Three Monday News Blips

How many Pakistani civilians have US drones killed in the past
nine years? No one really knows, it's in the thousands.

Check these out, gleaned from but a single issue of Raw Story:

1. While the prime rates are low and static, the 340 million credit card holders in the US have seen their interest rates go in only one direction. Can you guess which direction that is? Since the new so-called financial reform law is going place limits on the outrageous service and late charges the banks can stick us with, they have simply raised interest rates by about an average of nine percent. Read.
2. Latest toll of innocent people killed in Pakistan by an errant strike by a US drone: 20 killed (including 4 women & 3 children), another 13 wounded (several more children). My understanding is that counter-insurgency, the vaunted Petraeus strategy that's going to "win" our war in Afghanistan--eventually, if I understand what the administration and the Pentagon are setting us all up to hear. Read.
3. Up to 15,000 dead fish have turned up at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Tests are underway to determine if the kill was caused by the oil spill. What do you think? Drum, crab, red fish, eel, sting rays, speckled trout are among the victims. Read.

Happy Monday!

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It's in the Food; It's in the Air

The "It" in this case is something dangerous to your health, something that will make you sick. I can't quite wrap my mind around the idea of half a billion eggs. That is one hell of a lot of eggs. And that's how many are being recalled – at least to the present – because over 1000 people have gotten sick from salmonella poisoning spread by eggs. Now it turns out that the owner of one of the two farms from which these eggs came has been cited before for "numerous health, safety, and employment" violations over the years. His name is Jack DeCoster and, get this, he also owns a company called Quality Egg which supplies chickens and feed to both of the farms from which the suspect eggs have come. So boiling this whole story down to its essence, there's one villain we can blame.

I think this latest outbreak of danger in the food is just symptomatic of something that's going on all the time. I'd really like somebody to come along and prove to me that all the myriad facets of agribusiness are focused on the health of the consumer. I don't think so really. Am I just imagining things or are safety and food recalls are becoming more numerous? It seems like every other day now car company is recalling this model were that model. And we have these cases of dangerous food pop up once every couple of years it seems.

This kind of thing is is going to be inevitable in a world run by corporations. Concerned simply with the bottom line, and not really faced with any kind of competition, I think they consider the public relations disasters and loss of patronage connected with health and safety violations just part of the cost of doing business. The more these companies extend their tentacles into the government, the less likely we are to see viable regulation. Which means more bad eggs or something else dangers on your plate in the morning.

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The Naked God

I have written before about Richard Rohr*. I have come to believe that the kind of spirituality he practices and preaches is really only one that will ever be satisfying to me and my (perhaps overactive, never quiescent) conscience and forever restless soul. His counsel is all the things I cannot do: be silent, let go, rest in the Mystery, stop beating up on yourself, don't judge, accept yourself, be still. And I'm slowly coming to understand that these are all the things I know I must do if ever I'm going to find the Truth, which is all I've ever sought, which when I think about the heart of me has kinda consumed my life. I've gotten this far thus far: I'm convinced that what I'm looking for won't be found in the religion I know--indeed, it probably holds true for all Christian religions--with its logic-chopping about dogma and doctrine, its scandalous materialism, its commitment to self-preservation before all else. It's beginning to become increasingly clear, as clear, I suppose as anything about this subject can be, that the naked god of my quest can only be found by not seeking him. And it's fitting that this god of the universe, the seen and unseen, is paradox, enigma, forever unknown and unknowable.

The goal of all spirituality is to lead the “naked person” to stand trustfully before the naked God. The important thing is that we’re naked; in other words that we come without title, merit, shame, or even demerit.  All we can offer to God is who we really are, which to all of us, never seems like enough.  I am sure this is the way true lovers feel too.

As you know, the act of lovemaking requires some degree of nakedness, and perhaps sacred silence to absorb the communion that is happening. The same is true in loving and being loved by God.  We have to let go of our false self (as superior or as inferior) to be ready for real unity with God; and to do that, we have to be silent. 

Silence is the language of God, and the only language deep enough to absorb all the contradictions and failures that we are holding against ourselves.  God loves us silently because God has no case to make against us.  The silent communion absorbs our self-hatred, as every lover knows.

The piece mentioned at the bottom of this post mentions Rohr, and it's worth your time to read if you're interested.

*Here and here and here.

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Women's Equality, Oklahoma Style

Here are some statistics and facts I picked up a meeting of the Norman Justice Alliance this evening. It's not that I found these things hard to believe; it's just hard for me to believe our legislature finds it necessary to be so mean and hard-hearted. But on second thought, that doesn't surprise me either.

• Oklahoma has the highest female incarceration rate (per capita) in the world.
• Oklahoma's female incarceration rate is almost double the national average.
• Oklahoma does not have the highest crime rate: it ranks 17th in violent crime and 19th in property crime, so the high incarceration rate is not a direct result of the crime rate.
• Many of the women prisoners in Oklahoma are incarcerated for short periods of time. Almost half the female inmate populate population is released each year and replaced by other women prisoners.
• Almost half the women prisoners in Oklahoma were living with one or more of their minor children immediately prior to incarceration.
• Around 4,500 children in Oklahoma have a mother in prison at any point in time.
• Many of these children are in unstable living situations, having to move often or in households with the inadequate resources. (That's a surprise, eh?)
• A high percentage of the women prisoners report that they were physically and/or sexually abused as children, so family placement may not always be safe for their children. (another surprise)
• 80 percent of the women incarcerated in Oklahoma are there for nonviolent crime.

The idea for the NJA is to make people more aware of this, and we have a really good selling point: if you tell Oklahomans that their taxes are going to be lower if you reverse all of these figures, they will jump right on it. If there's anything these people understand here, it's low taxes are a positive good without any discussion whatsoever. And in fact, maintaining these draconian conditions for women in our prisons is tremendously expensive. Meanness does not come cheap.

That's Our Maggie!

Maggie Gallagher is described as a writer and commentator. She has a syndicated column; she has five published books; she has an exalted office. For the past 15 years she's been president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. Maggie is a social conservative, a Catholic, and if you did not know she was from Oregon, you could swear she was from Oklahoma. Here, without comment or adornment, are ten quotes from this font of knowledge that I found at this website.

1. It is not discrimination to treat different things differently.
2. We're here, we're not queer. Get used to it!
3. Ideas have consequences. This is what "marriage equality" means.
4. Europe, which gave us the idea of same-sex marriage, is a dying society, with birthrates 50 percent below replacement.
5. Same-sex marriage is going to lead to a fundamental redefinition--not only of marriage but of religious liberty and citizenship.
6. Gay marriage is not primarily about marriage. It's also not about Adam and Steve interpersonal practical legal needs. It is about inserting into the law the principle that "gay is the new black" – that sexual orientation should be treated exactly the same way we treat race in law and culture.
7. Public schools, when they teach about marriage, are going to teach your children and grandchildren that your views about marriage are discarded relics of ancient bigotry.
8. Black America knows better than anyone else the high price children pay for the sexual agendas of adults.
9. Gay-marriage advocates hope to use the law to reshape the culture in exactly the same way that the law was used to reshape the culture of the old racist South.
10. Democratic forms of government of vulnerable to mass prejudice, so-called tyranny of the majority.

If any of you out there can make any sense of this, please drop me a line.

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This Is Proof: You Can Rap about Anything

I took a more conventional approach to recommending Elizabeth Warren for the job as boss of the Financial Consumer Protection Agency. But this is very cool indeed.

Leave It Alone

Let's be up front right up front. I am drawing social security; my spouse is drawing social security. Both of us elected to start drawing it when we turned 62. So if you were inclined to quibble about what follows, you could always claim that I'm not a totally disinterested party. If you were so inclined.

That said, I have to bemoan the continuing clamor from the right about ending (or "privatizing" it, which amounts to the same thing) this most successful of government social welfare programs. It's an agitation that's never really ceased since the Bush administration.

Which is why I'm grateful to Paul Krugman. One of the coolest heads around among economists, Krugman's always managed to make the "dismal science" intelligible to me. I didn't know that last week marked the 75th anniversary of social security. If I had I might have set off some firecrackers. But the occasion didn't escape Krugman, and he devoted his column yesterday to a consideration of the program's current state of being.

Here are some of his most salient points:

• The people who are attacking social security . . . their math doesn't add up. They are basically concerned with ideology anyway, and they are either ignorant of or indifferent to the lives of most Americans. 
• Because of the way it's set up--with its own dedicated funding and part of the Federal budget--there are only two money problems the program could face. Inadequate dedicated funding or unsupportable costs for the larger Federal budget.
• Neither problem is "a clear and present danger." The program has run surpluses for years, and its trust fund won't run dry until 2037 according to its actuaries, and there's a good chance that won't happen.
• Over the next 20 years the aging population will cause the cost of social security to rise from 4.8 to 6 percent of GDP, significantly smaller amount than the rise in defense spending since 2001, which was certainly no crisis in Washington's eyes.
• Cries of crisis in the system are result of bad-faith accounting. And although the crisis is invented, many Washington elite buy it, all the Republicans and even some Democrats. They propose to deal with the "crisis" not but cutting benefits to present recipients of social security, but those out in the future.
• What's really going on is that the right hates social security for ideological reasons: it undermines their claim that government always screws things up. 
• Currently fashionable idea to raise retirement age eventually to 70--life expectancy has risen, so goes the argument and people can work till they are 70. Yeah right, if you are a white collar worker, and therefore somebody who needs social security the least.
• It's not just a matter of being able to work at comfortable office job vs. manual labor. No, it's deeper. "American is becoming an increasingly unequal society--the growing disparities extend to matters of life and death. Life expectancy at age 65 has risen for people at the top of the income distribution, but much less for lower-income workers.
• Bottom line: cuts to social security should not even be on the table.

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That Mosque . . . Again

This is the kind of thing I don't like about Obama. He's so wishy-washy the minute he sniffs any thing foul in the political breezes. He's made another statement on the project to build a Muslim activity center two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan. The right has been up in arms as I noted the other day about this "insult" to the survivors of 9-11 victims. This issue has gained incredible traction with the knuckle-dragging set who believe it's better to scuttle the whole notion of freedom of religion when it becomes inconvenient for whatever reason it happens to be at the time.

The other night we had some dinner guests and one of them put the question to me what I thought about the "mosque at Ground Zero." I think she was taken aback when I told her that the so-called mosque was actually a large building which would contain a mosque, that it was two blocks from Ground Zero on a side street, and that the Muslims had owned this property in Manhattan since before 9/11. None of which she knew. And she said no more about it. I wonder just how representative this ignorance is of the howling mob that's demanding that the "mosque" be moved some other place further away from the hallowed ground? I will confess to you that though I can understand why some people might be discomfited--else how could the unscrupulous fear mongers be so successful--I'm at a loss to understand how readily people are willing to jettison the foundational principles of this country.

But to point.  Naturally the Republicans are all over this, and polls show that a majority of Americans oppose the location of the mosque. And though Mr. Obama on Friday staunchly defended the right of a Muslim group to build a mosque on the disputed site when he was talking to a group of Muslin-Americans, he made it clear in remarks on Saturday that he was not endorsing the wisdom of the placement of the mosque, and he would be making no statements about this. As the writer of this piece points out, what's going on here is that the president can be seen to question the location of the project without actually saying so. Slick, and weaselly. And basically showing once again that Obama's finest instincts are all about tacking with the political breezes. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Barack Obama talks a good game. Delivering one is something that's obviously beyond him.

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Our Hero . . . Whoops, Not So Fast

Have you ever heard of Representative Mike Rogers? Of course you haven't, unless you're reading me from the depths of the 3d district in the great state of Michigan. And even then, you may not have heard  of this guy. I just learned of him myself when I read that he has called for the execution of Private Bradley Manning. I'll refresh your memory of him, too, because alas, he's probably already had his alloted fifteen minutes of fame. He's the guy who leaked to Wikileaks all those documents about the war in Afghanistan, which tend to show, not to my surprise and probably not to yours, that the war there is not going all that swimmingly. Earlier Manning had also leaked a horrifying video tape of a trigger-happy U.S. Apache helicopter crew gunning down about a dozen Iraqis in the street. Although several of the killed were armed, it's not at all clear they were enemies, and clearly several of the dead, including two children and two employees of Reuters News Service, were not. Think about this for a minute: for the crime of exposing the wanton savagery of some of our military and bringing to light the none-to-encouraging everyday of the war in Afghanistan some yahoo in Michigan wants to execute a guy who is actually a hero, a person with the balls to do what is right, regardless of consequences. And the consequences for such action can be serious indeed. As one writer at Alternet observes:

Regardless of whether he is found guilty and sentenced to prison, Manning’s life will be irreparably destroyed. “If you are deemed a whistleblower in the Army, there is a very good chance of it ruining not only your career but your life,” says David Debatto, a U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent who saw several such instances while serving in Iraq in 2003. Manning was already "pending discharge" when he made the complaints, but now, even if he isn’t charged, he will most likely be dishonorably discharged. This will mean a loss of all benefits and difficulty getting a decent civilian job, a bank loan or a lease.

Manning is not the first such military whistleblower to face serious repercussions and retaliation; not just from the military, but from the government, fellow soldiers, friends back home and even the general public and the media. The military is infamous for trying to silence soldiers who speak out against the war. Each whistleblower who is publicly denounced and punished acts as a prohibitive warning silencing any other soldiers contemplating coming forward.

Blowing the whistle while overseas is particularly risky. You are completely under the control of the military. As of mid-2008, almost 3,000 soldiers have filed complaints with the Inspector General’s office for retaliation against them when they tried to expose information. That number does not include the multitudes who were too intimidated —or simply too despondent — to make reports.

Guys like Manning in the U.S. military are the ones I consider the real heroes. People who do what's morally right, even in the most uncongenial circumstances. There are far too few of them. And you can bet this poor guy is going to pay a heavy price for being a hero.

This is not the usual tack I take with the military. In many circles I would be considered "unpatriotic" because I don't fall all over myself in gratitude and worship for our military heroes. As I've said before, I consider the U.S. military to be principally an arm of the empire. As such it will be continually employed in wars against our enemies, which if you haven't noticed, never seem to be defeated because they just keep multiplying. This is the nature of empires. They must constantly be at war. First, to keep their gigantic, bloated military machines occupied; and second, because since they are so despised by the rest of the world, there will always be enemies on every side. For the individual soldier, airman, sailor, or marine--more than likely not by choice but by economic necessity--caught up into the froth of patriotism and the endless billows of smoke being blown up your butt about being a hero and a "professional," I have nothing but sympathy and pity for you. You're just a tool, an eminently disposable tool, of forces far beyond what any of us can control.

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Despondex

Attention: The video below is squirrelly in the way it works. That is, it doesn't work like you expect it to. However that's not a big problem because if you click right here, the video comes up and plays just like normal.


FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful

Very amusing. Don't miss the "natural remedies" toward the end of the clip. They go by fast. And I think Dr. Alman Wei should run for Congress. I'd vote for him.