Torture and irredeemable evil

From this long article on solitary imprisonment:

Prison violence, it turns out, is not simply an issue of a few belligerents. In the past thirty years, the United States has quadrupled its incarceration rate but not its prison space. Work and education programs have been cancelled, out of a belief that the pursuit of rehabilitation is pointless. The result has been unprecedented overcrowding, along with unprecedented idleness—a nice formula for violence. Remove a few prisoners to solitary confinement, and the violence doesn’t change. So you remove some more, and still nothing happens. Before long, you find yourself in the position we are in today. The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five per cent of its prisoners, and probably the vast majority of prisoners who are in long-term solitary confinement.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande#ixzz18IzC8GKT

Also this:

The simple truth is that public sentiment in America is the reason that solitary confinement has exploded in this country, even as other Western nations have taken steps to reduce it. This is the dark side of American exceptionalism. With little concern or demurral, we have consigned tens of thousands of our own citizens to conditions that horrified our highest court a century ago.

It's becoming more and more difficult to avoid seeing US society as predicated on evil - inflicting savage and unpredictable punishments more or less at random, reliant on duplicity and fraud to sustain its businesses, penalising the poor and incapable and inflicting the same conditions on their children where possible, and trying its best to deny the capable avenues to improve their condition: plus showering rewards on the children of the ruling classes in abundance, as if to taunt those denied it.

Time, and past time, to move - but that will take a couple of years I fear. We just have to hold onto our self-respect and wash our hands frequently in the meantime.

Elections.

Feh, talk about overanalysed.

This election cycle is simply down to 2 factors:
(1) The economy sucks, and the party in power gets blamed for this
(2) Only 40% of the eligible voting population came out to vote, so old white voters are massively more significant as a proportion of votes cast.

All the rest is handwaving, special pleading, and irrelevancies.

Lumps

Well it seems to have been medical month (again).

Cat has been to get mammograms and see an oncologist, at the recommendation of her OB-GYN. Mercifully, it seems she just has a benign cyst, and the stabbing pain she is getting in her other breast are customary for the onset of menopause. Did I mention how much it seems to suck just being a woman?

And I've just been to the doctors & gotten a prescription for antibiotics, after getting what seems to be a spider bite on the back of my right hand - it raised a lump about 2 inches square, which failed to go down in a couple of days as I was expecting, hence the doctor. Nasty bugs hereabouts, it seems. The only odd bit really was that neither I nor the doctor could see any puncture wounds, yet it definitely seems to be infectious not inflammatory.

Quote of the week

“objectification” is a funny word invented by feminists because we look so cute when we’re angry

We Surrender, just take over dammit!

News from Mexico:

this is from the primary newspaper in one of the major Mexican cities near the border, and heavily infested with drug gang(s) who seem to be killing journalists writing disapproving stories:

From this Sunday's editorial in Diario de Juarez, translated by Borderland Beat:

We would like it to be known, we are communicators, not psychics. With that in mind, as information correspondents, we want you to explain, What is it you want from us? What is it you want us to publish, or stop publishing? Explain so we can attend these issues.

You are, at present, the de facto authorities of this city. The legal security commands have done nothing to prevent our colleagues from being killed in the line of their duties, although we have repeatedly demanded protection.

That is why, faced with this indisputable fact, we are writing to you and asking, because the last thing we want is another one of our colleagues to become another victim of your shootings.

The whole editorial is important and a condemnation of Calderon's policies towards CJ. However, I thought the key line was the one in which the newspaper declared that they believe the organizations to whom they address the editorial are "the de facto authorities of this city." While some pundits argue that Mexico's organized criminal groups don't have the goal of overthrowing or replacing the government, Diario de Juarez is suggesting that, at least in one city, they already have.

So much for government, apparently. Of course, thats how the robber barons originally got into the business, so I suppose there is a certain appropriateness to it.

Fuck the players ... again

From Lawyers, Guns and Money:

During the upcoming NFL labor negotiations, I’m either going to have to avoid reading much about it or be careful to watch my blood pressure.   The journalists who cover all sports (with a few honorable exceptions) seem to seem their role during labor negotiations as pretending that the interests of the owners and the interests of the fans are one and the same no matter how absurd or self-serving the arguments the owners put forward, but as Pierce says given the career and life expectancies of NFL players the inevitable sucking up to NFL owners is especially grotesque.
I’ve written this before, but as I public service I would like to note the following, which seems to escape both a majority of fans and a majority of sports reporters.

Distribution of money that comes from reductions or artificial limitations on player salaries:

• Teachers, cancer researchers, Haitian orphans, and other comparative groups often cited as more deserving of money paid to athletes in order to justify owners screwing players:   0%
• Extremely wealthy, usually lavishly taxpayer-subsidized owners: 100%

…And, as NonyNony reminds us in comments, “Amount that ticket prices would be reduced by if players were payed less: 0%.”

And the crazed hatred of anything Union-related just keeps on growing ... mostly among those who would benefit most. Welcome to the wage-slavery galley boys, take an oar and sit right down.

And in related football news:

Word comes that Reggie Bush will forfeit the 2005 Heisman Trophy because the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) has ruled him ineligible for accepting money from an agent while still playing football in college.
I have seen many disgustingly hypocritical organizations in my life, but the NCAA ranks at the top. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the NCAA is a cartel, which licenses universities to establish franchises that participate in its branded market niche, university atheletics. It's a scam unique to the United States, other countries having had the good fortune of avoiding this particular institutional setup.

The NCAA protects its niche in the sports entertainment market by -- get this -- preventing the players from getting any share of the millions and millions of dollars that flow through the system. And by trumpeting the moral superiority of this system, in which student-athletes play for the love of the game, rather than for the filthy lucre of the professionals. That this system provides a healthy living for thousands of sportswriters, and huge salaries for the coaches at the top, doesn't stain them, of course, because they are concerned with the "growth" of their athletes.
Probably the choicest bit of hypocrisy comes in keeping players from being "exploited" by agents who would -- gasp -- pay them in advance of their signing professional contracts. That's right, the NCAA tries to "protect" athletes by keeping them from being paid! And what harm is produced by these agents? They break NCAA rules, of course. The role of sports media is to imbue these rules, which are no more than tricks of the trade by which the the NCAA scam artists keep the money to themselves, with some sort of vague moral worth. "OMG, he broke the rules! The rules, the rules!"
I have an analogy which makes the hypocrisy clear. Imagine that college theater produced millions and millions of dollars in revenue. Imagine that the NCDA (National Collegiate Drama Association) established "rules" by which the money goes to the directors and lighting designers, and whoever else can leech off the labor of the student actors, but none goes to the actors themselves. Further imagine that the NCDA "protects" those student actors by making rules against Hollywood or Broadway agents who might want to give the best actors money while in school, in hopes of securing their patronage when they sign their professional contracts.
But that's ridiculous, right? The NCDA would be laughed out of existence, though perhaps a wry chuckle might come their way, acknowledging their chutzpah in trying to imbue their "rules" with some sort of moral worth, when it's clearly just a scam. So where, tell me, are the howls of laughter when the NCAA pulls its scam?

Welcome to the new Fascism

This just left me flabbergasted:

Yep, my older child has made a few choice observations during this first week of high-school: where to start? First of all, she was none too enthusiastic about the form we were asked to sign giving the US military permission to add her barely-out-of-middle-school name to their roster of potential recruits. (For pity’s sake. Could we hurry up and ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, already? Seriously.) OK, OK, at least they asked permission. 

I mean, wow. Just wow. And given that its a US High School, you just KNOW that anyone who doesn't give permission is going to be singled out for humiliation after it is 'accidentally' leaked'. Purely optional, my arse.

Clausewitz and the centre of gravity

From ReadTeamJournal

   In James McPherson’s retelling, Abraham Lincoln’s strategic acumen lay in his recognition that the Confederate Army was the COG of the Southern war effort. His generals, on the other hand, were obsessed with maneuvering to gain control of the Southern capitol. Seen in this light, striking the COG had massive effect across the Southern system. This is what an real “effects-based operation” looks like. The Southern Army was neither either purely of strength or weakness, but it was what bound the Southern war effort together. There is nothing really complex about this–as Clausewitz tells us defeating the enemy’s fielded forces is a good idea. This is true either in a campaign of annihilation or erosion.

 The whole concept seems to me to have been taken a great deal too seriously, I must admit - when reading Clausewitz, I thought of this as nothing more than a metaphor, rather than a specific functional object.

If the purpose of war is to destroy the enemy will to resist*, then the 'Centre of Gravity' is whatever binds the enemy will together and gives unity - in the example above (as often in participatory governments) the field armies embody this, and should be the focal point of attacks, with subsidiary targets being whatever sustains them (e.g. March through Georgia destroying the logistical basis for the field armies).

But to enshrine the CoG in the way the US armed forces doctrine appears to have, is to set it in concrete and avoid any analysis of what is actually needed to destroy the enemy will, rather than to enable open thinking about it.



*and to exploit that lack of will until it recreates itself, see Iraq 2003-10!

Jamais Vu!

I found this observation interesting:

Germany had in the past few years a row of scandals with an identical theme: Corporations became bold enough to behave as if they were entitled to treat their employees like subjects. This concerned especially the spying on subjects, err, employees at work and in general.

Mostly for the depressing realisation that it's been like that for as long as I can remember in the soi disant anglo/saxon world. Nice to think the continent is catching up (or down, as the case may be)

Why I hate Microsoft, Part #7812940522(b)

So I go to log into a server that has been loaded with the latest Windows Server install*, and lo & behold, instead of the standardised login screen that has been used for the last 20ish years, I get a full-screen teal blue blob with a stylised icon picture of a proto-human**, and a slot for password underneath.

What on earth is this? They are aiming for the day that everyone has pictures of themselves available so graphic confirmation is available? and how exactly is this going to help security? or is it just to provide a sense of warm familiarity to the user to see a picture of themselves? (not unlike being pissed on by Microsoft staff, in that case).


* Which itself seems to be deviating sufficiently from the PCbound version of their slime as to almost qualify as a separate system with a new name, really. Worthless Prizes offered for suggestions of a new name! - my own thought was Microsoft Corrupter



**Presumably this is what suckers customers actually look like to Microsoft: faceless, futile, and feckless

more cut&paste memos

From sf author Matthew Hughes (memo to Phil: get a flippin' copy of Template fgs)

MATTHEW HUGHES:

Not so long ago, if you called a man a liar, it was coats off and outside, pal. Go back a few generations farther, it was sabers or pistols at dawn.

Reputation was everything. “Give a dog a bad name and hang him” meant that when good standing was lost, all was lost with it. Better to die, or at least take a beating, than be branded a weasel.

Then something changed. Now people go on “reality” TV to lie and cheat their way to fame and fortune. And their blatant weaselhood doesn’t earn them public contempt. Instead, they become celebrities.

These aren’t secret agents who lie to defend their country. They’re doing it for the money and a chance to appear on Good Morning America. And every time there’s an audition, tens of thousands more rush forward and beg for a chance to connive and backstab their way to the top.

The thing that has changed, it seems to me, is that the role that honor used to play in our society has been supplanted by greed. I see it as a side-effect of the social transformation wrought by marketing in my lifetime: today we no longer think of ourselves primarily as citizens of a society, with rights and responsibilities; instead, we have become consumers in an economy whose only purpose is getting and spending. You know: “This means war! Everybody go shopping!”

In the old days, honor was an extension of pride, especially the esteem of our fellows. People might do something unworthy, but they sure didn’t want anyone to know about it. Our grandparents’ world was built around vanity. Our times are driven by avarice. We want it all, and we want everyone to know about it. And how we got it doesn’t much matter.

Being classically educated (well, I’ve read some really old books), I am aware that greed and pride are two of the seven deadly sins. I once got to wondering if there were societies based on any of the other five. For those of you who don’t read really old books, the rest of the seven big bads are: anger, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

Anger was easy: Sparta, Nazi Germany, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Envy? What about all those Asian societies where it is crucial not to lose face? And mini-cultures within our own sphere where keeping up with the Joneses is a driving force?

Lifted from Obsidian Wings

This letter from Berkeley professor Michael O'Hare to his students is so good I'm just going to include it in full here:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.
Swindle – what happened? Well, before you were born, Californians now dead or in nursing homes made a remarkable deal with the future. (Not from California? Keep reading, lots of this applies to you, with variations.) They agreed to invest money they could have spent on bigger houses, vacations, clothes, and cars into the world’s greatest educational system, and into building and operating water systems, roads, parks, and other public facilities, an infrastructure that was the envy of the world. They didn’t get everything right: too much highway and not enough public transportation. But they did a pretty good job.
Young people who enjoyed these ‘loans’ grew up smarter, healthier, and richer than they otherwise would have, and understood that they were supposed to “pay it forward” to future generations, for example by keeping the educational system staffed with lots of dedicated, well-trained teachers, in good buildings and in small classes, with college counselors and up-to-date books. California schools had physical education, art for everyone, music and theater, buildings that looked as though people cared about them, modern languages and ancient languages, advanced science courses with labs where the equipment worked, and more. They were the envy of the world, and they paid off better than Microsoft stock. Same with our parks, coastal zone protection, and social services.
This deal held until about thirty years ago, when for a variety of reasons, California voters realized that while they had done very well from the existing contract, they could do even better by walking away from their obligations and spending what they had inherited on themselves. “My kids are finished with school; why should I pay taxes for someone else’s? Posterity never did anything for me!” An army of fake ‘leaders’ sprang up to pull the moral and fiscal wool over their eyes, and again and again, your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph.
Now, your infrastructure is falling to pieces under your feet, and as citizens you are responsible for crudities like closing parks, and inhumanities like closing battered women’s shelters. It’s outrageous, inexcusable, that you can’t get into the courses you need, but much worse that Oakland police have stopped taking 911 calls for burglaries and runaway children. If you read what your elected officials say about the state today, you’ll see things like “California can’t afford” this or that basic government function, and that “we need to make hard choices” to shut down one or another public service, or starve it even more (like your university). Can’t afford? The budget deficit that’s paralyzing Sacramento is about $500 per person; add another $500 to get back to a public sector we don’t have to be ashamed of, and our average income is almost forty times that. Of course we can afford a government that actually works: the fact is that your parents have simply chosen not to have it.
I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English. Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.
Many of your parents took a hike as well, somehow getting the idea that the schools had taken over their duties to keep you learning, or so beat-up working two jobs each and commuting two hours a day to put food on the table that they couldn’t be there for you. A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.
You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves. Equally important, you need to start talking to each other. It’s not fair, and you have every reason (except a good one) to keep what you can for yourselves with another couple of decades of mean-spirited tax-cutting and public sector decline. You’re my heroes just for surviving what we put you through and making it into my classroom, but I’m asking for more: you can be better than my generation. Take back your state for your kids and start the contract again. There are lots of places you can start, for example, building a transportation system that won’t enslave you for two decades as their chauffeur, instead of raising fares and cutting routes in a deadly helix of mediocrity. Lots. Get to work. See you in class!

Krugman on tax cuts:

This has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.
So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

Except, oops, too late on that last

Post Twentieth Century Stress Disorder

Just a quick copy & paste of something I found very well put:

Post Twentieth Century Stress Disorder

by Jacob Davies

The twentieth century kicks off with the wizard invention of the concentration camp by the British in South Africa, who are engaged in a battle over Lebensraum with a bunch of Dutch guys, neither side having the slightest interest in the brown people previously occupying the area except as a sort of irritating natural resource to be strip-mined where possible. Whatever the original intent of the British, the key features of the concentration camp rapidly assert themselves, which is to say once you have a whole lot of annoying people gathered in one place and prevented from wandering around by barbed wire and guns, you can make them significantly less annoying to you by sort of, well, accidentally forgetting to feed them.

That's just a warm up though; we quickly go to the War to End All Wars That Doesn't, in which approximately one kerbillion soldiers from every civilized nation on the planet are ordered into an unremarkable area of France about the size of Vermont to die by various exciting means including being crushed by tanks, shot, stabbed, starved, bludgeoned, blown up, diseased, machine-gunned, and having the occasional bomb dropped on their heads in an amateurish fashion (they get better at this later). This accomplishes absolutely nothing for anyone and ends only when the Americans get tired of Germans randomly blowing up their stuff.

Everybody learns a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Peace, which they all put into action in the same way: a determined effort to ensure that this time they will be the ones with the biggest guns, goddammit. Russia has a proletariat revolution which scares the crap out of all the moneybags businessmen in the rest of the world, which just goes to show that their imaginations were a bit limited at the time, since they could have treated them like China today, i.e. a giant source of cheap labor for foreign corporations under a government that doesn't tolerate any silly talk about worker's rights because, hello, you live in a socialist paradise - haven't you read the newspaper today?

There's a brief period of glorious economic euphoria and excitement in the rest of the world, but then all the fun is sidetracked by the implosion of the entire economy everywhere and the immiseration of millions of people, which in America is the terrible worst bad thing ever and in much of Europe is destined to be "the good old days" - you know, back when you were only poor, homeless, and unemployed, and not starved, murdered, robbed or abandoned in a frozen apocalyptic wasteland - but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Germany drops the pointy hats but retains the paranoid militarism, and decides that the worst piece of logical induction ever - "bankers wrecked the economy", "many bankers are Jews", "therefore TEH JEWS wrecked the economy and we have to kill them all!" - makes perfect sense. So anyway, that's when things start to get actually bad.
Japan decides that what every modern industrial power needs is a gigantic empire, an understandable conclusion given that every other modern industrial power either has or is trying to acquire its own gigantic empire, but makes the small mistake of relying entirely on American oil for the whole thing.

It takes a surprisingly long time for all of this to blow up, but when it does, it really does. The thing is, Germany and Japan aren't really doing anything particularly novel. All the other imperial powers have spent the last couple of hundred years taking territory by force and butchering as many of the natives as necessary, and America has just steamrolled across the west regardless of the wishes of the prior inhabitants. The Axis are just late to the game and have plans so grandiosely insane and in conflict with the interests of the existing powers that they can't be left to get on with it.

And we all know this part of the story, or we think we do, but if we're from the west, especially the UK and the US, we don't really know it. We understand the Holocaust (which probably was the worst of the horrors, the most concentrated evil) because we have photographs and survivor accounts and records. But Generalplan Ost did not just call for the murder of millions of Jews, but for the starvation of nearly every person in the cities of Poland and Russia, the murder of 20 or 30 million people, and this plan is in fact put into action and in fact kills 15 or 20 million people and destroys absolutely everything it touches in Eastern Europe, it is the end of the world for entire regions and cities, but we don't see pictures so we don't really know that it happened.

So then after all that we discover a way to make a single compact air-deliverable bomb that can destroy an entire city. And we use it. And surely that is the end? It must have seemed so. Oppenheimer says it in a way grandiose enough to do justice to the reality:
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed... A few people cried... Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form, and says, "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

So then we have peace, amid the ruins and the corpses and the radiation. But we also have radio and television, and it turns out that that wasn't the end of the world, and after the postwar consumer boom winds down we have corporations looking back to the good old days when the US military bought everything they could produce, and shortly after that we have the new permanent enemy in the shape of the Commies who are poised to taint our precious bodily fluids and have to be beaten back at all costs and by the way, we do mean all costs.

And television - how much by accidental evolution and how much by intent is debatable - is the means of delivery for a diet of intense fear and anxiety and uncertainty and the promise that all of it can be abolished if you just buy this product or vote for this person or agree with what the man on television says. And because we are just simple plains apes and inclined to believe whatever we are told, we do believe it. Believing what you're told was a lot safer when sociopaths were spread out among the population and easier to spot, not so much when they are concentrated in the boardrooms of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, but we are a little slow. So everyone from the twentieth century is profoundly brain-damaged by extensive exposure to advertising designed to make us afraid and insecure and jealous.

So then we build enough nukes to kill everyone in every city on the planet just in case that ever seems like a good idea, but in the west at least, the thing to keep in mind is that nothing really bad ever happens for basically the rest of the century. Sure, unemployment, minor wars, social unrest, but the absolutely apocalyptic events that swept Europe in the 30s and 40s are never repeated in the west.  (Sure, 20 million people starve to death in China, but out of sight of cameras, so it's like it never happened.) Despite nothing really bad happening, we all live in terrible overwhelming fear that it will descend on us at any moment, which is not entirely irrational given that thousands of nuclear missiles are aimed at the exact place we are sitting and armed on a hair trigger.

And so the century comes to a close and by some miracle we are mostly still alive. And I suppose now you're wondering what the point of this superficial and glib and highly inaccurate account of the twentieth century is.
The point is this: we're all profoundly damaged goods, us twentieth century relics. Even those of us, like me, who only lived through the last quarter of it. We flinch at loud noises. We cower, and prepare to fight when someone hurts us even a little bit. We look at our neighbors and wonder if they would push us into the gas chamber if it came to it. We can't have too many illusions about the kindness and goodness of the human spirit because we lived through a period of total derangement and insanity, when a war that would likely kill everyone in every city across two continents was seriously discussed and prepared for.

So I have a certain sympathy for those who are suckered by chain emails and propaganda into worrying that we're about to descend into a socialist or fascist murder-state, or about to be obliterated by nuclear explosion, because the rational unlikelihood of it isn't worth much in the face of the irrationality that propels those kinds of events, and those events are barely historical, they were still happening in our lifetimes.

I think our children are going to think we are nuts. We live in, in the west, in a world incomparably better than the one our grandparents grew up in, with far less absolute poverty, with paved streets and indoor plumbing, refrigerators, clean water and cheap food, big houses, cheap cars. And yet we spend all our time jumping at shadows. The Muslims are going to take over! The terrorists are going to kill us all! Iraq is going to fly poison-gas planes over America! It is delusional, but it is understandable. We are the survivors of horror and threatened horror, and we are having a really hard time adjusting to the idea that maybe there won't be any more horror.

This isn't especially topical. But it's where I start from when I'm trying to understand the world, and I always want to put it all in as a preamble to even the most trivial comments on current events. The world is run by people and still mostly inhabited by people who are seriously traumatized from the last century, which genuinely was a horrific time unequaled in human history. That affects everything they - we - do and say.

Jeanne

Youd never know it
But buddy Im a kind of poet
And Ive got a lot of things I wanna say
And when Im gloomy, you listen to me
Till it's all, all talked away

Well, that's how it goes
And yeah it's passed time to close
So thanks for the cheer
I hope you didn't mind
My bending your ear


For all of the years,
for the laughs, for the tears,
for all the class that you showed
Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road,
that long, long road

A quick historical detour

From the brilliant Gladwell:

The absurdity of such expression games has been wittily explored in the spy novels of Robert Littell and, with particular brio, in Peter Ustinov’s 1956 play, “Romanoff and Juliet.” In the latter, a crafty general is the head of a tiny European country being squabbled over by the United States and the Soviet Union, and is determined to play one off against the other. He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?”

* * * * *

Cicero, it turned out, was the real thing. At least, we think he was the real thing. The Americans had a spy in the German Embassy in Turkey who learned that a servant was spying in the British Embassy. She told her bosses, who told the British. Just before his death, Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service during the war, told an interviewer, “Of course, Cicero was under our control,” meaning that the minute they learned about Cicero they began feeding him false documents. Menzies, it should be pointed out, was a man who spent much of his professional career deceiving other people, and if you had been the wartime head of M.I.6, giving an interview shortly before your death, you probably would say that Cicero was one of yours. Or perhaps, in interviews given shortly before death, people are finally free to tell the truth. Who knows?

In the case of Operation Mincemeat, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something false was actually true (even though, secretly, some of those spies might have known better), and Germany acted on it.

In the case of Cicero, Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while, depending on whether you believe the word of someone two decades after the war was over—and in this case Germany didn’t really act on it at all. Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all.

Which pretty much confirms what I have long thought, about most espionage - at least where it passes beyond advanced scouting: once both sides are actively using espionage, it becomes so random as to dependability as to be essentially useless. Not that the intelligence agencies would ever let on that this is the case, even to themselves, naturally.

Oh and this bit I thought marvellous:

The two men coördinated with Dudley Clarke, the head of deception for all the Mediterranean, whom Macintyre describes as “unmarried, nocturnal and allergic to children.” In 1925, Clarke organized a pageant “depicting imperial artillery down the ages, which involved two elephants, thirty-seven guns and ‘fourteen of the biggest Nigerians he could find.’ He loved uniforms, disguises and dressing up.” In 1941, British authorities had to bail him out of a Spanish jail, dressed in “high heels, lipstick, pearls, and a chic cloche hat, his hands, in long opera gloves, demurely folded in his lap. He was not supposed to even be in Spain, but in Egypt.” Macintyre, who has perfect pitch when it comes to matters of British eccentricity, reassures us, “It did his career no long-term damage.”

Good news from all over

Or rather, not too much.


On Tuesday I took Cat to the hospital, to (as it turns out) get a biopsy of her cervix - she's been having abnormal pap smears for a couple of years, and the viral infection (some version of HPV) has apparently taken a serious turn. From what the doctor said, they're expecting to find a 'pre-cancerous' lesion, which should be removable via a LEEP operation - a fairly minor outpatient procedure, we're told. Well, far better to have it treated and removed before it turns into a cancer, I guess.

Which, parenthetically, just made me goggle in abhorred wonder at all the nutcase parents in the US who are vowing and declaring never to let their teenage daughters be innoculated against HPV, despite its effect at reducing cervical cancer. The basis for this seems to officially be that being innoculated against a sex-born virus will just encourage them to have sex, and if they only have sex with the one man they ever marry, they will be in no danger of contracting HPV.

Which may be true, IF their husband has never had sex with anyone at all ever, either. And assuming they never divorce and remarry, or - heaven forbid - have an affair while married.

In fact, as far as I can detect, the real reason for this refusal is a far more visceral patriarchal reaction of 'Eewww, lady-parts, yukky!'  .... which actually pretty much describes the reaction of these nuts to most female-related issues.

Enough hypocrisy and rank deception to choke a hippo, really.

Oh, and speaking of hypocrisy, we have this little fiasco in Louisiana at the moment too: Experts now estimate that five times more oil has been spilling into the water from that oil rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana than they thought before:

Okay. Here's how much they estimated was leaking before this evening: 42,000 gallons a day.
Five times that amount means approximately 210,000 gallons a day have been leaking into the Gulf.
If this spill continues unabated for two months — and that seems to be the most likely time frame at this point — we're talking about 12.6 million gallons.
Exxon Valdez? That was 10.8 million.
Enjoy your evening.

Really not funny

One of the things that makes me most nervous about this country is the truly catastrophic consequences of serious illness here - getting cancer, or anything that requires serious expensive treatment, is often a quick route to bankruptcy, and frequently a guarantee of an unnecessary death once your resources do run out.

The idea of relying on private enterprise to 'insure' your health care always struck me as pretty dubious, and after encountering it at close range, and hearing a few of the many many many horror stories about how this has resulted in its victims being purged from the books once they start costing money, rather than just coughing up their cash, this has just been reinforced for me, over and over and over.

I mean, the NHS in England was pretty shoddy and embarassing at times, by NZ public health standards, but that was more or less in keeping with the English attitude to service, labour, and ... well everything to be honest. At least it was cheap, tho - something like 5% of GDP, compared to the 14% of GDP that the American system swallows (although to be fair I think that should be noted as 10% of GDP spent of health care and another 4% spent on health care insurance companies).

However, the occasional callousness and dirtyness of the NHS is as nothing compared to the utter barbarity of things like this:

One after another, shortly after a diagnosis of breast cancer, each of the women learned that her health insurance had been canceled. First there was Yenny Hsu, who lived and worked in Los Angeles. Later, Robin Beaton, a registered nurse from Texas. And then, most recently, there was Patricia Relling, a successful art gallery owner and interior designer from Louisville, Kentucky.
None of the women knew about the others. But besides their similar narratives, they had something else in common: Their health insurance carriers were subsidiaries of WellPoint, which has 33.7 million policyholders -- more than any other health insurance company in the United States.
The women all paid their premiums on time. Before they fell ill, none had any problems with their insurance. Initially, they believed their policies had been canceled by mistake.
They had no idea that WellPoint was using a computer algorithm that automatically targeted them and every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies, according to government regulators and investigators.
Once the women were singled out, they say, the insurer then canceled their policies based on either erroneous or flimsy information. WellPoint declined to comment on the women's specific cases without a signed waiver from them, citing privacy laws.
That tens of thousands of Americans lost their health insurance shortly after being diagnosed with life-threatening, expensive medical conditions has been well documented by law enforcement agencies, state regulators and a congressional committee. Insurance companies have used the practice, known as "rescission," for years. And a congressional committee last year said WellPoint was one of the worst offenders.
But WellPoint also has specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies, federal investigators told Reuters. The revelation is especially striking for a company whose CEO and president, Angela Braly, has earned plaudits for how her company improved the medical care and treatment of other policyholders with breast cancer.

Free markets are, by definition, more efficient than government programs which leads to better outcomes for everybody, across the board as incentives always line up in a seamless conjunction:

The cancellation of her health insurance in June 2008 forced Robin Beaton to delay cancer surgery by five months. In that time, the tumor in her breast grew from 2 centimeters to 7 centimeters.
Two months before Beaton's policy was dropped, Patricia Relling also was diagnosed with breast cancer. Anthem Blue Cross of Kentucky, a WellPoint subsidiary, paid the bills for a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
But the following January, after Relling suffered a life-threatening staph infection requiring two emergency surgeries in three days, Anthem balked and refused to pay more. They soon canceled her insurance entirely.
Unable to afford additional necessary surgeries for nearly 16 months, Relling ended up severely disabled and largely confined to her home. As a result of her crushing medical bills, the once well-to-do businesswoman is now dependent on food stamps.

I suppose one could blame these women for not realizing that all they needed to do was bring a few chickens to their respective oncologists/surgeons in order to get the care they needed, but that wouldn't be nice.

Snark aside, kudos to Murray Waas for covering these stories (see, also, Waas' coverage of a similar scandal involving Assurant and its systematic rescission of HIV-positive customers).

The reference to bringing chickens needs a little explaining - one of the Republican candidates for the US Senate seat in Nevada has publicly recommended reverting to barter (specifically, bringing a chicken in payment) with doctors in order to reduce medical costs. Seriously. When twice offered an opportunity to modify or retract this, she has reiterated and reinforced it. And yes, this happened in 2010, not 1810 (even the Victorians would be ashamed of such naked nuttiness).

Let's see, it cost about $1k for my cardio scan last year: frozen chickens sell for about $5 each, so that would be about 200 chickens - I hope they have some fairly substantial freezers at the hospital. Or I suppose I could bring live ones, which would be less valuable (all that effort slaughtering and plucking), so say 240-300 live chooks? Well I suppose they could use the carparks to pen them up, after all noone will be able to afford an automobile with this system.

Not Funny?

From the Washington Monthly:

Last week, the Georgia House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to consider a Republican proposal to "prohibit the involuntary implantation of microchips in human beings." I'm not entirely sure what the point is -- it's not as if there's been an outbreak of involuntary microchip implantation -- but GOP officials nationwide have a tendency to worry about imaginary threats, so I suppose this shouldn't be too surprising.
The legislative hearing led to remarks from a local woman, who claimed to have personal experience on the matter.

"I'm also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip," the woman said. Slowly, she began to lead the assembled lawmakers down a path they didn't want to take. [...]
She spoke of the "right to work without being tortured by co-workers who are activating these microchips by using their cell phones and other electronic devices."
She continued. "Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission," she said.
It was not funny, and no one laughed.

I'm sorry, I may be calloused and cynical, but I found it laugh-out-loud hilarious, not least that the elected politicians took this seriously.

What century is it, again?

I read this Washington Post article a couple of days ago, and I still haven't managed to really grasp that this is an article from 2010, not 1970:

Tuesday, April 13, 2010; 2:58 PM

A federal judge Tuesday ordered a rural county in southwestern Mississippi to stop segregating its schools by grouping African American students into all-black classrooms and allowing white students to transfer to the county's only majority-white school, the U.S. Justice Department announced.

And just to add to it, there have been letters to the editor and a spattering of web posts and comments defending this as 'part of our local culture', and 'making more sense for the local residents' ... the white ones of course, because they are the ones that matter, I assume.

I mean, seriously, these people still don't get how wrong this is? I should go and see how far away this county is, from the Mississippi county that cancelled their prom/dance rather than letting a lesbian couple attend it (and then snuck around the federal judge's order and their own promises on the dance), as the attitudes obviously dovetail comfortably. (See this article for details)

Edit: the answer would seem to be, the other end of the state, so I guess it's a statewide thing. Ha! if only that were all).

I suppose on the bright side, just when I think Arkansas is irremediable, Mississippi again overtakes it in the race for the bottom.

Patriotism

Is this not awesome?   Harry Potter billionaire J.K. Rowling on why she chooses to continue living in Britain even though she could reduce her tax bill considerably by residing elsewhere:

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s.
....A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

From conservative columnist Ross Douthat's book (Tropic of Privilege):

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend's parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point -- "Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?" she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn't sure what to say, but then I wasn't sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business ... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered -- "You know, I'm on the pill. ..."

I'm sitll kind of slack-jawed in astonishment at the repellent persona on display, not to mention the apparent total lack of self-awareness. I still haven't decided whether this is a deep-seated misogyny (of the madonna/whore bent), or deep-dyed repression latent homophilia ... but probably both.The end result is an attitude in which Buck/Douthat detests any woman so dirty and vile as to express sexual attraction toward a guy like him

What astonishes me even more is that the New York Times trusts this guy with a regular column? I mean, really? do they all loathe and despise women or is it OK to just have a bitter misogynist on the team to give true depth and breadth of coverage? I look forward to them hiring a quota of open fascists and antisemites as well (except, oops they probably have).

.

Kyrgyz conniptions

Hardly anyone in the West is celebrating Bakiyev’s overthrow (he has now offered to resign), singing the praises of Kyrgyz “people power” or writing lengthy, glowing profiles of acting PM Roza Otunbayeva. Having foolishly cheered the imposition of a far worse dictatorship on Kyrgyzstan than the authoritarian president the country had before, Western enthusiasts for popular revolution have become remarkably quiet as a real bloody tyrant has been deposed by a popular uprising.


Looked at one way, this muted reaction is a very good thing. It might suggest that Western observers are beginning to appreciate that violent political clashes on the other side of the planet are usually not what we believe them to be, and we might acknowledge that the reasons for the clashes have little or nothing to do with us in most cases. Our need to take sides or invest with one side with moral and political superiority almost always gets in the way of understanding what is happening, and it always gets in the way of correctly assessing what the American interest is. The fewer Western personality cults built around little-known foreign leaders, the better it will is abe for the quality of our foreign policy discussions and our political discourse generally. Of course, the muted reaction is also a reminder that democracy promoters and enthusiasts tend not to be interested in celebrating the downfall of despots aligned with Washington.
Nonetheless, it is striking how ready some are to complain that Russia contributed to the uprising. Bakiyev was a terrible ruler, the leadership of the new government appears at least marginally better, so far there is little reason to believe that the new Kyrgyz government will cut off U.S. access to Manas, and we now have the rather odd spectacle of Moscow aiding popular uprisings to remove governments that it believes are working against its interests. These all appear to be reasonably good developments by the very standards democracy enthusiasts usually apply.

Russian support for a popular uprising against an authoritarian regime reinforces my view that the Russian government is a pragmatic authoritarian populist government that will act to establish and maintain itself as a major world power, and it will not have ideological objections to aiding opposition movements against authoritarian rulers. Russia’s role in Bakiyev’s overthrow is one more reason to doubt Robert Kagan’s theory of a clear-cut ideological rivalry between democracy and authoritarianism (or what he insists on calling autocracy) defining great power politics in this century. It seems just as likely that continued democratization will lead to the alignment of new democracies and rising democratic powers with the authoritarian defenders of state sovereignty and the status quo. On many contentious international issues, we are already seeing cooperation among the BRIC states against the U.S. and Europe, and other large democracies are following suit. The major authoritarian powers are beginning to take advantage of the reality that democratization has tended to undermine rather than enhance U.S. hegemony, and they are exploiting the opportunities provided by the stronger expression of divergent interests resulting from democratization around the world.

The new situation in Kyrgyzstan leaves open the possibility that the U.S. and Russia might come to an understanding that Russia has far greater interests and influence in post-Soviet space, in part because this is apparently how many people in former Soviet republics want it, but that this does not have to preclude constructive relations between former Soviet republics and the United States. As the Gallup poll Greg cites also tells us, there are substantial constituencies in almost all former Soviet states that support maintaining good relations with America and Russia.
As long as our government does not insist that these states define their relationship with Washington with hostility to Russia and Russian influence, and as long as Washington understands the limited and temporary nature of security cooperation with many of these states, there does not need to be contest for influence that ultimately harms these states and poisons our bilateral relations. Before 2005, Akayev had maintained the balance between Washington and Moscow fairly well. The previous administration’s inexplicable anti-Russian obsession helped to wreck this. Perhaps now there is an opportunity to repair that damage.

Obviously, Kyrgyzstan is geographically very close to Russia, around one million Kyrgyz work in Russia, and as a result economic and political ties between the two are very strong. Russia will naturally exercise influence over a small, impoverished neighbor such as Kyrgyzstan, just as it exercises influence in all of the former Soviet republics. Was it a planned uprising? There is reason to think so, but it is improbable that the uprising would have succeeded as quickly as it did had there not been a significant groundswell of popular discontent with Bakiyev’s rule.

Following the war in Georgia in 2008, Yanukovych’s election in Ukraine earlier this year, and now Bakiyev’s overthrow, supporters of the “freedom agenda” as a vehicle for advancing U.S. hegemony in post-Soviet space have to acknowledge that their concerted anti-Russian campaign has failed completely. In the process, U.S.-Russian relations were badly damaged and are only now beginning to be repaired, and in the meantime the United States gained nothing we did not already have and contributed to the rise of three failed governments, at least two of which were more brutal and authoritarian than the ones that preceded them, and all of which have presided over terrible periods of misrule. It is now time to try to retrieve something from the wreckage, and that begins by establishing full relations with the new Kyrgyz government and making clear to Moscow that we are not going to try to prise former Soviet republics from its orbit.

Spring is Sprung!

On a happier note, the days are warmer and everything is blooming:

and to brighten our outlook, here is the tree in the front yard (called a Redbud I believe):

I should have taken this picture on Monday, when the weather was brilliant blue and gold, and the flowers seemed much brighter than they are now, but it's still very lovely

Spring is icumen in

Llude sing cucu

as our Middle English forbears would say it :)

And Cat has decided she needs some outlet for her gardening spirit: first, she has made a large wooden box and filled it with compost and other bits, to make a raised vegetable garden in our back yard:

and this is progressing fairly fast:

She has also made some compost bins behind the garage:

and is now working on a flower bed in the shady side yard:

Finally, Brandy pointed out that there had been a vast deficiency in cat pictures recently, and kindly posed on the sewing table:

Although of course she is bored by the constant barrage of papparazi:

Its Not OK To Kill Civilians

Like Slacktivist says (please read the link)



The Video is of a small and very ugly massacre in Iraq a couple of years ago, by a pair of US attack helicopters on a small group (including 2 Reuters journalists) wandering through a neighbourhood. During the approach and attack, the soldiers several times claim (to their superiors) to see people with weapons, and to be shot at, in order to receive permission to shoot these people, but after going over it several times, I can't see -any- sign of any of the victims shooting, and the only weapon I can see is actually a camera being hoisted by one of the journalists.

I really hope this will prove to be a fake, a mock-up photoshopped into something it isn't, but that seems unlikely (edit: apparently a senior US military official has confirmed that the video is genuine, so much for that hope).

This just makes me sick. This is just pure murder. It's almost unbearable to watch the thing, especially when they circle around again in order to kill the wounded man trying to find succor, and to massacre the van-full of people who drove up to help him and look after the dead.

I appreciate that civilians often get killed by accident in warfare.

This isn't accidental.

This isn't a WAR!

The Americans are a hostile occupying force seven years after a war was concluded.

Morality aside (and that's a mighty big aside), this is just indelibly stupid. The briefest look at any classic suppressive effort against partisans, (guerillas, what have you) will amply demonstrate that massacres and brutality breed resistance and aid enemy recruiting.

I should fulminate further, but what's the point? Those who know it is wrong will be horrified, and those who don't are out of reach of logic, reason, or any trace of common humanity it would seem.

Welcome Back!

Supreme Court finds American Revolution illegal

The US Supreme Court today, in a revolutionary ruling, has examined the status of the American Revolution in light of current International law, and voted 7-2 to deem it illegal and unsupportable. Accordingly, the US Constitution has been overturned, and all property in the continental USA has reverted to the ownership of the Crown, Her Majesty Elizabeth II.

In an interalia ruling, Alaska has been handed back to Russia, and the islands of Hawai'i have reverted to the descendants of the Polynesian crown (currently running a drycleaning shop in Fresno).

Queen Elizabeth is expected to announce the appointment of Prince Andrew as Governor-Regent for the Americas, and is expected to make a Royal Tour of her new provinces as early as next year.

Vile popery

Well, today seems to be quote day - this one from the esteemed Richard Dawkins:

Ratzinger is the perfect pope

"Should Pope Benedict XVI be held responsible for the escalating scandals over clerical sexual abuse in Europe?"
Yes he should, and it's going to escalate a lot further, as more and more victims break through the guilt of their childhood indoctrination and come forward.
"Should he be investigated for how cases of abuse were handled under his watch as archbishop of Munich or as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer?"
Yes, of course he should. This former head of the Inquisition should be arrested the moment he dares to set foot outside his tinpot fiefdom of the Vatican, and he should be tried in an appropriate civil - not ecclesiastical - court. That's what should happen. Sadly, we all know our faith-befuddled governments will be too craven to do it.
"Should the pope resign?"
No. As the College of Cardinals must have recognized when they elected him, he is perfectly - ideally - qualified to lead the Roman Catholic Church. A leering old villain in a frock, who spent decades conspiring behind closed doors for the position he now holds; a man who believes he is infallible and acts the part; a man whose preaching of scientific falsehood is responsible for the deaths of countless AIDS victims in Africa; a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence: in short, exactly the right man for the job. He should not resign, moreover, because he is perfectly positioned to accelerate the downfall of the evil, corrupt organization whose character he fits like a glove, and of which he is the absolute and historically appropriate monarch.
No, Pope Ratzinger should not resign. He should remain in charge of the whole rotten edifice - the whole profiteering, woman-fearing, guilt-gorging, truth-hating, child-raping institution - while it tumbles, amid a stench of incense and a rain of tourist-kitsch sacred hearts and preposterously crowned virgins, about his ears

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bold emphasis added by me, for the savoring of a perfect, and perfectly fitting, turn of phrase.

It's not what you know

From the New York Times:

In 1994, Philip Bowring, a contributor to the International Herald Tribune’s op-ed page, agreed as part of an undertaking with the leaders of the government of Singapore that he would not say or imply that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had attained his position through nepotism practiced by his father Lee Kuan Yew. In a February 15, 2010, article, Mr. Bowring nonetheless included these two men in a list of Asian political dynasties, which may have been understood by readers to infer that the younger Mr. Lee did not achieve his position through merit. We wish to state clearly that this inference was not intended. We apologize to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong for any distress or embarrassment caused by any breach of the undertaking and the article.

Gee, imagine that - accusing Lee Kuan Yew's son of being nepotistically rewarded with the Prime Ministerial office, purely because he's the incompetent son of a ruthless father? How could they be so blatantly biased?

Visitors

We were fortunate enough to have visitors from London last week - Dawn & Teresa came to stay with us for 4 days, then Cat drove them to Memphis & spent the evening with them there (I wasn't feeling up to the journey or I would have gone along).

It was marvellous to see them both again - Dawn is one of the most engaging, ebullient people I've ever met: she and Cat met while working together at Metropolis 5 or 6 years ago. She has since struck out alone as an independant consultant & contractor, doing floral design primarily for weddings and events. This must be a bit precarious at times, but she has a (well-deserved) stunning reputation, and seems to be steadily busy.

Teresa is a senior detective in the Met: she was head of the homicide squad for the west half of London when we first met her, and has moved on since then to handling the child abuse squad. She is quite hard-headed and (unsurprisingly) acute and inquisitive, but also one of the most warmhearted people I've ever met. She's also an exquisite cook and we had the fortune to have her offer (well, insist) on cooking us dinner on Thursday night, which lived up to her high standards.

We didn't really do much except go out for dinners & brunches, hang out and talk a lot, although Cat took them to look at various stores, mostly to show off the size of them I think: and we did all go to see the President Clinton Library, which was quite interesting - although I found it a bit depressing as a reminder of opportunities squandered, and the incredible damage done by the simple inability to keep his trousers zipped.

Altogether, just a wonderful time to see such dear friends, and to relax and talk heart to heart.

Pops

Wandering around the many many useless channels on TV one night recently, I stumbled across a biography of the wonderful Louis Armstrong and found it fascinating. I've never forgotten the epitaph one of his contemporaries gave him - "He was born dirt poor, he died rich and famous, and he never made an enemy" - and while I'm not sure that's entirely true, he was an amazingly generous, loving and kind man, as well as being a breathtaking genius. Of course, that he spent pretty much all of every day stoned on marijuana doubtless helped the relaxed and open manner, but still.

I must admit, while there is quite a bit of his music I like or love, there's also quite a lot of it that leaves me pretty much cold, especially the early stuff from the 20s - I can admire it, but it doesn't grab me and compel me, and its' technical virtuosity (or such of it as I can grasp, which probably isnt that much), doesn't make up for a strained melody*

While he may not have invented Jazz exactly, he certainly was the source for most of it, from the earliest days onward, and far more than anyone else can be acclaimed as the father of Jazz. But I hadn't appreciated the breadth of his genius, or how widely his influence spread - they had a quote from Glenn Miller, of an interviewer asking where his music came from, and his flat reply - "Oh that's all Pops", and two or three other of the Big Band era band-leaders citing Armstrong as the inspiration for the Swing era.

Not really going anywhere with this, just a tribute to a genius


*On a moment's reflection, this may well just be a reflection of the poor recording quality of what is available now, not about the music he played at all.

Blowing in the wind

Well, that was exciting.

Last night, as I was finishing cooking dinner, the sirens started sounding off! I thought, huh, late shift at the factory I guess (duh), but Cat came from the bedroom and told me thats the tornado warning sirens. We grabbed cats, chairs (and dinner!) and retreated to the central corridor in the house, closing all the doors, as the best protection available (no basement, alas).

We were there about an hour, I guess, listening to the TV (which I turned to the local station and cranked the volume before we retreated). It sounds like the nearest tornado passed about half a mile away, to the north of us. Haven't gone to look & see what sort of damage it caused, but the reports all said that there were no reports of injury to anyone, so Little Rock may have gotten off lightly - north of us are densely-settled valleys, interspersed with relatively lightly settled ridgelines, and of course the Arkansas river.

All a bit sobering, though.

The tornadoes were spawned/followed by a heavy lightning storm, that passed off after another hour or so.

Not Working

Sometimes this place seems crazy.

To get a law passed, you need to submit a bill to the House of Representatives, and get 218 (half plus 1) votes for it, submit a -separate- bill to the Senate and get 51 (out of 100) votes for it, reconcile any conflicts between the 2 bills, get them voted on a 2nd time in both parts, then get it signed by the President - if he vetoes it, you then need (I think) 290 votes in the House to overcome this. That all more or less makes sense, in a cumbersome eighteenth century horse&buggy sort of approximation to sense. It certainly ensures there will be no hasty Muldoonian legislation rammed through in an eyeblink.

However, it turns out, that 41 Senators can 'filibuster' - i.e. indefinitely block - any bill,without a final vote, so effectively you need 60 votes in the Senate, to get any bill passed.

That's pretty Rube Goldberg, but I can sort of see some point in terms of giving a large minority protection against a majority ... at least in principle. It seems to have worked fairly well in less ideologically fanatical times, up until, oh, about 1994: and since then, as party discipline has become less lax, it has been working progressively less well. But, fair enough.

What's absolutely crazy - I mean, totally beyond comprehension, just drug-sniffingly hallucinatorily mad - is that a single Senator has the power to 'hold' or block anything by withholding his consent for a vote, but this appears to be the case. We had an instance of this a couple of weeks ago, when a vile slimeball called Shelby put a hold on 30 or more appointments to various government positions (which apparently need ratification by the Senate), because he wanted some government contracts to be directed to his state, rather to a different part of the USA where the contracts could be more cheaply & efficiently completed. Well, that's pretty naked greed, but I guess you have to expect a certain amount of that from politicians, who fairly universally favor naked self-interest* over ... anything, really.

And now there is another crazy delusional fool, by name of Bunning, who is blocking a bill permitting the payment of unemployment benefits to the unemployed (and also various government infrastructure projects, such as highway and bridge repairs) on the basis of (a) they are just lazy and not looking for jobs, and (b) the government is paying for it with deficit financing (something he apparently had absolutely no objection to when Bush was crippling the country with deficits for the last eight years).

And apparently nothing can be done about this, unless they find some sort of bribe to shift him. This, when his own state (Kentucky) has 10% unemployment and the whole country is grinding through a terrible economic constraction, seems beyond just vicious, cruel and spiteful - it seems utterly, incomprehensibly savage and insane.

*not to mention egos so bloated as to obscure any flicker of intelligence thoroughly.

As soon as your born they make you feel small,
By giving you no time instead of it all,
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all,
A working class hero is something to be,

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school,
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules,
A working class hero is something to be,

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years,
Then they expect you to pick a career,
When you can't really function you're so full of fear,
A working class hero is something to be,

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV,
And you think you're so clever and classless and free,
But you're still fucking peasents as far as I can see,
A working class hero is something to be,

There's room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folks on the hill,
A working class hero is something to be.

Thank you, John

Winter

Unloading the camera, I forgot I'd taken this view out the front windows - this is from a fortnight ago, but could have been as recently as last Friday:

It started snowing again on Sunday afternoon, while things were half-melted, and Cat was simply outraged: she was quite fed up with all this snow, this is the South dammit!

Standing around

Driving around Little Rock, I found - to my horror - that I had become more or less inured to one of the (many) things that shocked and disgusted me in this city when I first arrived. In this case, what I'm referring to is the poor bastards employed as living billboards - hired to stand 9 hours a day holding a sign announcing Discount Jewellery Sale Last Days! or Special Underwear Sale Now On, or just Liberty First Tax Services!!

When I first got here, they would just stand at busy corners, holding the signs, then some bright spark got the idea that if they waved their hand, or the sign, it would attract more attention, so now the poor bastards have to spend their time standing, waving and trying to draw attention, and smiling, smiling, smiling the whole time.

Just as a matter of course, I make a point of avoiding firms that use this sort of low-rent, contemptuous advertising, but when I think seriously about it, it makes my skin absolutely crawl. In the richest country in the world, this is the best use they can find for so much labour? I don't know how much these poor buggers are getting paid, but I'm sure it's not enough: they are out there, literally rain or shine, even in the freezing colds and standing ankle-deep in snow.

Hell, I used to think burger-flipping at McDonalds for minimum wages was a bottom-of-the-barrel sort of job, but this stuff has really lowered the standard.

And it also - of course - gives the lie to that ancient canard beloved of the Right, that people will just sit around and do nothing if you pay the unemployed any sort of benefit, however minimal. These people are doing an excruciating, astoundingly dull job in miserable conditions, just to earn some pittance.

I suppose there may be a few people who are suited to this, that this might represent a good job or even the peak of their abilities, but ... one, or maybe two, in a city the size of Little Rock, not the 60 or 80 people who seem to be doing it every weekend (and about half that weekdays I think).

Whiter than this page

Well, still snowed in - it snowed all Monday & didnt stop til yesterday morning. The roads look marginally passable this afternoon, provided we can make it up the slight incline of the driveway, which is still more or less solid snow. Must buy a snow shovel if we can get out (and any are left of course!).

At least it's proper snow this time, not the mostly ice with a spatter of snow on top, that we got last weekend ... much more festive looking, and oooh, soft and clean and inviting ... from inside the windows anyway. Not exactly the sort of weather Arkansas is known for, and the locals are all doom and gloom, worst winter ever seen since 1829 (*cough*cough*). Plus, of course, shows there ain't nuthin' to this global warmin' stuff, it's gettin' colder not warmer, which I've already had 3 times this week, in emails.

Let it come down

Wow, it snowed again overnight, and it's still snowing, quite hard. I can see I'll be working from home tomorrow. There's about 4 inches of snow piled up outside in the driveway already.

R was over from OKC for a weekend visit this weekend - had a game of 6th Edition wherein he massacred me: Note to self, do not charge chariots frontally into hoplites. Just because it sorta worked in DBM doesn't mean it will anywhere else ... which (a) makes sense from the real-world point of view, and (b) what on earth was DBM thinking?

Otherwise, kinda tiptoed around all the things we disagree on, like global warming, and a general hankering to revert to the 50s when middleclass white males had it so good (which inter alia I would say, actually not, but that's yet another matter).

Everything comes and goes

Everything comes and goes

pleasure leaves too early

and troubles leaves too slow

Tough month: it's been freezing cold here, biting in a way that it wasn't in London. And I do mean freezing, quite a few days it hasn't even reached 0C at the warmest point of the day. Last weekend, we didn't go out for 4 days as we were iced in - all the roads were sheets of ice, with a dusting of snow, and the temperature seesawed between 15 & 25F (-10 and -5 roughly). 

It isn't the grim grind of an English winter, even at worst there are plenty of sunny blue-sky days - viciously cold, but fine: but it's decidedly colder. Of course all the locals are shaking their heads and saying, never been a winter this cold before ... as usual. They've also been cheerfully announcing that it means this global warming stuff is just foolishness (gakk).

It, or various medical issues, seem to have left me fairly depressed: quite hard just to get up and keeping going each day.

Cat seems to be feeling a lot brighter than this though - she's just launched into a new project to build a set of compost bins behind the garage, with a raised vegetable garden as the next project after that. She's tearing into that with quite a bit of energy, happily hammering and sawing away in the garage, while wrapped up in many layers of warm clothes.

Haiti, or how to make a disaster

I found this quite fascinating, as a rebuttal of a -lot- of racist cant making the rounds at the moment, about how 'black culture' and 'voodoo' are what makes Haiti so poor:

Why did the political, economic and ecological histories of these two countries — the Dominican Republic and Haiti — sharing the same island unfold so differently?
Part of the answer involves environmental differences. The island of Hispaniola’s rains come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the island receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth.

Hispaniola’s highest mountains (over 10,000 feet high) are on the Dominican side, and the rivers from those high mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side.

The Dominican side has broad valleys, plains and plateaus and much thicker soils. In particular, the Cibao Valley in the north is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world.

In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from the east.

Compared to the Dominican Republic, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture in Haiti is much smaller, as a higher percentage of Haiti’s area is mountainous. There is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thinner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery.
Note the paradox: The Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti’s burst of agricultural wealth came at the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. [...]
While those environmental differences did contribute to the different economic trajectories of the two countries, a larger part of the explanation involved social and political differences — of which there were many that eventually penalized the Haitian economy relative to the Dominican economy.

In that sense, the differing developments of the two countries were over-determined. Numerous separate factors coincided in tipping the result in the same direction.
One of those social and political differences involved the accident that Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in France’s overseas empire. The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was in economic and political decline itself.

Hence, France was able to invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island. France imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain.
As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbor during colonial times — and it still has a somewhat larger population today, about ten million versus 8.8 million.
But Haiti’s area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic. As a result, Haiti, with a larger population and smaller area, has double the Republic’s population density.

The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side.

In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti’s lowlands and mid- mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.

 This is from Jared Diamond (of Guns, Germ and Steel fame)