The Anderson militants in their compoundI suffer from many illusions. I think of the dark waxy substance that coats those little donuts that the they sell in little packs of six at gas stations as “chocolate frosting.” I imagine that when I cross a political boundary, say from Colorado into Utah, that the atmosphere has changed and that I am in a different place. When a carton of eggs says “cage free” I imagine chickens in a meadow rather than a heavily crowded building. When I see “organic” I think “better for you” rather than “more expensive.”
Some illusions do not affect me. I never imagine that when I am buying groceries that I have “saved” money, since I am spending money. When I see Starbucks coffee in a 12 oz bag for $11.99, I know that means $16 per pound. I know that a $15 pair of sneakers is priced at $119.99 because of advertising-created illusions of glamor and athletic prowess. When I pay for two items, I know that one of them was not “free.” I know that a “D” or “R” next to a politician’s name is also an advertising-created illusion of difference.
But I ran across one this morning that shocked me. This one has affected me my whole life. I grew up staying each night in a small building with other family members, eating and reading, watching TV and sleeping. Later, like most baby boomers, I got married and had children and we all stayed in a bigger building with more than one bathroom and color TV’s instead of black and white. Now that the kids are grown and gone I am staying in building with more rooms and bathrooms and TV’s than I need.
I always thought of these buildings as my “homes.” As it turns out, I simply don’t know the language we use. CIA uses a different word for these buildings when they attack them with drones.They are not family homes. They are “compounds”.
More importantly, the victims are not brothers and sisters, moms and dads. They are “militants.” And even though my country is attacking their country, my country is “defending” itself. That’s why we have a Department of “Defense” and not departments of “War” and “Aggression.”
It’s just language. Proper use of words makes all the difference.
I bought an iMac a couple of years back. I bought into the Apple aura, that the products were superior and so worth extra money. They are not. My iMac performed just like a PC. It required some different muscle memories to control it. These differences were not improvements.
Apple is the product of a fabulous advertising campaign that reaches us on a deep psychological level. All of the supposed advantages of Apple products over PC’s are merely the result of psychological suggestion. We pay hundreds more for a Mac that performs exactly as a PC. Then we convince themselves that it was worth it because none of us is susceptible to advertising. Right?
What it all boils down to is this: Some large energy concerns, Chevron among them, want to develop the natural gas of Ukraine, and so had to dispose of the old government, which was too close to Russia.
Everything else is cover. No one ever cared about democracy, of course. That’s a given. But the other concerns – Russia’s need for a buffer against repeated western invasions, Russia’s need for a warm weather port, the fascist and neo-Nazi elements that now occupy the Vichy government in Kiev … real enough, I suppose.
Young and Jack White prior to Young’s historic performance
Jimmy Fallon had Neil Young on his show a couple of nights ago, and they did something historic: Young recorded Willie Nelson’s song Crazy directly to a Voice-O-Graph vinyl recording booth.
Music is subjective, so I suppose people will disagree, but I thought after Young was done, even knowing he was going for minimalist, that the result was a badly sung song accompanied by a weak guitar with poor sound quality. Young has never appealed to me – I have never picked up on the vibe that made him famous.
He’s done a whole album of similarly recorded songs. Kitschy.
How much of our taste in music is suggested to us? The clothes we wear are entirely the result of suggestion. Ties are getting narrow again, as Fallon and others are wearing them that way. Is music the same – do we learn to like various acts due to subliminal suggestion? Or is it like the fashion business – follow the leader? I cannot imagine why else such mediocre talents as Lady Gaga and Britney Spears achieved stardom. And I imagine that if Neil Young walked into a recording studio today, unknown, that he would be ushered out as quickly.
Fallon’s in-house band, The Roots, by the way – if we can objectively agree on what is musical talent, that would be it. That is one energetic, gifted group of players.
In other news, officials in Boston announced that they had exhumed the body of serial killer Ted Bundy to sit and act as an impartial observer in the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Since airlines refused to fly a rotting corpse across the country, the judge ordered that the body be transported by rail.
Oh yeah, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With that in mind, anything is possible.
We are supposed to look away from Ukraine right now, what with the horrid murders of people in the trade Union fire and evidence that the new US-backed junta did it quite deliberately, and that there are American terrorists running around the place, so Nigeria popped up on our screens, but then some Pakistani malcontent wants to focus our attention on US behavior in Pakistan …
Focus, people, focus! We are talking about Nigerian girls right now. OK? Nothing else should trouble our pretty little heads.
Big Swede inserted a Milton Friedman link over at 4&20, and so I went for a longer version. The appearance in 1979 on the Phil Donahue show [which I think I saw at that time] was forty-five minutes, Swede’s link was about 90 seconds, and this one runs about ten minutes. Swede’s portion is part of the longer clip here.
I have my own views of Friedman, and some ability to hold them with integrity as I was swayed by him in the 1980’s with his book/TV series Free To Choose. His logic was so crystal clear that it seemed unassailable to me, and like Swede, I could not understand how anyone could argue with him. But so much of what he advocated turned out wrong. He was on the wrong side of a fascist dictatorship in Chile, and deregulation of the S&L industry and later electricity in California led to disasters. (Like the Great Depression, I assume Friedman hung those somehow on government failure too.)
But there was no way I could fathom in my mind a better way to organize an economy than around freedom of choice. I would not begin to break through the barriers of neoclassical economics until I removed the ideological underpinnings, removing “capitalism” and “free markets” and “free trade,” which are mere window dressing, and putting in their stead mere fascism. The essential feature of the market is market power. In a “free” market there are no restraints on power, and those who do not have it must suffer. The ultimate expression of this freedom they so cherish is slavery. After all, what force protects a man from being owned by another? The free market? Or government.
So I listened to him again so many years later and realized he was a charlatan, smooth and glib in his assertions. Most of them are just wrong. People like him (or Chomsky or Nader) should be presented to us on adversarial platforms, never to merely blandly assert to the tides, but to endure cross-examination and refutation until the subject has crystallized. Putting Friedman up against Donahue, an entertainer, was OK. At least there was some blowback, and Donahue did not pretend to understand economics well.
It is 1979, there is a Fairness Doctrine, so I imagine that Nader, who came under attack was allowed to respond. The format was cordial and the men were respectful of one another, each allowing time for full questions and answers. All of that went out the window with the Fairness Doctrine, so that TV interviews are torture these days, usually one-sided with mikes cut off, people talking over one another, audience unrestrained in their applause and jeers. It was a different era. Back then we were stupid, but polite. Today we are just stupid.
Hunter Biden (Has Dad’s disingenuous car salesman smile)
Note: Please be sure to read JC’s comments under this post, as he is all over this matter.
I learned from Huffington Post that Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, has an impressive résumé, as follows:
Hunter Biden currently serves as Chairman of the Board of World Food Program USA and as a Director on the not-for-profit boards of the Truman National Security Project, The Center for National Policy and the US Global Leadership Coalition. Mr. Biden serves as managing partner at Rosemont Seneca Partners, Chairman at Rosemont Seneca Advisors, is Counsel to Boies, Schiller, Flexner, LLP, a national law firm based in New York, and is a Director of CAYOVA a next generation social networking site.
Mr. Biden is also an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Masters Program in the school of foreign service. Mr. Biden is a member of the CSIS Executive Council on Development and the President’s Advisory Board for Catholic Charities in Washington D.C. From 2006-2009, Mr. Biden served on the Board of Directors of Amtrak, serving as Vice Chairman from 2007-2009. Mr. Biden was honored to serve as an Honorary Co-Chair of the 2009 Presidential Inaugural Committee and to have served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Previously, Mr. Biden was a founding member of the law firm, Oldaker, Biden and Belair, LLP, was appointed by President Clinton to serve as Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy Coordination under Secretary of Commerce William Daley and was Senior Vice President at MBNA America Bank. He is also a member of the bar in the State of Connecticut, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Mr. Biden received a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.
The guy is juiced. He’s connected to the Vice President of the United States, and has been appointed to the board of a company in an area of immediate interest in US foreign policy, a place where there has been insurgencies, riots, a violent coup d’état, massacres, where NATO wants to expand, where Russia’s security interests are threatened and a potential confrontation between two very powerful countries is an ongoing backdrop. It is not unlike George W. Bush shilling for Enron when his Daddy was president. It is not kid-juice, but rather daddy-juice, that secures these appointments.
Newsworthy? Nah. I got hold of this tidbit via Olga75 on Twitter. Otherwise, [crickets] all the way up and down the Google.
_________________ Update: One almost gets the feeling that, outside the United States and in the inner tubes exists a real news media. This is from a Buzzfeed story:
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told BuzzFeed that Russia saw no conflict of interest in Joe Biden working to wean Ukraine off Russian gas – which makes up about 60 percent of the country’s energy supply – while his son worked in the Ukrainian gas industry.
“Anyway, as everyone knows, there’s no gas in Ukraine,” he added. “The gas in Ukraine is Russian.”
Factor that into JC’s comments below in which Burisma appears to be nothing more than a shell – no gas fields, no real company, Cypriot ties and a connection to the former Polish president and the current US Vice President. Burisma and I have one thing in common: Both of us got our domain names from GoDaddy.
Caricature: exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics.
We are well into Twelve Years a Slave this evening, and are yet to meet a character who does not fit the above definition. I don’t know if I can sit through this much longer.
What trash! What nonsense! The quest for moral superiority is never-ending. I remind you that slavery was legal in much of the north as well as the south at that time. I remind you of Dr. King’s words, that he feared the quiet racism of the good people more than the open racism of the bad.
The Holocaust became the reason for World War II, after the fact. It appears to me that slavery became the reason for the Civil War in the same manner. Economics brings out the worst in people. There are still slaves on the planet in abundance, and sweatshop workers are not far removed. The free market demands it. There are people livening nearby you who cannot pay their bills or college loans or afford health care or have enough food based on our current system. People suffered then and now because those who control economics devalue people.
But people are the same, wherever you go. These evil southerners and noble slaves in the movie are literary devices, nothing more. The whole damned movie so far has been one long tortuous device.
Twelve Years a Slave: Rotten apples all the way through. Feel-good junk food.
