Month: June 2010

Why the frankness?

Like everyone on the outside looking in, I am surprised that Afghanistan has so many natural resources. Up until this time I thought we had attacked the country due to its strategic location and a desire to quash one pipeline and build another.

The question is, why are they telling us this? This is really weird.

In American journalism there is a phenomenon seen now and then called “Now it can be told.” After the fact, after the importance of immediacy has passed, when knowledge of government activity no longer makes a difference, we are sometimes told the truth.

Here is a document written in 1965 by Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton – an internal document never meant to be read in public. He’s answering the question asked by many in government: “Why we are in Vietnam?”

70% – To avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat. …20% – To keep SVN (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands….10% – to permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.

ALSO – To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used. NOT – to “help a friend.”

This document is part of the Pentagon Papers, or the real history of Vietnam. It was an internal history of our involvement in Vietnam commissioned by Robert McNamera and meant only for internal use. Daniel Ellsberg, then working for RAND, read the papers and found them so important that he risked his life and freedom to get this truth to us. He almost went to prison over it, and was only saved by an untimely burglary by Nixon. What the Pentagon Papers told us is that never once – never once had the American people ever been told anything true about Vietnam. Beyond just lying was the unavoidable conclusion: Lying was policy. It was natural and accepted. No one questioned it. Except this Ellsberg guy, who they wanted to send to prison.

Ellsberg said recently that he wanted more people like him in the Pentagon to release the truth to the American public. He wondered where they are, why the truth never gets out.

The release of information on the natural resources of Afghanistan might just be an appeal to our imperialist instincts. But it doesn’t fit.

So I am wondering if there is an Ellsberg in the Pentagon. Did someone get hold of some internal documents and release them? Is the press being told now about the true nature of the Afghan conflict because the information is going to come out no matter what?

That’s my guess.

Footnote: The extent and numerous locations for these minerals means that have not recently been “discovered’. Exploration has been ongoing, probably for decades. Was this the reason for the U.S./mujahedeen (aka “Al Qaeda”) expulsion of the Soviets in the 1980’s?
Footnote 2: Get ready for paternalism and a new, deep and abiding concern for the people of Afghanistan. Amity Schlaes of Bloomberg has captured the right tone in this op-ed – She says “now those tribes really have something to fight about.” Are you catching the arrogance? They are irrational, fighting over nothing. “We’re rational, they’re not” is the gilded gold coating on the attitude behind “imperial hubris”, one reason among many (another being the bombing and killing) concerning this conundrum that so many great minds have wrestled with: Why do they hate us?
Footnote 3: The idea that these resources will actually benefit the people of that country is odd. It’s never happened before with a resource colony. It would be a first.

Carole King plugs for NREPA

Carole King and James Taylor are on tour and will be playing at the Pepsi Center in Denver soon. As I read it, the “VIP proceeds” for each concert will be going to the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. This is a Montana environmental group that has steadfastly fought for “NREPA”, the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, over the years, never losing sight of that goal, never selling out in backroom deals, never taking Pew money.

AFWR is a loose group without a hierarchy, so loose in fact that they forget to tell the members that their dues are up.

Carole King and Rep Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from upstate New York are friends. Maloney is a steadfast supporter of wilderness and a backer of NREPA in congress. This is the connection that has kept NREPA alive all these years.

I hope that AFWR makes a bundle on the concert tour. They are worthy.

Heart and Souls

And now for something completely different …

I have been urging my lovely wife for years to watch the 1993 movie Heart and Souls with me. Finally last week she did. As expected, she enjoyed it very much and even found it moving.

The movie features a very young and extremely talented Robert Downey Jr., who plays Thomas Reilly. He is befriended as a young boy by the spirits of four people who happened to be killed in a bus accident at the moment he was born. For unknown reasons, their spirits attach to him, and he spends the first six years of his life with four very real but invisible friends, As if by magnetism, they cannot move more than a few feet from him. He can talk and sing with him, no one else knows they are there.

Little Tommy’s parents begin to suspect he is nuts, and fearing that they may be harming him, the four decide they must go invisible on their young friend. In a heart-rending scene, they bid him good bye. Twenty years later they are still attached to him, but he has long forgotten them. An angel comes by to pick them up, assuming they knew why they had been stuck with Tom. They had no clue – someone in heaven screwed up, so that they did not know they could enter Tom’s body and use him to rectify their lives. They were supposed to use him to do the one thing they most regretted not doing while alive. The reluctant angel gives them more time.

The four ghosts are played by Kyra Segwick, who jilted the love of her life before dying; Tom Sizemore, who stole some valuable stamps from a young boy and was trying to make good when he died; Alfre Woodard, who never got to see her kids grow up, and Charles Grodin, a singer who was afraid to perform in front of people. As the story moves forward, Downey has to play each of the other characters as they “enter” him and do what they must do. He also has to come to grips with his own inability to give love to others, most importantly, a girl named Anne, played by Elizabeth Shue (perhaps the only one in the movie not exactly right for the part. She’s a little cold and distant.)

It’s a schlocky chick flick, predictable and emotional. And I loved every minute of it. It is one of my favorite movies of all time. Make of that what you will.

By the way, the scene of the five lead characters moving in harmony down the street singing “Walk Like a Man” is forever imprinted on my brain. It is beautifully done.

The best tennis player ever

The late (and sorely missed) Mitch Hedberg said that he never met a tennis player who could beat a wall, the best player ever.

Here’s an anonymous poster named “Lizard” over at 4&20, saying something very important:

one thing’s clear, this is going to be one long summer.

this is Obama’s big chance, and Holder’s responsibility, to stand up to the 4th largest corporation in the world, and finally hold these blood suckers (sorry vampires) accountable for the negligent homicide and ecological plague their arrogance and greed has unleashed on the gulf.

but it’s hard when “the media” obsesses over the mood of the prez, analyzing his every gesture, and making his “ass-kick comment” the major feature of attention.

meanwhile, for those who can filter the bullshit, the story is out there: there was an on-deck showdown between trans-ocean and bp, and the greedy, shortsighted decision to replace the heavy drilling mud with salt water, combined with sloppy oversight of the blowout device (which had a broken seal that affected it’s ability to warn of changing pressure) caused this disaster to happen.

but that’s just the way the media rolls. same thing with Israel’s most recent murderous assault. i mean, imagine if this footage, got wide spread mainstream air time. and imagine if it was more widely known that the IDF had to admit it released edited video with doctored audio, inserting someone shouting “go back to Auschwitz”.

but no, it’s much more important for our slobbering propaganda blowhards to facilitate Ari Fleischer’s take out of Helen Thomas, because somehow her words are deemed more obscene than idf soldiers executing Turkish peace activists, journalists, and an American citizen in international waters.

watch the footage. Afterall, it’s your money that allows these atrocities to happen.

I’ve come to know Lizard a little but. He’s passionate, insightful, and seems well-read for his young age. Maybe he graduated in liberal arts; maybe he was a poor student in primary schools, as his mind is not tracked. And he thinks that in order to reach people it is important to say things in a nice way.

The thread that led to his comments was about the elections results. (They don’t matter at all.) And somehow it got sidetracked, and at some point the Israeli flotilla raid was injected.

Voting ≠ democracy. Israel ≠ a force for good. Palestinians ≠ evil. But this is a mindset that Lizard is dealing with, and understanding mindset is what matters.

The Republican mindset validates in the Israeli atrocity as a football fan watching a game. And they will try to pin the BP oil spill (now known in the media as the “Gulf” oil spill) on the Democrats. That’s easily understood. It doesn’t take much thought to be a Republican, as ignorance is far easier to grasp than denial.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have to somehow internalize all of this with the odd fact that there is a Democrat in the White House and a Democratic congress. Republicans “cause” bad things to happen, while bad things “happen to” Democrats.

The flotilla raid, therefore, is assigned in the mind of the Democrat to a sphere called “Neverland.” It happened, and is easily understood. It simply does not penetrate consciousness.

And the “BP” (not “Gulf”) spill … Ken Salazar doing a heckuva job … Obama feigning ass-kicking anger … all of that provides some refuge for the Democratic consciousness. Obama’s supposed anger reinforces the notion that there was “change” in November of 2008. If Bush were president and all of this had happened, as it would have, Democrats would be livid.

Neverland is a place of benign neglect. There are important issues all about – EFCA, single payer, Israeli barbarism, expanded wars and income and estate tax reform. These are the issues of our times. And yet when Democrats take power, the issues are no more addressed than with Republicans. They are merely acknowledged. There is a vague sense that they exist and that something positive should be done, and some effort among progressives to bring them to the surface. And then nothing.

Democrats are Hedberg’s tennis partner, that wall. His best shots coming bouncing back … the wall wins every time.

We will never beat the wall. The best thing to do is to stop playing the wall’s game.

Creep

Post-coital gratitude

I got a bit creeped out when I saw this photo. A right wing Democrat was being groped by a right wing Democrat – consensual incest. Later they will break out the cigars and celebrate Blanche Lincoln’s return to right wing politics after her brief and mandatory flirtation with progressivism during the primary challenge.

As with Howard Hughes or PeeWee Herman, the mind of the voting public should not be probed. It could be unsettling. I’ve been reading reactions to the election results here and there, and bloggers and pundits really do think that they can read votes and minds, as if there were some sort of cloud intellect out there pulling levers.

In 2006-08 there was a massive shift from Republicans to Democrats, and since that time hardly anything has changed. We’ve still got our wars, our fear, Guantanamo, corporate bailouts. Add to that the culmination of the Bush/Cheney offshore drilling program, carried forward by Obama, and maybe voters would like now to try something different … but this is the United States, and there are no real options.

So let’s just have some fun with it. Let’s elect Ron Paul and Jerry Brown and Joe Sestak. These guys do not seem to respect either wing of the corporate party. The only signal that I can read from candidates that indicates that they are not corporate-approved, other than being disliked by Rahm Emanuel, is unmanageable kinkiness.

Corporate money will allow Democrats to campaign as progressives when the wind blows that way, but they are not allowed to govern that way. I am not being scientific here, and I know about Rand Paul’s proclivity towards lunanomics, but I also suspect he is not being managed. He might not be dependable. He could be, like his Dad, a wild card.

Democrats tell us that we have to settle for getting a little of what we want with otherwise undesirable candidates. So they will take some comfort in the fact that Blanche Lincoln puts a “D” after her name. It means nothing – that groping hug in the picture above says it all. We’ll soon be screwed again by Democrats.

So have some fun with elections. Find the least likely candidate with the oddest ideas, the quirkiest intellect … and imagine. Virtually all D’s and R’s in the USA are C’s. Better run with the wild card crowd and be disappointed on election day than to invest in corporate “winners” and be disappointed for the following two, four or six years.

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain?” WTF?

I was sitting in a chair in the middle of our family room, half watching a football game, half listening to a conversation between my then-wife and mother-in-law when the words came out of the TV …”Dead on arrival.” John Lennon had been shot. Shocked, unable to control my emotions, I broke into tears, and mother-in-law was unable to comprehend. Why does that man matter?

In the many years since his death I have been able to put Lennon in his place. He was an incredibly gifted man who best spoke through music and words in music. The songs he wrote were not derivative or cute, not always even melodic. The word “shoot” interspersed between the lines of “Come Together” … who else would have even imagined such music? I think of my current wife when I hear the words “She’s not a girl who misses much…”.

Then last week I accidentally played “God” on the ITouch, and cannot get the words out of my mind … “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” Context is everything. What the hell was he thinking?

I don’t know. Good song though. I’ve heard and read his interviews after the breakup of the Beatles. He wasn’t really very good outside of music. He was actually kind of muddle-headed, trying to explain how music speaks to our emotion by using the example of a chair, Yoko sideboard muttering incomprehensible half-sentences. Maybe it was the drugs. He was clear about that. He said that he and the other Beatles did a lot of drugs, but that he went way beyond them. They would stop. He could not.

So I have wondered what the future held for him had he not died? Would he have continued to be a cultural icon? Would his music still cut the edge while at the same time offering up sweetness and angst and base emotion? Would he even be interesting?

Yes, I think he would be interesting. He would have dumped Yoko, no doubt, formally. He had already tired of her, and moved on to May Pang who he would have dumped for who knows. His entanglements were legend. He would have continued to speak out on public issues. He would have joined marches, cut his hair, appeared on (Late Night) Letterman and SNL and Stern but never Leno. He never would have endorsed a product, might have written a catchy tune mocking Apple, the corporation and the label.

But the drugs, the cigarettes, the angst … the man was tortured. God forbid, he might have taken Prozac, calmed down a bit, became introspective in a too-serious kind of way, and become boring. And slap me for saying this, but I would rather remember him as the dream weaver, the Walrus, and not just John.

So perhaps his death came at the right time, before the anti-psychotic medicines took hold. Nature does not care about pain, and pain gave us John Lennon as he was, brilliant and flawed at once. Better that death took him from us than Zoloft.

Ipilimumab

We’ve had some experience with melanoma in relatives – it was caught early and hasn’t returned. It’s an especially dangerous type of cancer if it “metasicizes” – that is, penetrates the protective skin layers and enters the blood stream. The cancer will quickly spread and infect other organs. It usually overwhelms the body with death shortly following.

So I was glad to read of the development of a new drug that helps people in whom the cancer has spread. It’s called ipilimumab, and is being “developed” by Bristol Myers, whose stock has responded favorably to recently released findings of clinical studies that found the drug effective.

But it is confusing. An article in Medical News Today reviews the findings of the study.

Early results of a trial found that a new drug that targets a genetic mutation found in over half of melanoma cases and some other cancers caused tumors to shrink and patients to live around 6 months longer without their disease getting worse, including those whose cancer had spread to the liver, lung and bone.

Current treatments can generally extend life expectancy around two months. Is this progress?

I suppose. And I don’t know how to read these studies. Perhaps the important point is that they have hit on an entry point into a new means of treating the cancer that will lead to an eventual cure.

Or maybe it is just hype. But it is fodder for those who tell us that large pharmaceutical companies are doing important research that is bringing real benefits to the human condition, and that this is what justifies the protection from competition that we grant them. Are we not seeing some return on investment here?

Not really. Bristol Myers did not invent the drug. A company called Medarex did. Bristol Myers merely bought Medarex.

And this is typical of the business model of large pharmaceutical companies. They take the research of others (most often, NIH) and leverage it into marketing bonanzas.

To illustrate: People often think of Nike as a shoe company. It is not. It is a marketing company. They know how to exploit sweatshop labor to make a shoe. That’s for sure. But their real talent is “adding value” to a $5.00 shoe, converting it to a $150 Air Jordan. That’s their specialty.

In the same manner, Bristol Myers markets drugs.

Take Avapro, for example, aka irbestaran. It’s a fairly modestly priced drug by PhRma standards – only about $120 a month. It is used to treat high blood pressure, and kidney problems in diabetics. It has an important side effect: It doesn’t work.

A large randomized trial following 4100+ men and women with heart failure and normal ejection fraction (>=45%) over 4+ years found no improvement in study outcomes or survival with irbesartan as compared to placebo test.*

Bristol Myers annual sales of Avapro: $1.3 billion.

Will ipilimumab be a life-saving drug for metastasized melanoma patients? Or, will it be a cash cow for Bristol Myers that buys some end-of-life time for Medicare patients? Is it yet another tap into the public health care coffers for big pharma?

The early bet appears to be marketing winning out over science. This hype around this drug, the purchase of Medivex by Bristol Myers, and the clinical trial that doesn’t seem to offer much hope beyond four month for people with a death sentence … all smells like another Pharma con game.

I hope I am wrong.
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* Massie BM, Carson PE, McMurray JJ, Komajda M, McKelvie R, Zile MR, Anderson S, Donovan M, Iverson E, Staiger C, Ptaszynska A (December 2008). “Irbesartan in patients with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction”. N. Engl. J. Med. 359 (23): 2456–67. doi:10.1056/NEJMoa0805450. PMID 19001508.

Fudds

A quick tour of the blogs this morning left a bad taste in my mouth. Some Democrats are pulling out the demon rum card due to some booze-related problems with Republican office holders. That’s politics – it’s a cage fight where one must use whatever weapon that lands in the cage. Do those who are doing this understand their own behavior? I sincerely hope so. Carrie Nation was not a wholesome person.

What caught by eye were comments by Rusty Shackleford and the anonymous entity calling itself “Pogo Possum”, to wit:

PP: Progressives love to rail against any Republican who they deem to cross the line when alcohol is involved. But one of their own steps out of line, regardless of the severity, and they are indignant that anyone would pass moral judgment on one of their own. … If Bryce Bennett and Pam Walzer had been Republicans, the liberals in this blog would have been screaming for their heads.

RS: Progressives trying to control others/telling others how they should live their lives, ya gotta love it!

There it is. Do you see it? The post they are railing on was written by a Democrat. Yet they are lumping Democrats, progressives, and liberals all together. It’s distressing that they don’t know the difference, even more so that I don’t.

But I will give it a shot.

Democrat: A member of the other corporate party. We are only allowed two. Democrats espouse and detest populism and democracy all at once. Basically, they have no governing philosophy.

Liberal: There is some inherited philosophy present this group, but mostly they have long-since detached from philosophical groundings. They are not Keynesian – and yet they are (just like Republicans). They are not pacifists, nor welfare statists, nor populists. However, as used in American parlance, a “liberal” is a welfare statist, a fuzzy do-gooder, an incoherent rambler that cannot grasp the importance of strength and militarism and paternal discipline. It’s confusing to be and not be all at once. But that is the question.

Check out, however, those in politics who might actually identify with the term. Liberals started the Vietnam War, for instance, and Bill Clinton was anything but incoherent, fuzzy, or a do-gooder. Self-identified liberals fit in very nicely with our corporate-run culture in that they can seamlessly merge what appears to be common-man ideology with corporate solutions to problems. Hence, liberals give us health care “reform”, that protects the health insurance industry, and parade it as a progress.

So perhaps it is better simply to call liberals “Democratic corporatists.” Better yet, a liberal is a “clever corporatist”, or a “dishonest Republican”. After all, many liberals, like Max Baucus, Michael Bennet, Ken Salazar and Diane Feinstein could easily be “conservative” or “Republicans”, since those terms are also so muddled as to be meaningless.

This leaves Progressives: It’s kind of a catch-all for anything left over. Pwoggies don’t want to be Democrats, as it is so vapid a state as to be insulting. They don’t want to be “liberal” as they cannot identify with the behavior of those who self-identify as such.

So they go back in history to a time when “populism” was at the fore, and “progressives” fought for change in the wake of the abuses brought about by the huge concentrations of wealth spawned by industrialism. Progressives sought to break up monopolies, institute an income tax, direct-elect senators, and get us into foreign wars and rule us by sophisticated and of subtle persuasion, trickery and imagery ….

Hold it! What’s that about foreign wars, tricks and images? Sad, but true. George Creel, Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays were all self-identified “progressives.” They also gave us American entry into World War One, the idea of “manufactured” consent, and public relations as a substitute for political discourse. In that sense, we are still in the Progressive Era.

Why the trouble with labels? It is like struggling to get out of a straight jacket under water. The jacket is the two-party system that melds all competing philosophies into mere a mere publicity contest between two corporate factions. It is underwater because it is really hard to breathe free in the two-party system.

In the end, words mean nothing and everything. “Conservatism” is long dead, “liberalism” is a mushy bowl, and “progressive” is an ever-so-meek way of saying “fuck you” to Democrats.

So my suggestion for a new label for those of us who yearn for a means by which popular and justifiable yearnings, such as public health care and education and anti-militarism, can coalesce and have a meaningful presence in the public mind … we should call ourselves something else.

My suggestion is the “Fuck the Democrats” Party. Maybe a little blunt, but it does drive home the point that Democrats are the barrier to liberal progress. Anyone got something better?
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Eureka!!! We can be the “Fudds”, meaning what I said above, but printable.

When perceptions cannot be managed …

Little of what is in the news is real news. Most of it are staged events and stage management of actual events. Those who present us with news on TV and in newspapers have many options before them, and decide to focus on some events and ignore the vast majority. That has to be, as media is small and the world is big.

But there are real events that cannot be ignored. There are people in business and government whose job is to monitor real events, and to the degree possible, manage perceptions of those events. When perceptions cannot be managed, they go into “damage control” mode, and if they cannot control damage, the event is said to be “out of hand.”

Out-of-hand events have the power to change public perceptions. With the oil spill in the Gulf, damage control has been, at best, only marginally effective. The Obama people are in the pocket of the oil industry, just as the Bush people before them. Consequently, they are mere spectators. Yet they must appear to be in charge. That calls for on-scene photos, staged confrontations, angry press conferences with oily sand as a backdrop. A staged hug with a fisherman’s wife would be good, as would a little girl and an oily turtle. Little girls really work well.

The best that they have done to date is this:

Obama finds cigarette butt

Is that the best they can do? Together with the occasional press report that Obama is “outraged!” his people appear to be rank amateurs.

This could be his Katrina – a PR nightmare. The underlying event is a large national catastrophe, but all of that aside, he has to appear tough and in charge. Fortunately for him, he was not off celebrating someone’s birthday. Still, his people have failed him miserably.

Maybe it is time for a staged distraction event. When 400 marines were killed in Lebanon, Reagan’s people invaded Granada. But the Gulf spill is so big that only a war or new terrorist attack could divert attention. But those things take time – that is, the Pentagon is always ready to go to war anywhere, but the public has to be prepped, and summer is the worst time to launch an advertising campaign.

It’s a perfect storm for Obama – a large and photo-friendly event that cannot be contained … in summer. This is his moment. Either he appears to take charge, or he appears not to be in charge. The cameras wait.

The oil industry in an ongoing development program of deep-water drilling off our coasts. The activity has been mostly unregulated. It was officially sanctioned by the Bush people, and later the Obama people carried on as if the election had changed nothing. Obama himself spread the illusion that he opposed such activity during the campaign, but that was just for perception sake.

That program will be set back a few years. That’s the worst that will happen to the oil industry. British Petroleum’s financial liabilities are limited by law. So is just a matter of riding out the storm before they go back to business as usual.

For the Obama Administration? They might be wishing for a terrorist attack. They are pretty much tapped out on wars at this time.