The Distant Ocean

Blacks now merely 18 times more likely than whites to go to jail for similar crimes

Who says we're not a color-blind society?

Congress has changed a quarter-century-old law that has sent tens of thousands of blacks to prison for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient treatment to those, mainly whites, caught with the same amount of the drug in powder form. [...]

The measure alters a 1986 law, enacted at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, under which a person convicted of crack cocaine possession gets the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine.

The legislation reduces that ratio to about 18-to-1.

Scoff if you will, but at the rate of a 5.5x correction every 24 years we might actually be incarcerating blacks at the same rate as whites for the same basic crime by, oh, 2058 or so.  Progress!

An injury to one

My brain is on strike at the moment and refuses to allow me to write.  Negotiations are ongoing, but until we reach an understanding here's an essential article for you about the inspiring, courageous, and all-around extraordinary Emily Henochowicz.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it

Two bits of more-effective-than-usual clicktivism for you.  First, from CCR:

An Algerian man who was wrongly detained at Guantánamo for nearly 8 years has gone missing after the United States sent him back to Algeria against his will. Abdul Aziz Naji did not want to return to Algeria because he feared persecution from both the Algerian government and militant anti-government forces.  The Obama Administration violated both U.S. and international law by forcibly repatriating Mr. Naji, and Center for Constitutional Rights is now deeply concerned as neither his wellbeing nor whereabouts are known. In the press, Algerian officials have given mixed signals about whether or not Mr. Naji is being held in secret detention, but they have at no point revealed his location or provided evidence that he is well.

Please write the Algerian Embassy in Washington, DC (at mail@algeria-us.org) and the Permanent Mission of Algeria to the United Nations (at mission@algeria-un.org) and demand that the Algerian government immediately account for Mr. Naji's whereabouts and well-being.

So please do send mail about this, since the more people the Algerian government hears from, the more they'll know that people around the world are paying attention to what they choose to do with this man and the better his chances will be.  To say it's the least we can do after subjecting him to eight years of hell would be a serious understatement.

Second, Jewish Voice for Peace has started a campaign to persuade TIAA-CREF to divest from corporations that support the Israeli occupation, and although the campaign has just started they've already been successful in getting TIAA-CREF to respond to their initial petition and securing a followup meeting.  JVP has an online petition they want you to sign (whether or not you're currently a TIAA-CREF participant).

This posting will self-destruct in five seconds.

Google's "ruin Google" plan continues apace

Having successfully ruined its main search page, Google has turned its attention to ruining Google News as well, with its July 1st rollout of an atrocious new format; see here for a good summary of the noxious suckitude they've foisted on their long-time readers.  Google has since backtracked somewhat by offering us the option to split the tiny column of useful information huddled in the center of the page into two columns which still use the same amount of screen space—hilarious, to be sure, but not an improvement.

So what can you do?  Thus far news.google.ca and other Google international news sites haven't been sullied with the new format, so you can switch to one of those temporarily, but Google is almost certain to get around to ruining them soon.  The best major alternative news portal I've seen is news.ask.com, but it's a bit underdesigned and lacks the customization that made the old Google News so useful.

Fortunately for us, Some Dude decided to take matters into his own hands and create a customizable lookalike to the old Google News page, at breakingnewsfeeds.com—and despite a few rough edges I actually prefer it to the pre-ruined Google News.  See here for some discussion of the site, along with comments from Some Dude (aka bmwolgas, may his user alias forever be praised).

If anyone else has a news aggregator to suggest, please do, since I've found this is the easiest and least painful way to get my daily exposure to mainstream news.

FOR THE KICKS: Bored?  Check out this support thread where Google asked its users for feedback on the new format (starting a little over a month prior to the rollout), got back hundreds of responses that ran about 99.997% scathingly negative, and proceeded to ignore them all.

Everyday heroes

I normally do everything humanly possible to avoid the non-news of the day, but I'm glad I read this article about Shirley Sherrod:

"I decided to stay in the South and work for change," said Sherrod, now 62, who believes her father's killing was more about a Southern black man speaking up to a white man than about who owned which animals. The all-white grand jury didn't bring charges against the shooter.

That summer, when she and several other blacks went to the county courthouse to register to vote, the county sheriff blocked the door and even pushed her husband-to-be, Lester Sherrod, down the stairs, she said. Activists used that incident to get a restraining order against the sheriff so blacks could register to vote, she said. [...]

Because of discriminatory lending practices, black farmers were losing their farms in the late 1960s and '70s. After college, Sherrod co-founded New Communities Inc., a black communal farm project in Lee County, Georgia, that was modeled on kibbutzim in Israel. Local white farmers viciously opposed the 6,000-acre operation, accusing participants of being communists and occasionally firing shots at their buildings, Sherrod said.

That's just a sample; read the whole thing and see for yourself.  It's a reminder of how many extraordinary people there are out there just going about their lives without fanfare or recognition.

So thanks, right-wing liars, for bringing this remarkable woman to national prominence and giving her the attention she deserves.

A week of liberal amusement

Last week truly was a treasure trove of brain-punching asininity from liberal commentators.  First, the always reliable Mark Morford explains why he wants Dick Cheney to keep on living for a while:

Besides, will it not be lovely for Dick to witness Obama sail into his second term, replace a third of the Supreme Court with people who actually have souls, and overturn/reverse nearly every law, stance and spiteful stratagem with which Dick ever fouled the earth? You bet it will.

It's breathtaking to see just how superfluous reality is to Morford's personal relationship with his god, isn't it?  But in his defense, maybe he means that Obama is going to spend his second term overturning/reversing nearly every law, stance and spiteful stratagem of Dick Cheney's that he's currently spending his first term solidifying/enhancing.  Could be, right?  You bet it could.

Then there was the also-reliable Digby with this gem (feel free to ignore the near-incomprehensible setup and just read the money quote):

Since the Village is essentially a Republican town perhaps they assumed that liberals were all going to be the same dead-enders the Bush cultists were, defending their man until the day he was out of office (and then insisting they never liked him in the first place.) That's what "little people" (and paid political hacks) are supposed to do. But liberals are not known for cultlike devotion to their leaders [...].

Ah ha ha ha!  Ooh, my sides, stop!  Seriously though, Digby, you really might want to take that up with the aforementioned Mark Morford.  Or maybe Ezra Klein.

Finally, here's John R. MacArthur doing his best to shred the credibility of John R. MacArthur:

I’ll leave to such scientists as James Hansen whether the target for reduction should be 350 parts per million — to keep the polar ice caps from melting — or if 450 ppm is a realistic aim. And I’m not qualified to respond to such respectable climate-change critics as Alexander Cockburn who exhibit seemingly reasoned skepticism about the human contribution to global warming.

(Dammit, remember my sides?  And how I was asking you to stop?  Oh, right, that was Digby, sorry.)

Yes, Alexander Cockburn exhibits "reasoned skepticism" about global warming in exactly the same sense that the Grand Wizard of the KKK exhibits "reasoned skepticism" about interracial marriage; see here, here, here or here if you haven't followed me following his precipitous slide into masturbatory Hitchensesque contrarianism on this topic.  And if you read the rest of the article's introduction you'll see that MacArthur has exhibited a similar level of intellectual rigor when it comes to the topic of global warming more generally.

Thank you, liberals, for making my week so entertaining.

Portrait of things to come

Just after midnight on Saturday I was driving back to San Francisco, and as I passed by Interstate 580 on the way to the Bay Bridge I could see that traffic was at a complete standstill.  It turns out this was the reason:

The incident started around midnight when two CHP officers tried to stop a white Toyota Tundra pickup that had been speeding and weaving in and out of traffic on westbound Interstate 580, said CHP Officer Sam Morgan.

The officers used a loudspeaker to direct the driver off the freeway, but he stopped on I-580 west of Grand Avenue, Morgan said.

As officers walked toward the pickup, they saw the man pick up a handgun and open fire on the officers, police said. [...] They said the driver was armed with a rifle and a shotgun as well as the handgun and fired at least two of the weapons during the shootout.

He was wearing body armor, by the way, so it seems clear that he had a plan in mind.  So why did this guy go postal, according to his mother?

"He hasn't been able to get a job because he's an ex-felon and nobody will hire him," she said.

She said her son, who had been a carpenter and a cabinetmaker before his imprisonment, was angry about his unemployment and about "what's happening to our country."

Williams watched the news on television and was upset by "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items," his mother said.

Ok, so here's some schmuck who's felt the tender mercies of radical corporate capitalism and has been subjected to right-wing judicial philosophy.  And who did he conclude was the most appropriate target for his rage?  Why, Congress and its numerous "left-wing agenda items" (like funding multiple wars, bailing out Wall Street, handing over more power to health insurance corporations, etc, etc), of course.  And he's not the only one.

I'm sure we can all guess which "news on television" Williams was watching, and I have to say that the warping of this one human mind truly was an impressive feat by the right-wing propaganda machine in this country.  And I'm not exactly going far out on a limb when I predict that we'll be seeing much, much more of the fruits of their tireless labors over the next few years.

But as much credit as they deserve, one reason they can succeed in drilling these fantasies into people's heads is because there is no competing left narrative in the mainstream.  That's partially due to various institutions functioning exactly as they're intended to and squelching that narrative whenever it rears its ugly head, of course, but it's also a result of the fact that the putative left in this country worships at the twin altars of "pragmatism" and "reform", and has nothing but contempt for anyone who speaks or acts from principle.  It's constitutionally incapable of offering people a story that would help them make sense of the daily atrocities they're subjected to, and in that vacuum the hideous distortions of reality spewed by the right are just that much more able to take root.

And when the actual left aligns itself with this ersatz left—as it has for years, and shows no sign of stopping—it does its own little part to ensure that we'll have many more gun-toting lunatics like Williams in our future.

UPDATE: More details on Williams' plan:

Convicted felon Byron Williams loaded up his mother's Toyota Tundra with guns, strapped on his body armor and headed to San Francisco on Sunday with one thing in mind: to kill workers at the ACLU and an environmental foundation, prosecutors say.

Williams, an anti-government zealot on parole for bank robbery, had hoped to "start a revolution" with the bloodshed at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco, authorities said.

Thank goodness there are patriots willing to defend us from civil liberties organizations and funding for environmental protection—two of the most severe left-wing threats to our freedoms today, I'm sure we'd all agree.

Remember Memento?

[ No spoilers, I promise—they're against my religion. ]

I went into Inception fondly remembering Christopher Nolan's Memento, and I came out trying to remember the same thing, because nothing that happened in the theater gave me a reason to think about anything else.

Ok, that's not exactly true: I did spend some time thinking about the confused narrative, the rules that were mentioned one minute and ignored the next, the standard-issue busy/loud/boring action sequences, the truly epic miscasting of Ellen Page (and the lesser miscasting of that guy from Mysterious Skin and Brick, who was at least fun to watch for the fond memories he inspired of his better films), the lack of any emotional connection to the characters, the fact that holding music in a constant state of crescendo effectively nullifies any drama it might otherwise be trying to suggest (and the fact that there shouldn't be multiple occasions in a film where you can't even hear the dialogue over the soundtrack), the ability of a 148-minute movie to have so many one-dimensional characters, and the headache I'd gotten from the unending aural assault.

I also thought how rolling around on the walls and ceiling was better when JoBeth Williams did it.  And how a movie about entering someone else's dreams just isn't as interesting without Dennis Quaid and a giant rubber-suited snake dude.  And how there was less tension in this whole film than there was in a one-minute scene of a guy taking a gun out of his coat in The Secret in Their Eyes.  And how it turns out that it really is possible to waste Pete Postlethwaite's talents.  And how when a movie aspires to be a science fiction film, an action film, and a psychological study/love story at once, it can actually fail simultaneously on three levels.

But mostly I just tried to remember Memento.  You remember Memento, right?  Ah, Memento.

CCR works hard, so you don't have to

What have the fine folks at the Center for Constitutional Rights been up to lately?

Earlier this week, a federal judge granted a motion filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Civil Liberties Defense Center, and other defense counsel, to dismiss the indictments in U.S.A. v. Buddenberg, a federal prosecution of four animal rights activists in California (known as the AETA 4) for allegedly engaging and conspiring to engage in "terrorism" against an "animal enterprise." The government's claim of terrorism is based substantially on First Amendment protected activities such as picketing, chalking the sidewalk, chanting and leafleting, but none of these specific acts were mentioned in the indictment.

On Monday, a federal judge sided with CCR and dismissed the indictments of the AETA 4 for lack of specificity and held that the indictments were so vague and general as to fail to provide defendants with notice as to what if any offenses they had committed.

Pushed through Congress by powerful lobbyists for corporations and institutions profiting from animal research, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) criminalizes a broad swath of protected First Amendment activities. The Court's dismissal is "without prejudice" to the government to re-indict, but the published order represents an important victory not only for those accused, but also for CCR in its ongoing work to challenge the COINTELPRO style targeting of environmental and animal rights activists in what has come to be known as the "green scare."

Beautiful.  See here for more background on some of the real-world horrors of the AETA (the successor to 1992's AEPA)—one of the lesser-known but more odious bipartisan legislative hairballs belched up by Congress in those heady years after 9/11, when no assault on civil liberties was too extreme.

And while I was visiting CCR's site I also noticed this:

[T]he Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed eight Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests regarding the United States government’s knowledge of, and actions in relation to, the May 31, 2010 attack by Israel on a flotilla of six vessels in international waters seeking to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, and U.S. policy towards the blockade of Gaza, which has entered its fourth year. The FOIA requests were made to a number of U.S. departments and agencies, including the Coast Guard, the Department of State, the Navy and the U.S. European Command.

Wonderful.  And this is why I hand over hard-earned cash to CCR every year: because they're doing exactly the kind of stuff I want a rights group to do with my money.  I secretly suspect they're reading my mind, because time after time when I find myself wishing that someone would do something about that, they do something about that.  Thanks again, lawyers!

Spain wins!

I know it's a few days late, but I wanted to congratulate Spain on its historic victory!  I think there's an important symbolic subtext to having Spain score such a dramatic win not only over the Netherlands but all other European countries as well (not to mention the US).

I know it might be a surprise coming from me, but I was really hoping the US would win this one.  We're the best at so many other things, but never the things where I want to see us succeed.  At least we managed to make it into the top ranks, though that hardly seems like an achievement given our enormous advantages in this arena.

Oh, right, I guess I should give you the link and an excerpt:

Spain has opened the world's largest solar power station, meaning that it overtakes the US as the biggest solar generator in the world. The nation's total solar power production is now equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station.

Spain is a world leader in renewable energies and has long been a producer of hydro-electricity (only China and the US have built more dams). It also has a highly developed wind power sector which, like solar power, has received generous government subsidies.

The new La Florida solar plant takes Spain's solar output to 432MW, which compares with the US output of 422MW.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!

It's category errors all the way down

Offered for your amusement:

For many liberals, this is the summer of their discontent.

Already disappointed with President Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on campaign promises, they now contemplate a slowing economic recovery and a good chance of Republican gains in November — two developments that could make enacting Obama’s agenda even more difficult.

It reminds me of the age-old debate: should we continue our selfless efforts to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq/Afghanistan/Kosovo/Vietnam, or is the cost to ourselves just too high?

It's all that bad—don't make the mistake I did of reading the whole thing.  Let me show you a little more of what you won't be missing:

• "Face it," [Eric Alterman] concludes, "the system is rigged, and it’s rigged against us." His essay is subtitled: "Why a progressive presidency is impossible for now."
• "It simply took too long to pass health care," says Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. "What should have been seen as an important progressive victory didn’t feel like it was as much of a victory because it just took so damn long."

Yes, I know if they could only have passed the self-same bill about a week faster I'd be ecstatic about it.  Quite possibly orgasmic.  Blast that discouraging delay!  In fact, now that I think about it I realize that most of my complaints about the Obama administration are scheduling-related.

Trust me, your life will be richer for having missed any more of this world-class rationalization.

Memo to Norman Solomon

TO: Norman Solomon
RE: Your interview, "From Wall Street to the war, this isn't what progressive democrats voted for"

Norman,

Yes it is.

- John

A serious question

Here's Noam Chomsky shamelessly plagiarizing the point I stole from him:

The study makes it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran’s military spending is "relatively low compared to the rest of the region," and less than 2% that of the US. Iranian military doctrine is strictly "defensive,… designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities." Iran has only "a limited capability to project force beyond its borders." With regard to the nuclear option, "Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy."

Though the Iranian threat is not military, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II, which yields "substantial control of the world," one influential figure advised (A. A. Berle).

But Iran’s threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence. As the Institute study formulates the threat, Iran is "destabilizing" the region. US invasion and military occupation of Iran’s neighbors is "stabilization." Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is "destabilization," hence plainly illegitimate.

I sometimes fantasize about an interviewer asking the prevaricator-in-chief something like this: "Mr. Obama, the Bush administration said over and over that Iraq was a grave threat to the United States in 2003.  And the warnings you and your administration constantly sound now about Iran are strikingly similar.  So in your estimation, does Iran pose an even more awesome existential threat to the United States now than Iraq did in 2003?"

I don't even care what towering edifice of bullshit he erects in response—I'd just like to see him have to sit there and listen to the question, wondering whether it's serious or a complete piss-take.

Another flotilla victory

In my previous posting about the many successes of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, I didn't mention (or even anticipate) this one:

Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that have long battled Israel with violent tactics, have begun to embrace civil disobedience, protest marches, lawsuits and boycotts—tactics they once dismissed. [...]

Officials from Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, point to the recent Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, in which Israeli troops killed nine activists, as evidence there is more to gain by getting Israel to draw international condemnation through its own use of force, rather than by attacking the country.

"When we use violence, we help Israel win international support," said Aziz Dweik, a leading Hamas lawmaker in the West Bank. "The Gaza flotilla has done more for Gaza than 10,000 rockets."

Coming from the Hamas leadership that's a stunning statement, especially considering the background:

Hamas's turnaround has been more striking, said Mustapha Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian advocate for nonviolent resistance. "When we used to call for protests, and marches, and boycotts and anything called nonviolence, Hamas used these sexist insults against us. They described it as women's struggle," Mr. Barghouti said. That changed in 2008, he said, after the first aid ship successfully ran the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

"Hamas has started to appreciate just how effective this can be," Mr. Barghouti said.

From "women's struggle" to "more effective than 10,000 rockets"?  And note that Barghouti says this change started with the first flotilla in 2008, despite the fact that the world largely ignored the blockade challenges until the Mavi Marmara massacre.  So not only was Hamas open to learning this lesson, they started learning it even before the massacre so greatly increased the prominence and effects of the Free Gaza movement's work.

I read similar stories in the runup to the Iraq war (for which I don't have the links, unfortunately): people throughout the Middle East said they were able to counter extremists in their societies who were calling for revenge against all Americans by pointing to the millions of protesters in the streets here and saying, see?  Many Americans are opposed to what their government is doing.  So when I hear people bemoaning the pointlessness of those protests—after all, Bush just ignored them, right?—I wonder if they've ever stopped to consider that the most important effects of protesting (and this is just one of many) are often invisible to the participants.

And this is exactly why it's a major mistake to discount the potential effectiveness of any and all activism, no matter how symbolic or small or futile it might seem: because you never know who's paying attention or what effect it will have on them.

Hey, check out those fish in that barrel over there

It's interesting how if you rip our overlords' homilies violently out of context, they often make perfect sense.  Here's Hillary Clinton with today's case in point:

[W]e must be wary of the steel vise in which many governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit. ...  Democracies don't fear their own people. They recognize that citizens must be free to come together to advocate and agitate, to remind those entrusted with governance that they derive their authority from the governed. Restrictions on these rights only demonstrate the fear of illegitimate rulers, the cowardice of those who deny their citizens the protections they deserve. An attack on civic activism and civil society is an attack on democracy.

... [W]e have to begin asking the hard questions, whether countries that follow the example of authoritarian states and participate in this assault on civil society can truly call themselves democracies.

She also asked us to "think for a moment about the civil society activists around the world who have recently been harassed, censored, cut off from funding, arrested, prosecuted, even killed."  Thanks, Hillary; I do in fact spend plenty of moments thinking about exactly those people.

I know you're waiting for the hammer to fall, but c'mon, I prefer at least some challenge.

OK, JUST ONE FISH: Without the slightest hint of irony, Clinton said the "leadership and support" of countries like Canada could contribute to "the expanding strength of civil society" and lead to the "true institutionalization of the habits of the heart that undergird democracy."  You know, like beating the tar out of journalists.  But again, it's hard to argue with her when she claims that this represents the true institutionalization of the habits of nominal democracies.

AND A BONUS QUIZ: Without looking, try to guess which of the following countries Clinton feels are helping to expand the strength of civil society, and which are crushing it in their steel vise of pure evil.  The answers may or may not surprise you!

A. Canada
B. China
C. Congo
D. Cuba
E. Egypt
F. Ethiopia
G. Iran
H. Lithuania
I. Mongolia
J. Poland
K. Russia
L. The United States of love and puppies
M. Venezuela
N. Zimbabwe

It would be wrong

It would be wrong not to read Time's Africa bureau chief Alex Perry throwing a titanic hissy fit in the comment section of FAIR's blog, and it would be even wronger not to read Jonathan Schwarz delivering a decisive groin kick  to Perry and Time in response.  Luckily Perry's head is embedded so far up his ass that his groin was protected!

I've always thought of Time as the USA Today of news magazines, but after seeing the intellectual rigor demonstrated by their Africa bureau chief I may have to downgrade that to People.

And I am a Zio-nist!

Oh, the apparent irony:

Not all rock artists have proven susceptible to the boycott pressure. Public Image Limited singer John Lydon refused to cancel his July gig in Israel. Israeli newspapers reported that the former Johnny Rotten had confirmed he’d play in Tel Aviv and that he castigated those bands that canceled for making enemies out of their fans.

Not only selling out but shaking his finger at those who didn't?  Enjoy the filthy lucre you'll make playing in that "fascist regime", poseur.

Actually this doesn't bother me, since I never had much use for the Sex Pistols anyway; when it came to punk I much preferred the Dead Kennedys (who could actually write a song) or Fear (who could not only write a song but play their instruments*).  And in particular I never had much use for Lydon, who always came off as a smirking, self-involved twit.  So now I can apply a retroactive patina of political respectability to my musical biases, and Lydon can take his rightful place in the company of such well-known English anti-establishment icons as Sir Elton John and Commander of the British Empire Rod Stewart.

* (If you're interested, see here for an interview with Spit Stix in which he talks about the brilliantly twisted guitar solo in this song.)