Lead in ammunition: An exchange of viewpoints

With Matt Koehler’s permission, I am reprinting below the fold an exchange from a public forum between him and Ben Lamb of the Montana Wildlife Federation regarding Sen Jon Tester’s “Sportsmen’s Act.”

In the 90’s when I was working around and for Montana Wilderness Association, MWF was one of those groups with which we held common objectives, even if we didn’t pick out curtains together. The essential bond was keeping public lands in public hands. Since there are always pressures from private wealth to privatize the commons, preservation requires a national impetus, and for that, we rely on the federal government. Private power seeks to fragment opposition by harping on “local control,” a means of fragmenting opposition into manageable portions. It is natural then that Lamb falls back on “local control” to advance his case that the EPA should not have the power to regulate lead in ammunition.

The exchange below below is preserved intact, and I have duplicated the links. I did take the liberty to italicize some PR language that Lamb used just for the sake of illustrating how that industry works – to come up with coded catchphrases that pack an emotional punch. That’s probably not deliberate – the advertising people, who are usually employed on the moneyed side of these debates, inject these words like a nurse administering morphine to an unconscious patient.

Also, I could help but notice that Lamb carries with him the same package of attitudes that Sen Jon Tester does about environmentalists – banning Koehler from commenting is akin to Tester’s fencing stakeholders out the discussions around his Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. Koehler is among the most respectful of commenters on the blogs, and always brings with him the actual language of bills and debates. However, industry and the moneyed interests have from the beginning attempted to marginalize the environmental community by insinuating that they are elitists; that use of the courts to bring lawbreakers in line is impolite; and that “mainstream” environmental groups (big budgets, foundation backing) are the only true representatives of the public interest. MWF appears to be a minor player in this regard, as its expenses only exceed revenue by about $100K.

Matt asked me to emphasize that he speaks for himself below, and not as a representative of any group with which he might be affiliated. He might also be politely suggesting that I not insinuate that he and I are working together – far from it. Everything above the line here reflects my own snarky attitude, and not Matt’s careful comments. (Full debate is beneath the fold.)
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“Free markets” are the “road to serfdom”

Michael Hudson
Michael Hudson
I have a problem with economics. It’s not that the “science” cannot explain the past or the present or predict the future. All of that is true. But in addition to being wrong, such teachings are even backward.

I worked for some very rich oil dudes in my early career, and each December they were forced with a choice: “Do I want to put my money in the ground, or turn it over to the government.” Without fail, they put it in the ground. It may have impacted their freedom, but it also served a greater good. The privileges of wealth should not override the health of our economy, especially when wealth results from mere rent-seeking.

The following is from economist Michael Hudson, who seems to have figured out the game:

Democracy involves subordinating financial dynamics to serve economic balance and growth – taxing rentier* income or keeping basic monopolies in the public domain. Untaxing or privatizing property income “frees” it to be pledged to the banks, to be capitalized into larger loans. Financed by debt leveraging, asset-price inflation increases rentier wealth while indebting the economy at large. The economy shrinks, falling into negative equity. …

…The private bank debts taken onto government balance sheets in Ireland and Greece have been turned into taxpayer obligations. The same is true for America’s $13 trillion added since September of 2008 …

…To put matters bluntly, the result has been junk economics. Its aim is to disable public checks and balances, shifting power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning an taxation is accusers of being the “road to serfdom,” as if “free markets” controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic.”

In other words, “free markets” are the real “road to serfdom,” as can be seen all around us. The science of economics has it all backwards.
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*A “rentier” is an entity, such as Bain Capital, engaged in “rent seeking,” or skimming off of income-producing activities rather than creating new wealth. The ultimate lie of economics is that mere wealth accumulation is a societal good. Wealth created from a newly created activity, as investing in a new invention, is not the same as merely buying stock in an existing enterprise and collecting dividends and capital gains. This is the economic basis for high marginal tax rates** – not to confiscate wealth, but to direct investment towards its highest and best use. Investors should always be given the choice – invest or pay tax.
**Two other benefits of high marginal tax rates: Charitable giving is encouraged by a high-tax environment. Given a choice between turning it over to the government or charity, investors most often choose charities. Secondly, municipal bonds flourish. A tax-free bond in a high tax environment is a powerful investment, so that cities, countries, states, neighborhoods have access to low-cost financing.

Off come the masks

As Chomsky often reminds us, the US not only supports despotic regimes all over the planet, but also acts in a formulaic manner when those regimes are challenged. The old dictator becomes a bad guy that we have always known about, and he is replaced with a good guy who later turns out to be a bad guy too.

I was a little sick at heart during the Egyptian uprising for two related reasons: Hillary Clinton was working the situation, meaning that she was lining up the new dictator, and US military aid continued without a hiccup, meaning that the new regime did not threaten either US or (subordinate) Israeli interests.

Well golly, it turns out that Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, is also Egypt’s new thug.

Tunisia’s new government is turning on the tear gas as well. Hillary can leave office with a “Mission Accomplished” banner overhead. She did her job. The thugs still rule.

About those “blah blah blah” matters

  • Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. (Carl Sagan)
  • It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. (Mark Twain)

I wrote an overlong piece yesterday, and was dissatisfied. I kept coming back and fixing it. Finally last night, while in a meditative state fixated on sitcom star Heather Locklear, I realized that anything that hard to write had to be nonsense. I had tried to summarize the rules of politics, but realized that all I was doing was trying to help gamblers understand Las Vegas. It’s a pointless exercise. Gamblers love to gamble, and partisans are the last to understand politics.

It all started at Intelligent Discontent in what ended up being a five-sided debate around two points of view, me against four others. An amazing feature of that debate was this insane fact: When the Republicans funneled $500,000 in money of unknown origin to help Rick Hill in his campaign for governor of Montana, these Democrats were incensed. When the Democrats funneled $1 million of unknown origin to do a powerful campaign close for Jon Tester, these same players were delighted.

It was this brick wall of hypocrisy that launched my long and mercifully discarded piece.

In the two-party system, corruption only exists in the other party. When people like me mention that both look quite the same to outsiders, they rationalize, and call on their intellectuals to make sense of it.

As I watched beautiful Heather last night I realized the real problem I was having with that long piece: I understand politics quite well, usually after-the-fact. It is people who give me trouble. I mentioned to a friend via email recently that firebrands are easy to understand – Randians, libertarians, fascists (going by other names), Tea Party imbeciles and others are wedded to slogans. It’s easy to rally around slogans. It’s “common sense.”

Democrats are far more complex, as they have no base philosophy and no three-word slogan that can summarize their nothingness. So they rally around candidates. So naturally, when the candidates betray an ideal, Democrats continue to support them. Theirs is not an idealistic enterprise. It is a clearinghouse used to gather funds to elect people calling themselves “Democrat.” Nothing more.

I’ve long said that “Democrats are the problem,” and I stand by that four-word slogan. With Obama’s reelection we will have more aggressive wars, torture, indefinite detentions, continued tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity and attacks on our social safety net, targeted assassinations, attacks on civilians and suppression of human freedom all over the globe. This is not the Neocon agenda – this is the enhanced Neocon agenda. When I listed them at ID, the response I got from “Namelessrange” was “blah blah blah.”

This response only makes sense if the man is the issue, and nothing else.

American two-party politics are not about principles, ideals, an informed citizenry or human dignity. It’s all about elections. Obama and Tester got reelected. Nothing else matters.

Democrats are the problem, you see.

The eye-flick

Some years ago – it’s been over a decade – I had gotten to know a young film student at MSU in Bozeman, Montana. I don’t know how this came about other than her being a barista at the coffee shop we frequented. We attended the showing of her film along with many others at graduation that year – she was part of a group, and I have no memory of their film. Later, and again I do not know how it came about, I passed along to her a copy of the original slave narrative from the University of North Carolina that was the basis for the Hollywood treatment of the incident called Amistad. (It got a royal Spielberging, which is why I am reluctant to sit through his rendition of Lincoln.)

This incident comes to mind because of another memory: while waiting for her to serve my coffee one morning, she told me about a film being made about the Ottoman treatment of Armenians, which she called the “first genocide of the twentieth century.” I responded that, as I recalled from my own reading, the first genocide of that century was in the Philippines, and was carried out by the United States. Her eyes flickered – and it is that flicker I remember so well. She was not stupid or shallow – far from it. The movement of the eyes was a reflex reference to her intellectual framework – she had quickly scanned her knowledge base and come up empty. My reference to a “genocide” carried out by the United States was outside her realm of the possible. No doubt within 30 seconds the conversation left her mind, never to return.
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PSYOP

A few months back I reluctantly plunged headlong into the ongoing investigation by others into the events of 9/11/01. I say “reluctantly” not because I am on some mission, but rather because I know myself, my obsessive nature, and that I would be absorbed until spent. Below is a summary of my sifting of books, YouTubes, movies and interviews. There are tons of such platforms out there on this subject, and most of it is nonsense. There is a thread of substance weaving through it, serious people who have done serious work. But it’s hard to separate wheat from chaff.

I find a self-directed Q&A format an easy writing device. Here goes:

  • Q: Who did it?
  • A: Unknown. It’s much easier to say who did not do it, specifically, Osama bin Laden and those 20 others. But that is not the question to ask. First, we need to know what happened.
  • Q: It’s not obvious to you?
  • A: It appeared so. But it is not at all obvious. 9/11 was a large operation, both military and psychological – the preparation had to have taken years. There are many sub-operations within the events of that day – placement of Bush in the presidency, use of the news media to plant the ideas of “Al Qaeda,” “Osama bin Laden,” and “planes hitting buildings.”
  • Q: Osama didn’t do it?
  • A: It appears he was as surprised as all of us – that’s what I read in his final interview before he died in 2001. He was not terribly smart; apparently did not even know that the US was backing him as he fought the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. And anyway, he certainly did not have access to the resources necessary to shut down the national air defense system that day. But set that aside. The question is, again, what happened?
  • Q: So what happened?
  • A: Maybe two planes were taken off course. They didn’t hit anything.
  • Q: I saw them hit the buildings.
  • A: We all did. More on that later. Here is the key to 9/11 in my mind: There were a large number of military and civilian drills going on that day that distracted our people, used vital resources, sent F16’s off to Alaska, and confused everyone. The military does this on a regular basis to keep their people sharp. One of fifteen or so drills on 9/11/01 was a scenario where planes would be flown into the Twin Towers. As the day unfolded, NORAD and other personnel were looking at blips on radar screens they thought to be part of drills.

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Galileo in jail, Part II

As long as we are doing basic Newtonian physics here, there’s another aspect of 9/11 that violates his principles. The Pentagon was supposedly hit by an airliner that day, flown so close to ground level that it clipped light posts that were seen scattered about on the street and lawn.

Let’s do some basic math: The plane had just made an amazing maneuver prior to coming in, so let’s be charitable and say that it had slowed to a speed that the body of the plane could withstand at ground level, 300 mph. At that speed the object is moving at a rate of 440 feet per second. A football field is 120 yards long, including end-zones, or 360 feet. So imagine that you are sitting at ground level on the fifty yard line, and an object travels by … one-thousand-one – blink of an eye, it has traveled the length of the field and then some, hard to even see.

That is the speed of the plane as it hit the light posts. Newton’s third law* says that it does not matter what is in motion and what is stationary – the transfer of energy takes place and the object with the greater mass will prevail. In this case, it is either the aluminum wings of a jet airliner, so light that, as we have all seen, there are warnings painted on them telling maintenance staff not to walk on them, or the light posts. Those light posts are made of steel, I would guess a 1/4″ or 3/8″ hollow tube, and fastened in place usually by four very heavy bolts. The transfer of energy takes place, the light posts absorb some of it, but the wings take a beating, are probably sheared off, and end up somewhere on the lawn of the Pentagon.

But they are gone, nowhere to be seen. The official story says that the building absorbed them, that itself impossible, but second in line on that list.
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Better equipment allows better knowledge, and deception

We watched an interesting episode of NOVA last night, this one dealing with the history of the telescope. Current NOVA’s are hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, our modern-day Carl Sagan, or public interface with science. Sagan reminded us in his many writings that people have not gotten smarter over the centuries, but merely have better instruments available to observe natural phenomena. With better tools we make better observations.

Part of the episode was devoted to the tribulations of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century astronomer. He was found “vehemently suspect of heresy” in 1633, and put under house arrest with the understanding that he could be imprisoned or executed at any time. His crime, advocacy of heliocentrism, was really nothing more than subterfuge for enforcement of a larger regime, thought control, by the Catholic Church. The church was the predominant military and financial power center of that time. These were not stupid people, and church insiders were probably no less convinced than Galileo of the essential integrity of his work.

One talking head during the episode remarked that people were not “dumb” back then, the pretext being that we have advanced so much that incidents like the imprisonment of Galileo do not happen anymore. That is not true. Nothing could be further from the truth, in fact. We have not changed an iota.

I am not Galileo, and have no pretense or delusions about great intellectual abilities. My advantage over others is simply my situation in life – I cannot lose my job or pension, and don’t care (too much) about ridicule if I think I am right. The opinion of others is important to me, but my own personal integrity far more so. In fact, my internal constitution will not allow me to profess to believe things that I know are not true. Self-employment, or personal freedom, does that to a person.

As a person of average intellect but more than average freedom, I can easily see that 9/11 was an inside job. All I had to do was expose myself to the evidence. So too can many others, but in their positions will lose their jobs, their lives, fortunes and sacred honor if they go public. If nothing else, they will be ridiculed, and if a public person, marginalized. The United States security state is every bit as oppressive as the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century.

Below the fold is a YouTube. It a snippet from is what is called the “Hezarkhani video.” It was shown late on the evening of September 11, 2001 by CNN. It is fake. It took all day to put it together. Hezarkhani had his camera in place when bombs when off at a predetermined location on the tower, and the image of the plane flying through the building, absorbed as if into a sponge, was added later by technicians using software widely available at that time.

This is where mere bonehead science enters the discussion. What happens in the video cannot happen for real. The plane is made mostly of aluminum, and the wings are especially weak, like beer cans. The building is concrete and steel. It does not matter if a plane flying at 560 mph (itself impossible) hit the building, or the building hit the plane at that speed – the plane would be demolished and the streets below would be littered with wreckage, bodies, luggage and kerosene. The building would sustain slight damage, as it is designed like a spider web to spread the impact of such a force. People would have been hurt and killed, fire would have burned until available fuel was used up, and nothing further.

The Hezarkhani video is a jumping off place for anyone of a scientific bent with just a modicum of natural skepticism. Since what happens in that video violates Newton’s third law, then other videos, photos, and testimony of talking heads must also be false. And in fact, diligent investigators have combed through the lists of eyewitnesses to talk to people who actually saw a plane hit the building that day. Other than those connected to news networks or government agencies and paid actors featured prominently in on-the-street interviews that day, there was but one person. One.

Anyway, click below to watch the video, or not. I assume you won’t. I don’t need a lot of science to understand why not, either. I’ve been reading about this phenomenon for twenty years, writing about it for six. It is the effect of social forces on individual thought patterns and perceptions. We don’s see with our eyes alone. We are quite suggestible, and see with the whole of our minds, often overriding visual evidence provided by our sight mechanism. It’s a hard way to live, friend, much harder than openly describing what is seen. I don’t envy you.
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Coming soon to your town: “The Fiscal Cliff”

Obama seems to be that type of personality that lights up when adulation comes his way. He naturally gravitates towards the speaker’s podium. We have projected leadership qualities on him based on that carefully crafted image, but what we really have there is a mystery. (The fact that we cannot view his college transcripts is weird.)

The expression “The White House” usually refers to some faceless executive branch operative. “Obama” is, in the public mind, the person exerting control over that vast apparatus. Whatever he may be underneath, Obama is the mask of power. He is probably a ribbon cutting teleprompter reader, but “Obama”and “The White House” are useful shorthand. Do not confuse words with reality.

Obama and the White House are controlled by “Wall Street,” another shorthand term which refers to the financial oligarchy* that operates behind politics. There are many familiar names and faces, and many more we do not know. (I doubt the Koch brothers ever wanted a high profile.) Perhaps the “New York-London financial axis” helps to illuminate the arrangement.

Obama is a “Wall Street Democrat,” that is, his party is a mask of a faction of the oligarchy. Republicans are but another faction. Each of these factions has attached themselves to various elements of the general population. It appears that Democrats have a more successful formula right now, and that Republicans are doomed to be the party of religious zealots, rednecks and the racist south. But they are smart, and will soon rebrand.

The stakes are very high during electoral contests, which is why the oligarchy is willing to invest billions of dollars in office holders. The White House and the Congress offer a pathway to the Treasury, the commons, the law enforcement and securities regulation apparatus, and of course, The Pentagon.
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Stupid me goes to a Bond movie … stupid stupid stupid!

What he said.

What am I doing going to a Bond movie anyway? In the opening scenes Bond is shot in the shoulder, yet functions as if not even wounded. A bullet to that part of the body is disabling and recovery will take months. Later he is shot again, falls several hundred feet and lands on water, surviving. In movies, you see, water is soft. In real life, it is like landing on concrete.

It is Bond, I know. I was only there because I had time to kill before catching a flight and didn’t want to be at an airport.

Javier Bardem reprises his Anton Chigurh role (No Country for Old Men, a villain done right), this time as a blond. He overacts, or is over-directed. He works too hard at being bad rather than just letting it come out naturally. As Coren mentions, (link above) a young woman is first molested by Bond after showing no interest in him, and then is murdered after a terrifying ordeal in which men are shooting at a whiskey shot glass on her head, the name of the whiskey featured prominently. She is gut shot! It is a horrible, slow and agonizing way to die, and you have to wonder if Bond is sad that he can’t bang her again.

If only it stopped there … there are public hearings about secret intelligence, a subway disaster where not one victim is shown, and at least six security guards murdered like so many pawns … cars drive through crowded markets as if people did not matter. Do you ever wonder, like me, how long it takes the poor vegetable stand owner to recover his losses after Bond rolls over him in his Aston Martin? What about wrecked and stolen cars and cycles? It’s a police report/insurance claim nightmare.

And then the come final scenes at Skyfall. I can’t tell you much about that, however, as watching planes take off and land had more appeal at that point. What is it about movie critics? Journalists can’t do journalism in this country. That’s understood. Have critics gone down that road? Are they afraid to tell us when a movie is bad? Will they too lose their jobs if they do their jobs?

Maybe they are perception managers. If 94% of them say they liked it, will people imagine they liked it when they really didn’t?