Eric over at his SoHum Parlance blog puts up interesting stuff all the time. Here’s from a recent post:

That’s a dolled-up peace symbol. Ever wonder where it came from? I’ve heard many wicked tales, like it’s Satanic, masonic, a witch’s foot, and on a milder note, a dove’s print. But it turns out to be something far simpler.

The symbol was designed in 1958 by Gerald Holtom as the symbol for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It was not originally intended to become the generic peace symbol, although the Campaign certainly never had any objections. They made a deliberate decision not to copyright the symbol.

The lines are overlapping naval semaphoric sympols (see the graphic below which comes from designboom) for N and D, intended to abbreviate Nuclear Disarmament.

Very simple, and yet artistic.

Ideas spread like viruses, and are often as hard to kill. But some ideas have been tainted by historical events, and though not dead, are not discussed openly. One such idea is what came to be known as Social Darwinism. It’s a combination of ideas of social progress and laissez-faire economics that proscribes a minimal role for government in our lives. It goes something like this: For government to interfere in the natural order of things is harmful, as people less able to survive in the natural market place are allowed to survive anyway, thus weakening the human strain.

The root of modern manifestations of what we call “conservatism” is nothing more than this – the conversion (and perversion) of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the political economy. We don’t say so openly – Social Darwinism has led to all sorts of tragedies, such as genocide, and not too long ago, the idea that an inferior race of people ought to be eliminated.

That’s why Social Darwinism is tainted, why it is no longer discussed in polite circles, why mentioning it in the context of modern conservatism is a social faux pas.

But scratch the surface and you’ll see the infection. It’s there – it expresses itself in fears that our society is being taken over by lesser mortals. It can be fear of people who depend on government assistance, or of illegal immigrants.

The original progenitor of Social Darwinism was Herbert Spencer, who lived during our Gilded Age, a time when the cream was rising. He invented the phrase “survival of the fittest,” rather than Darwin. He originally fostered the idea that government can only preserve the less fit at the expense of the more fit.

It’s an idea, a meme, and it’s hard to kill. It is, in my view, at the center of the conflict between libertarians, conservatives, liberals and progressives.

What alternative do we offer over here on the left? It’s simply a different world view. We are, by nature, nurturers. We see undeveloped potential in all people, and view modest government interference in the natural order as a means of fostering our well being, of unleashing human potential. We take ordinary people of modest means, and if necessary, give them food and shelter. But more importantly, we educate them, and then they educate others, and before you know it, you have a self-sustaining group.

Admittedly, there are among us people who can only be fed, but not nurtured. There are those who respond to nurturing with dependence. They are, fortunately, a small minority. Our social experiment is bound to fail with this in a small segment of the population. But this small group stigmatizes the great lot of people who need only education and opportunity to make a go of it. Ronald Reagan had them driving Cadillacs and collecting multiple welfare checks. For the excesses of a few, many millions suffer.

So there it is – on one side are Social Darwinists intent on preserving the fittest, on the other nurturers who want to see all of us advance. I cast my lot with the latter, but admit that any idea can be taken to extremes. Such an extreme of the right became Nazism, of the left, Bolshevism. Both unleashed frightening destructive powers.

I’ve been asked several times these past few days what I think of the NIE that says that Iran stopped its nuclear bomb program in 2003. I’m making that up, of course. No one has asked. Honestly, it’s just a silly blog. Who cares?

But here’s what I think, no matter how silly. There are competing forces within Washington, and power shifts back and forth depending on who’s in office and other political considerations. The Pentagon is a massive organization, and there are factions within it, and power shifts within it too. Most within that building are concerned about the American corporate agenda – first go corporations, then follows the military. That’s the ideal they serve, and that agenda seems to carry on no matter who is in office.

But several times now I’ve seen a different faction work in the shadows, and for the good of the republic, interfere in normal political affairs. Once was Watergate, when we had a seriously deranged president. Once again was the exposure of Abu Ghraib – an attempt to do lasting damage to Rumsfeld and Bush. And now the NIE report on Iran. It exposes what has likely been known for years. The amazing thing is that the underlying facts came to light. Bush has been good at suppressing truth. But there are people within that building who care about decency and the rule of law. The report could have been buried, would have been buried save for some dynamic maneuvering.

Bush and Cheney have at once been stopped in their tracks and exposed as a liars. That’s what should have happened in 2003, but in the wake of 9/11, there was too much power in the Oval Office. This exposure is a sign of a weakened administration. It’s the kind of thing we expect, but never get, from our ‘probing’ media.

For the time being, Iran is off the table. There’ll be no attack in the final days of Bush. It took some serious finagling to make it happen. It’s a good day for the republic.

Ron Paul is an interesting man who adds some life to otherwise moribund Republican debates (as does Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats). He suffers from hard-case libertarian, even Utopian, values. He would virtually eliminate government in every aspect of our lives. When he turns his vision to foreign policy, it gets interesting.

The following is from a brief interview he did in Business Week (12/10/07, p22):

You want to take the troops out of Iraq, but what about Iran? What do we do if other nations turn hostile?

I’d treat them something like what we did with the Soviets. I was called to military duty [as a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon] in the ’60s when they were in Cuba, and they had 40,000 nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, and we didn’t have to fight them. We didn’t have to invade their country. But to deal with terrorism, we can’t solve the problem if we don’t understand why they [attack us]. And they don’t come because we’re free and prosperous. They don’t go after Switzerland and Sweden and Canada. They come after us because we’ve occupied their land, and instead of reversing our foreign policy after 9/11, we made it worse by invading two more countries and then threatening a third. Why wouldn’t they be angry at us? It would be absolutely bizarre if they weren’t. We’ve been meddling over there for more than 50 years. We overthrew a democratically elected government in Iran in 1953; we were Saddam Hussein’s ally and encouraged him to invade Iran. If I was an Iranian, I’d be annoyed myself, you know. So we need to change our policy, and I think we would reduce the danger.

That “why” – why they attack us, why they hate us, is key and critical and studiously ignored by our largely right wing American media and virtually all the candidates.

Ron Paul’s not got a chance in hell. If he won the nomination, Republican handlers would probably organize a motorcade through Dealey Plaza. But he’s interesting to watch. He, like Kucinich, traffics without fear in areas otherwise verboten, saying things that are (gasp!) plainly true. That’s not allowed in American political campaigns.

Helen Thomas is a revered member of the old guard, a tough old broad who has been in the face of presidents and press secretaries since before I have memories. She recently let go with a bomb over at Huffington Post – I hope other members of the White House Press Corp, FOX, CNN and the networks all see it.

Here’s what she said: “It’s our job to probe.”

Michael Massing has reviewed several books at New York Review, and has written a long piece in the most recent issue called Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs. It’s well worth a read.

Here in the US, we don’t see much of the Iraq War except those parts we are intended to see. There have been horrible attacks on Nasiriyah and Fallujah that virtually destroyed those cities and killed tens of thousands, yet all we knew here was a sanitized version, if anything at all. An air war has been waged from the beginning, yet all we hear are reports of bombing raids killing this or that “Al Qaeda” operative.

Massing reports on four books, focusing on two: One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick and Generation Kill, by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright. Wright travels as an embed on a journey through Iraq during the invasion in 2003. He was with only a small group of marines, yet the devastation they wrought was significant, killing Iraqi civilians in the teens, but also countless unseen others as they lofted barrage after barrage of munitions into Nasiriyah.

One small group of soldiers left behind a swatch of death and violence. Along come groups like Hopkins and ORB to detail the carnage, and Americans are incredulous. The reason is simple: It’s all been hidden from us by a government intent on controlling images (the lesson of Vietnam), and a media embedded with that government.

The article is long, and I don’t have the inclination today to supplement Massing’s eloquent prose with my own of lesser caliber. But I will offer a couple of glimpses of what Iraqis have witnessed that Americans have not.

First a little carnage. Hide your young. Massing quotes from House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, by Staff Sergeant David Bellavia—a gung-ho supporter of the Iraq war as he casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.

Candy, anyone?

From Evan Wright:

During their initial thrust into Iraq, the Marines encounter little resistance. Speeding along Iraq’s highways, they are cheered on by excited Iraqi children. By the third day, the platoon has pushed to within twenty kilometers of the southern city of Nasiriyah. Along with 10,000 other Marines, they park on the road, waiting for orders. Even while idle, they leave their mark, in the form of garbage and—a subject rarely broached by the mainstream media—bodily waste. “Taking a shit is always a big production in a war zone,” Wright observes.

In the civilian world, of course, utmost care is taken to perform bodily functions in private. Public defecation is an act of shame, or even insanity. In a war zone, it’s the opposite. You don’t want to wander off by yourself. You could get shot by enemy snipers, or by Marines when you’re coming back into friendly lines. So everyone just squats in the open a few meters from the road, often perching on empty wooden grenade crates used as portable “shitters.” Trash from thousands of discarded MRE packs litters the area. With everyone lounging around, eating, sleeping, sunning, pooping, it looks like some weird combat version of an outdoor rock festival.

In a cluster of mud-hut homes across from the platoon’s position, old ladies in black robes stand outside, “staring at the pale, white ass of a Marine” who, naked from the waist down, is “taking a dump in their front yard.” A Marine says to Wright, “Can you imagine if this was reversed, and some army came into suburbia and was crapping in everyone’s front lawns? It’s fucking wild.”

Just a glimpse. It’s all going on over there right now, and here we sit, with occasional reports of Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence, or of Iraqis killing Americans as we try to protect them. Scorn and ridicule are heaped on those who are trying to smuggle the truth to us.

What a country.

I spent my Monday morning deep in a reading trance, but one thought took hold as I read of the defeat of proposed constitutional reforms in Venezuela – one of them was for a six hour work day, a 36 hour week. How would such a thing impact our work-stressed hyper-materialistic society?

I can only speak from personal experience. I was once employed by others, and marched lockstep. I was at work by eight AM, home at five, dancing to the tune. The man who signs the paycheck also has influence over thoughts. It’s the Stockholm Syndrome – we come to share the views of our captor. I worked in the oil business, and was a Republican oil guy. My kids remind me now and then how strict I was in dictating to them – they could not watch certain shows (The Simpson’s, for one); we marched them off to church and enrolled them in Catholic schools. I was intent that they adopt the conservative’s mind-eye view on the world. I would not have wanted me for a parent.

What changed was my schedule. I became a self-employed CPA on April Fools’ Day, 1986. Slowly I began to notice something – I had time on my hands. A CPA’s life is fairly busy during tax season, but for the rest of the year you’ll see empty offices often staffed by clerical help. We do have time, and I unconsciously used my time to un-indoctrinate myself. I had some intellectual yearnings, and began to read – at first, the conservative stuff – books by right wingers and magazines from outfits like Heritage. It was very unsatisfying. I had political leanings too – enough of the hand-sitting! I went door-to-door for to-be Governor Stan Stephens in 1988, and proudly shook hands with old yellow-teeth himself, Conrad Burns, on election night that year. As he stood outside Republican headquarters smoking a cigarette, I could only think of the cat who swallowed the canary. Even as a Republican, I thought little of him.

But time is the enemy of the good citizen, and I was also going some non-doctrinaire meandering. I wandered into a minefield – two areas of American foreign policy, Cuba and Vietnam, that had been the dominant themes during my coming-to-awareness time in the 60’s. I had only seen the right-wing side – that’s all my school and parents ever let me see. I began to read about them, and trouble ensued. Much of what was available was pro forma, but there was subversive stuff out there too. I experienced some minor disorientation that would, over a period of two years, become complete loss of faith. I experienced something rare – a crumbling of my foundations. First a small leak, then stronger, until in the end I was without fortification.

Enough of that. Each to his own, everyone to safety. In retrospect, it was a coming-of-age that is life-shattering. I experienced true freedom of thought. Few do. I was lucky, and it started with the end of employment.

The point is this: I had time. I was able to pursue my interests. I could read in the morning (a habit I engage in to this day), and take little diversions during the day. In so doing, the patriot was unraveled.

I was lucky – damned lucky. I could explore with my mind. I wonder if that is what Chavez has in mind for Venezuelans – to give them time and education, to free them.

No wonder he is so feared.

I got this over at Crooks and Liars. Couldn’t resist.

PS: I’m just fostering dialogue here.

I set out this morning to investigate Fred Thompson’s new “flat” tax proposal. I could only find Thompson-friendly sources – virtually all are carbon reprints of his talking points. There may be more to learn as it filters down.

The Thompson “flat” tax is fairly simple and not very well thought out – he doesn’t know how much it will cost the treasury. But here’s how it would work:

We would have a choice of paying taxes using the current code, or his flat tax. With the flat tax we would be offered a $25,000 standard deduction, plus a $3,500 personal exemption, so that a family of four would not pay the tax until it earned $39,000. Then the tax would kick in – 10% on incomes up to $100,000, and 25% thereafter.

There’s more to it, of course, but that is the nitty gritty. How they call a two-tiered tax a “flat” tax escapes me. But that’s not the only problem.

Thompson, like every other candidate in either party save perhaps Dennis Kucinich, is blind to the payroll tax. That’s the tax that in a sneaky way takes 14.2% of everyone’s earnings up to $102,000 (2008), and 2.9% thereafter. It’s a regressive tax, and it applies only to wages. Dividends and interest and capital gains – the kind of income wealthy people are more likely to have – are exempt from it.

The payroll tax is a cash cow. The most recent year for which I have numbers, 2004, shows that the government raised more money from the payroll tax than the income tax, even though payroll taxes applied only to the first $87,900 of wages at that time. Thompson kisses the ring on the hand that feeds him, and slyly ignores this tax.

Here’s the Thompson proposal in full disclosure mode:

Family of four depending on wages: Income up to $39,000 taxed at 14.2%, income up to $102,000 taxed at 24.2%, income up to $139,000 taxed at 12.9%, all income thereafter taxed at 27.9%. He creates a donut hole between 102 and 139.

Family of four depending on passive income (interest, dividends, royalties, capital gains): Income up to $39,000, no tax. Income up to $139,000, taxed at 10%. All income thereafter taxed at 25%.

Thompson maintains the basic unfairness of the current tax code – he double-taxes wages while giving passive income a pass. It’s a push in the ‘right’ direction – in the idealized conservative world, all taxes would be paid by wage earners, none by owners of capital. They are pushing us in that direction – in 2008, the initial tax on dividends and capital gains is 0%. Zero.

The idea behind this is, of course, trickle down, aka feeding the sparrows through the cow. I’m not sure they really believe in that, but it’s a nice bouquet of flowers that hides an ugly bride. It’s a way of making the little guy pay the freight. Since it is so inherently unfair and indefensible, there’s no real justification for its implementation. So the best thing to do is what Fred Thompson has done. Ignore it.

When given a free hand to implement their will, conservatives have pushed for “reforms” at the point of a gun. They reimposed private health care on Iraq, and installed a flat tax of 15%. In that country they could have their way. Paul Bremer was a dictator. In this country it’s not so easy. But the essence of the Thompson plan – that wages should be taxed twice while all other income is tax only once, if at all, is an unacknowledged part of our system. No ‘credible’ candidate wants to change that basic structure.

And Thompson is no exception. His candidacy is going nowhere, but his flat tax has legs, I’m sure, in Catoland. Watch out for it. It’s a new version of the current regressive system dolled up to look like something else.