Ratco Mladic, the Serbian military officer responsible for the deaths of as many as 8,000 Muslem men in the Bosnian wars of the early 1990’s, has been apprehended. His crimes were committed as NATO and the Clinton administration looked the other way.

Search is still underway for war criminals Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, and George W. Bush, thought to be responsible for the deaths of as many as 1,200,000 Muslims. They are suspected of hiding in the United States, a rogue country that is known to harbor war criminals. Tony Blair, also complicit, was last seen living in luxury in Great Britain.

The problem is, this is not intended is irony – the League of Conservation Voters really is this dense about things, or shills for the Democratic Party. From Mathew Koehler:

Just a real shame that Senator Tester can attach a rider to a budget bill removing northern Rockies wolves from the ESA…and can introduce a bill in Congress to mandate logging on our national forests and release Wilderness Study areas protected in the 70s by Senator Lee Metcalf (MT), while also making some WSA’s into permanent motorized recreation playgrounds…and can introduce a bill to amend the Toxic Substances Control Act to permanently exempt lead bullets, shot and fishing tackle from regulation….can pass legislation allowing guns in America’s national parks….

But then LCV and the head of TWS host a reception in support of Senator Tester to raise tens of thousands of dollars for his campaign. And yet we wonder why our movement, and our issues, continue to struggle.

Here’s what he is referring to:

Please join League of Conservation Voters Action Fund and
Thomas Barron ~ Sandy Buffett ~ Kimo Campbell ~
Tylynn Gordon ~ Rampa R. Hormel ~ Gene Karpinski ~
Theresa Keaveny ~ Michael Kieschnick ~ Bill Meadows ~
Scott A. Nathan ~ Kathleen Welch
(host committee in formation)

For a reception in support of Hon. Martin Heinrich (NM) & Hon. Jon Tester (MT)

Tuesday, June 7, 2011
5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Union Station
Columbus Court
Washington, DC
Hosts: $1,000 (per person)
Guests: $100+

RSVP to Jennifer Milley at LCV AF/202.454.4568 or Jennifer_Milley@lcv.org

You can make a contribution online at:
https://lcv.zissousecure.com/donate/heinrich (Martin Heinrich for Senate)
https://lcv.zissousecure.com/donate/tester (Montanans for Tester)
Or make checks payable to:
“Martin Heinrich for Senate” and/or “Montanans for Tester”
Mailing address: LCV Action Fund, 1920 L Street, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036

Contributions or gifts to “Martin Heinrich for Senate” and “Montanans for Tester” are not tax deductible. An individual can contribute as much as $5,000 ($2,500 for the primary election, and $2,500 for the general election). Married couples may together give a total of $10,000. Federal Election Campaign Laws prohibit contributions from corporations, labor unions, and foreign nationals who are not admitted for permanent residence. All contributions must be made from personal funds and may not be reimbursed by any other person.

Paid for by the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, http://www.lcv.org, and authorized by Martin Heinrich for Senate and Montanans for Tester.

It would be very good if some activists were to disrupt this organization of “conservationists.” How can they support a man who spits on their ideals?

We need more predators. The sheepmen complain, it is true, that the coyotes eat some of their lambs. This is true but do they eat enough? I mean enough lambs to keep the coyotes sleek, healthy and well fed. That is my concern. As for the sacrifice of an occasional lamb, that seems to me a small price to pay for the support of the coyote population. The lambs, accustomed by tradition to their role, do not complain; and the sheepmen, who run their hooved locusts on the public lands and are heavily subsidized, most of them as hog-rich as they are pigheaded, can easily afford these trifling losses. Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, p38

I looked in vain in my files for the above Abbey snippet in the past, but I used the word “wolves” instead of “coyote,” and so nothing turned up. Of course, ol’ Ed died before the reintroduction of wolves to the lower 48, and so would have spoken of the only significant threat to sheep at that time, coyotes. They are such an adaptable animal that their eradication was impossible without some kind of shock and awe attack that would have obliterated all living species. It was probably contemplated, but considered a threat to sheep. We must keep our world both safe for sheep and Democrats. But I repeat myself.

Going on faulty memory here: Dates may be wrong. On New Year’s in 1995 my now-wife and I were in Gardiner, Montana. It was a remarkable event, in my mind, as I’d never seen it in the dead of winter. We sat with windshield wipers flapping through a late-night rain storm. I didn’t know about climate change back then. Later that winter Yellowstone bison migrated into the surrounding national forest. The rain had frozen and formed a layer of ice, and the hulks were unable to access the foliage below. They had to move to find food, and were unaware of political boundaries.

Years before, the tone-deaf governor of Montana, Stan Stephens, had allowed the nation to see great white hunters stand a few feet from grazing bison and drop them with high-powered rifles. There was outrage. Governor Marc Racicot was a smarter man and a better politician. He did not change the policy, but confined the slaughter to a walled enclosure beyond the reach of reach of cameras.

I’m not terribly concerned about bison, as they tend to overpopulate in the absence of predators. I only hope their suffering is minimized before death, and do not want them to starve. The lessons that I took from the events of those years were these: 1) It is important to control images in politics. Pictures are potent, and can alter public perceptions and affect policy; and 2) Governors Stephens and Racicot were not in charge of policy regarding bison – they merely carried it out. The Montana Stockmen’s Association was the governing force, and the governors’ task was merely to appear to be in charge as policy was carried out.

I’ve been following the debate around the recent actions taken “by” Jon Tester (read: Stockmen’s Association Montana Department of Livestock – see JC’s comment below) to bypass the EPA and due process, and legislate the demise of wolves in Montana. As usual, since Tester has a “D” after his name, those who should oppose such tyranny are either silent or actively support him. The active supporters are no more than the men with brooms who follow the parade.

I am not concerned about loss of sheep or cattle due to wolves, as there are adequate compensation policies in place to take care of that matter. I don’t have personal feelings for individual wolves, as they live and die by predation. I take no pleasure when I witness their activities. It’s gruesome, and as I see the wolf-watchers in Yellowstone Park I am reminded of the Roman Coliseum.

I regard wolves as an important part of a healthy and balanced ecosystem. In the years since their reintroduction into the Yellowstone ecosystem, the place has changed for better. Bears are doing well, and elk migrations have reverted to pre-eradication patterns, leaving the valleys earlier and thereby allowing foliage to take firmer hold. The elk population has been brought under control, and the elk themselves are again alert, with weaker and older ones routinely failing to show up for dinner.

There’s great trepidation now that Congressman Dennis Rehberg might replace Jon Tester in the Montana senate seat. I don’t have personal feelings for either, as they live and die by political machinizations. However, I do not like to witness their activities. I regard both as slovenly beats, and believe that their occasional removal is good for the political ecosystem. When a man like Tester goes down, it allows better foliage in the Democratic pastures. Slovenly grazers who try to make nice with predators ought to fail to show up for dinner now and then.

What Tester did in pushing through the science bypass to allow for predation on wolves was something that Rehberg would not get away with.

I see ol’ Jon now, peacefully feeding on spring grasses, wistfully imagining his reelection to have importance to the greater good. I see Rehberg, himself a grazer, waiting to move in on that meadow. The predators that will take down poor ol’ Jon (a lot of meat on the hoof there!) are the same ones who dropped those bison from close distance back then.

I don’t like to witness carnage, and so will avert my eyes as Jon gets taken down. I only admire the noble workings of nature, and hope that he, like lambs, is accustomed by tradition to his role and does not complain.

As late as about 1994, people like say, Bill Gates, had no interest in the Internet. He wouldn’t even go to conferences about it, because he didn’t see a way to make a profit from it. (Chomsky, interview with Corpwatch, May, 1998)

The above quote, which I cannot source beyond what I have there, has stuck with me over the years. It indicates that perhaps Bill Gates is no guru, and falls in line with Nassim Taleb’s musings in his book The Black Swan that there isn’t as much financial genius in the world as we like to think, but rather a whole lot of luck. Maybe Gates just got lucky.

This is taken from the book The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, p207 forward:

I was watching late-night television recently when another star, though not one from the entertainment world, appeared for an interview. His name is Bill Gates. Though the interviewer is known for his sarcastic approach, towards Gates he seemed unusually deferential. Even the audience seemed to ogle Gates. The reason, of course, is that for thirteen years straight Gates was named the richest man in the world by Forbes magazine. … And so when he was asked about his vision for interactive television, everyone waited with great anticipation to hear what he had to say. But his answer was ordinary, no more creative, ingenious, or insightful than anything I’ve read from a dozen other computer professionals. Which brings us to the question: does Gates earn $100 per second because he his godlike, or is he godlike because he earns $100 per second?

Mlodinow goes on to describe the origins of Microsoft. IBM, whose success was built largely on government subsidized research, had belatedly decided to get into the personal computer business, that bevvy of geniuses having dismissed the trend in its planning during the 1970’s. They did not even have a program to run a PC, and so approached Gates for some help. Gates didn’t have one either, and referred them to Gary Kildall of Digital Research Inc. Talks did not go well between Kildall and IBM, and another IBM employee, Jack Sims, approached Gates again. He still did not have a program, but began to show his true “genius.” He knew someone who did.

The system Gates had in mind might well have been based on Kildall’s work. Gates asked if IBM wanted him to go get it, or if IBM would do that dirty work itself. Sams, understanding what was going on, insisted that Gates go get it, hint hint.

Gates did, for $50,000 (or, by some accounts, a bit more), made a few changes and renamed it DOS (disk operating system). IBM, apparently with little faith in the potential of its new idea, licensed DOS from Gates for a low per-copy royalty fee, letting Gates retain the rights. DOS was no better – and many, including most computer professionals, would claim far worse – than say, Apple’s Macintosh operating system.

Ergo, the conundrum so many of us have faced over the years – crappy PC technology dominates the market because IBM had market power at that time. “People bought DOS because people were buying DOS.” Gates and Microsoft amassed a huge war chest of money, and from there started to buy up competing companies and to reverse engineer technology, including Apple’s icon-orientated home screen so common now on computers.

With the internet, which Gates pooh-poohed, came the need for a means to access the web, and with some government funding, the Netscape Navigator was born.

Microsoft wanted none of that, and pushed its own product, the Internet Explorer on the market in a now famous scheme whereby IE was pre-installed on new PC’s. Netscape, long gone now, would sue and win a settlement, but IE by default became the market standard. Mozilla’s Firefox, which I use, is a superior product, but IE is the only program on any new PC that I have purchased over the years.

My first computer was and Apple IIe, and I hadn’t a clue how to make it work. It sat there. I set it up to download stock quotes for my then boss, and each time we did a download, the company providing the quotes charged us. When the bill came through, it said we were downloading “recipes,” and my mercurial boss shut us down, saying that she had more important things to do than to provide cooking ideas to her staff.

Later came VisiCalc, and at last I could put the computer to work in a practical way. Later still I bought a program called “Appleworks,” a combined spreadsheet/word processor/database. It was a remarkable program for its time. My employer owned around a thousand mineral deeds in various western states, and with Appleworks I was able to input all of the information on those deeds using over twenty parameters, and thereafter quickly locate any one for any reason. All of this before Lotus and the crappy Microsoft Office system, which now dominates the spreadsheet market. That’s becuase PC’s dominate the market.

Bill Gates is no genius, and perhaps that’s the reason he feels a need to give away so much of his fortune. If only the rest of the financial world would see it that way too. In mutual funds, for instance, given that there are thousands of them, it goes with out saying that maybe a hundred of them will outperform the others in any arbitrary period, say, a calendar year. The next year, it will be a different hundred. In the meantime the underlying companies whose stock make up the portfolios are working hard to develop products that might or might not tempt the market and create some success. No one knows which will survive or thrive. There are no geniuses. The future is just a damned mystery.

Wall Street financiers have worked a clever way around market uncertainty. Money itself has become the driving force, the thing that creates wealth. Speculators have devised financial products that are themselves considered commodities for trading without any underlying product or idea or entrepreneurial genius. It’s a house of cards, of course, and so collapsed in 2007-2008. It’s been rebuilt, and will likely collapse again, though I do not know the future. But as they say about North Dakota, there is no there there.

I was recently asked by our former landlord in Boulder about the future – what’s going to happen with the stock market, is the economy going to start ticking again. I informed her, with all the sincerity I could muster, that I had no clue. This left her cold, and no doubt she ran to a financial adviser for better advice. I sympathize, but life offers no certainties, no geniuses, and charlatans rule the financial world. The best thing to do is hope that you can pull a Gates, and get lucky.
_____________
Update: No sooner is this post up than I learn that Microsoft is going to buy Skype. Apparently, the reverse engineering failed.

We are hiking the slot canyons and washes of Utah this week, and are deep in Mormon country. It’s an oppressive feeling in the towns – we are in Blanding, and it is sleepy. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s an air of insularity here. I look at the faces of other diners in a restaurant, and there is a passivity that creeps me out. These people do not think for themselves, and are trained all their lives to accept the rule of church hierarchy. They are severely punished if they get out of line.

In Bill Maher’s movie Religulous, he interviewed a couple of fallen away Mormons. they talked about ostracism. They not only lost contact with their friends and community, but also their business relationships, jobs and income. If you leave the Mormon church, you might as well leave Utah and start over. And that is hard, if not impossible, for most people. So they get their minds right.

And they seem happy, and that brings to mind Napoleon’s observation that freedom is not something most people want, but is rather something cherished by only a few people “of noble mind.” People don’t want to think for themselves or go againt the flow. I’m not talking about Mormons, of course, but all of this nonsense about “killing” Osama that is going down. It is so painfully obviously a total hoax, and yet those who are even a little suspicious are ridiculed and so might have to leave the Big Utah, the US of A, or just look at their shoes. Or get their minds right.

And I suppose they are happy.

Maybe that is why the Mormons ended up in Utah. It is such a big state with so many ways to go off and be alone. Maybe they all sneak off now and then and have a private thought. Maybe they tear off that white shirt and tie and tie one on, or read a book that has evil thoughts. I haven’t seen it, but these canyons are so deep that they have not all been discovered or explored. It could be that there is life here after all.

Maybe we will stumble on a colony of freethinkers today.

Osama is dead, says Obama.

Osama bin Laden probably died in late 2001 in the early bombing of Afghanistan. His images over the years have varied. He’s gotten younger, worn jewelry, a changed his dominant hand. Who it is that has been manipulating his image we cannot know. I presume it is the Americans, as his face was a valuable commodity. In propaganda terms, he was the focal point for our hatred, a way to manipulate us into supporting our own terrorism.

When Obama was elected, I thought perhaps they would “kill” Osama, indicating that there really had been regime change here. When they did not kill him, when Obama signaled to the world that there had been no change by leaving Gates at at the Pentagon, I knew that we were in for four more years.

What does his “death” mean? is it significant? We can only speculate. Perhaps his usefulness as ebbing. Maybe they are going to pull out of Afghanistan, either acknowledging defeat or moving on to new and better wars. They cannot leave Afghanistan without “killing” him.

So maybe this is a time for cautious optimism. Perhaps it is a good time to hope for some change. Not very damned likely, but indeed change is in the wind, so I only hope it is a positive sign.

I am just going to rough this out a bit, and maybe refine it later, or maybe commenters can fix it up for me. I am fond of saying that there is no such thing as “free markets,” and have support on that idea from Dwayne Andreas, former head of Archer Daniels Midland, who said

“There isn’t one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.”

Andreas, who (no surprise) is a major donor to “both” political parties, is wrong about that, in my opinion. There are indeed free markets, and as anyone who read the book or saw the movie “The Insider” knows, ADM spent a great deal of executive time trying to avoid those markets. The thing is that free markets scare the pants off of people, and just about everyone is looking for ways to hide out. That is most of the reason there are thousands of lobbyists in Washington, DC – they are looking for special tax treatment, access to the commons, protection from competition.

There are, however, people so weak that they cannot hide away, and so are exposed daily to the grinding mechanism of the free market. The are, in order of weakest to strongest, as I see it at this moment, as follows (the lower the number on the list, the more exposed to free markets):

1. Slaves
2. Indentured servants
3. Unemployed people without benefits
4. Sweatshop workers
5. Migrant agricultural workers
6. Unemployed workers with benefits
7. Non-unionized employees
8. Self-employed craftsmen
9. American unionized employees
10. Unionized employees in countries with strong labor laws
11. Self-employed professionals
12. Employed professionals (athletes, architects, etc)
13. Business executives with small companies
14. Business executives with large companies
15. People who make large fortunes by skill or luck
16. People who marry people who have large fortunes
17. The heirs of people who make large fortunes by skill or luck

Best I can do at this moment. Note that the higher the number on the list, the more inclined people are to support the concept of free markets, until you reach the ultimate absurdity: The Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, the Walton Family, George H.W. and W. Bush, and Steve Forbes, #17’s all, trust babies all, and firm believers in free markets, one and all.

Who was that guy who came to mind as I read this? Can’t think of the name … rhymes with staley …

“He had delusions of adequacy.” (Walter Kerr)

This came in the mail today. Just curious – do you drive yourself there, or do they prefer you be dropped off?

Long a student of politics, I could not help but notice that Paul Ryan has copied Ronald Reagan’s hair style down to the the side and size of the part. That both are graced with widow’s peaks is useful for Ryan, but who knows – maybe he had plugs. And I would not be surprised if Ryan has added color. This is part of the sublime art of politics, and is evidence that Ryan has high ambition and good advisers.

As seen in the image to the left, taken during his 2010 campaign, this is a new hair style for Ryan. Don’t you just love the politics of sublime manipulation?