In the long run we're all dead

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

War: Are we still that fucking stupid?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

And as it turns out . . .

. . . 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

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

Insane Campaign Clips Volume 1

Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre

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

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.

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.