28 February 07 - 14:54
The latest "Senate Armed Services Cmte. Hearing on Global Security Threats" on CSPAN really made me laugh. Not only was the "threat" from Venezuela terribly overplayed, but some of the things that John McConnell (Dir. of National Intel) sounded like they came from the White House/Fox News Standard Security Threat Talking Point list. What does the DNI think is a threat? "Those critical of free markets". Not a Market Fundamentalist? You might be a threat.
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28 February 07 - 11:26Upper East Side bomb scare
Nothing in the major news outlets yet, but at around 10:30/11:00 AM, a bomb scare occurred on the UES. Lexington Avenue appeared to be closed
from 96th down to 86th, or possibly further. There were checkpoints every block, with a police car in the middle of the street. Emergency personnel were all over the place, and traffic was at a near standstill on the surrounding streets and avenues. Subway service appeared to be working normally.
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27 February 07 - 09:02
Pariah or Prophet?: Many have dismissed Ralph Nader's recurring candidacy as an "ego trip", but veteran journalist Chris Hedges argues that the activist and agitator has in fact taken a consistent and necessary stand against the consumer fraud of American politics. '
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23 February 07 - 09:32
The Bush administration has put together a
project to enforce religious entitlement and discrimination as an answer to the
AU's first freedom first project (which aims to strengthen church-state separation). This goes along with another scary new plan:
new national program to temporarily transform churches into courthouses.
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21 February 07 - 08:01
Fighting despotism, armed with a keyboard and modem: Secular, reformist bloggers under attack in Egypt and Syria.
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21 February 07 - 03:03
Maybe We Deserve to Be Ripped Off By Bush's Billionaires: Taibbi's scathing attack on media that ignores important issues in favor of celebrity minutiae.
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21 February 07 - 01:46
Changing the World, One Laugh at a Time: The Daily Show and Political Activism
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21 February 07 - 00:31
The world hangs its head -
Habeas Corpus loses.
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20 February 07 - 10:53
Blind to the Consequences of Offshoring: Economists in Denial.
Key quotes:
"
If success is defined in terms of the country in which the ownership of the profits of global firms resides, then a country can be successful with its labor force unemployed."
'
The competitiveness report owes much of its failure to an abstraction -- "the global labor supply." There is no global labor market that equilibrates wages in the different countries. There are only national labor markets in which wages reflect cost of living and labor supply.'
'
Like Porter, Blinder says that America's future lies in service jobs. The good service jobs will be those delivering "creativity and imagination." Blinder understands that the education solution might be a pipe dream as such abilities "are notoriously difficult to teach in schools." Blinder also understands that "it is hard to imagine that truly creative positions will ever constitute anything close to the majority of jobs." Blinder asks: "What will everyone else do?"'
'
Today, capital is as mobile internationally as tradeable goods, and knowledge-based production functions operate identically regardless of location. Neither of the conditions upon which the case for free trade rests exists in the present-day world.'
'
Economists long ago ceased to think objectively about free trade. Free trade has become an unexamined article of faith. As far as I can ascertain, economists no longer are even aware of the necessary conditions specified by Ricardo that are the basis for the free trade case.'
'
Offshoring is causing dire problems for the United States. I have suggested that one necessary reform will be to break the connection between CEO pay and short-run profit performance. As long as CEOs can get filthy rich in a few years by dumping their U.S. workforce, the trade deficit will continue to rise, and more college graduates will be employed as waitresses and bartenders.'
'
..much of America's success is due to World War I and World War II, which bankrupted rivals and destroyed their industrial capacity. It was easy for the United States to dominate world trade after World War II as America was the only country with an intact economy.'
'
Many economists dismiss the problems with which offshoring confronts developed economies with the argument that it is just a question of wage equilibration. As wages rise in China and India, the labor cost differential will disappear and wages will be the same everywhere. This argument overlooks the lengthy period required for the hundreds of millions of workers, who overhang labor markets in India and China to be absorbed into the workforce. During this time, hardships in currently high-wage countries will be severe. Moreover, once the wage adjustment is complete, the new developed countries will have the upper hand. Will they give up their competitive and strategic advantages?'
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19 February 07 - 10:37The "Support the Troops" myth
Military action is an instrument of foreign policy. It is not an end unto itself. The notion that pulling troops out of Iraq is "not supporting them" is totally absurd. The occupation, like all wars, is an implementation of a policy. The troops are there to implement it. They aren't there for their own purposes. They are there
because this US administration and its policies sent them there. It's like saying that if you stop building a house, you aren't "supporting the people building it". If building the house is a
bad idea, you
stop building it.
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19 February 07 - 00:16
The Tragedy of Donald Rumsfeld: The Undertaker's Tally.
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12 February 07 - 07:57The unspoken, core ideas separating Cultural Liberalism and Cultural Conservatism
What is the core thing, the simple tenet that defines, free of country, temporal, nationalist, ethnic or other associations, Cultural Liberalism and Cultural Conservatism? For Liberalism, it's fundamentally about
human happiness. Boil down the Lockean and other ideas, and that's what you're left with; tolerance, equality, and a basic respect for other members of humanity all are a kind of means to an end:
happiness.
Conservatism, on the other hand, is fundamentally about
order, not happiness. It pursues stability and "sameness" at the expense of all else. Same people, same ideas, an attempt to achieve the same way of living, year after year. Of course, Conservatism is reborn, over and over in countries and times, all over the world. It attempts to take some window of human experience and freeze it, always rejecting the new, but always being consumed by it, which produces yet another Conservatism. There's a fear that comes from having an ordered, and seemingly ideal type of existence be upset. Fear of losing that so-craved sense of stability. Fear of the other. Fear of losing a world and a worldview, that, in the mind of the Conservative just
makes sense. A world that's well organized, well categorized, well delineated. A world where the rules are known and can't be changed. A world with "us" and "them". You know your friends and your enemies. You know who is "good", and who is "bad". You know who to trust, and who to punish. A world that's easy to make sense of. A world of
order.
When looked at in a general sense, Conservatism is not really a specific ideology, like Liberalism. It doesn't have a set of universally applicable principles. What it has is simply a desire to cement a way of seeing the world and existing that conforms to a perceived ideal, whatever that ideal may be.
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09 February 07 - 02:57
Al Qaeda's 20 Year Plan: Escalation: Surging Right Into Bin Laden's Hands.
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08 February 07 - 14:51
Ackerman's Lesbian Platoon: "For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are against terrorists, but they're very brave with the terrorists. ... If the terrorists ever got a hold of this information, they'd get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad." This guy is funny.
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07 February 07 - 16:36
Learn about
The Overton Window
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07 February 07 - 16:25
"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -- James Madison
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07 February 07 - 13:38
Banning the freedom to deny: a dangerous road. If people want to stupidly deny the genocides of the world, that's their right. If "denying the facts" becomes a crime, we can suddenly criminalize:
- denial of global warming
- denial of evolution
- creationism
- belief in angels, saints, miracles, imams, gods, ghosts, astrology
How about people who reject the 2nd law of thermodynamics? GRAVITY?
If people want to reject logic, rationality, empirical evidence, science, and facts, that's their right. As detestable, ignorant, and intellectually bankrupt as some of us may find these people, once we start down the road of criminalizing denial of the facts, we're going down a very dangerous road towards censorship. Should we have standards for people speaking in official capacities and the like? Yes. A person expressing a personal "belief"? A bad idea. We should be combating these people and their mistaken, and often ugly beliefs with the
facts. Browbeat them, shake them, turn them upside down with the facts - but to punish them for not accepting? Dangerous.
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06 February 07 - 21:14
Solar-powered street lights
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03 February 07 - 03:48
How to end the war in Iraq: Congress already has the power to stop the war in Iraq; it just needs the guts.
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02 February 07 - 02:48
An Iron Curtain is Descending: And Most Americans Don't Know.
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01 February 07 - 14:41
Olmert grilled for hours about Lebanon war: why doesn't this happen in the US? Why is the president treated like a monarch? The founding fathers wholeheartedly rejected royalism, yet Congress still treats the executive with kid gloves. In the US, there's this seeming fawning reverence for the commander-in-chief. This constant, awkward, walking on eggshells "Mr. President" trash. He should be getting grilled on a daily basis for his incompetence and his utter disrespect for the law, the constitution, and the people.
This is not a monarchy!
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01 February 07 - 03:24
'One of Hussein's best friends, Haydar, was not long ago found shot in the back of the head at a deserted ranch outside the city. "Some say he was shot by a family member in an act of honor killing; some say he was shot by those so-called death squads," Hussein said. "Everyone says it's easy these days to get away with killing gays, since there is no law and order here."
All Hussein thinks about is getting out of Iraq.
"Things were bad under Saddam for gays," he said, "but not as bad as now. Then, no one feared for their lives. Now, you can be gotten rid of at any time."'
We need to offer asylum to all Iraqis that want to leave, like, yesterday. This is just ridiculous beyond belief.
Full Story
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01 February 07 - 02:47
Iran Clock Is Ticking
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