Author: Mark Tokarski

Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.

American Ingenuity

I have written here and elsewhere on the subject of torture that 1) it is widely misunderstood on the left; 2) it didn’t start eight years ago, 3) it is not done for for the purpose of gaining intelligence; and 4) what we stumbled upon at Abu Ghraib was classic U.S. use of techniques developed in the last half century. I’ve further said that torture is meant to break people down, and is in standard use in our many counter-insurgency campaigns. (Right now, those would be Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Colombia, and surely many other places.)

Iraq, an illegal invasion used to set up a permanent occupation, was a “shock and awe” campaign, but a counter-insurgency as well. Our leaders did not know to what extent there would be resistance – but once it became apparent that it was there and was widespread, they went to work on breaking its back. It’s a long and tedious process – rebels have to be broken, one by one. U.S. soldiers break down doors of homes in the middle of the night, terrifying the family, and take away fathers and young men to places like Abu Ghraib for the purpose of torturing them. (There are many Abu Ghraibs.) Once done, victims are released back into the population, but they are not the same. They are traumatized and no longer resistant to the new authority structure. (The message: Resistance is futile.)

Torture not only worked to break down individuals, but also sent a powerful message to others. In general, torture was an important facet of our terror campaign against Iraq.

People don’t believe me, of course. There’s a widespread notion in the population that the U.S. is both better and different than other countries. Consequently, what we find is the general impression that Abu Ghraib was isolated, not that terrible, and anyway is now behind us. Further, Democrats like to believe that it started with Bush and stopped with Obama.

Not so. Not so. Here’s an excerpt from a 2006 book by Alfred W. McCoy called A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. I saw Mr. McCoy in a TV interview months ago, then promptly forgot his name as was never able to recover the lost memory. I stumbled upon him in other reading. This from the introduction:

From 1950 to 1962, the CIA became involved in torture through a massive mind control effort, with psychological warfare and secret research into human consciousness that reach a cost of a billion dollars annually – a veritable Manhattan Project of the mind. After experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, electric shock, and sensory deprivation the work then produced a new approach to torture that was psychological, not physical, perhaps best described as “no-touch torture”. The agency’s discovery was a counterintuitive breakthrough – indeed, the first real revolution in the cruel science of pain in more than three centuries. To test, and then propagate, its distinctive form of torture, the CIA operated covertly within its own society, penetrating and compromising key American institutions – universities, hospitals, U.S. Agency for International Development, and the armed forces. As the lead agency within the larger intelligence community, the CIA has long been able to draw upon both military and civil resources to amplify its reach and reduce its responsibility. Moreover, the agency’s attempts to conceal these programs from executive and legislative review have required manipulation of its own government through clandestine techniques, notably disinformation, and destruction of incriminating documents.

Still, if genius is discovery of the obvious, then CIA perfection of psychological torture was a major scientific turning point, albeit unheralded and unnoticed in the world beyond its secret safe houses. For more than two thousand years, interrogators had found that mere physical pain, no matter how extreme, often produced heightened resistance. By contrast, the CIA’s psychological paradigm fused two new methods, “sensory deprivation”, and “self-inflicted pain”, whose combination causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers. Although seemingly benign, the term “sensory disorientation” means, in this CIA usage, something far more invasive. Through relentless probing into the essential nature of the human organism to reveal its physiological and psychological vulnerabilities, the CIA’s “sensory deprivation” has evolved into a total assault on all the senses and sensibilities – auditory, visual, tactile, temporal, temperature, survival, sexual and cultural. Refined through years of practice, the method relies on simple, even banal procedures – isolation, standing, heat and cold, light and dark, noise and silence – for a systematic assault on all the human senses. The fusion of these two techniques, sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain, creates a synergy of physical and psychological trauma whose sum is a hammer-blow to the fundamentals of personal identity.

The notorious photo of an Iraqi in a box, arms extended and wires to his hands, exposes this covert method. The hood is for sensory deprivation, and the arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. A week after the scandal broke, the U.S. prison chief in Iraq summarized this two-phased torture. “We ill no longer, in any circumstances, hood any of the detainees,” the general said. “We will no longer use stress positions in any of our interrogations.”

Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators. One British journalists who observed this method’s use in Northern Ireland called sensory deprivation “the worst form of torture” because it provokes more anxiety among the interogatees than traditional tortures, leaves no scars, and produces long lasting effects. Victims often need extensive treatment to recover from injury far more crippling than mere physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. Though any ordinary man or woman can be trained to torture, every gulag has a few masters who take to the task with a sadistic flair – abhorred by their victims and valued by their superiors. Applied under the pressure of actual field operations after 1963, psychological torture soon gave way to unimaginable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations, plumbing the human capacity for brutality, are often horrifying.

I guess we can be proud of one thing – we did apply good ol’ American ingenuity to torture, and by god, made it better than ever before.

Is this anything?

America’s health insurers have come forth with a new proposal for saving money – it is being trumpeted as being worth $2 trillion. For some reason it made me think of an old Letterman Late Night bit where the curtain rises, and some oddball does an act, like twirling several hula hoops or creating sparks with a grinding wheel against parts of a metal costume.

Letterman and Paul Schaffer then have to decide whether it is “something”, or “nothing”.

This proposal seems to have been thrown together like a late night sandwich, probably in response to public pressure for either single payer or at least a public option in health care insurance. But President Obama jumped all over it – an anonymous spokesperson called it a “game changer”, and Obama himself a “watershed event”. That smacks of cheerleading for the industry. Why?

Timing is everything. There’s nothing in the package that could not have been done last year or twenty years ago. But health insurance companies are hugely profitable, and therefore have seen no need to rectify problems like soaring costs or millions of uninsured. As long as investors were getting a good return, there was no talk of change.

But right now there is pressure for change, and they are under intense scrutiny. What better time for a grand and meaningless gesture?

The cost savings would be welcome, but as with ever-elusive future projected shrinking federal budget deficits, are probably not going to materialize. The gesture is most likely just some good political gamesmanship, a way of keeping the insurance industry in the health care game. It also offers political cover for Democrats as they work with the health insurance industry to preserve … the health insurance industry.

Health insurance companies are the problem. We need to get rid of them. They know this. This grand gesture is, in the end, not a “game changer” so much as a “bacon saver”.

I vote that it’s “nothing”. What do you say, Paul Shaffer?

Hayduke Lives

Here’s a great interview with Doug Peacock. Mr. Peacock is a Vietnam veteran who suffered from PTSD. He has long been an environmental activist, and is credited for being, at least in part, the person who inspired the character George Washington Hayduke in Edward Abbey’s books The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives.

Part One, 4/23/09, here.
Part Two, 5/12/09 here.

Amy Goodman was in Bozeman and participated in a fundraiser for our new radio station, Gallatin Valley Community Radio (KGLT). I have been mildly involved in the formation of this station, though others have done far more to make it happen.

Herding Sheep

I was posting a long reply to a comment over at Electric City Weblog (“All of You Voted For Me), and when I clicked “submit”, the connection was interrupted, and so the world now suffers. All that I wrote was lost.

Here’s the comment that set me off – in true blog form, it is written by “anonymous”, probably someone fearing “the man” – the boss knowing that he is blogging during work hours:

You know what is amusing is that Fox news is always accused of “lying” but I can’t think of it being involved in the sort of big whoppers that other major news organizations have been guilty of.

All news organizations make mistakes, that’s just part of the nature of the beast, when you are putting together a lot of information on deadline. But Fox hasn’t had anything close to the Dan Rather fiasco, or fiascos at other media outlets.

The New York Times had the reporter who was making up stories for months and months, Jason Blair. The Times still hasn’t lived down the famous Walter Duranty, I think his name was, who covered the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s, and it was later discovered that he was sugarcoating and making up things up in order to make Stalin’s Soviet Union look a lot better than it really was. He won a Pulitzer, and many feel the Times should return the award for the phony reporting.

CNN had the Tailwind scandal and the situation where it admitted going soft on Saddam in order to keep reporters in Iraq.

NBC claimed GM trucks had unsafe gas tanks, and in the course of its investigation, it turned out that they rigged the tanks with explosives to make them look more dangerous than they really were.

The Washington Post’s Janet Cook won a Pulitzer for her reporting on an impoverished young boy, and then later admitted she made the whole story up.

The New Republic has had several writers who were discovered to simply be making up stories out of whole cloth. (One of them was the basis for a pretty good movie…Shattered Glass I think was the name)

Now, an impartial observer might say that Fox is the only news organization that doesn’t lie. Only a hyperpartisan would say that, compared to others, Fox is a lying news source.

I suggested to Anon that the right wing, in addition to not being able to handle nuance, was susceptible to anecdote as well. Every word that he wrote might be true, and yet mean squat. All those isolated incidents tell us nothing about the news gathering process. Who are the people who give us news? Who do they work for?

Most news gathering organizations are public corporations mostly owned by the investing class. Their most influential people within are their management and boards of directors. There are very few “liberals” among them. The boards especially are an interlocking set of corporate moguls and retired military officers and politicians (collecting service rewards). (NPR and PBS, supposedly independent of this structure, are heavily funded by the same people in the form of grants. In addition, conservative politicians watchdog them and create a stink should they step out of line.)

The public interface with news organizations are individual reporters and talking heads. But behind the reporters are authority structures, and they are subject to largely unwritten rules of behavior regarding what is a viable story, what is not. They have flexibility, but for the most part they live in their boundaries. If one were to ask any of them about their perceived independence, the answer would be “No one tells me what to report and write. No one!” This leads to the overall impression on the right wing that the media is comprised of liberals working for themselves.

And there is considerable leeway within the system. Abu Ghraib was exposed (and then covered up). Torture has been exposed, though we only saw the tip of a massive iceberg. (It is now covered up again.) But for the most part, reporters cover conventional stories in a conventional manner – they collect news from government and corporate authorities, reword it, and pass it on to us as original reporting.

The vetting system for advancement within news organizations is very similar to the system for advancement in our school systems: In our schools (outside of those seeking purely scientific careers), people are graded on how well they comply and submit to authority and internalize our propaganda system. Those that don’t do so well are given bad grades, and these days are drugged into compliance. ADHD they call it – inability to conform.

In American news coverage, there are times when the velvet glove is removed, and the steel fist is apparent to everyone in the business. When the decision was made to invade Iraq, all of our news organizations went into compliance mode. There was no debate about the legitimacy of the objective or the motives of the officials carrying it out. It was no different when Clinton attacked Serbia in 1999, or when we invaded Vietnam in the 1960’s, Korea in the 1950’s.

(Interesting footnote: In 1998, Clinton was set to launch rocket attacks on Iraq. His Secretaries of State and Defense, Albright and Cohen, attended a town meeting in Dayton, Ohio, that had been infiltrated with protesters. It was supposed to be a propaganda rally, like a two-minute hate, but instead, Cohen and Albright were jeered and heckled and sat stone faced while being confronted with actual tough questions. This was unacceptable, of course. Later the Clinton Administration remarked that CNN had “dropped the ball.”)

So the media is largely a monolith controlled by the investing class but submissive to government control. Why on earth do we get the babble about it being “liberal”? I suspect that the ownership of these organizations like that perception, as it masks their role and identity. I have asked conservatives repeatedly to explain to me why the most conservative organizations in the country allow a liberal slant on the news. I am yet to get an answer.

What we get is anecdote. Yes, most reporters are probably left-leaning, but living as they do in the shadow of power, they are severely constrained in what they can report. They have to internalize this authority structure, and so aggrandize their motives and pass out numerous awards to one another for high-skilled job performance. But they are nothing more than the American version of Soviet commissars.

What is really fascinating is to watch how government officials manage the media. They control them by allowing or denying access to information and the people in power. At the same time, they lavish praise on them for the wonderful work they are doing. Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner was very forthright in talking about how he is so often displeased by some coverage he is receiving, but how he recognizes that reporters are just doing their job.

I just — I want to end by saying a few words about the men and women in this room whose job it is to inform the public and pursue the truth. You know, we meet tonight at a moment of extraordinary challenge for this nation and for the world, but it’s also a time of real hardship for the field of journalism. And like so many other businesses in this global age, you’ve seen sweeping changes and technology and communications that lead to a sense of uncertainty and anxiety about what the future will hold.
Across the country, there are extraordinary, hardworking journalists who have lost their jobs in recent days, recent weeks, recent months. And I know that each newspaper and media outlet is wrestling with how to respond to these changes, and some are struggling simply to stay open. And it won’t be easy. Not every ending will be a happy one.

But it’s also true that your ultimate success as an industry is essential to the success of our democracy. It’s what makes this thing work. You know, Thomas Jefferson once said that if he had the choice between a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he would not hesitate to choose the latter.

Clearly, Thomas Jefferson never had cable news to contend with — (laughter) — but his central point remains: A government without newspapers, a government without a tough and vibrant media of all sorts, is not an option for the United States of America. (Applause.)

So I may not — I may not agree with everything you write or report. I may even complain, or more likely Gibbs will complain, from time to time about how you do your jobs, but I do so with the knowledge that when you are at your best, then you help me be at my best. You help all of us who serve at the pleasure of the American people do our jobs better by holding us accountable, by demanding honesty, by preventing us from taking shortcuts and falling into easy political games that people are so desperately weary of.

And that kind of reporting is worth preserving — not just for your sake, but for the public’s. We count on you to help us make sense of a complex world and tell the stories of our lives the way they happen, and we look for you for truth, even if it’s always an approximation, even if — (laughter.)

He’s only been in office a few months, and he has already adopted the tone and pitch.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Someone once said that “In the beginning, man created God in his image.” This is true – “He” is our own invention. He explains all that we do not understand. He gives meaning to life for those who cannot handle meaninglessness.

But I think we went too far. We gave Him too much power. Since He supposedly knows all, He sees the future and the past. And since He knows the future, He knows our fate. And since He knows our fate, nothing we can do will change that fate. So we have no choice. Our lives are predetermined. We are not free.

This is predestination – I’m sure I’m mucking it up, as theologians are very good at making the simple complex, having nothing better to do. But in creating such an all-powerful God, we reasoned ourselves into a corner.

But how are we to know if we are saved or damned? I do not know. I suppose those well-dressed people sitting in the front pew presume to be chosen. They might be in for a surprise. But if indeed when we die we are dead and stay dead, then there are no surprises in store for anyone. Zombies aside, Wulfie.

Anyway, this conversation came about over pizza and beer last night. We finally concluded that we need a new God, one not so powerful. My God knows the past and the present, but not the future. So when something like Katrina happens, he says “Dude … did not see that coming!”

This new God cannot penetrate the skull barrier. He doesn’t know what we are thinking. We have total privacy. And as life unfolds before us, we are gloriously surprised, because we don’t see things coming either. And so we are truly free.

And, when we die, he lets us be dead – no cloud sitting, no harps, no eternal fires or accordions. Just let life happen, and death too. Enjoy the ride.

When the Right is Right About a Right

Gregg Smith at Electric City Weblog (John Galt … on the Bench?), quotes District Court Judge Nels Swandal, who was sitting in on the case Wallace v State:

Ayn Rand correctly observed that the right to life is the source of all rights-and the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights, no other rights are possible. These principles are embodied in the Montana Constitution in Article II, Sections 3 and 29.

The case has to do with voter-passed initiative I-143, which outlawed game farming (grandfathering existing operations) in Montana, specifically, the right to shoot an animal for remuneration.

Here are the cited sections of the constitution:

Section 3. Inalienable rights. All persons are born free and have certain inalienable rights. They include the right to a clean and healthful environment and the rights of pursuing life’s basic necessities, enjoying and defending their lives and liberties, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and seeking their safety, health and happiness in all lawful ways. In enjoying these rights, all persons recognize corresponding responsibilities.

Section 29. Eminent domain. Private property shall not be taken or damaged for public use without just compensation to the full extent of the loss having been first made to or paid into court for the owner. In the event of litigation, just compensation shall include necessary expenses of litigation to be awarded by the court when the private property owner prevails.

Those who wrote the constitution were not likely thinking about Ayn Rand as they inserted these two clauses. Save for the part about “a clean and healthful environment”, I’m hearing more ‘Founding Fathers’.

Both sides of this case have legitimate claims. Claimants are saying that their rights were unconstitutionally violated because their right to use their own property was abridged without just compensation. The public is saying that its rights are superior to individual private property rights when it comes to shooting captive game for a fee. No matter the outcome, someone is going to be harmed.

Gregg concludes:

Heaven forbid some organized group of activists decides that they don’t like what you do for a living.

It is said that one difference between right and left is that those on the right cannot handle nuance. This is one of those cases. I suspect that the public overstepped its boundaries in passing I-143 – I find shooting captive animals offensive, but as the father of four daughters I also find pole dancing offensive. That doesn’t mean we should outlaw it. But communities can, if they so desire, restrict such behavior, no matter who owns the pole. Individuals have private property rights, the public has the right to regulate the use of that property for the greater good. There are limits on each. Hence, a court system.

It’s a question of where to draw the line, and in participating in the ensuing discussion over there, I am left with the impression that they cannot handle anything beyond a bright red demarcation – Ayn Rand correctly observed that the right to life is the source of all rights-and the right to property is their only implementation.

That statement would be OK if it did not contain the word “correctly”.

But they make a strong case nonetheless – not that there is never a case where the public can prohibit certain business activities, but rather that in this case, the public overstepped. If they, and Swandal, had left Rand out of it, they would made a much clearer and stronger case.

Still, they have manage to convince me that I-143 was a taking, and that just compensation was owed. Officially, I concede. I’m unclear on the matter of spread of disease, but that doesn’t appear to be the matter at the fore. So my taking ensuing the discussion down that road was an unintended diversion.

But citing Rand from the bench … c’mon now. Suppose another judge cited Karl Marx’s views on private property. It would be as meaningful.

Gregg is going to read the entire body of the opinion in Wallace v State. I look forward to his thoughts and conclusions.

We’re mostly stoners now

I am not a marijuana smoker myself, so I don’t have a horse in this race. And I might add that if I were to actually try marijuana, it might make me claustrophobic and cause me to wander the pavement at night, startled by sounds such as kids on skateboards, and afraid to go indoors. Then I might see fit to eat every frickin’ morsel of carbs in the house. That’s what I think might happen, so I don’t mess with it.

But here’s a new poll, done by “conservative leaning” O’Leary, that shows that 52% of the public favors legalization of pot.

These 52% are free to join the 70% or so that favor single payer health care. They may now stand in the hall and wait for class to end. They are no longer relevant.

Drug policy is not health policy. Some drugs, like crystal meth, are truly harmful, and we should educate people about them. Others, like pot, are merely recreational. I’ve known potheads – people whose brain seems to be saturated in ‘don’t give a shit’ juice. That’s not good, but they don’t belong in prison any more than the habitual drunk or gambler. That cross-section of society will always be with us. Perhaps they are people who are simply not a fit in our agricultural society – hunter-gatherer remnants who don’t regiment easily. Maybe they merely yearn to breath free and cannot, and so take refuge in mental escape. Maybe they just like a buzz. Whatever. Leave ’em be. They are not hurting (or helping) anyone.

I’ve heard various stories about criminalization of pot, from the Hearst effort to suppress production of hemp (see here, scroll down to 1898) to Chomsky’s assertion that it is done to take control of the pesky minority populations. (Suburban white people don’t have to worry about their doors being busted in while they snort cocaine. But in poor and minority neighborhood, people have to be extremely vigilant, as the cops are looking to bust anyone who sneaks a joint.)

Others simply say that we need some reason to get rid of surplus population of young males, and we can’t put them all in the military. So we throw them in prison.

This I know: Marijuana will remain illegal, and millions of people, mostly minorities, will be kept in prison because of it. It’s not drug control. It’s people control. Government will not easily give up its hammer.

PS: Here’s a fascinating Glenn Greenwald piece on his experience with legalization of drugs in Portugal. It’s been an unqualified success, with drug use down, treatment up, imprisonment nonexistent, and money formerly used for prosecution and incarceration freed up for other uses. Greenwald and CATO are in league on this.

The Sellout

Sen. Max Baucus is in the process of cutting a deal with the insurance industry, and of undercutting the movement for health insurance reform that has gathered so much momentum in these last four years. I don’t know what the final product will be – I only know that unless Democrats can mount severe and direct pressure on Baucus, he will not change his ways. That is, they have to threaten to hurt him.

They have never done this before. I doubt they will do it now.

First, a word about private health insurance: It is structurally incapable of offering universal care. It does a fairly good job of covering people in the workplace. This is because people in the workplace generally are not there because they need health insurance. Consequently, adverse selection is avoided. I have no doubt that, job insecurity aside, most people who have insurance through their job would like to keep it. I have had it myself, and coverage was very good.

Outside the workplace, it’s a different story. There are professional organizations, such as engineers or accountants or small business owners, who are drawn together for reasons other than health insurance. These groups sometimes offer health insurance to their members. But more and more these groups are denying insurance to members due to adverse selection – people joining solely to get health insurance. I was turned down for insurance by the Montana Society of CPA’s because of my preexisting condition. I no longer belong to that group.

Individuals trying to buy insurance on the open market are pretty much screwed. Either they are fairly well-to-do and healthy, or they will not be offered coverage. If they can afford insurance but have one of the hundreds of conditions that qualify as “preexisting”, they’re out of luck.

The health insurance companies are running a business. They have to do what they do, otherwise claims will skyrocket. Premiums will follow, and people will drop coverage, and eventually they’ll be left covering the already-sick at enormous cost. Health insurance companies are not run by bad people – these are smart people who are selling a product that simply cannot meet our needs. I don’t wish ill on any of them. I only want them to find a new profession.

Private insurance is heavily bureaucratic and expensive. They have to pay high commissions to sales people to sift through the population to find profitable clients. They have to generate a profit for investors. They have to avoid paying claims, requiring expert staff to justify the practice of formally denying benefits. And they have to dump their costs – on patients, hospitals, doctors, government, and other insurers.

But there two ways that private health insurance can both meet our needs and be profitable: 1) If coverage is mandatory; and/or 2) if government subsidizes it. But to demand that people buy their product is neither fair nor wise; to subsidize it is to institutionalize their inefficiency.

There is really only one solution in our diverse country: Single payer. But that won’t happen anytime soon. In the meantime, we need a mixed system, with private insurance operating in the employed workforce, and government insuring anyone who wants coverage (with subsidies for the elderly and the poor). This is called the “public option”.

Now comes Max. He’s already taken single payer off the table. Fair enough – it’s not going anywhere no matter what. But yesterday, he had doctors arrested for trying to butt into his private circle of friends. He’s really gotten to be an arrogant dick.

According to Open Secrets, Max’s top contributors, 2003 to 2008 are as follows:

Securities and investment ($1,003,018); Health professionals ($851,141); Pharmaceuticals and health products ($850,131); Lawyers and law firms ($791,004); and Insurance ($784,185).

I didn’t see a listing for “the uninsured and people abused by insurance companies”. So we’re screwed. We spend a great deal of time trying to analyze the impact of campaign contributions – do they influence a politicians vote? I can answer that: Duh. It’s worse than that – every dollar has the impact of two dollars: If Baucus doesn’t collect these dollars, they will go to a potential opponent. He too is a smart business man.

So what is coming down the pipe? Probably we are going to get some sort of universal plan with a mandate that people buy insurance from private companies. Unless 70 House Democrats prevail, there will be no public option. Insurance companies will be required to cover people with preexisting conditions, but this is key: They will be subsidized. Government will pay them to do so. Add one more layer of costs to our already-overburdened system.

Ordinarily a piece like this ends with the words “Write or email Senator Max Baucus. Tell him you want health insurance with a public option.” That’s bogus. First of all, emails are pointless – they are too easy to generate and submit en masse. And letters take weeks to get to him due to the anthrax scare. And anyway, he’s not listening.

Instead, I ask the following of Democrats:

Turn against Max Baucus. Punish him. Hurt him. Call his local office. Don’t even think about being civil. Write nasty letters to the editor. Organize groups to picket his offices, letting the newspapers, who generally support him, know what you are doing. (That way, they can ignore you too.) Vote for his opponent when you get a chance, even if that opponent is a Republican or a whack job. Above all, be nasty to him. Let him know he is a schmuck.

Max is extremely vain, and treasures his image. Tarnish it. Face him head on, tell him what you really think. Don’t stutter.

Max is not a sellout. He never had to sell out. He’s bought, from the very beginning.

Disabused …

Craw: The thin-walled expanded portion of the alimentary tract, used for the storage of food prior to digestion, that is found in of a bird or insect

I must have an expansive craw that is as big as the bladder of an elephant. Yesterday two statements lodged. Explosive dislodging is in order.

From David Crisp at Billings Blog, writing about a post by Professor Rob Natelson at Electric City Weblog: :

I am not as far to the left as Mr. Natelson is to the right, but I admit that I saw elements of what looked like fascism to me in the Bush administration. We invaded countries that hadn’t attacked us; we then ran the conquered countries with an almost seamless marriage of corporate, military and governmental interests. We suspended, without admitting it, habeas corpus. We adopted torture for the first time in American history. We taunted prisoners’ religious and cultural beliefs. We ignored and insulted allies. It’s the closest thing to fascism I have ever seen in America.

American journalists need to be focused and attentive, but there is more to it than that. They also have to wear blinders, and steadily focus only on acceptable subject matter. Otherwise, they move on to a new profession, say, house painting.

The most important part of the job of the American journalist is not to know certain things, and most of them are very good at their jobs. Crisp is one I have always thought saw those things he was not supposed to see. I thought of him as a man with a good eye and a flare for a pithy phase.

Yesterday I shed my illusions. Crisp noticed things under Bush that he hadn’t seen before:

We invaded countries that hadn’t attacked us…

Just in my lifetime: Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Serbia, Bosnia. Afghanistan. All before Bush. I’ll shorten the list by not mentioning those countries we attacked without full scale invasion.

we then ran the conquered countries with an almost seamless marriage of corporate, military and governmental interests.

This strains credulity. I’ll limit my scope to one small area where we have run the affairs of other countries with that seamless marriage: The Western Hemisphere. Every single country, including Canada, who we harassed and invaded on several occasions in our early history. It’s been going on since the days when John Quincy Adams said that Cuba would fall into our hands like “ripe fruit”.

We taunted prisoners’ religious and cultural beliefs.

OK – I’ll give him this one. This is an area where I suspect Crisp may be right – in the past, the U.S. has not been racist nor has it picked out any one religion or culture for special humiliation. We’ve been indifferent as to whether the target of our animus was white or black or Hispanic, Christian or Muslim or Hindu. We go after everybody.

Finally,

We adopted torture for the first time in American history.

Crisp’s blog, like mine, is not widely read. Were it, there’d be guffaws and explosive snot rockets from Panama City to Khartoum, Hanoi to Athens. It’s a long way from here to tiger cages, and none of those poor Vietnamese schmucks who were dropped from helicopters after interrogation lived to tell their story.

Yes, Mr. Crisp, the U.S. does not torture. Never did before, doesn’t now, and won’t continue to do so in the coming decades. I’ve got a bridge in my backyard … give it to you for a song ….

The saddest part of this is not just one lonely editor in Billings – it is the entire Democratic Party who thinks that Obama has cleaned up our act. All the tricorders have now been turned off. All is calm on the starship. We’re not curious anymore.

Enough. Here’s the other insect caught in my craw: “Just a Citizen” writing at Electric City Weblog:

Not sure the age of empires is over. They may look different but still be an empire.

This might actually be insightful and observant. JAC might see something that none on the right or the housebroken left can see. The United States is an empire. However, read further:

Think what the cultural Nation of Islam might look like in 40 years, given current demographic trends in Europe and N. America.

‘Nuff said.