he re-assembles the bits and pieces that make up the total person in the normal state to which he returns - but the bits and pieces have been washed, rinsed, and dried as it were. The world looks different, for a blessed little while at least - not because it its different, which it isn't, but because the instruments by which he perceives it have been cleaned and oiled" (196).

"One of the main objections to Leary's and Alpert's experiments with psilocybin was that they refused to program the participants on medically acceptable lines, in a laboratory setting. Now Leary and Alpert insisted - not yet as prophets and cult leaders, but as scholars - that the laboratory setting was totally dysfunctional, and that it led to "bad trips" almost invariably; that a warm, loving, supportive atmosphere is essential in order to obtain the maximum benefit of the psychosomatic substance. But it was quite clear that such terms as "warm," "supportive," and particularly "loving" were outside the laboratory and research rules – and it was obviously Leary’s and Alpert’s initiatory action that catapulted them into disaster, and into the discontinuation of the Psilocybin Project. Leary and Alpert wrote “the goal of the research sessions run by the Harvard IFIF group was not to produce and study frightening disturbances of consciousness, which was the goal of most psychiatric investigation of model psychoses, but to produce ecstatic experience, to expand consciousness, to provide the subject with the most memorable, revelatory, life-changing experience of his life . . . from the beginning of our research, our attention was directed to the engineering of ecstasy, the preparation for, the setting for, the achievement of ecstasy” (210).

Violent Crime: Not Just for Brown People Anymore

2006-07-21T14:16:00.000-04:00

Just last week, Police Chief Charles Ramsey declared a "crime emergency" in my home town, our lovely nation's capitol. Fortunately for me and my irrational desire to be on the streets late at night, this city is no longer the murder capitol of the country, but it is still filled to the brim with crackheads and gangsters. It is right and proper that the city government takes 14 murders in as many days very seriously, but I have some nagging concerns about the reaction.

First, the primary response to the crime wave was to lower the curfew for teenagers to 10 pm. This is completely ridiculous. You can't just confine a large sector of the population to house arrest after dark because of a few murders. Human beings under the age of 18 are still human beings with all the rights pertaining thereto. They get stepped on because they have no electoral power, no public voice to defend themselves. These measures mean that people who want nothing more than to socialize and enjoy the summer nights (the only time when any sane person would be outdoors) will be harassed and fined by DC's finest.

Second, the city government enacting these policies is the same one that just this year violently opposed Congressional discussion of repealing DC's gun ban. Firearms are illegal in this city and yet many of the recent murders were committed with them. What does this tell us? That criminals have access to guns through the same black market connections that buy their stolen wares and provide them with drugs. Us law abiding (more or less) citizens are left unarmed, and the criminals know it. Rather than paying for more man-hours and police cruisers, we could allow the city's citizens to defend themselves. I always carry a blade when I go out, but as a wise man once said, "Never bring an knife to a gunfight." I dread the day some junkie decides he likes the look of my watch or my woman and I am powerless to stop him.

Finally, the only reason that these murders are big news is that some of the more brazen slayings occurred outside the poor and rundown black and Hispanic neighborhoods. They took place in the popular bar districts of Adams Morgan and Georgetown, places that are important for tourism, places that are visible, places that are filled with young, rich, white people. As a young rich white person myself, I suppose I shouldn't be complaining about the protection, but I can't help but feel that if all these killings had been in Anacostia where they usually are, there would be no talk of an emergency, just a busy couple of weeks for the cleanup crews.

This city is so messed up, I don’t even know where to begin fixing it.

Electronic Surveilance and You: A Police State of Our Own

2006-07-14T12:01:00.000-04:00

Major U.S. news outlets recently broke a number of stories about covert electronic spying on U.S. citizens, and I, like many Americans, am concerned that the government will soon discover all of the illegal things I do and put me in jail . . . No but seriously, I am not happy about these programs, and I fear that, while benign for the moment, they will be used to repress home grown political organization and dissent at some time in the future.

It is clear that the NSA has been monitoring calls between Americans and foreigners with Muslim names. It is not clear how much data mining from domestic sources has been taking place. If you have a computer, use email, or carry a cell phone, you are at risk of surveillance. There is nothing you can do to stop it, and no way to know if you are being watched at any given moment.

Due to widely documented security vulnerabilities in cellular encryption and cooperation with phone and internet service providers, it is possible and in fact quite likely that the NSA monitors millions of phone calls and emails a day without warrants or disclosure.

Although these surveillance programs are highly classified, we do know a bit about how the most basic ones work. Computers known as "dictionaries" are first programmed with a list of words, phrases, voice signatures, email addresses, IP addresses, or telephone numbers. Using speech or pattern recognition software, these machines can scan huge streams of data, marking and recording the correspondence that matches the programmed parameters. The flagged conversations are then forwarded to a human operator who must determine if the conversation constitutes actionable intelligence.

It is also possible for people to determine where a cell phone (and therefore its owner) is at any time, regardless of whether a call is being placed.

Imagine a world where government agents are tracking your online activity, your correspondence, your friends (through social networks and calling behavior) and your whereabouts. Imagine the innocent little lens and microphone on your cell recording and transmitting real time audio and video. Imagine that your worst enemies can find you any time they please.

Are you worried yet?

Join me in opposing the extension and legalization of electronic surveillance before they have us by the short hair.

Cuba Part 2: Life in a Police State

2006-07-10T18:54:00.000-04:00

First things first: the U.S. Department of State classifies Cuba as a totalitarian police state and has no formal diplomatic relations with the government of Fidel Castro. However, the U.S. does still operate an “Interest Section” which is housed in the same building as the old embassy (we “gave” it to the Swiss to avoid being thrown out). The building is surrounded by Cuban troops 24 hours a day, and anybody seen loitering around, walking too close, or gazing into the building is promptly shuffled off by armed men. Nobody gets in or out without showing a passport and having his information recorded and forwarded to the Ministry of the Interior.

The Ministry has its own police force, and when our group arrived on the island, we were introduced to our case officer. We were also issued Cuban identification papers which had to be presented for even the most basic transactions (changing currency, using the library, catching a cab). Our little brown booklets marked us as foreigners while Cubans held a variety of colors to indicate party status and rank within the government.

Our case officer explained that he was responsible for knowing more or less what we were doing and where to find us, and he also told us about the rules of our stay. We were to notify him through our program director any time we left Havana, we were to leave the country as soon as classes were over, and we weren’t allowed to have Cubans anywhere near our living spaces or in our building after 10pm. During the day, they could enter our common area, but they had to present ID and be registered. While these rules were ostensibly for our protection, they allowed the government to keep tabs on us and all the people we associated with.

Out and about in the city, there were uniformed police in kiosks at all major intersections and on almost every corner downtown. I can only speculate as to the presence of plain-clothes officers, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Trucks filled with soldiers rolled through the streets frequently, but they represented just a tiny fraction of the island’s defense force. Cuba’s government requires 2 years compulsory military service from all able bodied 18 year olds, and so practically everyone has been trained and prepared to fight in the event of an invasion. Tunnels, fortifications, and weapons caches litter the city, and drills are held periodically so that everyone knows where to report for duty.

Government offices and facilities (the University where I studied for example) have their own command posts, and employees and students on site when the alarms sound are expected to defend these areas.

In the neighborhoods and apartment complexes, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution handle the mobilization.

The CDR has houses on each block across the country, and they are staffed by an elected neighborhood delegate. They organize social and service events in each community, and these events, while "voluntary," are best attended to avoid being singled out for special surveillance or punishment.

In the early days of the revolution, the CDR network was used extensively to enforce ideological conformity and identify potential counterrevolutionaries. I must say that the CDRs I visited seemed quite benign (my local delegate was a friendly and drunken old man), but it is difficult to tell from the outside how active they still are in reporting dissent and policing the population.

With the state presence so ubiquitous it’s hard to imagine anything slipping through the cracks, but the illegal migrants, squatters, unregistered taxi drivers, prostitutes, drug dealers, and black marketeers are living testaments to the fact that it is impossible for a government to be everywhere and control everything. To put it bluntly, human beings are smart enough to know what they can get away with under any system.

In Cuba, the enforcement of the government’s complex and absurd laws is quite sporadic. If you are unlucky enough to be stopped at one of the main check points surrounding Havana, if you are careless enough to draw official attention to your business, if you do not tow the party line in conversations with strangers, bad things may well befall you.

However, so many people are employed by the government that it is impossible for an impending crackdown to be kept secret. When something serious is about to happen, the news is spread quickly by word of mouth, and people take action to avoid detection.

I remember one fine day it was impossible to catch a taxi. That’s because the government had decided to start randomly checking licenses. Most of the illegal drivers had gotten wind of it, and they wisely decided to take the day off. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t get the memo, and so I ended up having to pay some jerk five times the normal rate for a lift home.

It may not be easy, but people survive, people work around the law to live their lives. The vast majority of casual dissidents, law breakers, and petit capitalists are never caught.

This is the reality of every state.

When governments attempt to change the fundamental behavior of their citizens, they are ignored by most, obeyed by some, and supported by those whose natural behavior happens to align with official policy. The state can play its whack-a-mole enforcement game indefinitely, but it cannot change us.

At the very worst of times, we can be cajoled into apparent acquiescence, displays of allegiance, acts of conformity, but the state can never silence the rebellion that takes place inside our minds when our rights our violated.

In the end, I was struck by the similarities more than the differences when I went to Cuba. Family, work, romance, and rest are at the core of life – and oppression and resistance define every society, even our own star spangled paradise.

Fatherland or Death: A Cuba without Castro

2006-07-09T21:22:00.000-04:00

As one of the few American students who managed, despite pain-in-the-ass Treasury Department regulations, to spend a semester studying in Cuba, I put my time to good use asking everybody I met, "What on earth is going to happen when Fidel dies?” During my four months at the University of Havana, I assaulted students, professors, taxi drivers, girls in clubs, and strangers on the street.

The answers I received ranged from “I would rather not stick around to find out,” to the more common “No es fácil” (It ain’t easy) - typically followed by a forlorn headshake and a rambling discourse on the various factions within the National Assembly or some similarly depressing theme.

One professor said to me during a conversation after class: “How can you as a foreigner understand Cuba when we don’t understand it ourselves?” She went on, “Why do hundreds of thousands turn out for marches they don’t care about? Why do we all speak one way about the government in our homes and another way in our offices and on the street? There is no hope for you.”

And yet I keep trying.

Don’t be fooled by people who tell you that they know exactly what will happen when the Máximo Líder ends his career as the world’s longest reigning head of state. One thing is certain however: even Castro cannot suspend biology.

The problem for pundits is that, by design, the Cuban system renders impossible the political forecasting that we practice in the United States. Public opinion polls are illegal and rank-and-file Cubans are prohibited from owning all practical methods of information dissemination.

These and other methods of social control certainly annoy the more politically aware Cubans I encountered, but not everyone is as “counterrevolutionary” as some Americans seem to believe. I heard dozens of Cubans exclaim, “You don’t have to like Fidel, but you can’t help but respect him.” To many, he is still a hero, a liberator, a larger-than-life, imperialist-dog-stomping badass.

He is admired as much as he is feared, and this is why he can hold on to power.

Fidel holds back the various fights that could flare up over differences of ideology or class on the island. When he is gone, there is no telling what factions will emerge. In the end, there will be no choice but some sort of market opening, however controlled and limited it might be. The official economy is badly broken, and the black market has stepped in to fill the significant gap between monthly rations and the necessities of life.

As it stands, the extent of the informal economy in Havana is astounding considering the vigorous official discouragement. Professionals and educated people are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the inverted wage structure that dramatically favors black marketeers, the tourism sector, and farm workers while leaving doctors and engineers to subsist on the scraps.

One important point for Americans to consider when trying to imagine a post-Castro Cuba is the perception on the part of many Cubans that free universal health care and education, the core promises of Castro’s government, are every bit as important as the freedoms of speech and press enjoyed by residents of the United States. Any party that attacks these "rights" will be wildly unpopular in Cuba, at least in the immediate aftermath of Castro’s departure.

This statist bias is reinforced by the powerful nationalism that pervades the island. Cubans are deeply committed to self-determination regardless of their feelings about the current activities of their government. Cubans of all political stripes view the U.S. embargo as nothing short of economic war whose implied goal is re-colonization, not liberation.

Remember, we did attempt to invade the island during the lifetime of many Cubans. Americans should not believe that the U.S. Government will exert the sort of influence seen in post-Soviet Eastern Europe as Cuba undergoes its transition from Castro.

In fact, a high-profile U.S. government presence during the transition in Cuba could endanger reforms because conservative elements would be able to paint progressive Cubans as U.S. stooges, just as they have since 1959. If we forget about this history, the knee-jerk rejection of U.S. backed policies may doom real reform.

Cubans have no desire to go back to the 1950’s when Americans interests ruled Cuba and the streets of Havana were lined with casinos and hookers instead of clinics and bureaucrats.

Finally a use for treason

2006-06-29T01:14:00.000-04:00

Article III Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution limits the definition of treason to those acts that "consist only in levying war against [the United States ] or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid or Comfort." However, in the modern world of well-funded and powerful non-state actors, the face of war has changed. As we have learned at such great cost the last few years, our enemies need not be foreign governments.

They are just as likely to be transnational or domestic agents who seek to pervert this nation's democratic processes for their own ends. In the most basic sense of the word, these agents wage war on our country, though their weapons and tactics are more refined than the enemies of old. Islamist terrorism is the most stunning and public form of this new war, but it is conducted on many fronts and without regard for race or creed.

In light of this new reality, the Abramoff scandal – a matter that to our collective shame has been fading from public attention – bears implications that go far beyond the bribe taking and corruption of a few dozen Congressmen. The scandal is another piece of evidence demonstrating that our political system is penetrable by moneyed and motivated interests that would usurp the formidable powers of our state.

The powers to tax, confiscate, imprison, appropriate and put to death are so dangerous in their misapplication that our forefathers erected an intricate institutional structure intended to tightly constrain the behavior of government officials and safeguard against abuse.

And yet, for all the "checks and balances," all the oversight, all the required disclosures, the ultimate and only safeguard against corruption is a solemn oath taken before God and country. It is the sacred honor of our legislators and leaders which defends our state from its enemies.

When this honor is compromised, when the oath of office is broken for the benefit of some special interest or other, an official has committed the most heinous crime our country recognizes. It is the only offense thought important enough for inclusion in our founding document, and it is punishable by imprisonment and even death.

The acts of these officials damage our society more than cold-blooded murder, a crime for which we execute hundreds each year. These official traitors hide behind their offices while causing and permitting the machinery of the state to grind countless innocents to dust. The violation of the public trust is more perverse than any rape because, far from a momentary act of weakness, it is a continued, conscious, and calculating disregard for the rights of all citizens.

People, where is your outrage? Are your legislators above the laws they create for you?

When these criminal parasites feed on the guts of a democracy that millions have died to protect, will you leave them with slaps on the wrist?

The power that state officials exercise requires them to be spotless in their honor, steadfast in their commitment to good government. They must be held to a higher standard.

This means that they must be tried and convicted for the crimes they commit. When they violate their oaths, when they violate our trust, when they are guilty of treason, they must be publicly and swiftly punished.

Proponents of the death penalty speak of its deterrent effect for violent crime, a claim that is difficult to verify and complicated by the fact that the truly brutal criminal seems to bypass the moral and rational faculties required to respond to such disincentives.

The Congressman or bureaucrat has a much more refined sense of self-preservation and, one would hope, a more rational mind than the violent criminal. For these leaders, the knowledge that corruption is equivalent with treason and that they will be executed if they are caught might actually accomplish the deterrent function that is intended by the death penalty.

Perhaps this measure appears extreme, but the honor system has not been working particularly well of late (in case you hadn't noticed).

This much is certain: we must put our own house in order before we can continue telling other states how to manage their affairs. These politicians of ours leave us with no choice.

Ideas

2005-03-22T03:27:00.000-05:00

Ideologies are ideas for idiots. They are pre-digested, pre-packaged groupings of half-truths which, on the lips of a good politician, can sound just like real thoughts. Ideologies are attractive in their cohesive simplicity. Every problem has a snappy and evasive answer that somebody else has dreamt up, and there is no need to worry about being consistent because everything fits together like an Ikea bookshelf.

Ideologies provide us with ready made weapons for battle. Imagine! You can win arguments if only you repeat the bullet points of your chosen sect louder, more emphatically, and with more elaborate hand gestures than your opponent! But the arguments that are won in this way were not worth having in the first place. Nobody learned anything; there was no cooperative thrust toward a deeper level of understanding which a constructive discussion can facilitate. I know all of this. I have learned it by looking into the glassy eyes and gaping mouths of all the windbags and ideologues that swarm the streets and offices of my home city of Washington.

But I can feel it happening to me none the less. That slow but seemingly inexorable process by which the dreaded ideology welds itself into the structure of my brain like a computer virus. Now, I have done my shopping. I have selected an ideology that seems fairly reasonable and internally consistent, but at this stage in the game, there is no guarantee that I have not been blinded by its power already.

What, then, are my alternatives? I could aspire to perfect my craft, to become the loudest, least hesitant, most abusive, chest-thumping ideologue that anyone has ever seen, but the power of this achievement lasts only so long as I can trick other people into sharing a room with me. Once they leave, the response by the best of them will be to redouble their efforts to undo whatever grasp I might have on authority. No, this path leads to an empty life.

Instead, these potential enemies, these best among contenders for intellectual supremacy, must be persuaded to give me the best of their insights. Without realizing the implications of their actions, each will aid me on my quest to be both correct and convincing. But first, I must recognize my own psychological tendency to operate using an ideology so that I may move beyond it. This first and most uncommon of conquests will be all that I need to sustain myself, for I do not seek to win arguments.

Once an argument has begun, I have already lost. Rather, I must learn to state the truth with such stunning eloquence that none can resist the urge compelling them to rush to my side. I have spent years sharpening the linguistic weapons of battle, but I would lay them down in an instant for the tools of seduction. Without them at my command however, I must be content to attack at such a dark and unprotected corner of my opponents’ thinking that they do not even realize that their defenses have already been eviscerated. Only then can I feed on their true store of knowledge devoid of the poisons of intrigue and concealed agenda. . . they will share with me of their own accord.