The Power of Nightmares
I just got the first episode of this series (just like NetFlix to have it on three different one-hour disks when it is sold with all three episodes on a single disk at Amazon) by Adam Curtis about the use of fear to enslave people. It, along with other fun reads like The Shock Doctrine and C Street make me think that Niccolo Machiavelli had it right in The Prince back in 1513: power is all that matters. Watch a group of pigeons fighting over a slice of bread if you want to know everything important about political and economic power (the same thing, really) in the human world.
Justice Stevens Regrets Capital Punishment Ruling
In an interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg, Justice John Paul Stevens admitted to regretting one of his decisions:
TOTENBERG: In 1976, when Stevens was first on the court, he voted to uphold the death penalty. At the time, he says, the court believed it was upholding statutes that allowed the death penalty for a narrow category of offenders, using procedures that, as Stevens puts it, prevented loading the dice towards the prosecution.
But as the court’s composition grew more conservative, he says, the universe of those eligible for the death penalty grew, and the court permitted more prosecution-friendly procedures in capital cases.
Mr. STEVENS: We did not foresee how it would be interpreted. I think that was an incorrect decision.
It is worth listening to the whole story, which is only about eight minutes long.
The Worst Twenty Years—ever!
From an article by Peter Coy in Bloomberg Businessweek, “Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University belongs to the committee of distinguished economists who officially declared on Sept. 20 that the U.S. recession ended way back in June 2009. Don’t mistake that pronouncement for optimism. According to Gordon’s research into the long-term determinants of growth, America’s next two decades are going to be disappointing. He predicts that between 2007 and 2027, gross domestic product per capita will grow at the slowest pace of any 20-year period in U.S. history going back to George Washington’s Presidency.”
Welcome to fourth-world America…
Gooo team!
Stupid Jew Boy
I was looking for something to listen to while I cooked dinner and I came upon Sam Seder on The Young Turks Network, because he was going to have Chris Hayes on, and I really like him. It was on YouTube, so I looked at some of the comments. Two, right in a row where: (1) “lol stupid jew boy” and (2) “air america fell because of jews like YOU!!” I still can’t get my head around this. Or Rick Sanchez? I’m all for blasting Israel, but Jews? I know they have retractable horns, but come on!
