The Distant Ocean

Translating Bloomberg on Netanyahu

Somewhere down there on the list of the 1,231,967 ways Israel punishes the Palestinians for the sin of living in the wrong place is the creation of "enterprise zones" in the Occupied Territories, which allow Israeli corporations to take advantage of a population that's been pushed into poverty and desperation through years of total Israeli control over nearly every aspect of their lives.  The latest example of this is Benjamin Netanyahu's push for "economic peace" through the creation of an industrial park in the Jenin district.

Unfortunately the Bloomberg article I saw about this was almost incomprehensible due to the standard obfuscations.  So I've gone through and corrected some of the more offensively obsequious phrasing for you:

Netanyahu, who will announce his government today following the Feb. 10 elections, is betting that improving the Palestinian economy...

"is eager to take advantage of cheap Palestinian labor"

...will create conditions for more favorable negotiations toward a Palestinian state.

"and determined to focus on anything other than negotiations toward a Palestinian state."

Critics say that without political progress, his economic initiative...

"delaying tactic"

...faces obstacles as formidable as the 723-kilometer (450-mile) fence...

"wall"

...Israel is building to keep out potential terrorists. 

"to steal Palestinian land."

The park, destined to employ 14,000 Palestinians...

"exploit"

Hey, always happy to help.

ALSO: Whitewash completed!  Result?  White:

Military Advocate General Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit on Monday instructed the Military Police Investigation unit to close the inquiry into soldiers' accounts of alleged misconduct and serious violations of the army's rules of engagement during Operation Cast Lead.

He said it was unfortunate that the soldiers, who discussed their Gaza experiences in private on Feb. 13 at a military academy session which was later leaked verbatim to the media, had been careless about accuracy.

"It will be difficult to evaluate the damage done to the image and morals [of the armed forces] in Israel and the world", his statement said.

A vision of things to come

The most frightening, or maybe informative, headline I saw last week: "Bank Execs Pleased With Tone Of Meeting With Obama".

This would be something like "Mafia Bosses Pleased With Tone Of Meeting With District Attorney" or "Vampires Pleased With Tone Of Meeting With Van Helsing".  Except in those cases it would be a surprise.

Runaway Train

Can you imagine an existential action film written by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Andrei Konchalovsky?  Neither could I until I watched it for myself about 20 years ago.  I've seen it several times since then, but never in a movie theater until last night, and while it's a great film in any context it was clearly meant to be experienced on the big screen; my knuckles were literally white even though I knew everything that was coming.

The performances in Runaway Train are nearly all pitch-perfect, and Jon Voight in particular is like a force of nature as Manny.  I wanted to share the best exchange in the film with you:

Sara:  You think you can sacrifice someone else's life instead of your own!  You're an animal!
Manny:  No!  Worse.  Human.  Human!

It's filled with truths like that, spoken and unspoken.  This is one of the most stark, uncompromising, haunting films I've ever seen—so immediate that you feel like you live it rather than just watching it.  If you've never seen it, you owe it to yourself.

(One of the most surprising things to me about Runaway Train was that it was produced by none other than Golan-Globus, who were otherwise responsible for some of the most egregious dreck of the 1980s.  How the same team that made Cyborg and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo managed to produce a film of this caliber is one of life's eternal mysteries.  Then again, I can forgive them a lot for having put Mathilda May on the screen buck naked for, oh, nearly two hours in Lifeforce.)

Chomsky on Geithner

Via the Real News:

One of many money quotes: "They're simply recycling the Bush-Paulson measures and changing them a little, but essentially the same idea: keep the institutional structure the same, try to kind of patch things up, bribe the banks and investors to help out, but avoid the measures that might get to the heart of the problem."

Topolanek totally unprepared to rock

Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek displays his musical ignorance with this criticism of Obama's spending plans:

"All of these steps, these combinations and permanency is the road to hell," Topolanek said. "We need to read the history books and the lessons of history and the biggest success of the (EU) is the refusal to go this way."

Dude, it's a highway to hell.

"The lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever"

As he so often does, Gideon Levy cuts to the heart of the matter:

The soldiers' transgressions are an inevitable result of the orders given during this brutal operation, and they are the natural continuation of the last nine years, when soldiers killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians, at least half of them innocent civilians, nearly 1,000 of them children and teenagers.

Everything the soldiers described from Gaza, everything, occurred during these blood-soaked years as if they were routine events. It was the context, not the principle, that was different. An army whose armored corps has yet to encounter an enemy tank and whose pilots have yet to face an enemy combat jet in 36 years has been trained to think that the only function of a tank is to crush civilian cars and that a pilot's job is to bomb residential neighborhoods.

To do this without any unnecessary moral qualms we have trained our soldiers to think that the lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever. It is part of a process of dehumanization that has endured for dozens of years, the fruits of the occupation.

It's honest, fearless Israelis like Levy who give me hope that Israel might just have a chance of pulling back from its insane descent into the moral abyss.

By the way, if you're wondering what he means by "the only function of a tank is to crush civilian cars", here's an example:

I took this picture in 2002 a few blocks from Arafat's compound in Ramallah (just before we headed to the compound).  As you can see, the Israelis not only used tanks to crush cars, they actually used the crushed cars to build roadblocks.  Hey, at least they weren't letting them go to waste.

The Israelis had crushed all the cars in the parking lot outside Arafat's compound, too.  It's just a thing with them.

Glenn Greenwald rapidly depleting world's straw supplies

I've mentioned Glenn Greenwald's fondness for caricaturing the left before, but he seems to be taking it into overdrive lately.  Here's a straw man from his article a few days ago about Obama's message to Iran:

There will be no shortage of people attacking this as a Chamberlain-like capitulation to the Evil Persian Hitlers, and there will be an equally vocal group mocking it as an empty gesture from America's bloodthirsty and war-craving emperor.

(Bonus irony: see here for Greenwald's argument that "the seemingly endless string of military interventions over the last several decades" is "what an empire does, by definition."  And just what do we call the person who runs an empire, Glenn?)

Apparently dissatisfied with that effort, he tried to top himself with this bit today:

Those who reflexively and blindly criticize whatever Obama does (based on the immovable, all-consuming conviction that he is intrinsically Evil) are nothing more than the opposite side of the same mindless coin as those who reflexively and blindly praise whatever Obama does (based on the immovable, all-consuming conviction that he is intrinsically Good).

Maybe so, but they're not exactly equally prevalent outside of Glenn Greenwald's straw barn—considering that I've seen numerous examples of the latter and, oh, zero of the former.  I suppose it's possible that I've just missed the explosion of "Obama is a bloodthirsty, war-craving, intrinsically Evil emperor" blogs, but I doubt it.

As I said before, there's a tendency on the left to say "this far and no further", meaning that my opinions define the limits of reasonable criticism.  Greenwald does it with a vengeance in this latter article, defining his own positions as the model of what a "rational citizen" should think and distancing himself from the Manichean robots to his left who "reflexively and blindly criticize" Obama based on their "immovable, all-consuming conviction that he is intrinsically Evil."  Of course, the point of these repeated grotesque caricatures is to reaffirm his credibility for the great mass of his Democrat-voting audience, who might otherwise begin suspecting his judgment or motives when he takes on their guy; the ritual denunciations let his liberal readers know that he shouldn't be mistaken for one of those Marx-reading, Nader-voting, tree-humping yahoos to his left, no matter how harsh his criticisms may sound.

I'm sure Greenwald is trotting out this routine more often now because with a Democrat instead of a Republican in the White House he's getting much more pushback from his fans, but that doesn't make it any less irritating.  I appreciate much of what he writes, but this is one of the main reasons that I only read his stuff when I happen across a pointer to it somewhere.

The impossibly high bar jump

I don't know what's funnier: the hypocrisy of Barack Obama's epistle to the Iranians instructing them that their "rightful place in the community of nations...cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions," even as a U.S. nuclear submarine and amphibious assault ship are running into each other a few miles off of Iran's coast, or this assessment of Iran's reply by Brian Murphy of the Associated Press:

But Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's response was more than just a dismissive slap at the outreach. It was a broad lesson in the mind-set of Iran's all-powerful theocracy and how it will dictate the pace and tone of any new steps by Obama to chip away at their nearly 30-year diplomatic freeze. [...]

Khamenei set the bar impossibly high — demanding an overhaul of U.S. foreign policy, including giving up "unconditional support" for Israel and halting claims that Iran is seeking nuclear arms.

So in Murphy's view, Iran is setting an impossibly high bar by 1) asking U.S. officials to stop going light years beyond their own intelligence services' estimate regarding Iran's nuclear program and 2) asking not that the U.S. stop supporting Israel, but stop doing so unconditionally.  Or in other words, it's completely unreasonable for Iran to ask the U.S. either to stop lying or to treat Israel like any other nation.

And a look at the fuller context of Khamenei's impossibly high bar also shows that Murphy can't distinguish between a demand and a rhetorical question:

Has your hostility towards the Iranian nation changed? Where are its signs? Have you unblocked the assets of the Iranian nation? Have you lifted the oppressive sanctions? Have you given up your mudslinging and making accusations against this great nation and its popular officials? Have you stopped your unconditional support for Israel? What has changed? They give the slogan of change but we have seen nothing in practice. We have seen no change.

Yes, what outrageous "demands" these are.  Why oh why are our enemies so unreasonable?  And why do they insist on locating their countries on top of our oil?

THE DEPTHS OF OUR RESPECT: Glenn Greenwald goes from lamenting that "it's becoming increasingly difficult for honest commentators to do anything else but conclude that the only improvements that will be made by Obama will be cosmetic ones" (in reference to civil liberties assaults and executive power abuses) to lavishing praise on the cosmetic improvement that Obama's message to Iran represents.  He even went so far as to claim that Obama "never once mentions Iran's nuclear program."  What did he think Obama meant by "terror or arms"—handguns?  Slingshots?  Limbs attached at the shoulder?  And Obama made another clear reference to that alleged nuclear program when he said that Iran's "capacity to destroy" wasn't a measure of its greatness.

Yes, Obama's overture to Iran represents a tactical change from the past 30 years, but to characterize it as "deeply respectful" (as Greenwald does) is absurd.  Obama's message was crystal clear in its paternalistic condescension: if only Iran will set aside its terrorism, its mad pursuit of nuclear weapons, its irresponsibility and its rejection of peaceful actions, we might finally deign to let it "take its rightful place in the community of nations."  Or in other words, we'll let Iran come back to the dinner table if it will just apologize for hitting its sister.  This was nothing more than an extended remix of Obama's Inaugural Day dig that "we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

And then there's the more indirect but no less serious insult of Obama ludicrously boiling down the conflict between the U.S. and Iran to "serious differences that have grown over time."  Apparently our violent overthrow of their elected government in 1953, our subsequent quarter century's worth of support for a brutal dictator, and our backing of Iraq as it killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians are entirely balanced out by their takeover of the U.S. Espionage Den in 1979.  I can't help but recall Jimmy Carter's statement that there was no need for the United States to "apologize or castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability" with respect to Vietnam because "the destruction was mutual."

When I read Obama's message I thought that the least he could have done if he was genuinely committed to change in this case was to apologize for (or even just acknowledge) the U.S.-backed overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, which is both public knowledge and entirely indefensible.  But even such a small symbolic gesture was too much.  So Khamenei was absolutely right to say that Obama's message was "the slogan of change" rather than the genuine article—and anyone who's able to set aside their U.S.-centric world view for a moment should be able to see that.

Even bigger animals

Israeli soldiers' letters to god:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

Here's a thousand words' worth for you:

To be fair, these soldiers are just following the IDF National Defense College head of research's prescription for the subhumans whose very existence denies Israelis their Lebensraum:

When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

As Noam Chomsky said about the United States four decades ago, "We have to ask ourselves whether what is needed ... is dissent – or denazification."

ALSO: Ha'aretz has published the longer transcripts of those soldiers in Gaza.

"I went to our soldiers and said, 'The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out ... This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, 'Why?' I said, 'What isn't clear? We don't want to kill innocent civilians.' He goes, 'Yeah? Anyone who's in there is a terrorist, that's a known fact.' I said, 'Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.' He says, 'That's clear,' and then his buddies join in: 'We need to murder any person who's in there. Yeah, any person who's in Gaza is a terrorist,' and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

"And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor - something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn't really help."

It's a measure of the current value system in Israel that the good guy in this story is the one who wanted to give Palestinians 5 whole minutes before destroying their homes and killing anyone who hadn't yet made it out.

Calling a spade a manual earth-moving device

By now you may have seen the firsthand accounts of what the most moral army in the world was doing in Gaza—but if you only read the U.S. press accounts, you've been missing something.  Here's the London Times quoting one soldier's story:

"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder. Each storey, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?"

But here's the L.A. Times' version of the same story:

"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up story by story," he was quoted as saying. "Each story, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself: 'How is this reasonable?' "

Apparently "I call that murder" was a little too strong for American readers, so they dropped it right out of the middle of the quote and inserted "he was quoted as saying" instead.  And not just once; here's how the L.A. Times wrote up another atrocity:

In another incident, a different squad leader said an elderly woman was shot dead on orders of a company commander as she walked on a road about 100 yards away.

That squad leader said he argued with his commander over the rules of engagement.

But here's the London Times version:

The same unnamed NCO said that his commanding officer ordered soldiers on to a rooftop to shoot an old woman crossing a main street during the fighting, which a Palestinian rights groups said left 1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.

"I don't know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don't know her story," the NCO said. "I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder."

Not in the L.A. Times, it wasn't.  Judging by the 270 current hits for "murder" on their web site, they haven't suddenly become reticent about using the word; I wonder why this case is different?  Maybe the editor just felt that the carefully crafted third-hand exposition of "that squad leader said he argued with his commander over the rules of engagement" gave the story more punch than some superfluous direct quote about "cold-blooded murder"?

The crowning irony: the L.A. Times specifically mentioned the "gripping language cited by two Israeli newspapers", before proceeding to bowdlerize it.

UPDATE: The self-same Richard Boudreaux who wrote the L.A. Times article cited above followed it up today with an article titled "Israel soldier calls order during Gaza assault 'murder'", which featured three more instances of the m-word in the text in addition to its prominent placement in the title.  Is this proof that major media outlets look to my web site to put their fingers on the hot, beating pulse of public opinion?  I think the answer is clear.

A turning point, cont'd

The New York Times reports an alarmingly positive trend:

Israel, whose founding idea was branded as racism by the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 and which faced an Arab boycott for decades, is no stranger to isolation. But in the weeks since its Gaza war, and as it prepares to inaugurate a hawkish right-wing government, it is facing its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades.

Examples abound. Its sports teams have met hostility and violent protests in Sweden, Spain and Turkey. Mauritania has closed Israel’s embassy.

Relations with Turkey, an important Muslim ally, have suffered severely. A group of top international judges and human rights investigators recently called for an inquiry into Israel’s actions in Gaza. "Israel Apartheid Week" drew participants in 54 cities around the world this month, twice the number of last year, according to its organizers.

More evidence that the attack on Gaza may turn out to be a critical turning point in the way the world sees Israel.

Oh ye of little faith

Today's trivial newslet:

Cancer patients who rely on religion to cope with their terminal illnesses are more likely to use intensive life-prolonging care, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. [...]

Cancer patients who had high levels of religious coping were three times more likely to receive aggressive life-prolonging care.

The researchers propose [login info here] precarious explanations like this one:

Religious copers may choose aggressive therapies because they believe that God could use the therapy to provide divine healing, or they hope for a miraculous cure while intensive medical care prolongs life.

So religious people think God needs an assist from modern medicine while he's cobbling together their miracle, or that he needs to work through their IV drip?  Somehow I don't think so.  And in offering these dubious explanations the researchers appear to have missed an obvious question: isn't it just a tad ironic that religious people are working so hard to avoid meeting God?  That the devout are so determined to postpone this consummation devoutly to be wished?

No, I think the actual underlying reason has less to do with modern medicine as a vehicle for divine healing, and more to do with the fact that most thieves would be happier postponing their trials.

The California opinioner

My reaction to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer debacle: is "intelligencer" really a word?

It is?

Well, I'm going to write the dictionary people and have that checked. Feels like a mistake to me.

Another victory for justice

Finally, nearly two decades later, El Salvador has fully emerged from its U.S.-sponsored descent into Boschean nightmare:

Salvadorans on Sunday elected a former TV reporter as the country's first leftist president, unseating a conservative party that ruled for two decades and choosing a government that will be dominated by former guerrillas.

Mauricio Funes, an affable political moderate running on behalf of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, claimed victory after nearly complete returns gave him a lead that experts said was insurmountable.

"This is the happiest night of my life, and I also want it to be the night of greatest hope for El Salvador," an emotional Funes said in a crowded hotel conference room, as cameras flashed and supporters cheered. "Thank you for choosing the path of hope and for overcoming fear."

To appreciate the tremendous significance of this victory, consider that the U.S.-trained and -backed military forces and death squads in El Salvador spent twelve years torturing, raping, murdering and massacring those who wanted to see it happen.

Roberto Lovato offered a perfect summary of what this moment means:

I’ll just quote a song that says, "Y que venga la alegria a lavar el sufrimiento"—"Let the joy come and wash away the suffering." It’s something on an order I’ve never seen in my life. As a child of Salvadoran immigrants and as someone who’s spent time here and as someone who saw the Obama experience, I really can’t tell you what this is like, when you’re talking about ending not just the ARENA party’s rule, but you’re talking about 130 years of oligarchy and military dictatorship, by and large, that’s just ended last night. You’re talking about $6 billion that the United States used to defeat the FMLN, as you mentioned earlier. You’re talking about one of the most formidable—a formerly political military, now political forces, in the hemisphere, showing the utter failure of not just the ARENA party but of somebody in particular, too, who has a special place in many of our hearts: Ronald Reagan. This is the defeat of Ronald Reagan, nothing less.

And more generally, the defeat of the United States and its resort to terror and oppression throughout the hemisphere.

So congratulations to the people of El Salvador, and thank you for following millions of other people in Latin America in giving us yet another illustration of what real democracy looks like.  I only hope that some day we'll be wise enough and brave enough to follow your example.

ON A RELATED NOTE: A few weeks ago I watched Innocent Voices, an excellent film based on the life of screenwriter Oscar Torres about the Salvadoran civil war in general and the abuse of child soldiers by the Salvadoran government in particular.  As dark as the subject matter was, it was handled beautifully, and the ultimate message—especially now—was one of hope.  Highly recommended.

I can believe he changed!

Dr. Quentin Young (Martin Luther King's doctor and a Chicago buddy of Barack Obama's) describes the expedient evolution of Obama's views on health care:

DR. QUENTIN YOUNG: Well, Barack Obama, as we know, was a community organizer, a very lofty calling, in my book, and he made the decision, when the opportunity came, that he could get more done politically, and he accepted the nomination for the seat in the State Senate. It’s not that long ago, really. It’s about a six, eight years ago.

Barack Obama, in those early days—influenced, I hope, by me and others—categorically said single payer was the best way, and he would inaugurate it if he could get the support, meaning majorities in both houses, which he’s got, and the presidency, which he’s got. And he said that on more than one occasion, and it represented the very high-grade intelligence we all know Barack has.

However, as his political fortunes went upward, including the campaign for presidency, the nomination and, finally, the election, he qualified his position from saying it’s the best system, but that given the past American history with employment-based healthcare, he would have a plan that—and he has put one forward—that encompasses other incremental approaches.

Just another illustration of the fact that Barack Obama is very good at getting Barack Obama elected to higher and higher public offices, but unconcerned about remaining faithful to the principles that were supposedly his reason to do so.

Charles Freeman

Let's get one thing straight: Charles Freeman most certainly did express support for Chinese repression of the Tiananmen protests:

I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than -- as would have been both wise and efficacious -- to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at "Tian'anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action. [...]

I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

And in another email Freeman said that the lesson of Tiananmen is that "one should strike hard and strike fast rather than tolerate escalating self-expression by exuberantly rebellious kids."  I've seen multiple articles claiming that Freeman was just describing the dominant view in China rather than stating his own views, but as the fragments I've emphasized above make clear, he was doing both.  This doesn't mean that Freeman was happy about the massacre, of course, but he explicitly supports the repression of dissent by China.

Setting that aside, I never understood the euphoria over Freeman's appointment to the National Intelligence Council.  Yes, it's very nice that he said 9/11 was in part caused by U.S. support of Israel and that Israeli violence against Palestinians is a barrier to peace.  But how excited should we really be that someone with relatively sane (though avowedly amoral) views would be summarizing intelligence reports for the emperor and his coterie?  I'd be just as enthused to hear that Obama was mandating waterless urinals in all government buildings.

And while I'm always happy to see the Israel lobby getting kicked in the groin as Freeman made a point of doing after his resignation, I'd have more respect for him if he'd either 1) stuck it out, if it was in fact his own choice to resign, or 2) blown the whistle on the Obamaites if they asked him to leave.  But he decided to do the usual Washington good soldier routine instead.

Overall I find it odd and even a bit discouraging that progressives spent any time considering the significance of the Freeman appointment*.  There's no doubt whatsoever where Obama stands on Israel/Palestine (and many other foreign policy issues)—and the appointment of one somewhat less doctrinaire person to a mid-tier bureaucratic position makes not the slightest difference in that.  I honestly couldn't give a rat's ass who Obama ends up appointing instead, and I don't see why any other progressive should either.

* (Yes, I'm aware of the hilarious irony here.)

Why we're doomed

In a poll last month that asked Americans to rate 20 issues as top priorities, global warming came in dead last (at 30%), behind such pressing concerns as deficit reduction (53%) and moral decline (45%).  Hangnail removal wasn't included in the list, but it looks like it would have handily beaten planetary catastrophe.

And in a new poll focusing exclusively on the environment, global warming still came in dead last; far more people are concerned about pollution of drinking water (84%) and soil contamination (80%) than they are about the transformation of the planetary environment to something radically different from that in which human life evolved (60%).  The poll report notes: "Not only does global warming rank last on the basis of the total percentage concerned either a great deal or a fair amount, but it is the only issue for which public concern dropped significantly in the past year."

The poll also shows that the percentage of Americans who think the threat of global warming is exaggerated is at record levels:

As recently as 2006, significantly more Americans thought the news underestimated the seriousness of global warming than said it exaggerated it, 38% vs. 30%. Now, according to Gallup's 2009 Environment survey, more Americans say the problem is exaggerated rather than underestimated, 41% vs. 28%.

Compare this with the reality that nearly every official forecast of the effects of global warming has been exceedingly cautious (mainly thanks to heavy political pressure from the world's largest per capita carbon emitter), and the observed effects are regularly exceeding those estimates.  It just doesn't get any better, does it?

There's at least one bright ray in the gloom, though: puppies are still cute!

[ Previous trip to the land of poll-driven despair here. ]

Well, that's deeply reassuring

Iran-Contra alumnus and Obama co-conspirator Robert Gates:

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Wednesday that the current American administration as well as those that follow it will exercise extreme caution before launching a pre-emptive military strike against an enemy state. [...]

"I think one of the biggest lessons learned in this is, if you are going to contemplate preempting an attack, you had better be very confident of the intelligence that you have," Gates told PBS.

"I think that the lessons learned with the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] and some of the other things that happened will make any future president very very cautious about launching that kind of conflict or relying on intelligence."

So from now on the United States will be "very very cautious" before committing the supreme international crime of initiating aggressive warfare.  I don't know about you, but this really puts my mind at ease.

Blame California!

A new study points out that 62% of 2008 foreclosures occurred in four states (Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada).  Here's a brief summary of the California data:

California in particular was responsible for a disproportionately high number of foreclosures. The state may have had only 10 percent of the nation’s housing units, but it had 34 percent of the nation’s foreclosures in 2008. (Nevada, however, had the highest foreclosure rate, as you’ll see in the map below.)

California was especially vulnerable, the authors wrote, because the homes that its residents bought were quite expensive compared with their incomes.

(See the link for the referenced map.)

So on behalf of all Californians: sorry for submarining the U.S. economy, thereby devastating the world economy, thereby vastly reducing the chance that we'll do anything serious to stop global warming, thereby all but guaranteeing a Mad Max future for the human race, everyone.  What can we say?  Buying that $850,000 condo just seemed like a can't-lose proposition at the time.

Rationality becoming more fashionable?

So this would seem to say:

America is still a predominantly Christian nation, but it's becoming both less Christian and less religious, according to the results of the new American Religious Identification Survey.

According to the poll, which came out today, the percentage of Americans who define themselves as Christian has dropped from 86 percent in 1990 to 76 percent in 2008.

In one of the most dramatic shifts, 15 percent of Americans now say they have no religion -- a figure that's almost doubled in 18 years. Americans with no religious preference are now larger than all other major religious groups except Catholics and Baptists.

Or one of the more toxic brands of irrationality may be becoming less fashionable, anyway.  But I don't think we can start celebrating a victory for reason until atheism manages to outpoll Wicca:

Meanwhile, the number of atheists, while still small, has nearly doubled from 900,000 to 1.6 million. ... Some 2.8 million Americans now say they identify with new religious movements like Wicca, paganism or spiritualists.