How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
From today’s paper:
The Denver Post is your trusted source of information and will run corrections of all stories that contain information that is not factual or is substantially inaccurate.
In a news story in Saturday’s edition we reported that there is no US military presence in Yemen. However, the correct spelling of the international airport in the capital city of Sana’a, where marines and equipment have not landed, is “El Rahaba” and not “El Rahabai”. The Post apologizes for this error.
Page two of Monday’s Financial Times had the following stories: Spotlight on Greek left after poll surge; Sinn Fein’s anti-austerity stances strikes chord with young Irish; and Hollande must cope with split inside EU over path to reform.
All of these stories are about elections in European countries, where public opinion can and does translate into public policy (it does not here), and the reaction to “austerity” programs, or the idea that public programs for public benefit are the public’s business do not exist at the whim of bankers.
Here’s a snippet from the Hollande article:
What gets less attention was Mr. Hollande’s revealing admission that he did not share [President of the European Central Bank Mario] Draghi’s vision, endorsed by Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, that … growth … should be structured on structural reforms, such as increasing labour market flexibility.*
Mr. Hollande was not coy about this. “Can we really believe that liberalism**, privatisations and deregulation, which led us into the financial crisis we are in, well help us get out of the crisis?
Indeed. Mr. Hollande, please come to America, write about us as de Tocqueville did, give us the insight he did. We really need some French wisdom on this side of the pond.
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* “labor market flexibility” is code for hire and fire at will, no job security.
**”liberalism”, over there, is equivalent to what we might refer to as “neoliberalism” here, or the Greenspan-Bernancke-Clinton school of deregulation and low taxation of concentrated wealth.
I witnessed yesterday two of the most high-profile jellyfish politicians of our era, President Obama and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, finally take a stand on equal rights for gays. This can only mean one thing: The battle is over. Soon, maybe within five years, gays will have equally protected constitutional rights in all fifty states, including North Carolina.
One pundit yesterday – Thom Hartmann? – said that the TV show Will and Grace had perhaps saved more teen agers than any other force in our country. The highest suicide rate in our land is among gay teen agers. Watching a popular medium like TV, seeing openly gay people accepted and treated with respect, gave many the courage just to get through high school, get away from the bigots, maybe move to a bigger city, and live their lives.
Please note – after the battle was waged, after the walls were falling, only then did Hickenlooper and Obama weigh in. This gives weight to the argument that popular movements, even of minorities, is the strongest determinant of future public policy. This explains FDR an LBJ. They did what they did because they felt pressure, perhaps even acting on their own impulses knowing that they had power behind them.
Joe Biden appeared on Meet the Press yesterday and made a big splash by endorsing gay marriage. This is the sort of thing that drives me buggy about American journalism – a scripted performance by an elected official on a program known to act as a handmaiden to power. These days it is David Gregory playing the part of Tim Russert.
This is politics, of course. There is no disagreement within the administration about gay marriage. More likely they, like most power centers in the country, are disinterested. It’s a wedge issue, and important in politics, and not beyond.
Secondly, the Vice President tackles this issue because it is too hot for the president to handle. Call him Spiro Biden if it helps to understand the matter.
Third, Obama has been indifferent to gay marriage during his presidency, or better said, disinterested. But campaign time is approaching, and his campaign team is busy assembling his voting blocs. He’s gone after youth on TV and in a popular magazine, and now the LBGT community via Biden.
Continue reading “Politics 201”
I have encountered the following attitude on numerous occasions: If we elect not to participate in the American electoral system when that system offers us no meaningful choice, we are engaged in “nihilism.”
Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated. It is often associated with extreme pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence. A true nihilist would believe in nothing, have no loyalties, and no purpose other than, perhaps, an impulse to destroy. (Encycopedia of Philosophy, Internet Branch)
I suggest that if we do not participate in the system as it is structured for us, that we are asking for a positive alternative to meaninglessness. We will have, in November, two men who mirror each other on virtually all policies (except perhaps abortion). Choosing “none of the above” is an informed choice. Voting for either is the opposite.
President Obama sneaked into Afghanistan last night, in Bush-like manner, to sign a “post-war” agreement with Hamid Karzai. “Post-war” is beyond 2014. Since the US knew in 2001, when it first attacked Afghanistan, that the conflict would still be going on ten years later, it’s easy to see why they can rely on 2014 as a get-out date.
Karzai is in a tough spot. As the sovereign leader of Afghanistan, he has to take the offer. Otherwise he’ll be killed.
Obama said nothing about the mission. We’ve never had it spelled out for us. At first it was to get Osama bin Laden, but Osama refused to cooperate, kicking the bucket in late 2001. After that, the enemy became the Taliban, and the ally the “Northern Alliance,” a group of terrorists that we trained and funded during the Soviet occupation. If you were to ask any American who the “Taliban” are, you’d get a wide-eyed shrug. We don’t’ know. We just know they are evil.
As with “Al Qaeda,” a group of ragtags without any real power or popularity, Taliban is amorphous – they are whoever we happen to be attacking. The thousands of civilians killed in the process, well, they just had bad days. It is said that Al Qaeda pulled off 9/11, but it’s really hard to imagine that a small group of ragtags could pull off a sophisticated operation. But 2/3 of the public believes that, and are still pissed, and so in the mind of the public, Taliban=Al Qaeda=Saddam=Qaddafi=Chavez . They all have one thing in common: They have faces, and as we learned to hate their faces, we learned to hate the people we were killing.
Propaganda 101: Put a face on the enemy, so that the public can focus its hatred.
Continue reading “Obama to Karzai: Peace with honor”
Chen Guangcheng, a Chinese dissident, escaped custody and now resides in the US embassy. This creates international tension, as the US and China are deeply involved in economic co-dependency, and at the same time must have some window dressing regarding human rights.
Perhaps the US, in a gesture of goodwill, could offer an exchange of political prisoner Bradley Manning for Chen.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
Continue reading “American education: Ticky tacky little boxes”
I woke up this morning thinking about a friend of years ago who died in 1998 by his own hand. In writing about him I always called him Roper Jobes, and that’s enough of a name for anyone else. In the wake of his passing I was rewarded with his books and written treasures. Among them was a Sierra Club weekly calendar from the 1970’s. Born in New Jersey, he fell in love with the outdoors at a young age, and with the West on a Sierra Club outing. He made his way to Montana at earliest opportunity.
The young man in that diary was lively and exuberant. He had hiked the Great Smokies that year, and some of the passages jumped off the page at me. He wrote about his mornings in camp, the joy of a camp fire. There were expressions like “caught a trout!” and “Black bear!” Sheer joy.
Continue reading “Roper the mountain man, city shit”
My middle daughter graduated high school in 2000, and we went through all of the mindless graduation rigmarole, including a breakfast where the class valedictorian spoke. Such events are showcases, and also serve to remind the parents of ordinary kids that their kids are ordinary.
But this talk we heard, by a young lady, was deplorable. It was a Catholic school, I should add, but for ten minutes this kid did nothing but regurgitate her lessons and speak Christian mush. She presented not one original thought. She reflected back on her teachers so well that she got straight A’s.
My daughter, an ordinary student, later caught fire, getting a good liberal arts background in college. With that in place, she then got career training and now works for a ‘respected’ corporation in Portland doing respectable work in exchange for a respectable salary. I have told her that her job will pay her bills, but her English degree, which did nothing more than to teach her how to think and to broaden her horizons, will make her life full and rich.
Had she absorbed everything that Billings Central Catholic High School was teaching, she might now, like the class valedictorian, be boring. She’s anything but.
