Go Away! Don't Come Back!

Here comes some news that's been subdued lately. And I'm really sorry to see it come around again. Jews are killing lots of Arabs; Arabs are killing a few Jews. Wouldn't be great if this problem would go away and not come back ever? (Allow me just one more hallucination before we leave 2008.) It sullies every new year, and it's been doing that for 60 years.

Last night watching Rachel Maddow--a new favorite (there are not enough hours in the day for a news junkie like me; I have to self-restrict my TV if I'm going to blog, read, do anything else productive; then what happens is I discover people like Rachel, and Oxford PhD, no less, doing the news)--and she tells us that the Gaza strip is about twice the size of Washington DC--360 square kilometers. [Actually, that's not quite right, Rachel. DC is 259 sq km. So a proper rendering would be something like "Washington DC is about three-quarters the size of the Gaza Strip.*] So let me see here: our buddies in Israel are just bombing the living shit out of place one-quarter again the size of our national capitol crammed with about 1.5 million people. Just what is funny about this picture?

Well, to me it's a bit like a full-grown guy whipping up on a two-year old. And here we are, we Americans, making excuses for the full-grown guy. Just like we always do. Since the eruption of this latest Arab-Israeli crisis a few days ago, the Bush administration has blamed Hamas for the outbreak of the violence and said that Israel is justified in retaliating. What the hell?

Chris Floyd's outrage about this is instructive:

Here is a simple, stone cold fact. You cannot read or hear the truth about what is happening in Gaza from any corporate media in the United States. The only thing you will find there are regurgitations of Israeli spin, which are themselves only regurgitations of the kind of spin that American militarists have put on their own depredations -- for centuries now.

Floyd reports an even more damnable piece of news: these attacks by Israel have been planned for months! They would have happened without any provocation at all.

Papers in Israel -- in Israel, but not the United States -- are reporting the truth: the murderous assault on Gaza was planned not only before the six-month ceasefire ended -- it was planned before the cease-fire even took effect. Indeed, the cease-fire was part of the military plan to decimate the civilian areas of Gaza; it was a hoax, a scam, a deliberate feint to buy time for military preparations -- precisely the same strategy followed by the Bush Regime (and its bipartisan Establishment supporters) in "going to the UN" to seek a "peaceful solution" to the "Iraqi crisis" -- when the invasion was already in the works.

So now we learn that the Administration is pressuring Israel to relent. Oh, really? Ya think? Civilian deaths in Gaza have now risen above 60 and total deaths there surpass 350. (Just out of curiosity, I'd like to know the original source for these numbers. I'd be willing to wager they are higher.) I don't know where the figures stand today. Some of them have been caused by GBU-39 smart bombs the US has supplied Israel with. My recollection is that the Hamas rocket attack on Israel that ostensibly provided the bogus rationale for the massive retaliation killed 3 Israelis.

I'm not exonerating Hamas, not by a long shot. These guys are stone crazy for so much as tossing a rock at those people to their east who are even crazier than they are. But if we cannot have justice, a prerequisite for peace, I believe in the doctrine of fairness. This is insane.

*Just how anal is this, this ridiculous obsession with accuracy? I've decided it's overcompensation for the poor estate to which accuracy and correctness, not to mention morality, manners, and consideration for other people, have fallen in the dying empire.

Lists: I Love 'Em

It's that time of year for lists of stuff from the past year. You know, bests of, worsts of. That kind of thing. If I had any kind of memory at all, I'd construct my own list of stuff. But I'm doing good to remember last week, much less the whole year. So I have to rely on others to post decent lists for me. I've found a few, and I'll share:

The best list I've seen so far is Arianna Huffington's list of things she wants to forget about 2008. Most, as you might suspect, are politcally connected--several about McCain and Palin. I'm in broad general agreement with everything she lists, and thankfully, I can report that several items there I didn't have the foggiest idea about: Tricia Walsh-Smith, Josef Fritzl in Holland (mein Gott im Himmel!), Levi Johnston (whom I should have remembered, but why would anybody want to remember this nobody?), and Ashley Dupre (ditto).

I like movies, so I searched out a few lists of these: Rotten Tomatoes critics' picks for best and worst movies of 2008. Also Newsday's list, and the nice article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Then I discovered something that can only be described as a treasure trove for list lovers, trivia nuts, and information junkies: Fimoculous.com's concatenation of list of best-of lists for everything from ads to books to gadgets to music to websites and words. Be forewarned: you could sink into this and never surface. Random samples: Slate's best books, Ten Pretty Obvious Video Favorites, and last but hardly least, The Top 60 Japanese Words/Phrases for 2008.

Knock yourself out.

Like Pheasants (who couldn't even fly)

I'll admit it. I'm a Katrina junkie. I spent most of my formative years in New Orleans, and I love the place. Hurricane Katrina devastated the city--large parts of it are still nothing but wasteland over three years later--but it also devastated the thousands of us who know and love the Crescent City, and who, like everyone else had to watch the horror of the storm's aftermath on TV.

One of the true horrors, and one you didn't see on TV was the one that's the subject of this piece in Tomdispatch. A great deal of the media hysteria in the immediate aftermath of the storm focused on the widespread looting happening and the supposed sniping by black gunman after the storm. This, it later turned out, was greatly exaggerated, as in: it didn't happen at all. Mind you, I'm not saying looting did not happen. It did,by both whites and blacks. But snipers? Nope. Urban legend.

What did happen, however, was a bunch of white vigilante killings of black people across the river from downtown New Orleans in Algiers. This was alleged quite soon after the storm, but the full story is just now coming out. It's estimated that at least 11 young black men, all innocent of anything except being black and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, were shot and killed by white gunmen "protecting" their neighborhood. At a backyard barbecue several weeks after the storm, one of these vigilantes boasted about it being "like pheasant season in South Dakota. . . . If it moved, you shot it." You can read a substantial report about this under-reported atrocity here. And the video below allows a glimpse into the minds of the shooters.

This video about what went on in Algiers after Katrina, including interviews with a couple of guys who were shot and survived, moved me greatly:



In similar instances, the New Orleans police gunned down unarmed African-Americans in the aftermath of the storm. And the Gretna police chief and his officers refused at gunpoint to let desperate victims of the storm cross a bridge from ruined and flooded New Orleans to the untouched west side of the river. Check it out right here.

I don't think we'll ever know just how awful it was for those poor people left in the city after the storm. Suffice it to say the whole truth is a lot uglier than we suppose.

Ugly Americans Revisited

As the American people, sitting in the ruins of what used to be a great nation, impatiently await the departure of the vile little fraud in the White House back into the oblivion of Texas and into his deserved reputation as the worst president in the history of the republic, some (few) of us are considering what sort of charges these departing criminals should be accused of so they can be brought to justice and be punished. Without even considering foreign policy, the raft of Constitution-violation crimes is extensive: wire-tapping, domestic surveillance, rendition, unilateral suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and more. There's a body of opinion that regards the invasion of Iraq as a war crime. It's certainly comparable to the war crime of aggression we convicted the Nazis of at the Nurenberg trials.

Even without what I consider the most heinous of the Bush administration's crimes, there is more than enough to convict the man and send him away. Of course, there's hardly any likelihood of that happening. Nor, I'm sorry to say, do I think it possible that any of the people connected with the authorization of torture will ever be punished. Indeed, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out a couple of days ago, there's no lack of apologists for this crime. Although Greenwald is more fulsome, here's the gist of it: well, yes, it was torture, but we must understand the circumstances under which it was employed--that terrible 9/11 thing-- and the unsullied motivations of those who authorized it; it's a complicated question, this torture thing. This is not a minor position. No less than the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times propounds this argument, and says, in effect, that since our high-ranking criminals had pure motives, they should not be prosecuted for what they did.

I'm sorry, but this is veriest horseshit. Greenwald says the same thing, only far more eloquently. He also discusses one of the most reprehensible facets of the American character: our tendency, despite all evidence to the contrary, to consider ourselves morally, ethically, and intellectually superior to the rest of the globe. As our nation has descended steadily into the nasty, steaming pits of hell well explored by any number of nations before us, our homegrown apologists have become ever more irrational in defending the US for all the things we criticize other countries for. And we have steadily redefined what is moral and ethical and intellectually respectable until the terms are unrecognizable. No wonder so many people across the world despise us. Our hypocrisy reeks in everybody's nostrils but our own.

Reasons Not to Know the News, Holiday Edition

What kind of person dresses up as Santa Claus, knocks on the door of house on Christmas Eve where a party with more than 20 people attending is in progress, proceeds to kill nine people in the house, and then burns the structure to the ground? The first person he shot with his semi-automatic, by the way, was the hapless 8-year old girl that answered the door. A madman, obviously. A crazed assassin. A guy with a gun who was pissed off at his ex-wife, to be more precise. This story appeared yesterday, but that was Christmas, and I swore off reading or watching any news on the safe assumption that whatever it was, it would be bad enough to ruin the holiday. I was right, of course. I cannot help but think every time I read or hear of something like this of the insane gun culture we live in.

Case in point: the nut cases at the NRA are pushing for legislation allowing students at colleges and universities to carry concealed weapons. Read about it here. (We'll stop these college shooters, by God. We'll just allow everybody to pack heat!) Oh great idea. Let's have hundreds of concealed weapons where people are getting drunk all the time and live in dormitories. The good news is bills to allow this have failed in such bastions of gun crazy citizens as Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Kentucky, among other states. But the NRA has not given up, and a new group of collegiate gun nuts has formed their own pressure group to lobby for concealed guns on campuses.

Ain't this a great country?

Wish I'd Said That

Ever since I was about 11 or 12 years old, I've liked and collected aphorisms or other sayings that I'd run across somewhere that caught my eye, imagination, or heart. These sayings were printed on black pasteboard in various kinds of day-glo like colors. There was usually an illustration of some sort on there too. I had these things hanging all around my bedroom, which when I think about it now was pretty peculiar for a pre-teen. It might also be peculiar for a Medicare aged adult, too, for all I know, but I still do it. Only now I write these things down in one of those books with blank pages. And I certainly don't care whether it's eccentric, something you never want to be when you're 12.

So this Christmas Eve, I thought I'd share some of these random sayings. I really don't have to go too far. Open my little book about halfway, and I encounter these. See if any strike a chord with you, and let me know.

==Controversy equalized wise men and fools alike--and the fools know it.
--Oliver Wendall Holmes

==We live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual, because in spite of great scientific and technologtical advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
--Walker Percy

==I am dissatisfied, profoundly so, with the world as it is. But I would be dissatisfied with any world.. And I'd hate to lose my dissatisfaction.
--Alfred Kazin

==To succeed in the world, it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.
--Voltaire

==I can get along with the crazy people, it's only the fools I can't stand.
--Ezra Pound

==All the time we've saved/since we stopped praying for our souls/hasn't filled the hole/inside the human gut.
--Tony Hoagland "Volunteer"

==I had just about all I can take of myself.
--S. N. Behrman

and finally, a couple of longer ones:

==I almost think we're all of us Ghosts . . . It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
--Henryk Ibsen

==How to grow old with grace and firmness
Is the kind of eternal problem that poetry
Is best reserved for, imagining poetry
That isn't afraid of saying what time will do
To our taste and talents, our angles of observation.
--Carl Dennis "Eternal Poetry"

Blessed Christmas, everybody.

Unintended Consequences

In one of the most amusing and satisfying bits of irony I've encountered in a while, it appears that the famous throwing a pair of shoes at Bush has had a salubrious effect. The shoes are Model-271 from the Baydan Shoe Company of Istanbul, Turkey. The company has been inundated with orders for the shoe from all over the world. So many that owner Ramazan Baydan has had to hire an additional 100 workers to keep up with orders for 300,000 pairs of the shoe. This is about four times the normal number sold. Iraq, naturally, is the largest customer, but sales are brisk in neighboring Arab countries, too. All of the details are here.

Ho Ho Ho--3 Little Tales of Christmas Cheer

Christmas in another three days. All of my kids will be here. All of them healthy and employed, and from all outward appearances, happy, thank God. I wonder just how many fathers get to say that about their grown children this Christmas. The times are tough. Christmas is going to be lean for millions of Americans. 2009 is looming up as a terrible year for the economy, both in the U.S. in Europe, and elsewhere. which means the little people everywhere are going to get squeezed even more than they're being squeezed right now.

With this as backdrop, herewith three economy-connected stories:

1. First off, a look at what's been happening to some of the bailout money that Hank Paulson and Ben Barnacke told us was vital to keep the sky from falling on our heads.* Well, $1.8 billion--that's billion--has been handed over to rescued banks' executives in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits. It's as if nothing happened for these guys. Their gravy train is still streaking down the tracks. Mind you, the banks we're talking about here were the ones so poorly managed they had to be propped up with rescue money. So the guys getting all this money are the morons who ran their banks into the ground.

2. Speaking of morons, guess who just got a raise for their outstanding service and performance, not just in handling this economic crisis but in skillfully tackling all the problems of the last eight years? And at the most austere time for Americans in a couple of generations? Congress. That's right, boys and girls. They're giving themselves a $4,700 hike; it'll cost us taxpayers an additional $2.5 million now to pay these bastards. It's even more slimy than you might think: Congress arranged some time ago to get their pay hikes automatically. (That was to avoid having to vote themselves raises out in the open.) During these troubled times, they had a chance to do the right thing. No way. An Arizona Democrat introduced a bill to forgo the raises for next year. It got 34 co-sponsors, but it never got out of committee. So much for concern about tough times.

3. Foreclosure rates were up 25 percent in October. By the end of the year, over a million bank-owned houses will be on the market, and that's about a third of all the houses up for sale in the country.

Merry Christmas.

*I recently read the best piece yet that I've seen on the collapse of Wall Street. I highly recommend it to you other economic dumbos that may be reading this. It's lengthy, but well worth it.

Amen, I Say

OK. This whole Rick Warren thing. At the risk of tarnishing forever my progressive image, if not blowing it up entirely, I have to say I cannot understand what all the furor is about. As anybody who's not brain dead knows, the proverbial shit has hit the proverbial fan when Obama named Warren to pronounce the invocation at the inaugural. My fellow progressives are raising cain about this. Just goggle "Rick Warren" on Technorati or Bloglines and duck. You'll be inundated. Honestly, I think it makes more sense to get exercised over an issue that really means something, like the escalating war in Afghanistan. What's going on here is some political horse-trading that does no read damage to anybody, despite the volume of wailing from the gays and liberals.

Rick Warren is your standard issue so-called Christian right-winger--actually, there's little that's Christian I can discern in these people, but that's another story. He runs a megachurch in Orange County, California, the prototype for rabid, knee-jerk conservatism, for goodness sake. That this guy is up on Obama's platform on January 20 saying a prayer may be incongruous, but it's hardly the end of the world. Nor is it a sign that Obama is either embracing Warren's views or dissing the gays. I don't agree with Warren on his views about gays. I don't think homosexuality is a matter of personal lifestyle choice. On the whole gay marriage thing (Warren's firm opposition to Proposition 8 in California is what gets the masses on the left totally riled up.), I don't much care one way or the other. I don't oppose these unions, and I don't care what they call them: marriages, civil unions, blessed cohabitations, love knots, whatever.

This fight is all about symbols. Having a card-carrying member of the Christian right on the podium is the real problem for the left, because Warren represents everything progressives loath. The progressive community is fuming because well, one of their constituencies, the so-called LGBT (God, what a horrid acronym.) group is highly offended and up in arms. And by God, we're in charge now, and we need our people in the spotlight. But here's the thing: Rick Warren is not going to change Obama's views on gay rights. He's not going to change my views, he's not going to change anybody else's views about it if he stands up there and says a prayer. Let's everybody just say "Amen" and move on to something important.

Raise Your Right Hand, Your Poor Bastard

Military recruiting is costing us taxpayers a bundle. Take a guess what kind of money we're talking about. Millions? Certainly! Hundreds of millions? No, dude, you're way too low. Try billions of dollars. It was a measly $4 billion in 2003 . . . the Pentagon's budget for 2009 for recruiting calls for a staggering $20.5 billion. Five times as much in 6 years. Doesn't anybody care about this? Bush couldn't find less than this for health care for kids, remember?

And here's something that'll surprise you. A Navy study over ten years ago found that "family incomes proved to be the most important economic variable … Enlistment rates are much higher when income is lowest and college enrollment rates are low.” Well, duh. You mean the military finds it easier to convince the mudsills of society to become cannon fodder? How novel! That's only been going on for thousands of years. The poor, shepherded by an elite officer corps, die for the rest. Thus it was ever so.

I'm always delighted to hear about how the military is pissing away millions of our dollars scouring the fields and hollows for poor kids willing to raise their right hands for a term in the military. This story about a $12 million recruiting facility near Philadelphia caught my eye recently. What we're talking about here is a walk-in playground for potential GI Joes and GI Janes. In this emporium of shoot-em-up video games and simulators, these innocents are presented "a unique opportunity to learn what it means to be the best-led, best-trained and best-equipped Army in the world by allowing them to virtually experience multiple aspects of the Army," says Pete Geren, Secretary of the Army. No, this glitzy place full of simulator toys for impressionable kids swimming in an irresistable hormone storm has but one purpose. Get their signatures on those recruitment papers.

The Army--and presumably the others, too--is none to choosy about who joins up either. They've managed to meet their recruiting goals only by lowering their standards. A high school diploma is no longer necessary, nor is a decent score on the aptitude test. The waiver policy has also been loosened up: serious misdemeanors aren't a problem anymore. Here we're talking burglary, narcotics/drug charges, aggravated assault, larceny, and breaking and entering. Health problems like bad eyesight and high blood pressure don't keep you out either. This is just the tip of a sooty iceberg. Recruiting is a sleazy business.

But they're recruiting for a sleazy business, so why not?