Dribbling Out

Dribbling out. That's what I would describe Obama's ballyhooed plan to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. Earlier this week, the president announced that he would withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of this year, and 33,000 total by the end of next year. We currently have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. In other words, then, by the end of next year, not this year, we will have removed one-third of our troops from a country we have been fighting a war in for over ten years. One-third! When in hell are the other two-thirds coming out?

Are you kidding me? A conflict that has already taken the lives of some 4,500 American soldiers, that has cost our country over half a trillion dollars, that is disapproved of by a majority of the American people, and that is being fought for no discernible reason other than to further enrich the grossly corrupt and incompetent Afghanistan government--do you seriously think the so-called Afghan National Army and the police force will be effective in securing the country from the Taliban no matter when we leave? That is the stated goal. But, as you might recall, the original reason we went into that country was to get Bin Laden and flush Al Qaeda from their haven there. Both those original goals have been accomplished.

But of course those goals have long since been overtaken by first, nation-building (establishing a stable democracy) to the present vague aim of standing up the Afghanistan forces to cope for themselves. An open-ended commitment, actually, with no idea of what the end of the US mission there looks like at all. How in the name of all that's holy has this country let this farcical situation continue?

And I'm sure you'll be surprised to learn that the Pentagon doesn't like Obama's timetable. Naturally. It's too precipitous for them. What else did you expect?

Well, I'm here to tell you that I think Obama has once again wimped out. If it were me, I'd have every last one of our troops out of there by the end of this year, all 100,000 of them. The policy of ever fighting a war there was folly. After ten years, it's madness.

Related articles

• Speed of troop withdrawal from Afghanistan depends on whether Biden or the generals won the argument (dailykos.com)
• US senators press Obama on Afghan withdrawal (alternet.org)
• Commentary: Obama's announcement marks a pivot point in Afghanistan (mcclatchydc.com)

Two Notable Items

First, I noticed this little notice today. It can only be seen as a bid for sanity. We now are witnessing people at the level of the national government who are introducing legislation that will begin moving the country towards a sane policy on marijuana. This is a first step only. But it's a significant one, not a baby step. The proposed legislation, introduced in the House by cosponsors Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX) aims at ending the federal prohibition on weed altogether. (Another five Democratic reps are co-sponsoring the bill.)

The Oakland Tribute reported that the bill would limit the federal government to enforcing cross-border or inter-state smuggling laws, and allow people to grow, possess, use or sell marijuana in states where it is legal to do so.

Of course, the states would still be able write their own marijuana laws, but this would be a huge step forward. Getting the Fed out of the insane business of spending God only knows how much of our vitally needed sustenance chasing stoners. And, be it noted, helping keep the price of pot so high that criminals are naturally all over it.

Currently 16 states and DC have legalized the use of medical marijuana, and legislation is pending in 10 more . By my count that's more than half the states of the Union. If you add the five additional states (including Oklahoma!) where bills to legalize medical marijuana never got out of committee, you are talking a fair majority of the states.

It's plain that the time has come for this issue. Straight out legalization cannot be too far away. The striated financial condition of just about every state in the U.S. is going to have lawmakers casting about everywhere they can to scratch up some revenue. A "sin tax" on legalized pot will have irresistible allure.  And all the winds are blowing that way.

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And the second item: I just keep discovering these great bands. This one I stumbled over quite by accident on a podcast.



This group is called The Rosebuds. A fantastic song, don't you think?

No, It Isn't

No, it isn't time to kill the liberal arts degree. It never will be that time. Even if only a tiny fraction of the college student body majors in something besides business-related subjects, there's always going to have to be some people around with the knowledge to remind all the others what lies at the core of us: our humanity. And that's what the humanities are all about, aren't they?

It appears that we're moving inexorably into an era where the accursed marketplace will call all the tunes. Everything will be judged by same criterion: does it help or hinder business. Are you ready for this world? I fear, despite my fervent wishes otherwise and all my instincts, that is the world we have already entered. As if to confirm it, I ran across another blog today that I will be reading regularly--yet another! (I can't keep up with all of them now.)--called "The Leibowitz Society"--by the way, if you've never read Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, your life is woefully incomplete--anyway this blog is dedicated to the preservation of knowledge for the rebuilding that will be necessary after the coming Dark Age. And this piece, coincidentally the first I've ever read there, concerns this very subject of liberal arts degrees.

Remember yesterday when I was talking about Ms Kim Brooks, the author of the piece that set off these ramblings? And I said I did totally dismiss her out of hand? This was because after several hundreds of words arguing that it was indeed time to kill the liberal arts degree, she ended up saying that she would not trade her education in English, and all that poetry, fiction, and theory, for anything. Which doesn't necessarily mean she would do it all over again if she were starting today, but even with 20-20 rearview vision, she cannot bring herself to say what she learned was useless. I sure as hell can't. Either for her or for me.

Related articles

• Business and the Liberal Arts (unfspb.wordpress.com)
• O yes, little college students, we live in a post-feminist world (badbadwebbis.wordpress.com)
• Religion and Liberal Arts Education (peripateticpedagogue.wordpress.com)

Is It Time . . .

I was already pretty well irritated by the time I had finished reading the title of a piece in Salon, the online general interest magazine (best thing about it, btw, is that it carries Glenn Greenwald's regular column). "Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?" the author, one Kim Brooks, asks. Well, I have to confess, I was prepared to go into full what-the-hell-kind-of-idiot-question-is-this mode, but by the time I got to the end of the article, I couldn't really be angry with her because I found myself agreeing with her, at least the stuff she said near the end of the piece.

Which followed a long, dreary lament that 1) liberal arts degrees are worthless in the marketplace; 2) the poor graduates owe thousands of dollars and the poor dears can't find a job; 3) the recession is real bad and it makes finding jobs harder; 4) liberal arts professors have no answers for these observations--she knows because she talked to several of them. She also thinks the universities should be more helpful to students in these employment matters, if only, I gather, telling them all the reasons they should not be studying liberal arts.

Well, okay. Not that employment is not a concern. It's a great concern. But my question is while we're rooting around in the crass realities of how we're going to handle our lifelong enslavement to the Almighty Marketplace, the only God the U.S. recognizes and worships unconditionally, what about the rest of us, the rest of ourselves, the part that makes us something other than economic units worth only the weight we register on the marketplace scales?

Stay tuned . . .

Related articles

• A Matter of Degrees, and a Matter of Money - or Should we Say Debt (timesoftexas.com)
• Will Psychology Majors Make the Big Bucks? (sciencedaily.com)

No Privacy

Back in the late '70s or early '80s, the Rolling Stones had a tune called "Fingerprint File"--at least I think it was in this tune--where Jagger moaned about "all secrecy, no privacy." It's a lament that fits our times even better than then, and it fit well enough 30 years ago, that's for sure.

Just thinking about the implications of my discovery that Google, a company whose products I use continually and habitually, is tailoring results of my searches to my own individual profile it has built up based on no less than 57 variables about me that it knows and applies. I've become a Heinz 57 Variety without even knowing it. In fact, I think that all of us are transparent to hundreds of commercial enterprises. We're being sliced and diced by data mining software daily. All this data in the service of selling us more merchandise we don't need. And this is hardly the whole of it. I think this Google thing is just the tip of the iceberg. How much does the U.S. government know about me? What lists am I on?

The very notion of privacy has become almost quaint. And you know what I think? I think that even if the American people had any idea about the tons of information numerous corporate entities as well as the U.S. government has on them, and believe me, they don't--well, there would be nothing they could do about it. Let's face it: the idea of democracy itself has become quaint. This thing we go through the motions of in the U.S. Well, it's a charade. The people have control over nothing. We belong to the corporations, the government belongs to the corporations, and both know everything about us. We live in George Orwell's world, and we may as well get used to it.

Related articles

• Datamining and privacy: don't shoot the pianist (zyxo.wordpress.com)

Google Is . . .

Here's a little quiz for you. This is a multiple choice question. It goes like this. Complete this sentence:

Google is:

a. Cool

b. Ubiquitous

c. Scary

d. Indispensable

e. All of the above.

You want to say e., don't you? Sorry. The correct answer is c. Scary. Okay. It was a trick question, just by way of introducing you to some information you may not know. I consider myself a pretty well informed person, and I did not know this.

The information I'm about to share can be found here, in a pretty stout article in The New York Review of Books--thanks to my friend Cecil for turning me on to it--about three new books out about computing. More specifically, the effects and future of the revolution computers have wrought in the world. The names of the books aren't important. You can read about them in the piece. But what I want to tell you about is some stuff I discovered that, I have to confess, I find bothersome indeed.

I pretty much knew that somewhere at some mega database in the sky that every place I've ever been to on the Internet is recorded and who knows how it's being sliced and diced. This thought is disturbing enough, but there's a lot worse. We all think that Google is pretty much working on a much improved and sophisticated version of the original algorithm. Which, as you recall, figured out what to throw up there first when one searched by figuring out what sites people most visited for that information. So-called "page ranking". There's probably a better way to explain it, but I trust you know what I mean.

So if you and I search for, say, the word "art," we're going to get the same thing back, right? Well, of course, you say. In fact, you could not be more wrong. Without our knowing it Google has been amassing a whole slew of data about us as individuals. And on every search we do, it applies this data to construct a search result just for us. There are 57 separate variables considered. Read this bit from the article:

The search process, in other words, has become “personalized,” which is to say that instead of being universal, it is idiosyncratic and oddly peremptory. “Most of us assume that when we google a term, we all see the same results—the ones that the company’s famous Page Rank algorithm suggests are the most authoritative based on other page’s links,” Pariser observes. With personalized search, “now you get the result that Google’s algorithm suggests is best for you in particular—and someone else may see something entirely different. In other words, there is no standard Google anymore.” It’s as if we looked up the same topic in an encyclopedia and each found different entries—but of course we would not assume they were different since we’d be consulting what we thought to be a standard reference.

If this ain't scary, I don't know what is. More on this tomorrow.

Related articles

• Google's collateral damage after algorithm changes, illustrated (thenextweb.com)
• Reverse Google Pagerank Algorithm (hobo-web.co.uk)
• Bursting the Bubble: Are We Isolated in a World Wide Web of One? (time.com)

A List

Things I find hateful:

• broccoli
• hyper-patriotism
• roaches
• people who abuse sales clerks and waiters/waitresses
• the New York Yankees
• being clumsy
• watching the Texas Rangers or LSU Tigers lose (especially to the New York Yankees and Alabama or Florida, respectively)
• incomprehensible poetry
• hypocrisy
• political
• religious
• moral
• the idea of Wal-mart
• Wall Street fat cats
• wildlife poachers
• all varieties of people and institutions that despoil the environment
• liars generally
• boredom
• being hurried up when I'm already hurrying
• people who blather on the telephone
• Fox News
• vincible ignorance about ordinary stuff
• militarism and racism
• sweet potatoes
• knowing that I will never, ever be caught up on reading
• sex traffickers 
• the entire airport/air travel experience
• people who are cruel to animals
• waiting somewhere with nothing to read
• anti-immigrant nut cases
• knowing that I've left probably half a dozen things off this list

Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire.
They are a terrific band.

Two different arrangements than those on their The Suburbs album.



Arcade Fire performs "We Used To Wait" on Sound Opinions from WBEZ on Vimeo.




Arcade Fire perform "Sprawl II" on Sound Opinions from WBEZ on Vimeo.

A Great Big Bored Outa My Gourd Yawn Already

The Republican campaign in one easy mock.

I told Susan, more accurately I forced Susan to listen to my rant about the absurdity of all the hullabaloo being made about the so-called "debate" among seven Republicans who want to be president. It's June of 2011, the first primary is in February next year. What the hell?

The rant was along several lines: first, that we are all going to be subjected from now till November of 2012 with the endless blather of not only candidates, but the pundits, commentators, and other talking heads who are going to breathlessly keep score on who's ahead and who's losing. Second, all of this will be carried on in great seriousness, as if who is elected president is going to really make a difference in the lives of ordinary Americans. Third, all this election crap will be inescapable if you a) read; b) watch TV; c) are conscious during the next 18 months.

I tell you, brothers and sisters, as I think I have already, I'm done with believing that politics in this country is anything more than a continuing exercise into the ways and means of advancing the interests of global corporations, keeping the Pentagon happy, and swelling the already obscenely bloated fortunes of the fat cats. To me, it's lamentable naivete to believe otherwise. It basically makes no difference whatever who is the president or from whatever party. The agenda is the same for any of them.

Making it all even more painful is the utter vacuousness of the campaigns of I-don't-care-who. The whole purpose of whatever comes out of their mouth is to say nothing substantial. Nothing that could possibly be construed as thoughtful or challenging. And this is matched by the mind-numbing predictability of media coverage. It's a race, you see, and all we're interested in is who's ahead and by how much and who's behind.

Pardon me, but fuck it. Let me know when somebody proposes substantial cuts to the defense department, advocates stiff taxation on those who can afford it, or tells the American people the truth about the real state of affairs instead of blowing huge quantities of smoke up their butts.

Matt Taibbi is the guy to read during this coming ordeal . . . Here's what he had to say about the so-called GOP debate:

• The clear winner was Michele Bachmann, who kept her insanity bottled up very effectively, only lied once or twice, and made the rest of the group look like vacillating stooges. 
• Man, I had forgotten in four short years how little there is in the way of actual ideas in presidential politics. Every single candidate last night was saying one version or another of the same thing: that the private sector rocks, the government sucks, we need to drill everywhere, reduce taxes and end regulation. 
• Newt isn’t going to make it to the New Hampshire primary, which is too bad, because watching his hyper-macho intellectual ego be battered by the reality of losing to Michele Bachmann is going to be extremely entertaining while it lasts.

He had other excellent insights that you can read here. Guys like Taibbi are the only people you should be reading during this coming ordeal.

Related articles

• After GOP debate, New Hampshire voters still looking (mcclatchydc.com)

Need a Yuk?

Well, then here are a couple of really bad commercials. And I do mean bad. Both of them are actually hilarious. Watch and see why.







Can you believe that this would ever sell a stick of furniture?