Anti-neighborly Americans

Version 0.2

This is actually a combined reaction to some news and reading. The news was the recent spate of shootings in America. All of them involved the police at some point, but I was most impressed by the ones that started out with shooting at police. In particular, I was struck by the case of the armed lunatic who apparently walked into police station and managed to shoot four policemen (actually starting with a policewoman) before going out in a blaze of non-glory.

The reading was another passage from Little House on the Prairie. Though I've read a lot of related books, I've never actually read this one (at least since I started keeping records in 1971). It actually comes up in my Japanese study, so I'm only getting it second hand through the translation. However, the thing that struck me about it was not so much the independent streak as the dislike of neighbors and the selfishness. Probably some contribution from The Selfish Gene, too, but I plan to write more about that in my book review blog...

What it made me realize is that many people came to America for bad reasons. Yes, many of them had positive reasons like ambitions and dreams and a love of freedom as they imagined it existed in America, but many of them had bad reasons like disliking their neighbors and relatives or selfishness and greed. As it applied during the period of rapid growth in America, it meant that there were many small and rapidly growing families spreading across the country--families of people who basically didn't like the neighbors wherever they came from.

It drove a lot of expansion across America, killed a lot of Native Americans, and produced a lot of new Americans, but now there's no place for them to go. Too bad they still hate their neighbors, eh?

So they go nuts and shoot people or various other craziness. Now I'm reminded of the guy who flew his plane into the IRS building in Austin about a year ago...

Money is infrastructure

Version 0.2

Money is infrastructure. Early forms of money were basically accidental, in the same way early roads were basically accidental. The first roads were just the worn paths where many people had gone before. The original forms of money were just things that seemed valuable to people for various reasons. Later the standard units of money were defined by governments as coins. Greater convenience, but they already had to introduce laws against shaving coins, debasing them, or counterfeiting them.

Modern money is advanced infrastructure, basically made up out of whole cloth. The value of a pretty little scrap of paper is essentially zero, but our governments legally define a much higher value and actively work to protect it. Just one of many infrastructure-related services the government provides as part of our advanced civilization.

Wanting to have lots of money without paying taxes is like wanting to have all the benefits of civilization without paying for them. The proximate cause for noticing this is actually WikiLeaks, which apparently just received a list of prominent tax evaders who are hiding their money in Swiss banks.

The reality is that we need infrastructure. Try to imagine the situation if every road was a privately owned toll road that forced you to pay your share every time you used it. Each time you entered the stretch controlled by someone else, you'd have to stop and pay the toll. Without government to organize freeways, every trip would be incredibly inefficient and troublesome. Actually, that's kind of what they have now in Afghanistan, but that proves my point about civilization.

Another example is that everyone benefits from education--but it's quite difficult to see the direct linkages. Lots of selfish and short-sighted really people hate the idea of helping to pay for other people's education. It's not just that the benefits are years down the road. In many cases they are ignorant fools who don't even appreciate what little education they received.

This is under the America's fall because the anti-government anti-paper-money rants seem to be pretty clearly concentrated in America. They are part of the problem, NOT part of the solution.

These days America seems to be an almost boiling pot just under the insanity point. Last week in Arizona, the pot boiled over again, and we had yet another mass shooting.

Advanced forms of slavery

Version 0.4

The key here was actually combines the WikiLeaks release of the 250,000 US government documents with the results of last month's election. The insight took the form of:

"The truth shall make you free? But what if the truth is that you are a stupid slave?"

In theory, the main value of the so-called Fourth Estate is the exposure of government corruption so that democracy can function.

What has actually happened is that news has devolved to the best propaganda that money can buy. Since the rich people have more money, they can afford to hire the best propagandists, and the result is that they can distort the reality to the point where their mindless greed is probably going to to lead not only to the destruction of the economic system that made them rich, but quite possibly to the destruction of the human race.

For most of history, most of the people have been slaves, though most of the written history has focused on the adventures and exploits of the few non-slaves. I'm not just talking about the officially recognized slaves who had the title. Almost all people lived their lives with little or no freedom. The largest obvious category is women, who were basically treated as property, and though many women have more freedom now, there are still large numbers for whom nothing has really changed. However, there are so many other categories of quasi-slaves and semi-slaves that I argue that most people have lived most of their lives as slaves. Another large categories is the serfs and peasants and various other impoverished farmers who were more or less firmly bound to the land of their peasant ancestors. In spite of the free exploits of the generals and admirals, most of the actual soldiers and sailors lived in disciplined conditions of de facto slavery. Even most of the hunter gatherers lived effectively without any choices but to repeat the lives of their parents. that's already covered most of the people who've ever lived.

Nowadays we've largely moved to economic forms of slavery. We even recognize them as wage slaves. The new chains are not made of steel, but of legal barriers to bankruptcy for the average people and improved law enforcement systems, even to the international scale. I'm not sure the slaves of old lived in greater fear of their masters than the indebted middle class now lives in fear of losing their jobs... In relative terms, being sold to a different master probably feels like the same thing as before. In contrast, if you start by living in a good house, and then you are forced to start living under a bridge, or are driven to criminal acts while trying to feed your children and winding up in prison... Well, those are big steps down, and plenty to be afraid of.

There's yet another form of modern slavery that may be the key to the destruction of humanity. That's in the form of national restrictions against migration combined with increased knowledge of the national differences. In brief, nowadays almost everyone in the world knows about advanced and wealthy life styles, with America having the wealthiest and at least one of the more advanced forms. However, for essentially all of the people living in poor countries, they are as unfree as the slaves of old when it comes to changing their lots in life. Most of the adults probably accept that they could never become wealthy doctors or lawyers--but they still believe their children would have much better chances at such lives if only they could live in rich countries. They also know that the lives of relative poverty in those rich countries would be no worse than their current lives, but with that enormous difference for their children...

Why the key to our destruction? Because the existing rich people and the increasing numbers of newly rich people can only sustain their wealthy status by squeezing more blood from the poor turnips. In other words, the rich don't only get rich and the poor poorer, but the rich people must translate more and more of their wealth into the wasteful military tools of oppression to keep the increasingly desperate poor people in their places. The asymmetric so-called war on terror is NOT going to go away, but only become more and more vicious and desperate. The natural and probably inevitable outcome will be a true doomsday weapon (probably a super bioweapon) in the hands of people who are willing to use it...

The punchline? It's that "Live free or die" is an American slogan. The Americans are both leading the modern forms of slavery and proud of claiming that they would rather be dead than enslaved.

WikiLeaks Realities?

Version 0.3

Though I have been following the general topic for a while now, I haven't seen anything like the following obvious analysis.

First, the minor conclusion is that the terrorist win again. Okay, so this line of analysis probably isn't "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer", but follow along. What we know suggests that most or perhaps all of this large document dump originated with a single private in the American military. How is that possible? How could one amateur spy acting alone possibly gather so much sensitive material?

It actually goes back to 9/11. Though the so-called investigations were highly fractured and mostly focused on protecting the incompetent, one of the main conclusions was that our intelligence services failed to connect the dots. In response, we created a system that enabled a lowly private to harvest 250,000 jumbo dots. We already know that a partial response has been to isolate some of the major databases--but that is flopping back towards the situation that allowed the 9/11 attack to succeed. America's so-called homeland security apparatus continues to respond with wild spasms targeted against the LAST perceived threat--and the terrorists win. (At least the last counter-terror spasm required them to buy a couple of cheap printers, but we are handling this one all by ourselves.)

Second is actually more serious. Remember that this rather massive information leak was the action of one low-ranked minor clerk. It's hard to even regard him as a spy. Now if this amateur could harvest so much information working on his own, imagine what must have been going on with the professional spies with the backing of their respective national governments. The two differences are that they probably harvested much more information and that they didn't send any copies to WikiLeaks. I have no evidence--but I bet the damage is vastly more serious, and it would certainly explain a lot of what has been going on recently, including some of the Chinese government maneuvers that had seemed somewhat mysterious.

Third, we get to the minor topic, but the main aspect if you look at the actual mainstream news. That's the aggressive, vindictive, and personal attacks on WikiLeaks, especially on the person of Julian Assange, who I predict is about to become a non-person. Actually, there is a significant aspect here, though you wouldn't notice it from the mainstream media news coverage. That's the determination to attack journalism and freedom of speech. Little late there, since they're both already essentially dead spirits, especially in America.

One more compound prediction. When they finally get around to analyzing it, almost all of the information that WikiLeaks has exposed will be judged harmless and mindlessly overclassified, with a small fraction that had legitimate grounds for secrecy and a much tinier fraction that was legitimately dangerous if revealed. My guess would be something like 99% to 1% to 0.1% based on the discussions so far. They've been desperately fishing for that tiny fraction of really dangerous stuff. I would be utterly astounded if the first category was less than 90%.

Maybe there's a solution down the road. Maybe the entire notion of secrecy is collapsing. There is some technical evidence that it's becoming more and more difficult to control information. However, an alternative outcome will be privacy as the ultimate privilege of the rich and powerful. The rest of us peasants may spend our entire lives under the microscope...

Campaign Finance Reform in the Lame Duck Session

Version 0.3

The minor lesson of the recent election was that visible money gets discounted, and heavily. Even with $140 million of her own money, the voters knew exactly why Meg Whitman was saying all those bad things about her various opponents, and she got discounted down to zero and lost badly.

However the main lesson of the election of 2010 was that invisible and anonymous money works rather well, as clearly shown by the large bulk of the election results. Not all of the voters select political leaders the same way they select laundry soap, based on the last ads they were exposed to on TV, but enough of them do that democracy is pretty much nonfunctional in America. (Remember that the largest voting bloc is the non-voters, who quite rationally understand that their votes have been gerrymandered away in advance.)

In the big picture, it's worth thinking about why McDonald's doesn't run attack ads against the other fast food restaurants such as Burger King and Wendy's, and vice versa. Obviously because they would be hurting their own business, shrinking the pie, so to speak, which is exactly what has happened to the value of the professional politicians as perceived by the citizens. About the only thing that all Americans agree on at this point is that we need far more high-quality political leaders to replace the current crop (but who quite often cling to power right up to their dying days).

The most obvious solution is campaign finance reform, and it's even conceivable. All it would take is for a few of the outgoing Republican senators to decide that they wanted to go out as statesmen who tried to save democracy in America. It's clearly in the interests of the less wealthy Democratic politicians to go along with the idea, and it's clearly what most of the people want. Unfortunately, there is absolutely no public discussion of the topic or any evidence that Congress is considering it. In the month since the election, I've only seen two public mentions of the topic. One was a letter to the editor from a defeated Democratic candidate suggesting he had been defeated because he had almost no money, which was probably true, and the other was a report that the supporters of the so-called Tea Party were determined to block any consideration of campaign finance reform, though they haven't had to lift a finger or spend a nickel on it.

Anyway, the hope would be pretty slim. The Supreme Court created new law to undo the McCain-Feingold law, and the same five so-called justices are still there and just as eager as ever to destroy democracy in America. The flood of secret money will eventually be exposed, but it's already too late to worry about it, though the full force of the damage won't be in place until next month... (I'm reminded of a law student with whom I corresponded at the time of Bush v. Gore. He said America was becoming a judicial dictatorship--and that was exactly why he was in law school.)

As it stands, the last chance for campaign finance reform is rapidly slipping away, though I wasted the last month doing what little I could to try to stimulate a public discussion of the topic. I'm convinced that if they don't pass it NOW, in this lame duck session, it will never happen. America has already suffered from one experiment with a so-called permanent Republican majority, but I don't think the country can hope to be lucky enough to get another Teddy Roosevelt.

Perhaps some of the problem is the demeaning label of "lame duck session" for the last session of the outgoing Congress? Maybe it would help if we called it the "retiring statesmen session"? Ha ha.

For my next joke, did you hear the one about the gerrymandered term limits?

(The effective discounting of votes by such practices as gerrymandering and the general abuses of professional lifetime politicians are also very important, but those problems are much more difficult and even I am unable to imagine them being tackled in a lame duck session. Congress has NEVER had that many statesmen at one time, even without regard to the consideration of extra ethical freedom for imminent retirees.)

P.S. This is really just a kind of outline post, but my new blogging policy is not to spend much time on a theme unless there are some comments suggesting someone is at least slightly interested in the topic. I will probably limit my responses to comments in responses, but if there is enough interest, I may do a full-scale consolidate rewrite, presumably as a new post.

Terraforming Venus?

One of the most prominent symptoms of America's malaise is the paucity of the nation's dreams and ambitions these years, at least as regards realistic or constructive ideas. There are plenty of highly vocal and even violent extremists arguing for such goals as destroying the intrusive federal government or selling the whole thing to the highest bidder.

Much earlier in my own lifetime America as a national government still had some quite noble dreams, including some that seemed wildly impractical. For a sad example, we had the War on Poverty that ultimately fell before the Biblical perspective of John 12:8: "You will always have the poor among you..." As a happy and successful example, we had the Apollo Program to reach the moon.

Along the lines of that success, I started thinking about a very large project near the limits of our capabilities--and arrived at terraforming Venus as something we could be be seriously thinking about, whether or not America is capable of taking the lead. It turns out that Wikipedia does have an article about terraforming Venus, but I guess that just shows that some people do agree with me about the essential feasibility of the idea. Not sure what will be in that article if you follow the link now versus when I read it, but I can offer a few obvious critiques and minor extensions:

1. We'd need to start with a very intense robotic exploration of the current state of the planet to make sure there is no life there now, or even an imminent (as in the next billion years or so) potential for life. Obviously, that could not be life as we know it, but we obviously don't know much about the limits of the universe, so a proper study would itself be a major and long-term investment.
2. I'd favor relatively small controllable mirrors in orbit around the planet. This would require a whole lot of computing power (mostly for the weather modeling), but relatively little physical power. Each mirror would essentially be a wire loop with a thin reflective film stretched across it, and a remotely controlled gyroscope at the center to reorient the mirror continuously as needed. In the case of Venus, most of the mirrors would be used to shade the planet most of the time, since there's a large surplus of solar energy at that distance from the Sun, but that energy could be directed to local power generating stations on the planet.
   
3. The design goal of the power stations would be to minimize the heat and maximize the conveniently usable electricity.
   
4. The power stations would then be used to power robotic factories. Their three most important tasks would be to produce more robotic factories, to generate hydrogen to boost more mirrors into orbit, and to produce really large chemical plants to change the atmosphere. Of course the real key is the self-replicating factory, since that geometric progression would be able to grow extremely rapidly once we get past the bootstrap phase.
5. The idea of changing the Venusian day (in the Wikipedia article) seems to me to be a total boondoggle. If we have sufficiently sophisticated control over the orbital mirrors, we can simply use them to make day and night whenever we want them at any location on the planet. This would depend on very advanced weather modeling--but that's a technology we also need to develop for use right here on Earth.

Anyway, the main point of this little commentary is that I've seen no evidence that America as a national entity is still capable of dreaming so big. Even the external websites referenced in the Wikipedia article are mostly outside the States (again, as of the date of this writing).

Democracy was a nice idea

It seems I need to preface these comments by saying something about why I think democracy has mostly worked pretty well. It keeps coming back to my basic projection of my love of freedom. I like to make my own choices and control my own destiny, and democracy is the system that makes that possible for more people. Amusingly enough, I don't think it's the highest percentage of people, but the largest absolute numbers of people. As you go backwards in time, when you arrive at a primitive hunter-gatherer society, then you can argue that everyone has absolute freedom--but none of the other comforts of civilization. However in terms of the old utilitarian approach, civilization creates a lot of happiness for a lot of people. I think the costs (such as governments and taxes) are worth the benefits (such as larger populations with more interesting and longer lives), but you can argue that is just my personal bias. As it applies to democracy, if it's actually working, then everyone should feel like they have a stake in the pie, even if their own preferred leaders didn't win the latest election.

However, that isn't how it's working out in America these days. I would say that democracy is being destroyed from two directions, and we had sterling examples of both attacks in this last week, one in the special senatorial election in Massachusetts and one at the SCOTUS in Washington, D.C.

The first attack is the transient rise of populist stupidity. You don't have to fool all of the people all of the time to persuade them to vote against their own best interests and against the best interests of their nation. That's the bow to Lincoln's 'all of the people' (though there's some doubt he actually said it). You don't even need to fool 51% just on Election Day, per 'most of the people'. It's even worse than that. There are large blocs of voters who are known to vote in certain ways, so all you need is to fool enough people to reach 50% + 1 voter on Election Day, which is a rather small chunk of 'some of the people'. Maybe the real cause of the stunning neo-GOP victory wasn't stupidity and very short memories. In that case it would appear to be pure vicious selfishness. Take your pick, but it's pretty hard to see as a victory for the wisdom of crowds. What this election apparently proves is that the voters have already forgotten how the neo-GOP ran the country into ditch, and now the neo-GOP can prevent anyone from fixing the mess they created. (As a political party, the existing neo-GOP is most like Lenin's Bolshevik's and nothing like the GOP of Teddy Roosevelt or the progressive Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln--but now the neo-GOP party is joining the Teabaggers, who most closely resemble the Russian anarchists who gave the czars so much trouble. Pretty hard to find anyone who would claim that either of those groups made any constructive contributions to Russian history...)

The other prong of the attack is the amazing SCOTUS ruling that allows corporations to donate as much as they want to any political campaign. Perhaps it's kind of inconsistent, since I actually regard money as a pretty pure motivation--but that's only true when all the parties to the transactions know everything that's going on. Absolutely safe to say that this is not the situation as regards politics, even in the relatively open American system. Of course Exxon is going to say they donated $50 million out of love, and it was purely coincidental that 6 months later the politician in question decided to kneecap and eliminate all of those pesky alternative energy projects. If hypocrisy was a fatal condition, Obama would get to nominate five new Justices, because those five would have exploded their own heads. Or maybe they don't know that the strong from of the claim of corporate personhood was actually a mistake, basically an opinion inserted into the official record as the SCOTUS deliberately evaded the issue.

Anyway, I did feel that democracy contributed a lot to the success of the United States over the years, though I don't feel it was the only factor. I'm actually inclined to think the main factor was the infusion of pure wealth from the real estate that was simply taken without any value-related payment as the native Americans were exterminated. Probably be a few centuries before historians and economists reach any kind of consensus on these topics, and as of this writing, I'm absolutely convinced that the United States won't last that long. I feel like the country has been racing towards a cliff, and the leading fools are squabbling over who's holding the steering wheel without even thinking about the lead foot on the gas pedal.

President Obama is about to make his state of the union speech. Every president says the state of the union is "strong". That's become pretty meaningless, because the strengths that exist are being overwhelmed by weaknesses that no one wants to face honestly. If he wants to be honest, I think he has to say that the state of the union is "insane, and quite possibly incurably insane."

The traditional Chinese system is an authoritarian kleptocracy with a merit-based bureacracy, and they just change the name of the ruling dynasty from time to time. Right now its the so-called communists, but things in China haven't really changed that much if you look at the big sweep of history. The Chinese view has always been that China is the center of civilization. It's just that they have a few bad centuries from time to time--and think they are just getting back to normal after one of those 'little' slumps. It troubles me to think that I may well live to see the contest decided, and the overwhelming evidence seems to be that China is smarter and tougher at playing these big games.

Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman: Part the Tiger Woods

Soccer Zen and Nice Guy Dennis Rodman:
Part the Tiger Woods

'Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman' is actually something of an ancient meme relative to my 20 years in Japan. It was surely something I thought of before Rodman retired in 2000 (courtesy of Wikipedia in my Internet lobe). Therefore I conceived it at least 10 years ago, and probably during my first 10 years in Japan. Though Rodman had joined the NFL even before I came to Japan, it took him some years to establish his reputation as a 'bad boy'.

The soccer zen part is related to my own very limited athletic experiences with soccer. Though I played for many years, I was never much good. However, there were a few flashes of zen moments when I was able to put all the pieces together, transcendent moments when I was really into the game. In my case, those moments were mostly when I was tackling the top striker of the enemy team, one Steve Martella. (I met Steve again at our 25th high school reunion in 1999, after he'd already retired from delivering mail.) Our confrontations were mostly back in the fifth grade, when I was in Mrs Clarke's class, and we basically played class on class against Stevie's class. I was too slow and too poor a ball handler to do much, so I was usually hanging around the goal waiting for Stevie to break out and came a rushing. I'm sure that he beat me most of the time, but I also and more vividly remember those times when I had the dream state and was able to strip the ball off him. It wasn't a matter of thinking or planning or trying, it was just a matter of doing. On those occasions, it was like my feet knew what was up and where to go, and I was just along for the ride. He was fast enough to go around me and skilled enough to take the ball through my legs, but there were those times when he couldn't do either. I didn't really appreciate it at the time, and my limited soccer skills actually got relatively worse over the years as the other players improved much faster than I did, but upon reflection, those were my moments of highest athletic involvement, what I would now call moments of soccer zen.

My belief is that a good athlete must feel like that for much of a game. A professional athlete probably has to be in that state for entire games at a time, competing against other professionals who are functioning in very much the same zen state. Then you have to think about the very top athletes, people such as Dennis Rodman in his prime, who are able to go even farther. Upon my poor foundation, I can only imagine levels upon levels until you reach those skills.

Of course there is a physical aspect to sports, but in the end, all of the top professional players are pretty much similar in their bodies. There are lots and lots big, strong people who can't become professional athletes at all, and there is always fierce competition from many healthy youngsters trying to become professionals and star athletes. If the body was all that mattered, you'd expect professional players to be lucky to last a season or two before they got beaten out by a youngster. It wouldn't matter what the peak age was, there would always be a large number of potential professionals reaching their physical peaks every year, whereas the reality is that the best players tend to last many years.

The important differences are clearly mental. There has to be something special about the mental condition of someone who can excel over and over again while playing against the best opponents, and for years at a time. In the case of Dennis Rodman, my fuzzy recollection is that he was especially strong on the boards. That means that he possessed outstanding abilities to figure out where the ball was likely to go in the future, to get there first, and then to fight off other athletes who were also experts with very similar skills and very similar bodies. My recollection is that he also got a lot of fouls, including some technical fouls, but he was obviously able to keep the fouls controlled to the degree that he was able to stay in the games and make important contributions. Lots more details in that Wikipedia article.

Dennis Rodman worked hard to earn a reputation for non-nice behavior, but my contention is that the wrong scale is being applied. It is completely unrealistic to expect above-average performance from average personalities. I'm being a bit hyperbolic to call him a "nice guy", and I still wouldn't want anyone like that as a neighbor, but if I was a basketball fan (which I'm not) and if I was buying a ticket to see the best possible game of basketball played by the best professional basketball players, then a great competitor is a "nice guy" of sorts, regardless of the peripheral considerations, and especially regardless of that player's antics away from the court.

Of course you should be able to see where I'm going with this as regards Tiger Woods. However, over the years I've noticed many professional athletes who have been criticized for mental aberrations of more or less sincerity. If I had a separate "Part the " for each of those stories, I'm sure I'd have more sequels than the worst of those recidivist movie franchises.

Still, we have to admit that the Tiger Woods episode is especially interesting in several ways. His game, golf, is especially mental compared to most sports, but most of his income was actually peripheral to the game, in the form of product endorsements. In addition, much of the value of his endorsements was based on a carefully cultivated reputation for really being a "nice guy", an image of Tiger Woods as a polite gentleman of the nicest sort. The reality turned out to be very different, that he was a rather wild philanderer, dallying with many women at the same time as he was pretending to be a faithful husband and a good family man and role model.

I actually don't feel like he should be criticized so much on moral grounds. I suppose a lot of it would depend on how much he lied to his wife BEFORE they got married. In retrospect, it now seems very likely that he was playing the field--the non-golf field--for some years, and probably going back before they got married. If he fooled her, too, and pretended that he was not seeing many women, then that's quite a different thing than if he told her that he was already playing around quite a bit. My own feeling is that she doesn't seem dull-witted, so she probably knew about his past before they got married, and in that case the big question is whether or not he promised to reform and be faithful. It sounds pretty sordid if you put it that way, but I have to regard her as pretty foolish if she actually expected a leopard to change its spots.

On the other hand, there's certainly plenty of foolishness to go around here, and I think the lion's share is clearly the Tiger's. Apparently there were at least a dozen other women involved here. How long did he imagine this could remain a secret? It's hard enough to trust one mistress, but a dozen? Even if all of them were sincerely discrete, he was just scattering too much evidence around too widely. Someone was going to figure it out sooner or later. It also appears that he had developed an adversarial relationship with his wife, which kind of boggles my mind. Before he got married was the time to check for jealous tendencies, and he certainly had a buyer's market to shop for a reliably tolerant spouse.

Maybe it just comes back to the mental aspect again? Maybe he needed the extra tension of the illicit sex to give him the extra tension on the golf course?

Where we are now, Tiger Woods is apparently regarded as financially the most successful professional athlete in history, the first athlete to gross over $1 billion, of which about $600 million has been converted into his personal worth. Not being a golf fan, I have to recycle the old joke about 'Not bad for chasing a little ball around with a stick.' Tiger has announced that he is taking a break from the game, but that was predicated upon becoming a better husband and father and rebuilding or somehow saving his marriage, and that seems to be a rather forlorn hope at this point. So far he hasn't missed any major tournaments, and if his marriage is really toast, it might be best for him to agree to a quickie divorce, and get back to his games of quickie lovers and golf.

The frequently repeated theme has been that his continued success on the golf course would salvage as much of the situation as can be salvaged. After all, the primary basis of his reputation is that he has the potential to be the greatest golfer in history, and the nice guy stuff was just frosting on the endorsement contracts...

Now it's time to elevate the analysis to a higher level, to the relationship of these professional athletes to the main theme of this blog, the "Distant View of America's Fall". My focus here is on the breakdown between the hard reality of these imperfect humans and the faith-based desire for perfect role models. This has actually become part of the national delusion that is destroying America. There is no Superman coming to the rescue, not on the athletic field and not in politics. This is actually a theme that I've addressed from a number of perspectives, but right now President Obama is becoming increasingly handicapped by the widening realization that he, too, isn't Superman flying to our rescue.

The dynamics of contemporary American politics are such that many of the supporters of any candidate regard their candidate as some sort of divine savior. In Obama's case, the themes of hope and change are now coming to haunt him. I want to believe that they are only bluffing and that they will think carefully in future elections, but disillusionment is a powerful negative emotion, just as many people feel disillusioned when professional athletes turn out not to be the role models they were marketed as. From that perspective, at least Dennis Rodman didn't market himself as a nice guy in the way that Tiger Woods did--and I think the result of that disillusionment may well manifest itself in the future in disruptive shouts on the golf course when Woods is competing, unwelcome distractions which may well prevent him from focusing in the way he needs to win.

It's very different when much of your base is completely faith-based on every issue. I'm talking about the hard core of religiously-motivated Busheviks that continued to support Dubya to the bitter end, no matter how overwhelming the evidence of Dubya Bush's miserable failures. Now that constituency has evidently transferred itself to Sarah Palin, while many of Obama's more rational supporters have simply become quite disaffected by his stubborn wrestling with harsh realities and neo-GOP obstructionism. My own feeling is that Obama is well qualified, intelligent, and skilled and is probably doing as good a job as is possible under the circumstances he inherited--but we seem to be in a situation where the best hope for the nation is for the GOP to be imploded by its dominant neo-GOP far-right wing, thus giving the Democratic Party the overwhelming leverage needed to fix the divisive problems that threaten to consume the nation.

I can actually imagine the situation getting worse--but not that much worse before it collapses completely. I think we dodged a major bullet in 2008 when the financial markets, again last year when Dubai was bailed out, and the Chinese might be about to throw another spanner into the works...

Can the CIA even protect itself?

Long time, no post, eh? Well, the obvious thing to note is that the apparent lack of readers of this blog is certainly not motivating me to do more work here--and writing well is pretty hard work. If I make you think, then a tip of the hat via a comment would be appreciated. If you have contradicting evidence to cite, I'm especially interested in learning about it. If you agree, that's nice, but I confess I don't really care that much. Basically I'm confident that my views are well considered and well supported by lots of evidence. I'm actually more interested in reasoned disagreement supported by solid evidence--but there seems to be very little of that in American politics these days.

Having said that, the topic of today's scribbling is actually in the category of a thought experiment based on the recent bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least 8 Americans (with a couple more still at risk of dying from their injuries). The solid fact is that the victims were not military personnel, and the reports and some evidence supports their having been CIA employees. This thought experiment is based on the belief that they were CIA people, and that the Taliban bomber went after them for precisely that reason.

The conclusion of my little thought experiment is that the CIA is clearly functioning extremely poorly. It should be obvious that there is no good reason so many potential human targets should be allowed to gather in such a place, and if the CIA didn't understand that, then they are really foolish or incompetent or both. It does not matter at all when the bomber started working for the Taliban. Maybe he was an old member and the background screening failed, but that's extremely likely in the turmoil of Afghanistan. However, I think it probably more likely that his background was completely clean and checked--at the time he started working with the Americans. What happened later to flip him doesn't matter at all. Maybe he regarded himself as a true patriot and started working for the Americans precisely because he knew his background was clean--and then he contacted the Taliban to join up. Maybe the Taliban contacted him, telling him that his entire family was being held hostage and would be killed if he failed to kill the Americans. Those are just the three most obvious intermediate stages of this thought experiment, but the obvious conclusion is that NO Afghan can really be trusted in this context, and the Americans ALWAYS have to operate on that assumption.

If the bombed facility was for exercise, as widely reported, then it should have been divided up by walls of sandbags so that any bomb detonation could never kill more than two or three people at a time. I'd also put big mirrors in a lot of the corners to expose potential hiding places for shooters. Lots of other precautions leap to mind, but the obvious point is that a CIA base in that place HAD to use such precautions, and some more besides, as the old joke goes.

So why did I include a Dubya label for this post? Because I think a lot of the REAL problem is that Obama still hasn't cleaned up ANY of the major messes he inherited. To a degree, that's a natural state of affairs insofar as some parts of some government systems were working pretty well, and even where they weren't, most of the people in those systems were sincerely trying to do their best. Also, it's obviously dangerous to rock the boat when you're in the middle of a river--but the mess left behind by Dubya is more like being adrift in the middle of the Atlantic. I'll explain more when I get around to writing "Soccer Zen and nice guy Dennis Rodman, Part the Tiger Woods", which also belongs to this particular blog as another aspect of the malaise of America...

Fitting end of the Dubya era?

Feels like a rather awkward one to write, even painful. Kind of an obituary of a relationship? Not really close enough to call a friendship, though maybe I just don't know what friendship is supposed to mean. Most clearly a former employer, but we also had more than a few drinks in the local bar over the years, and I recall being invited to his palatial house one time. Even one of the few people I saw on both of my trips back to the States...

However, I'm deliberately attempting to protect the identity of the person I'm writing about here. Just a privacy thing for me, but I'd be uncomfortable if someone wrote this sort of post about me by name, so it's intended as a philosophic courtesy... For convenient reference, I'll call him Mr X.

The unique aspect of Mr X that motivates my writing is that he was the only Dubya supporter who I both personally knew and personally had high regard for. Actually, I was quite surprised, almost shocked, to find out that he was supporting Dubya Bush. There aren't many Dubya supporters around here, and the few I knew mostly seemed obviously flawed in ways that made me regard their political leanings as part of a flawed package. (For example, a Dubya-supporting moralist who admitted that his morality justified cheating on his wife, apparently because he felt everyone did. He was on his second or third wife by that time...) I've kept in touch with a number of old friends and acquaintances, and none of them were supporters of Dubya--but this one fellow stood out.

My recollection is already rather fuzzy, but I think I asked him a few years ago about what was going on in the States these years. It was a kind of open-ended query, but I was quite surprised to find that he regarded support of Dubya as a normal thing. At first, I figured it was just a Texas-local business thing, since most of his customers are in the rich or super-rich classes that Dubya describes as his base. I thought he was just playing along to make money. Such a well-educated and intelligent fellow couldn't really be drinking the koolaid, could he? However, he eventually managed to convince me that he meant it.

There was a lapse, and then we started discussing it again. I don't remember all the details of the discussion, but I never felt like he offered a rational defense of his position, and I suppose he felt the same way about my side of it. I remember that he wanted to make some kind of a wager about a prediction on the anti-Saddam war--so I referred him to my long list of predictions, written around 2001, but he evidently wasn't interested. Sadly, those were predictions of harms and damages that Dubya might do or at least be responsible for, and it turns out that all of my worst fears were realized--with compound interest. Worse than that, I missed plenty of other areas of harms I couldn't even imagine--and even though I was painting with a very broad brush there.

A couple of his later email messages finally convinced me there was no point to the discussion. At one point he tried the extremely weak argument of Dubya as the fellow you'd like to have a drink with. Fundamentally a flawed argument if you believe that Dubya is a teetotaller and if your idea of "with" means you aren't drinking alone. He actually approached it sideways, however, citing as his evidence a video of Dubya's self-deprecating humor at the White House Correspondents' Dinner a few years ago. That was the same year that Stephen Colbert did the extremely funny and rather devastating closing presentation that showed the actual limitations of Dubya's sense of humor--when Dubya stalked off in a huff afterwards.

At that point I felt that there wasn't much sense in continuing the discussion, so I blew it off. It's one thing to disagree about what is funny, but I really felt like asking how Mr X felt about Dubya's earlier attempt at humor at the same dinner a few years earlier. I was thinking about the extremely tasteless video about searching for Saddam's missing WMDs. Thousands of Americans and far larger numbers of Iraqis have died for that sick joke--with a running tab of something like $600 billion to date (for the direct and acknowledged costs). Or should I have commented about all the unintended humor of Dubya? Not much basis for discussion there, since I think the options are incompetence, stupidity, or a simple lack of respect for his audiences. Having nothing good to say, I said nothing.

Later he followed it up with some pretty crazy stuff about a gun-related lawsuit resulting from Katrina. My fuzzy recollection is that he was happy some policeman had been successfully sued for trying to disarm potential rioters in the aftermath of the disaster. Church of the Second Amendment, eh? Sorry, but I just don't see the relationship to the well regulated militia" there. Actually, I see the Second Amendment as having a very clear intention--that was completely overturned by the American Civil War. It was written in the context of a recent and successful insurrection, and it was their intention to make sure the federal leadership wouldn't do exactly what President Lincoln did do. The real question of the Second Amendment should be whether or not the Civil War was worth the cost--which we're still paying. At least that's how I interpret the former Southern Democrats who are now the Reagan Republicans with the decisive voting bloc in Texas and several other states of the Confederacy...

He sent a couple more pieces after those, but there didn't seem to be much reason to respond to them, either. Having nothing to say, I said nothing--but I kept thinking about it, and it continued to bother me. Hence this venting.

Conclusion? I guess it's that Dubya was lying (again) when he claimed to be a uniter rather than a divider. Good riddance to bad rubbish, but we'll all be paying for Dubya's miserable failures for a long, long time to come, no matter who takes over to clean up the mess.

Comments on the Election of 2008

Secondary Subject: I hope you have hope

That's the great thing about voting. It gives me a hope I can make the world a bit better. It isn't like owning the government, but it's better than nothing, and even if my guy didn't win last time, maybe I can pick a winner this time.

Short version of my story: The neo-GOP of Texas tried to prevent me from voting this year, but Senator Obama's supporters saved my vote. I am grateful and want to share my gratitude.

Introduction to the long version: All things are linked, and pulling out a key thread is hard. What do you already know? Where are the gaps I must bridge? Why are you interested? What bores you? There is no Zen, but this is a Zen tale...

So does voting matter? Perhaps it's a kind of religious thing for me, but I've always regarded voting as a sacred right and a civic duty. I'm big on doing my duty. Often it seems that my vote will have no effect, but I do my duty and I rarely skip an election. I always hope to vote.

The hope of Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn was to prevent me from voting this year. She works in the office of the Secretary of State of Texas and sent me a long and complicated email message that was intended to convince me I could not vote. It fooled me, and it was even good enough to fool a retired lawyer friend, too. Maybe it was just the legal code hidden between the lines? Seemed really complicated to me, but probably it's easy stuff for lawyers. Focus on legality and lawyers agree on the law. From her legalese, I'm pretty sure Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a lawyer, too. McCain says he hopes to make budgetary evildoers famous--though he means infamous, but I think Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn deserves to be infamous, too. Have you have been disenfranchised by her? If so, please tell your story, too. But why did Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn try so hard to prevent me from voting? That thread leads to general political motivations, and the specific situation in Texas.

Remember that *ALL* of the politicians say they approve of voting, but I think most of them are lying. Yes, a few of them really love voting and are sincere about democracy, but most politicians see votes as bus tokens that they need to collect, and collecting tokens is just a tactical game. Stealing a bus token is even better--it's like getting two tokens at once. But if you can't collect the token and you can't steal it from your opponent, then the next best thing is to make sure it gets thrown away before your opponent collects it.

So how do most politicians play the game? Mostly by claiming to agree with the voters, even when they don't. But the voters often disagree with each other, so it's logically impossible to agree with all of them. Is it hopeless? Any disagreement with the politician could lose that token. One tactic of some politicians is to agree with both sides of every issue--which is why most politicians are known liars. It's just getting too hard to avoid getting caught, and it's much better to say meaningless gibberish while attacking anything the other guy said. Ergo, Karl Rove tried to perfect the art of politics as lying about your political opponents. (But maybe that mudslinging machine has finally run out of steam?)

That's actually a relatively 'good' side of the political game. An ugly side is the selective disenfranchisement. For example, gerrymandering during redistricting can concentrate the other side's votes so many of those votes are effectively wasted. Details would be too far afield here, but it's worth noting that many Americans don't vote simply because they know that their so-called secret ballots have already been precounted and gerrymandered, and thus rendered meaningless. Another vicious variation is when the neo-GOP targets 'hostile' voter registrations.

Perhaps my case isn't so bad, though I'm sure I was targeted because I was a likely Democratic voter when I mentioned wanting to vote in the Democratic primary. I don't know for certain if Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn is a Republican, but Texas politics is now dominated by the Republicans, so either she's a Republican appointed to her position for that reason or she's working for a Republican. In any case I'm firmly convinced the real motivation of her persuasive but misleading email was to block a probable Democratic voter. Voting while Democratic is almost a crime in Texas now.

These years the Republicans run Texas and control all of the top statewide offices--just as Texas used to be dominated by the Democrats for many decades. It's worth noting that the switch was due to a shift of old Southern Democrats who became new Reagan Republicans. That's a long history going back to the "War between the States" (AKA the American Civil War), but the best short summary was LBJ's statement that the Civil Rights Act was ceding the South to the Republicans for a generation--but I also hope that generation is over... Actually. when the Democrats ran Texas, the real state election was the Democratic primary, and now the real election in Texas is the Republican primary--and therefore, by blocking me from voting in the primary Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn had already succeeded in taking away my vote in Texas (but mostly if I switched to the primary that counts).

However, buried in the fine print in a lower paragraph of her email she actually admitted that I still had a residual right to vote--and that's what the Obama people told me about after the primary was past. They told me what steps to follow, and eventually I was rewarded with a ballot. Now I can hope it will be counted--unless Elizabeth Hanshaw Winn has some new tactic to kill it. Maybe I used the wrong kind of ink?

That's pretty much my story, but I want to close by trying to persuade you that you should vote, too, because there are real differences between the candidates in this race. If you don't choose, someone else will--and I confess I was *VERY* mistaken in 2000 to think it didn't matter much. I'm going to focus on one positive and one negative reason why I think this election matters.

What do you think about the "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"? I think the life thing has to come first, or you aren't going to care about anything else. But do you think your right to life should depend on whether or not some insurance company thinks it's profitable to insure you? If you haven't needed medical treatment to save your life, just wait a bit. I think Obama understands this much better than McCain. I think Obama hopes to provide more medical care to help us live, while McCain just hopes to help some insurance companies. America pays more and gets less--because the insurance companies are too greedy in the middle. I think better medical care is a positive hope.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin hopes to meet Jesus, and soon. She's said she expects to meet Him within her lifetime. According to her church, that means she is hoping for and dreaming of Armageddon--and I *REALLY* don't want her in the White House working to make her dream come true. Self-fulfilling prophecies can be dangerous--hoping for the end of the world is a negative hope.

A summary? Politicians have various motivations. I think most politicians are in it for money, some for the power, and only a small number are really into the idea of public service for its own sake--even though all of them claim to put public service first. These differences cross party lines, but there is a bias. The Republicans have always been the party of business, and proportionately more of them are motivated by the money. That's why they normally treat elections the same way, working out the most cost-effective ways to get the required 51% of the votes. The power-crazed politicians seem roughly evenly split--but it's very clear that McCain has become one of them. However, the true public servants now seem to be disproportionately in the Democratic Party. Of course it's hard to be certain in advance, since they all say the same things... So far Obama has been walking the walk.

I started by hoping to pick a winner this time around. I'm picking Obama. This time is *NOW*. We need some hope for a better future.

RIP: Here lies the Rule of Law in America

Just focusing on one MSM story to celebrate this sad 4th of July, the day the rule of law died in America. Here are a few of the obituaries, courtesy the robots over at Google News:

"Leniency for Libby and the '08 presidential race", Christian Science Monitor - 46 minutes ago

"Libby might have sung ...", San Francisco Chronicle

"Bush won’t rule out full pardon for perjurer, Libby", Boston Herald

The Googlebot report 3,108 current stories on the topic. I especially like that last one. You know the ol' rule of law has been one pretty tough hombre, so ol' Dubya wants to keep one more stake ready to pound into its heart, just in case it tries to start moving again.

The Law? "The Law" is for innocent peasants in Afghanistan, not for friends of the resident of the White House. An unfair sentence for a lawyer who perjured himself and got caught? Not like he knew any better, eh? Well, in Guantanamo Bay Dubya has been imprisoning people longer than LIbby's "excessive" 30 months, and sometimes "American justice" a la Dubya discovers they've been sentenced unfairly--except that they were never sentenced in the first place. Clemency? Hell no. We just quietly dump those ones back on the street and expect them to be grateful and to keep their mouths shut. After all, Dubya could always throw them back in the slammer on Cheney's say-so.

Yeah, actually "the law" in America has been dead for quite a while, but there's also some quibbling about the exact timing of the Declaration of Independence, too. However, the anti-symmetry is just too much to ignore. The Founders of our government wanted publicity, they wanted everyone to know that King George had gone too far and they weren't going to put up with it any more. This King George wanted quiet. He wanted to bury the sad news under the celebration of the work of those great Founders. It didn't work as well as Dubya had hoped, but what's one more miserable failure for such a reign of error?

Founders, eh? So now it's the ship of state that founders. Cheney in the role of Captain Bligh? The rule of law isn't just a good idea, it's the law! That's supposed to be an optimistic joke of some twisted sort. I really do think laws are a good idea and the societies with good legal systems have competitive advantages over the others... So where does that leave Dubya's United States? On the wrong end of a short rope.

Guilty until proven innocent!

A copy of my comments to The Register with regards to an article about the privacy-invading behavior of Microsoft's protect-Microsoft-first approach to 'security':

Just a second while I warm up my harp... Now for the harping.

"Guilty until proven innocent." That's the 'legal principle' of WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage). Next thing you know, they'll be trying to repeal habeas corpus. Oh. Wait.

I suggest that you try to change the terms of the debate. It's okay to refer to it as WGA for purposes of official identification, but for the sake of reality you should call it "Microsoft's Advantage Program", since the only advantage of this program (both as software and as a policy) is to help Microsoft squeeze the last few drops of blood out of some poor turnips somewhere in Africa or South America.

Me? 90% of my home computing is on Ubuntu Linux now, and about 20% of my work computing. The work-side is gradually increasing, and my current dream is to avoid Vista as completely as possible.

I better clarify that the basic premise of Microsoft's software is that you are *NOT* authorized to run Microsoft's software unless you can prove you're a legitimate customer. Unless you (with your computer acting as your proxy) can prove you're an innocent and legitimate customer, Microsoft assumes you're a pirate--even though they have a track record of creating miserably buggy software. It's not even limited to the bugginess of their software making false accusations and putting the onus on you to prove your innocence. It's that Microsoft also defines the rules of the game in their shrink-wrap legalese so you can't even be sure you are *NOT* a pirate as Microsoft has defined it.

In addition to making the twisted rules and prosecuting you in advance, Microsoft is also a crooked judge in this situation. It is in Microsoft's interest to claim the piracy problem is large, and to make their 'damage' claims as large as possible. Po' widdle Micwosoft. Don't you just pity them for all the money they've lost to those vicious pirates? Next thing you know, they'll be in the poorhouse, right? Wrong. Much more likely you'll be bankrupt and jailed for copyright violations. Microsoft is working on that one, too.

Right now the secondary point of enforcement (once you've gotten past the primary point and gotten the software to run in the first place) is that they will block you from updates (but I'm sure they're working on stronger alternatives). In other words, they will withdraw their token protection for your vulnerability to their security incompetence. They not only created the disease, but they don't care if it fries your computer. As usual, the #1 concern of Microsoft is to figure out new ways to squeeze money out of people who don't want to do business with them in the first place.

Think about the other side of it. Pretend that Microsoft was actually held liable for all the losses and problems caused by their incompetence in writing software. Pretend that they weren't permanently immune from all liability thanks to their magic shrinkwrap contracts. If Microsoft paid for the damages, I'm sure they would be bankrupt.

<sarcasm> However, it's possible that you've somehow detected that I wouldn't cry too hard at the demise of Microsoft.</sarcasm> Why? Because I like my freedom and I'm tired of Microsoft stomping on it for profit.

Another example of the fish rotting from the head up. BushCo is leading with the policy that anything you can get away with is okay. Microsoft has always lived by that policy, but just more so now. Me? I continue to believe that freedom and democracy confer competitive advantage--and America is losing those advantages. Microsoft is just following BushCo's lead down the drain, and taking the country with them.

Return of the native and new 2008 speculations

Over two years since I've commented here, so I think I should start with a bit of contextualizing and history. This blog actually originated in what has to be described as a "manual blog" I was preparing at http://shanenj.tripod.com/antibush.html as a kind of sporadic ongoing commentary on the political news of the day. That actually started early in 2001 when I'd never heard of the idea of a blog, though I think Blogger probably existed at that time. Great minds think alike? Or maybe I'd heard something about such an idea and just forgotten about my source for the idea? I often wonder... Anyway, I was just doing it by hand, which is a lot of nuisance for the bookkeeping and mechanics and the especially painful archiving of older posts when it got too large. No provision for visitor comments. People could send email comments, but if anyone was reading it, they mostly didn't say anything... At some point I heard about Blogger and I tried to integrate it into my existing methods, which wasn't too easy.

After a few years, there was the disgusting ultimate-mud-slinging election of 2004, and I was pretty much bummed out with the whole thing. I still think the yet-to-be-revealed truth is that Kerry was Karl Rove's hand-picked-in-secret nominee, and that the election was truly determined by the MSM attack on Howard Dean over the bogus issue of "the scream". Dubya has certainly committed a basically uncountable number of worse gaffs--if they only felt like giving him equal treatment, but in Dubya's case they just claim it makes him the guy "you" want to have a beer with--except for the little detail that Dubya doesn't drink bear with anyone in this revised life... Anyway, In 2000 Rove's neo-GOP drummed up support for Dubya as a 'name-brand' candidate who could (but didn't actually) beat Al Gore, and in 2004, the neo-GOP picked Kerry as a Democratic candidate that Dubya could beat--and I'm still not sure about that, given the games they played in that election, mostly with disenfranchising Democratic voters. Another one that may get revealed when the data is finally unraveled...

Anyway, after the election, about the only political part of my website that remained active was the anti-Dubya book review section, which has grown into quite a large file over the years, even though I'm not reading so many politically relevant books now. My general perspective remains pretty much unchanged, which is that America is on the way down... I keep seeing more and more evidence in the most surprising places. I think the big economic disaster will be triggered by a devaluation of the American dollar responding to the balance of trade and deficit spending. So the latest surprising place was in a Japanese history book a few days ago, where I ran across a very interesting graph of the American balance of trade with respect to England in the period before the American Revolution... It all fits together. Like we used to say in the Rice history department, "The only lesson you learn from history is that no one learns any lessons from history."

At this point it looks like America was sort of jostled out of it's nap for the election of 2006, and Dubya Bush's legacy of miserable failure is coming unraveled at every seam. However, I think it's just too little, too late...

Today's proximate cause of commenting was a comment I wrote yesterday for another venue. The topic of that discussion was the probably Democratic nominee for 2008. Slightly polished here...

I'm not so much against Hillary Clinton as a moderate Democratic professional politician as I am against her as a nepotistic family candidate. That's 95% of how we got Dubya in the last place. Dubya Bush should have been laughed out of any serious political race on his own track record of miserable failures and amazing incompetence. Yes, her qualifications are vastly superior to Dubya's, and Bill Clinton deliberately picked her, while Dubya is just a genetic accident of the worst sort. However, the bottom line is that she wouldn't be considered such a strong contender if she wasn't "a Clinton", and I think that family is the kind of criteria you can reasonably use for picking figurehead kings and queens, but that nepotism has no place in what is supposed to be a rational democratically elected representative republican form of government. (Did I include all the proper buzzwords there?)

However, I admit that I would certainly vote for any of the current Democratic candidates, even including Hillary, against any of the Republicans who have declared their intention to run. I kind of hope they manage to nominate that flip-flopper double-speaking McCain, but I fantasize about Cheney as the candidate. Heck, let's dream big. Imagine Rove coming out of the closet and actually pretending to be a real politician and somehow getting the nomination by calling in all his chips. That would be a rout to end all routs. (On the other hand, Dubya should have been routed in 2000 *AND* 2004... You only have to fool 30% of the voters on Election Day these days.)

The way things are looking now, the Republicans are going to be desperately fishing for any candidate on the negative litmus test "Can he beat Al Gore?" Well, that strategy didn't even work in 2000, though the SCOTUS kicked dirt in everyone's faces and shoved Dubya into the White House.

Michael Moore's error in fighting fire with fire

Putting it in two words: Wrong fire.

Actually, it comes back to my original reaction to Fahrenheit 9/11. When I saw the movie, I felt like asking "Is that all? What's the fuss about?" From the loud screaming and bitter noisy crying of the Bushevik children, I was really expecting a monumental epic.

Michael Moore made no secret that the movie was supposed to be a very negative attack on Dubya's qualifications for and handling of his "job". However, there was nothing extremely negative there. The background facts were old and well known to anyone who has been paying attention. A lot of the footage was just the end bits that regular media sources had snipped out of their broadcasts. Yes, Moore's perspective certainly didn't match the official propaganda very well, but the tone was basically light, even humorous. I certainly dislike Dubya and am receptive to criticism of BushCo, and I certainly would have been sensitized to notice any reasons to hate Dubya on some kind of personal level, but the movie didn't offer them. In conclusion, only a rather ignorant person could have a strong reaction to that movie--but the many strong reactions suggested that there were lots of such Americans...

Contrast it to the anti-Clinton rhetoric and the endless witch hunt. Maybe I was fooled, but they sure had me convinced that their hatred was real, very sincere, and very intense. Contrast it with the anti-Michael-Moore books and movies that were made in "response" to Fahrenheit 9/11. No way I could be mistaken about the palpable hatred there. Compare it with the attack ads from Nixon's revived swift boat vets and you can feel the purity and intensity of their rightwing hatred. Not just limited to politics, by the way. It's the same kind of irrational hatred that fanatically argues that 3,000 innocent American deaths (caused by Saudi terrorists with funding that originally came from BushCo) completely justify 100,000 innocent Iraqi deaths (even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no significant threat).

In conclusion, Michael Moore obviously recognizes how negative American politics has become, and he wanted to fight that fire with fire, but he didn't have the right fire--the fire of wrongness. A bit of humor is no match for the pure, distilled hatred that drives so many of Dubya's supporters.

Japanese premier of Fahrenheit 9/11

Well, I finally got to see the movie yesterday, and I have a number of personal impressions to report. These are really just preliminary notes while the event is fresh in my mind.

At 11 a.m. there was a long line extending several hundred meters from the ticket lobby in Ebisu Garden Cinema. My friend had arrived when the ticket window first opened at 9 to validate the pre-purchased tickets. He thought he would be able to waltz through to the front, but there were already a lot of people ahead of him and he had to wait, and his tickets were eventually validated around number 130 for the 12:30 (third) showing. They had changed the schedule to use both of their screens for Fahrenheit 9/11, but the second screen is only about 100 seats. At that time there were a lot of media people taking pictures of the line (and I took some). Some people were also setting up for a little straw vote presidential election for people coming out of the first showing.

When we came back for the showing itself, they let the first 10 validated tickets go in first, then the next 10, etc. We still had plenty of good seats to choose from when we got in, and we got a block pretty near the front. The theatre was soon full, and I could see no empty seats anywhere, so I believe it was sold out. The advertisements were mostly for French movies, so I felt like it's an "arts" theatre.

I had three main impressions of the movie itself:

There didn't seem to any real justification for the R rating. Though there were some gruesome images, they were the kind of thing regular TV news could include and they flashed by quickly enough. I think I'm rather squeamish about these things, but I was able to watch all of it.

There were no material errors of fact. I was listening very closely for ANY mistakes. This was not naive searching, but based on various reported criticisms of the movie, mostly from devout Busheviks who certainly seem to be quite sincere about wanting to find flaws in the movie. Having read their claims, I was listening very closely at those points--and I could not spot anything that supported their criticisms. The closest thing was in the section about the post-9/11 evacuation of the Bin Ladins, where Michael Moore juxtaposed the closed air space very closely--but the movie did not actually say when the Saudis first received their special permissions to get out of the US--and of course the REAL issue there and the REAL focus of the movie was on whether or not the Saudis should have been allowed special treatment in comparison to the other "suspicious" "Arabic" people who were rounded up and interrogated. Around 1/4 of the way into the movie, I actually thought I did hear a one-word mistake that I had never read about, but it was a minor item. Not sure if that's sufficient justification to go again next week when it opens in my local theater. Kind of expensive just to try to catch a one-word glitch. (However, I'm at least going to visit the theater to see how big the "pure" Japanese crowd is.)

Notwithstanding all of the noisy criticisms, it was a very balanced and even moderate documentary. It certainly mentioned a lot of the smoke around BushCo, and even showed a few of the fires, but it stuck quite ploddingly to the facts. It did ask a lot of really rude and pointed questions, but they all seemed to be questions for legitimate public discussion. Especially as regards the questions about the real justification or lack of justification for the Saddam-removal war, these are life-and-death questions that should have been answered much more definitively before anyone died. It's really hard for me to understand what all the violent criticism is about. Well, actually I think I sort of understand some of it, but it's a complicated question of push propaganda. When you ask questions and show the available evidence, some people will leap to conclusions--and in this case most of those conclusions are NOT favorable to Bush.

I did see a LOT of examples where the critics were willfully misinterpreting scenes from the movie. For example, there were a few pre-war scenes of life in Iraq, but nothing suggesting that there was any sort of Iraqi paradise under Saddam. It showed normal human beings living their normal lives--and they just happened to be Iraqi human beings. Michael Moore's obvious goal was to juxtapose those images against what ALWAYS happens in REAL war, which is that some innocent people also die.

After the movie, there was no big reaction from the crowd, though I've heard of reports of standing ovations and such. I should have looked to see what percentage of the audience were foreigners. The Japanese in our group liked the movie, but had no strong reaction to it. There was one pro-Bush American in our group, and he wasn't particularly offended or upset, though he wanted to defend Dubya by diffusing the responsibility, especially for the seven minutes of sitting. (By the way, I'm now sure the movie did say My Pet Goat as the title of the book, which is a known mistake, but obviously irrelevant to the significant question of Dubya's inaction and lack of leadership.) We did stand around talking about the movie for a while afterwards, but it wasn't a big long discussion.

My overall conclusion is that the movie was pretty good, but not really great--but maybe that's just because Michael Moore knows his target audience very well and I'm not in the target. My initial reaction to Dubya was to see him as a kind of sick political joke, not a REAL politician who could possibly wind up in the White House. Michael Moore wants this movie to reach the people who have initial doubts about Bush, but my doubts are WAY past that stage. I can see where someone who had never heard about any of this stuff would be surprised--but to me it seemed that Michael Moore was only showing the tip of the iceberg. For example, he only scratched the surface of the material covered in House of Bush, House of Saud, even though he spent a fair bit of the movie interviewing Craig Unger, the author of that book.

From the amount of crying and screaming from the BushCo side and the sheer number of violent ad-hominem criticisms directed against Michael Moore, I really expected the movie to be MUCH stronger. I think Michael Moore did what he could with the editing of the pre-existing stock film that was available, but that kind of documentary footage is fundamentally limited. The specially produced footage (like the ice cream truck) was not really that compelling or powerful. I think it would be a legitimate candidate for best documentary, but I have trouble seeing how it could win in the best picture category. Also, if it were nominated in the best director category, I don't see how the judges could make fair comparisons, because it would be like comparing apples and oranges.

On the other hand, Michael Moore's criterion for the success of this movie is simple. If it helps remove Dubya from the White House, then he (and I) will be happy. The question of Dubya-removal will soon be resolved, but it may never be absolutely clear what part this movie played in real life.

Dubya is toast on both sides

I'm feeling increasingly optimistic about disposing of Dubya. He really is getting heavy fire from both sides these days, the funny side and the unfunny side.

Of course, the humor-based attack is Michael Moore's primary angle in the Fahrenheit 9/11 movie. Is he just reacting to the BushCo propaganda? Or is he just that politically shrewd? Perhaps both? Of course, it's obvious that Rove has tried to recast Dubya as presidential since 9/11. From the reviews I've seen, it appears the main point of the film is that Dubya is a laughingstock, at least as far as fighting terrorism goes. I'm really looking forward to seeing the film as soon as possible. I'm sure it makes Dubya look stupid, but how stupid? Fire-the-loser stupid?

Don't forget that before 9/11, and especially in the 2000 campaign, Dubya sang a different song. He was supposed to be just a regular guy who just accidentally happened to be the stinking rich son of a president, and who was just lucky to have so many stinking rich friends eager to invest in his campaigns. I think the case for Dubya as a cunning and vicious fool is quite strong, but I keep remembering that a lot of people thought that's some flavor of what they were voting for in 2000. However, they either thought the fool would hire smart assistants (like Rumsfailed?), or they were persuaded by the crazy rightwing propaganda that Gore was some sort of dangerous monster. (Too bad the American presidency is no longer suitable for nice guys like Gore or Jimmy Carter.) Is Dubya the fool he originally pretended to be? The new and improved presidential fool? And what will the voters want in November?

Meanwhile, the anti-humor attack is mostly blowback from Iraq. Now we have a movie aspect there, too, with new films of the prisoner abuse. Honor and integrity? Sure thing, coming right up--as soon as BushCo can find some gaps in the unending streams of lies. Restore America's dignity? Is that anything like the human dignity we took from the Iraqi prisoners? Iraq is almost certainly the biggest and most impressive failure of all of Dubya's miserable failures. There are just so many ways to slice the failure in Iraq... American deaths? Loss of all international influence except for the old gun in your face method? Extreme abuse of power to the point of systematic war crimes? All that money flushed away? (Except that BushCo got kickbacks, so they don't regard that part as wasted.) Building a "new and improved" Al Qaeda? Dead Iraqis? Oh, I keep forgetting. Dead Iraqis don't count. They're just untermenschen.

Actually, I think BushCo's failure in education policy is also a strong contender as the most miserable failure, but it may take decades for that damage to become fully apparent, and even longer to assess it. Every other BushCo policy has failed, too, except maybe the environmental policy. Trick question! BushCo doesn't even have any environmental policy, so those failures have to re-filed in other categories.

You'd think that someone should be held accountable. Punish someone significant like Rumsfailed? Perish the thought. (Saddam doesn't count--the reason he's been punished is only because he quit the team.) It reminds me of some comedian's joke about Dubya admitting that there was a security failure on 9/11 and punishing someone, even if he had to retroactively fire someone from the Truman administration. Guess it depends on what you remember. Most people remember Truman for "The Buck Stops Here", but BushCo only remembers the bit about "Never apologize."

So let's see what the voter's remember in November.

The Iraqi Farce continues unabated...

I'm currently increasingly convinced there is no direction in Iraq but out, and the only question is whether it's before or after the election. Before, and it would be a politically fatal admission of his blunderhood, so we can basically rest assured that Dubya will not bring the troops home by Christmas. Doesn't matter how many soldiers and Iraqis do the resting, as in RIP.

The context that got me thinking about this involved considering the Israeli policies towards the Palestinians as models of the American policies in Iraq. However, I think this is only peripherally relevant to the situation in Iraq, and mostly it only serves as another bad example of how to handle such situations. As an American I'd actually prefer to use the American Revolution as the bad example. At least it's a "bad example" from the perspective of King George III. The bottom line is that all such examples show that lots of people are willing to fight very hard when they believe they are fighting for their freedom. Sometimes that's religious freedom, but the exact nature of "freedom" doesn't seem to matter much. Yes, there have been many historical cases when the "freedom fighters" or "terrorists" or "patriots" or "criminals" (depending on who won and who's speaking) do lose in their struggles, but people have a tendency to persist in such struggles, and in the end, I think they usually win--unless they are exterminated as a people. Freedom is a really powerful motivation.

Right now it certainly seems like a large number of Iraqis have decided they are fighting for their political freedom (or national identity). The alternative is remaining in (or returning to) the status of being an American client or puppet state. Other Iraqis apparently believe they are fighting for their religious freedom--and one can scarcely blame them with lunatics like Ann Coulter on BushCo's side. Probably Dubya, too, though he hasn't actually publicly said their leaders should be slaughtered and the masses forcibly converted to Christianity the way Coulter did. I actually doubt that these "freedom fighting" groups are a majority of Iraqis, but there are two funny aspects there.

First, if you took a poll of Americans at the time of the Revolution, I bet that most of them would have said it was a bad or crazy idea. Completely nuts to fight the British supreme-superpower-of-that-day. Actually, it was kind of amazing we did win, and the war would have dragged on if the French navy hadn't helped out at just that moment.

Second, Dubya is not and never has been worried about acting for the majority of Americans--only about dragging or suckering enough of them along. Obviously Dubya's only real interests were in getting into power, and then in using that power to do what he wanted to do anyway. King George II?

Returning to the latest screwups in Iraq, apparently BushCo has changed their minds again on the Falluja mess. We don't actually like THAT general, but we want one of Saddam's OTHER generals to take over the mess. We'll trade that popular general for another general to be named later? Crazy.

My guess on the REAL situation is that BushCo realized this guy was too popular. They actually managed to talk to some Iraqis, and they discovered that they regarded this "solution" as an Iraqi victory. Allowing the Americans to be defeated would be a BIG mistake. If the Americans get "whipped" anywhere in Iraq, the whole country is liable to go nuts, and we can't allow any more of that, can we? So now the Marines have stopped withdrawing and are preparing to counterattack again. Or maybe not. Or maybe...

There have been a number of comments about the significance of the prisoner abuses, but so far not much light has been shed. For now, I still believe those sorts of problems are inevitable in these sorts of situations, but on some reflection, I'm kind of surprised we got our American hands dirty there. I actually thought that handling these sorts of things was part of our secret understandings with the Kurds. Very difficult to speculate when BushCo is so big on secrecy, but if there was such a clause, then the actual problem is probably much larger than revealed so far, since most of it would have been passed along to the Kurds for discreet "handling". (An additional reason to read Dean's new book? Apparently argues that BushCo is even more abusive of power than the Nixon gang. It would be interesting to compare the chronology of abuses in Vietnam.)

Can't remember where to credit this, but it definitely belongs in the humor category. It was supposed to be an analysis of possible political solutions to the mess. Remember Colin Powell? No? Well, anyway, if you could remember him, he's supposed to be involved in that sort of diplomatic stuff. But the hilarious part was saying that a "broader political solution" could have made it possible to use Indian troops to get the numbers needed for the occupation of Iraq. Riiiiiiiight. Anyone else remember that the whole idea of India was to get the Muslims out of there? Not even BushCo could claim that the Iraqis would greet the Indian troops with flowers.

In the tragedy category, I was reading about an entire outfit who got their chain yanked real hard. They'd finished their long hitch in Iraq, turned their heavy equipment over to their replacements, and even shipped their personal effects home. And then they got new orders to stay in Iraq. Shock and awe big time. The shock was the orders, but the awesome part is that Rumsfeld thinks they'll be happy about it. All 'dem soldiers be lil' Colin Powells, right?

Bush is toast.

"Elected dictatorship" be damned, there is a reality out there, and there are limits to how far you can stretch it. Go too far from reality, and reality is going to bite back. And hard. Reality is NOT going to just sit there and take it forever. (Just too bad so many relatively innocent people get squished in the process. Heck, even many of the fanatics are sort of innocent. At least they are innocent of any understanding of reality.)

The latest report from Iraq has one of our military spokesman saying we need to make sure that Sadr understands we're not going anywhere. The "we" is the Americans, and the anywhere is apparently out of Iraq.

Wait just a minute here. What is the reality here? Who is invading who? Who exactly belongs where?

I hate to break the news to you, but Sadr is the guy who lives there. He's the one who isn't going anywhere. The Americans are the invaders in Iraq, and even the BushCo claims that the goal is to leave--as soon as they can declare a "suitable victory" and find appropriate puppets to leave in charge of BushCo's latest mess.

Remember this is an ideologically purged army, and this is one of the best spokesman they can come up with. Well, at least it's as purged as they can manage and still keep some boots on the dirt. When they start talking so stupidly... Time for "We have to destroy the village to save it." Anyone remember that witticism? Little place called Vietnam. Remember? (Dubya sure doesn't. He was too busy dodging paper cuts in Alabama.)

Dubya is toast. Roasting slowly on his cross of oil.

Call it BushCo's lunatic fringe strategery (sic) and Nader worship. Yeah, it's hard to believe, but Nader announced he's running again. In the American system, it's hard to buy votes directly, but lunatic fringes are the easiest to buy or divert. In terms of election strategy, it works quite well for BushCo. Dubya is perfectly willing to accept the votes of various lunatic fringes, and BushCo has the money to persuade their pet troublemakers NOT to run separately and suck off any of their votes. Meanwhile, the votes you can siphon off from your REAL opponents are just as useful as the votes you capture with lies or bribes.

In the current example, BushCo can covertly encourage fringe candidates like Nader to run on the other (progressive/liberal) side, thereby sucking off the lunatic fringes that might help offset the lunatic fringe votes they've collected for BushCo. I'm not saying that all Nader supporters are lunatics, but that's becoming his strongest base of support. Without him as an escape hole to toss their votes into, some of those fanatics would be willing to accept reality. Don't forget that Dubya's entire claim to legitimacy for his tyrannical redirection of America, his entire "mandate for change", comes down to 500 votes in Florida in 2000, as justified 5-4 by SCOTUS. (Never forget: "Our considerations are limited to the present circumstances." That's where history will file Scalia et al.)

You might want to cite Buchanan as some sort of exception, but he had no significant negative effect on Dubya in 2000, but, in a less-than-amusing twist of fate, purely by accident managed to have a significant negative effect on Gore in the crucial Palm Beach situation. Not the only crucial situation in 2000--but almost all of them broke against Gore.

Principles are important, but when your principles prevent you from seeing reality, you are insane. Gore is NOT equal to Bush. But even if the fanatical Nader worshippers wanted to say both of them were evil, Gore was VERY clearly the lesser of the evils--and one of them was going to live in the White House. Nader is serving NO constructive purpose now. In the three years since seizing power BushCo has already done more harm than all of the good Nader ever accomplished in his entire lifetime. Only insanity can explain Nader's divisive new campaign. It can only have two possible outcomes: it will assist BushCo in clinging to power or it will discredit Nader's beliefs and causes as far as the new Democratic president is concerned. President Nader is NOT a possible outcome.