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:

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!

Physics and Economics

Paul Krugman writes in Math, Models, and Mystification about economists who consider the likes of Brad DeLong and him ignorant of modern macroeconomic theory. Krugman’s theory about these people is that they understand the math of their models, but not the theory that underlies them. This rings true to me. When I used to teach physics, students commonly complained that they understood the concept, just not the math. But when I removed the math, I found they understood neither. Higher-level students tend to understand the math. The concepts are the hard part of physics. This seems at least as true of economics.

Glenn Beck: Making “Wingnut” Normal

Are we Surprised by James O’Keefe?

I don’t even understand this. What is this about? I know that James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart are worse than liars. But what exactly dose this attempt to get sex video of CNN correspondent Abbie Boudreau have to do with furthering the conservative cause? I think it is telling. Maybe this means that there really is nothing behind conservative ideology other than bile and hatred.

Libertarian Fire Control

I got this via DailyKOS:

This is a typically libertarian argument: insurance, insurance, insurance! The obvious problem here, and the reason that the $75 yearly payment should be mandatory is that Cranicks may be perfect libertarian rights-responsibilities examples: they had the right not to pay and the responsibility of keeping their own home from burning. But their next-door neighbors are what? Perfect examples of the other side of libertarianism: lawsuits, lawsuits, lawsuits? Their fields would never have burned if the fire department had responded to the Cranicks’ fire. Now what do they do? Sue the Cranicks, who probably have very little money (liquid and non-liquid)? What do they do if the Cranicks have to file for bankruptcy? They just lose. So much for the libertarian utopia.

My third calendar month of doing this thing.

Polly Wanna a Good Economy?

J. Bradford DeLong has written a really good article Economics for Parrots on Project Syndicate. In it, he attacks the idea that we are seeing more and more: high unemployment is structural. By this, people mean there isn’t unemployment because everyone is afraid and won’t spend and thus there is low demand. No. These people claim that there are plenty of jobs out there: it is just that the current workforce doesn’t have the right skills or aren’t willing to move to the right places (like Nebraska). Dr. DeLong obliterates this argument, showing that a parrot trained to say, “Supply and demand! Supply and demand!” is a better economist than these fools.

You see, the point of all this “structural unemployment” business is a way for these people to say that the government doesn’t need to do anything. It is the only reasonable-sounding argument that people can make against stimulus spending. And I do mean “reasonable-sounding” because the arguments are not reasonable at all. I believe these people don’t want anything done, because any kind effective measures taken by the legislature or the Fed will naturally cause inflation to rise. That is the last thing millionaires and billionaires want. (Well, maybe the second to last thing Meg Whitman wants.)

The End of The Shock Doctrine

I finished The Shock Doctrine today. I was particularly struck by a small part in the conclusion where Klein is quoting an editor of a Spanish newspaper: “‘In every act, in every gesture, in every sentence, Aznar told the people he was right. That he was the owner of the truth, and those who disagreed with him were his enemies.’ In other words, the very same qualities that Americans identified as strong leadership in their president after September 11th, were, in Spain, regarded as ominous signs of a rising facism.” Yep.

Meg Whitman

I more or less believe Whitman about the housekeeper thing. I’ll bet her husband got the initial letter, hoped it was nothing, and gave it to the housekeeper to work out. (The issue about possible future letters is more troubling.) What is bad about this situation is how it shows Whitman and husband to be above such matters. “Oh, you take care of this! I’m too important.” It also shows Whitman to be a hypocrite, but not in the way most people think. Her statements about the housekeeper being “part of the family” are shown to be hollow. She was “part of the family” for nine years and Whitman never learned that she was undocumented? She wasn’t part of the family. She was part of the staff: one of many people Whitman employed to do her dirty work.

Some time ago, I promised that I would write about Janis Bell’s Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences. And I haven’t yet. And I won’t today. The truth is that I had an idea for an article about this book and some disagreements I had with it. Unfortunately, I never wrote them down. So now I’ve read the book a second time to see if anything reminded me. It didn’t. I still have some things to say about it, but I find that I don’t disagree with Ms. Bell very often or (more important) very passionately. But I’m getting to it. I’m getting to it.

I do want to discuss a little grammar, however. It came out of the coverage yesterday of Margaret Witt’s case against the US Air Force and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. In the decision, U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips ruled that Witt should be reinstated as soon as “practicable.” This was not the first time that I have read or heard that word. But I don’t recall ever hearing it outside of a legal context. A friend of mine is having a well drilled on her property, and she doesn’t say, “It will be drilled as soon as practicable.” No one but lawyers and people quoting lawyers use this word! (All right, that’s an overstatement, but if you can’t tell the difference between my considered writing and my rants, then get the hell off my website.)

Being a practical man (Or is it a “practicable man”?), I have never researched the difference between these words because I knew that I didn’t need to use the word “practicable”—unless I became a lawyer or was quoting one. But the day has come for me to end my ignorance—and yours, whether we like it or not. And I do not.

You see, there really isn’t much difference between these words, except that “practicable” doesn’t mean as much as “practical.” “Practical” has a number of definitions: five according to Merriam-Webster and only two (but it should be one) for “practicable.” They both mean, “Capable of being put to use.”

You might think this would be an issue like Enunciating and Annunciate where I think it is high time to ditch the latter word. But alas, it is not so simple. Encarta makes a strong case [Note: no longer available online. -FM] for retaining the two words, and especially their anti-versions: impractical and impracticable:

So there you go. But! If “impracticable” just means “impossible,” why do we need it? In fact, I would say we can get rid of it because its use will not mean “impossible” to 99% of English speakers. Instead, they will just hear “impractical” and think you are a weirdo. So I say we jettison that garbage. For the time, let’s hang on to “practicable” as being the non-judgmental version of “practical.”

It is practicable to maintain the lawn with kitchen shears, but I’m not sure it’s practical.

War Heroes

I constantly hear of “war hero John McCain” but almost never “war hero John Kerry.” But I had never heard anything about what made McCain a hero other than being a POW and passing up early release available to him because of his powerful father. Thus, I looked up his war record. There is a lot of George W. Bush in the young McCain, but he did receive a Bronze Star and the Navy Commendation Medal—an award considerable less prestigious than the Bronze Star. His Bronze Star was for dropping bombs on Viet Nam—not exactly what I think of as heroic, but okay: he got the award and I guess we can call him a hero.

John Kerry, on the other hand, won both the Bronze Star and the Silver Star—for acts of heroism that I could never see myself doing. By any definition, Kerry is as least as big a war hero as John McCain. And yet, during the 2004 election, Republicans were more than willing to shit all over Kerry’s heroism in the name of politics. And to this day, McCain is the “go to” man in the Senate when it comes to the military—not John Kerry. Could it be that we are not forever hearing about “war hero John Kerry” because he happens to be a member of the Democratic Party? That he is generally against war?

Is it any wonder that we are perpetually at war when the only people we look to are warmongers who mostly have never seen war. And I include people like McCain who only saw the war from a horrible POW camp and a mile above land?

The Daily Show

Just when I hit Jon Stewart, he puts out a good show. Of course, it was easy for him: he got to make fun of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Republican’s silly Pledge to America. But it was good—at least until the third act when he had a really boring interview with King Abdullah II of Jordan.

Of course, there is that other problem: Colbert was still a hell of a lot better. “Lingo is a term for an Australian lesbian.” Need I say more?

More Self-Torture

I read Parts 3 and 4 of The Shock Doctrine this morning. It is heartbreaking. It is hard not to be self-loathing. Eastern Europe wanted to reform itself, and what did the West offer: economic shock and awe; the looting of their economies; the impoverishing of their people. We suck.

Pithy Hypocracy You Already Know

A woman in Montana was charged by a black bear while she was in her back yard. Thinking quickly, she picked up the closest weapon to defend herself: a large zucchini, with which she fended off the bear. All I can say is that had she grabbed a zucchini, this story would not have ended so well. I hope that I don’t have to explain why!

Show Sucking Daily

For about six months now, The Daily Show has been really pissing me off. John Stewart and company really go out of their way to be “even handed.” This might be okay if both sides of the political debate were equally ridiculous. But as we know, this is not the case. In fact, Glenn Beck has already tried to turn the “Rally to Restore Sanity” into some kind of conspiracy to whip up young people into a frenzy right before the election. Who on the left is anywhere near this paranoid and just plain nutty? And yet, on last night’s episode, Stewart bent over backwards to make an equivalence between the Democrats and the Republicans on the issue of the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Almost no mention was made to Republican hypocrisy on this issue, and absolutely no mention was made to John McCain’s towering hypocrisy. Stewart rarely makes me laugh any more, and we he does, it is because of his silliness. The Colbert Report has been consistently better for the last six months. So has The Rachel Maddow Show! Stewart’s satire just isn’t working—I think because satire can’t be “even handed.” Anyway, we already have enough of that: it’s called the mainstream media.

Regarding the “Rally to Restore Sanity”: it is almost certain that it will draw far more people than Glenn Beck’s rally. The Daily Show has as many viewers as Beck at a time when far fewer people are watching TV. Those viewers are far younger, and thus more likely to go out to a rally—or free live comedy show, depending upon how you want to look at it. And the rally is taking place in a liberal area. It will be interesting to see how many people show up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets well over double Beck’s paltry 87,000.

This is Rich

On the day that important health care reform goes into effect, the Republicans are presenting “A Pledge to America.” In reporting about it, the New York Times waits until the fourth paragraph to get at the heart of it: “The blueprint was also clearly intended to provide fresh ideas to answer allegations by Mr. Obama and Democrats that Republicans simply want to return to the policies of the Bush administration. Still, many of the proposals represent classic Republican ideals of small government and low taxes pursued for generations by George W. Bush and other party leaders.”

The document (pdf) is rich in that it contains the same welfare for the rich policies that we always get from Republicans. But what is even more rich is the whole tone of the piece, especially the introduction. Take for example, this gem where they talk about the need to address, “Rising joblessness, crushing debt and a polarizing political environment”! Rising joblessness? Who forced the stimulus to be cut and to be distributed in the least stimulative way? The Republicans! Crushing debt? Who wants to extend tax cuts for the rich that will increase the budget deficit by $700 billion over the next ten years? The Republicans! Who has created a polarized political environment? Oh please! Was it Obama because he had the audacity to be black?! The Republicans have been in lockstep in opposing anything the Democrats want, even when it was originally a Republican idea—like McCain’s health care reform, which is what we got stuck with, even though he voted against it. The Republicans: they’re rich in more ways than one.

But let John Boehner get to the heart of the matter:

Self-Torture

For whatever reason, I decided to torture myself yesterday—but it didn’t start until this morning. I picked up a copy of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, from the library. I’ve already read the book; Andrea sent it to me as a “gift” about two years ago, after she found she could not make it past the first chapter. It is perhaps the most important book I’ve read in the last ten years, but it is also an extremely unpleasant one. Well, those two aspects of the book are tightly linked. I could not bring myself to read the first chapter about Ewen Cameron again, so I started on the second chapter and read all of the second part about Milton Friedman’s and Augusto Pinochet’s two pronged torture of the Chilean people. It is so sad and it makes me so ashamed to be an American. None of this is what we are supposed to be. None of this is what I was taught in civics classes. But more and more, this is what the conservatives in this country explicitly claim. This is not to say that the liberals are not also very much to blame (although less so), but they don’t hold up such despicable behavior as ideals of our nation.

Ayn Rand

I heard about this from Paul Krugman, but it is originally from King Fu Monkey: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

On the same page is a statement that makes it clear that Kung Fu Monkey is a kindred spirit, “The news that there is now a retractable version of the Uniball Vision pen matters to no one … except those few of us to whom it matters more than our mother’s love.” Of course, I would never use such a pen, but it is not the taste that matters so much as the fact that taste matters.