The Distant Ocean

Are you inexperienced?

Apex hypocrisy: liberals who just last week were fiercely denying that their sensei Barack Obama was too lacking in experience to be president have now switched, without missing a beat, to pounding Sarah Palin for her lack of that self-same experience.  Hey, whatever argument works at the moment, right?  Who gives a damn about honesty or integrity or consistency?  As long as it helps your team, anything at all is justified—isn't that right, liberals?

I'm not sure what bugs me more about this: the soul-searing hypocrisy, or the ludicrous notion that it requires "experience" to be the figurehead at the top of the pyramid of American empire.  Do these people really think Palin lacks the experience to implement the corporate agenda at every turn, to cater obsessively to the interests of the wealthy and privileged, to bellow and posture and order up a fresh helping of bombs for the people of yet another helpless nation, to mouth the platitudes that pacify us with the illusion of substance and the seductive doctrine of American exceptionalism?  Call me crazy, but I think she'd somehow manage it.

I wonder if the liberals who hold this belief have considered that the single most experienced person in America today—and therefore, apparently, the most qualified to lead us—is none other than George W. Bush.  He shares his eight years of presidential experience with their hero Bill Clinton, of course, but Clinton's experience is stale while Bush's is not just fresh but also quite extensive, thanks to his many experience-building forays in murdering foreigners.

Personally I'd be ecstatic to see anyone who lacked this experience become the President of the United States; in fact it's one of my political fantasies.  But as anyone who follows municipal and state politics knows, there's a filtering process that ensures that those who rise in political life are the ones who understand with crystal clarity which constituency it is they actually serve.  And there's not a single person on either major party presidential ticket who doesn't have that qualification.

What a refreshing change it will be to be screwed over by a largely black guy

Dennis Perrin reads my mind and writes what I'd write if I thought exactly what I think, and was Dennis Perrin.  A tasty bit:

Obama the community activist is long dead. The guy is one step away from managing an aggressive empire. Not quite what King had in mind, I'm guessing.

"I have a dream, that one day, a man of African heritage will rise up from humble beginnings, and take the reins of imperial power, bombing and starving poor people he's never met in order appease those affluent few who made his ascent possible. I have a dream today!" [...]

All I saw last night was collective mania and delusion. The fact that a black man may lead the next phase of empire is genius, a beautiful cover. How long the con will last is anyone's guess.

Anyone?  Wait, that's me!  And my guess is zero, four, or eight years, depending on how many presidential elections Obama manages to win.  Those who can see through his facade are doing so already, while vanishingly few of those who don't (or don't want to) ever will—just as precious few of the people whose critical faculties were overthrown by Bill Clinton's priapic charisma ever managed to break their mental chains.  There's nothing like the power of self-delusion, especially when it's carefully nurtured by a shyster of Obama's caliber.

Though there's a tiny part of me that's glad to see this particular symbolic barrier breached in a country with such a deeply racist past, that's thin gruel indeed compared to what Obama truly represents: yet another carbon copy Democrat, dedicated to neoliberal principles, exquisitely attuned to the needs of corporations, properly obeisant to Israel, and ready and willing to expend billions more on the military machine with which he fully intends to bloody his hands.  And as long as all of that holds true—as it has for all major party candidates during my lifetime, and likely will until I finish my mortal coil shufflin'—I couldn't care less about their melanin count or naughty bits.

The Jackpot Syndrome

I happened to read a bit of David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day at a friend's house recently, and this passage caught my eye:

Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence.  Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime.  I didn't want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks.  The money was tempting.  I just didn't know how to get it.

This is just one of the many things wrong with this country: there are too many people who fully expect they're going to be in the winner's circle some day, and so they want to protect the ones who are already there—and the system that put them there.  Few things have been more instrumental in cementing elite power and control in the US than this shared national fantasy of wild success just out of reach.

I thought about this tonight when I caught the last bit of the Hopemeister's convention speech.  I managed to contain my gag reflex long enough to reach the end, but it got away from me when I heard the music they played after he'd finished ("Only in America", by Brooks and Dunn), including lyrics like these:

A welder's son and a banker's daughter
All they want is everything [...]
Yeah only in America
Where we dream in red, white and blue
Yeah we dream as big as we want to

Which put me in mind of Justin Sullivan's deconstruction of this kind of delusion in "Great Expectations":

So all I wanted in the end
Was world domination and a whole lot of money to spend
Everything I touch, everything I see, fame and fortune, immortality
Well that's not much to ask, it's really not
It's not much to ask, just the same as anybody else

Or maybe Matt Johnson's "Anybody can be a millionaire / so everybody's gotta try."  But they're both Brits, so you wouldn't expect them to understand what makes this country the greatest on earth: the willingness of millions of people to sell the present for a future that most of them will never see.

(NOTE: "Too many people" link updated, since the original link went bad.)

Wall Street Journal dove taxonomy

The Wall Street Journal sees some positives in Obama's choice of Joe Biden as VP—foremost among them that:

...he brings some realism to national security questions, realizing that there are men and nations in the world that wish America harm and that sometimes they have to be confronted.  He voted for the Iraq war in 2002, understanding that Saddam Hussein was a threat, and he waited longer than the other Democratic Presidential candidates to turn against the war.

They contrast Biden's "realism" with the coterie of "superdoves who populate Mr. Obama's national security councils", citing in particular Susan Rice.  To get a feeling for Rice's superdove credentials, here she is talking about Iraq in December of 2002, in the runup to the invasion:

"It's clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It's clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that's the path we're on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side."

And here's what this hardcore superdove was saying in 2005:

Finally, if and when we succeed in our mission to establish a stable, secure and democratic Iraq, U.S. national security will be enhanced by our complete withdrawal. [...] Why not base our troops in more safe, friendly environs where they can be deployed rapidly to go after Al Qaeda elements and provide a credible deterrent against truly dangerous and hostile regimes, such as those in Iran and North Korea?

Now at this point you may be somewhat confused about the seemingly subtle distinction the WSJ is drawing between a "realist" and a "superdove", so I've put together a partial taxonomy to explain the differences:

• realist: Wants to kill people in countries that pose no threat to us whatsoever
• dove: Pejorative term for "realist"
• superdove: Wants to kill people in countries that pose no threat to us whatsoever, but does think we should stop killing them once we "succeed in our mission", thus freeing us to kill people in other countries that pose no threat to us whatsoever
• mega giganto maxidove: May sometimes require a UN Security Council resolution before they're willing to support killing people in countries that pose no threat to us whatsoever
• pacifist peacenik America-hating appeaser "dove": Believes violence should be used only as a last resort, typically in self-defense against a genuine threat.  These people are clinically insane and should be ignored.
• extreme dual overhead cam ne plus ultra pentium turbo dove: Rejects violence unconditionally, even in self-defense.  These people are also clinically insane and should be ignored, unless they're Jesus, in which case they are the infallible source of moral truth and should be worshiped as all-powerful deities in addition to being ignored.

I hope that clears things up.

Minimum safe distance

The most entertaining part of this election season for me has been watching the Changeling and his handlers turn a 7 point lead into a 5 point deficit by carefully hewing to the standard Democratic formula of playing to the mythical center.  Sure, it didn't work twice before, but the third time's the charm, right?

That's why I found the choice of Joe Biden as VP particularly yukworthy.  McCain has hammered Obama on his lack of experience for the past month—so how did the Obama campaign respond?  By putting some gray hair on the ticket.  The message is clear: sure, our guy is a lightweight, but don't worry, there'll be an adult in the room with him at all times.  The Obama campaign has done more than its share of backpedaling over the past few months, of course, but in this case they're actually backpedaling on their own candidate.  It's enough to make you wonder if Bob Shrum has joined the team.

I'm a little sad that the Democrats won't have a chance to match their staggering achievement of losing twice to George W. Bush—since I think they may well have been up to the task—but seeing how they manage to blow their endless list of advantages will still be good for a few laughs over the next few months.  Almost as fun as watching the dismay of the fervent believers in an inevitable Democratic victory, as they run headlong into the reality that they share the country with people who literally believe that their golden boy is the anti-Christ.

Apocalypse soon

[ WARNING: This will be a hopeful, uplifting post that will leave you so full of joy you may actually enter a euphoric coma and die.  Read with caution. ]

Regular readers here will know I'm somewhat concerned about global warming.  When a Mack truck is coming at me at 100mph from a few feet away, it tends to really focus my attention.  I'm just like that.

Jonathan Schwarz, a cheery, optimistic sort, looks on the bright side of the issue in this posting, in which he points out one ray of hope: there are sane billionaires out there who not only have the financial wherewithal and political clout to make something happen, but who actually take the threat of climate change seriously.  This is one of the reasons he believes human civilization will likely "manage to mitigate global warming and survive."

Now, I can be a cheery, optimistic fellow too; in fact my closest friends know me as Señor Sol.  But I'd say it's much more likely that humanity will not mitigate warming, but will still survive, albeit in a much changed world.  And the billionaires—sane and otherwise—will survive in that new world quite comfortably (as long as they're not hacked to death in their arctic redoubts by the massive mobs of displaced, starving peasants).  Which naturally mitigates their motivation to do anything about it.

I don't think we'll mitigate global warming for one simple reason: there's just not enough time anymore.  The tipping point—the point beyond which accelerating feedback effects make it all but impossible to reverse the process—is likely within 10 years, and quite possibly less.  And as I've observed before, at this point there's nowhere near the sense of urgency there'll need to be to avert it—especially because averting it will require large-scale changes that would be slow and disruptive to implement in the best of circumstances, even if they weren't already so near-impossible to achieve politically.

One informal but telling measure of that lack of urgency is the deafening silence in the presidential campaign on the issue.  We're not hearing about global warming all the time from Obama and McCain, and other politicos, for one simple reason: most Americans simply do not give a royal rat's ass.  They're focused with laser-like intensity on the economy, and they're plenty worried about the price of gas, because they can see and feel the effects of those things right here and right now.  But something that a bunch of NASA "scientists" claim could be a big problem in a few decades, or whatever it is they're saying now?  "We have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb", and "the next president and Congress must define a course next year"?  Yeah, sure, Poindexter.  Go tell it to the ozone hole!  Ha ha ha!

So barring a miracle, we're screwed.

But I've got my Señor Sol reputation to think about and "screwed" is a relative term, so I should point out that there is a sunny side: if you're over 30, or thereabouts, you'll almost certainly be dead before the worst hits.  It'll just make your twilight years a little more interesting.  And that's not all: if you have a reasonable amount of money—even if you're a few bucks shy of a billion—you'll be able to buy your way out of the worst of it.  Take that, 2.6 billion people living on less than $2 a day!

Poetry corner: The Frivolous Cake

It's rare to read a book and feel that you're experiencing genius, but that's exactly how I felt about Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan (and his other two Gormenghast novels, though Titus Groan is the strongest).  Peake's facility with language in general and metaphor in particular is breathtaking, and I mean that almost literally; there were times when I'd read a passage so perfect that my breath would catch, or I'd laugh out loud, or I'd shake my head in wonder as I reread it.  I'm usually impatient with authors who offer stylistic mastery in lieu of (or at least at the expense of) story—Thomas Pynchon, anyone?—and there's no doubt that Peake is guilty of that sin, but in his case it almost feels like a virtue.

We're here for the poetry, though, right?  So without further ado here's "The Frivolous Cake" from Titus Groan (which isn't representative of Peake's style generally, but is strong enough to stand on its own):

----------------------------------

A freckled and frivolous cake there was
     That sailed upon a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was
     In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly
     The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly
     Threw fish to the lilac sky.

Oh, plenty and plenty of hake there was
     Of a glory beyond compare,
And every conceivable make there was
     Was tossed through the lilac air.

I can't help but feel this says something important about the media

Number of results on news.google.com for "Iraq forgery": 203
Number of results on news.google.com for "Bigfoot": 2,590

UPDATE: "Iraq forge" fares somewhat better with 1,584 results, but it still can't compare to two nosepicking Georgia yahoos and their dead opossum (currently clocking in at 3,090).

Speaker for the Dumb

Via IOZ, here's Orson Scott Card demonstrating some of his self-professed centrism:

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

That's definitely some high-grade lunacy, though my personal favorite part of Card's howling screed is his horror that "A vast number of unmarried men and women have such contempt for marriage that they share bed and home without asking for any formal recognition by society."  Perhaps he thinks we should rename it a "copulation/cohabitation license" and emphasize that it's a license in exactly the same sense as a driver's license (in which case you have to wonder: how far could you go with your learner's permit? and would you have to have an adult in the front seat with you?).

But the most boggleworthy thing I've seen from Card would have to be this bit, from 2006:

In our country, our sharpest foreign policy mind is in the White House. And he has a majority of both houses of Congress at least nominally supporting his correct actions in defense of western civilization.

Yes, he's really referring to George W. Bush.  Go ahead, read it again and again.  It'll still say the same thing.  And you can read the rest of it for gems like this: "if Bill Clinton is the center -- well, there's only about three inches of Left to the left of Bill."

There was a time when I respected Card, who was easily one of the finest short story writers in science fiction.  I always assumed he was socially conservative based on his preachy Mormonism, but I had no idea how far that went until I read that in his book Empire, "a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States," apparently in retaliation for Gore's failure to claim his victory in the 2000 election.  Ha ha!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha!  Ha ha ha ha!  Stop, my sides, you're killing me!  And as you can see from the snippets above, dude is serious about this stuff (which is why the subtitle of the book is "A disturbing look at a possible future").  All of which led me to the conclusion that I wouldn't be reading much Orson Scott Card in the future.

[ Not much of a loss, since it's been years since Card has written anything as good as (say) Treason, and his penchant for reworking tight novellas into bloated novels—most egregiously when he padded out his short story "Lost Boys" with hundreds of pages of mind-numbing details about Mormonism—has always gotten on my nerves. ]

In which I discuss the concept of fair use

Given this bit of news—in which the Bush administration tries to achieve a new high in synchronized evil by simultaneously making it easier to kill off endangered species while also destroying Tuvalu—it's ironic that I chose this Onion editorial cartoon as an example of outrageous parody:

And just think: we have five more months of gloves-off lunacy to see how they can top themselves.  What a lucky, lucky country we are, and what a lucky world to have us in it.

And don't even get him started on Vietnam

I thought the Onion's editorial cartoons were intended as completely over-the-top, unbelievable parody, showing once again that it's a serious mistake to underestimate the level of moral blindness we're capable of achieving in this country:

Especially hilarious in light of this.  All it needs now is Maliki saying "And the price is worth it!" to achieve self-parody nirvana.

The 2003 version of this masterpiece of political commentary would have had Iraq as a seedy prostitute leering from an alleyway at George Bush, passing by on the sidewalk with papers in his pockets labeled "reconstruction $$$" and fighting the urge to acknowledge the foul temptress, and the caption would read: "Even the best of us has a weak moment."

(Seen in a paper in America's heartland; see here for similar horror.)

Begone, slatternly produce

Setting aside the horrifying elements and assuming it's not apocryphal, this article about life in Iraq under al Qaeda raises all sorts of thorny questions:

"They regarded the cucumber as male and tomato as female. Women were not allowed to buy cucumbers, only men," he said.

Ok, I can figure out anything that's significantly longer than it is wide, but what about more ambiguous items like the kiwi?  Sure, it's rounded like a tomato, but the hair strikes me as suspiciously masculine.

And as for this...:

"They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram," Hayyes said.

...I have to say that if you're spending that much time inspecting the ass-end of a goat to see if it lights your fire, it says much more about you than it does about the goat.

Radio silence

I'm out of town, so things will be slow around here for a while.

Solar energy at night?

Here's one for the oft-neglected good news file:

The problem with using solar power has been figuring out an inexpensive way to store the sun's energy for those times when the sun isn't shining, said Nocera. Although it could be done, the cost is prohibitive with current technologies.

Taking a page from photosynthesis in plant life, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, came up with a process to use the energy from the sun to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, according to a report from MIT. Later, when it's needed, the gases can be combined inside a fuel cell. That reconnection creates carbon-free electricity that can be used to power an office building, a home or even an electric car — whether the sun is shining or not.

I'm skeptical of the ability of science miracles to save us from what we're doing to the planet, but this is an exciting discovery no matter what. And just think: not only might it pull us back from the brink of global warming catastrophe, but it may even enable us to destroy ourselves in some entirely new and different way!

Controlling the Untermenschen

Israel once again demonstrates its unflagging commitment to human rights:

"After all my responses [the Shin Bet agent] said to me: 'I want to talk to you openly when you return from Israel so that you will have an acceptable reputation on the Israeli side. Either you make contact with me and agree to my demands, or you will not get any medical treatment which will cause you to be blind and you will become a burden to your family and friends,'" Wahidi said in his affidavit.

But he said he refused and was forced to return to Gaza without receiving any treatment. Now the 28-year-old, who married a year and a half ago, is completely blind in his right eye and losing the vision in his overstrained left eye.

"I might divorce because I can't stand in front of my wife as a disabled person," Wahidi said .

He is one of an unknown number of patients from Gaza who have been denied medical treatment after refusing to inform on their friends, neighbours and relatives. Many patients feel they are being forced to choose between preserving their life or protecting their community. Physicians for Human Rights says such pressure amounts to coercion and extortion.

More details on Wahidi's case here, including this:

Mr Al Wahidi – who had previously been given an exit permit – says he made clear that he would not co-operate, and that he would go to human rights organisations, the Red Cross and the press. He claims that Moshe, who had earlier said he was losing his patience, laughed and added: "What you are talking about does not exist in the dictionary of the IDF."

Apparently Moshe somehow missed the "IDF is the most moral army in the world" memo.

A quick quiz: which of the following headlines for stories about this PHR report comes from the Washington Post?

1. Israel's Shin Bet 'coerces ill Palestinians into becoming informants'
2. Israel demands Gaza patients be informants
3. Gazans' Access to Care Faulted
4. Does The Shin Bet Decide Who Lives And Dies In Gaza?

See here for the deeply shocking answer.

Cinematic analogy for the day:

Digital effects are to movies today what synthesizers were to music in the 80's.

(LEST I BE MISCONSTRUED: Because they're occasionally used with skill and subtlety, but much more often slathered on with abandon in the belief that more is inherently better; because the ease with which they can be utilized has made the creation of crappy, soul-depleting works more accessible and therefore commonplace; because their popularity has choked off support for the careful craft required for the alternative; and because it's reached a point where their presence in any significant amount nearly guarantees that you're experiencing some serious dreck.

I only wish we'd be lucky enough that what happened with synth would happen with digital effects, but they're just too much cheaper than the alternative for the studios ever to give up on them, so there's no way it's going to happen.  I was a lot happier when the effects in my mindless entertainment were brought to me by crafty effects wizards like Harryhausen and Trumbull meticulously constructing models and matte paintings rather than surly Cheeto-chomping nerds sitting at graphics workstations, but hey, we all have our crosses to bear.)

And victor's justice for all

Now that Satan's left testicle has finally been dragged into a courtroom, it seems like a good time to jump in the time machine and revisit another example of Balkans justice.  At the end of the last millennium Bill Clinton decided to establish NATO's "credibility" by attacking Yugoslavia, brushing aside a possible peaceful resolution in favor of a military assault (pointedly undertaken without UN authorization)—because, as Madeleine Albright reportedly chortled, the Serbs "need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get."

No doubt mindful of the fact that initiating a war of aggression is the "supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole," law professor Michael Mandel (and others) proffered charges against NATO to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.  This was the response of ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte:

Asked if she intended to look into the possibility that NATO had committed war crimes, she said she had received many reports about such NATO intervention, and was looking very carefully at them. She would take a decision about that and make it public, but that was not her priority.  Asked why not, she said her priority was the open inquiry she had found upon taking office on 15 November.

She reiterated this later when asked a followup question:

The priority was the open inquiry she had found upon undertaking her function on 15 September, she replied to a question about why the alleged killing of civilians by NATO was not her priority. She had many ongoing inquiries, including some related to NATO activities.

So the prima facie evidence against NATO was a lesser concern to her because the folder left open on the desk by her predecessor said "Milosevic", and it's very difficult to do two things at once, as anyone who's ever tried to inflate balloons while simultaneously juggling knives knows all too well.

Asked about the same topic a few months earlier (when Del Ponte's predecessor Louise Arbour was heading the ICTY), odious NATO mouthpiece Jamie Shea offered this priceless paean to victor's justice:

I think we have to distinguish between the theoretical and the practical. I believe that when Justice Arbour starts her investigation, she will because we will allow her to. It's not Milosevic that has allowed Justice Arbour her visa to go to Kosovo to carry out her investigations. If her court, as we want, is to be allowed access, it will be because of NATO so NATO is the friend of the Tribunal, NATO are the people who have been detaining indicted war criminals for the Tribunal in Bosnia. We have done it, 14 arrests so far by SFOR, and we will continue to do it. NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers, and of course to build a second chamber so that prosecutions can be speeded up so let me assure that we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to justice and I am certain that when Justice Arbour goes to Kosovo and looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslav nationality and I don't anticipate any others at this stage.

(Translation: if you want to put NATO on trial, buy your own damn tribunal.)  And here's another of Shea's oily explanations of the underlying principle.  I've emphasized my very favorite bit so you can enjoy it too!

We are the countries that overwhelmingly support this Tribunal, finance this Tribunal. The United States supplies the President, Canada supplies the Chief Prosecutor and NATO countries provide many of the other judges and officials of the Tribunal. We therefore are committed to facilitating its work although, as I stress, the Tribunal is an independent body, it makes its own decisions first and foremost.

And of course the ICTY did make its own decisions first and foremost; regarding Del Ponte's assertion that she had some sort of inquiry of NATO in place, I'd say the "theoretical and the practical" have been pretty decisively distinguished at this point.

At least it's reassuring to know that there are so many people out there tirelessly dedicated to protecting us from criminals with the poor judgment to fight for the wrong side.