Sunday September 29, 2002
A great article on the change in behavior of the Great Ocean Conveyor, for those of you who aren't religious Slashdot readers.
Above is a chart showing the change in the water salinity at depths from 1,000-4,000 meters, over the past 40 years. Red is high concentrations of saltwater, blue is high concentration of fresh water. It is posited that once the North Atlantic region reaches a specific saturation of fresh water at that depth, the Great Ocean Conveyor will simply stop, lowering the temperature of the North Atlantic region by around 10 degrees.
The article goes into much greater detail.
Friday September 27, 2002
Just watched Bush on Fox, warning us of terrorists who want to "struggle" nuclear devices into the country.
Paul Krugman's piece today in the NYTimes indicates that FERC might be engaged in a coverup, hiding audiotaped evidence that "traders from Williams Energy called plant operators and told them to turn off the juice."
"If that's true, FERC caught at least one power company red-handed, in the middle of the crisis, at a time when state officials were begging the agency to take action — and then suppressed the evidence. Yet this story has received little national play."
I can't find any news about today's protests in DC. Damn. They must not be happening!
If a tree falls in the forest, and the event isn't reported by the American media, did the tree even really fall?
Thursday September 26, 2002
So much for the infinite fucking generosity of the American people. Seen via a link at the Rittenhouse Review. This hasn't even merited a spot on the "crawl" of the all-news networks.
"Abused and starving, Chester Lee Miller, 18, was forced sometime this month to make a desperate 1,000-mile bus journey from the home of his mother and stepfather in Hazleton, Pa., to the Florida Panhandle, a place from which his natural father had earlier sent him packing.
"Aboard the bus, in terminal after terminal, town after town, Miller said, he cried and begged strangers for help.
"No one listened.
"Weighing little more than 60 pounds, the famished teenager with sunken eyes finally arrived in Milton, Fla., about 20 miles north of Pensacola, only to be rejected again. There, authorities said, his relatives shut him out of their trailer home on Saturday and literally dumped him at an apartment complex.
"'He looked like a Holocaust victim,' said Janice Goodman, at whose door Miller knocked, pleading again for help. 'I never would have thought something like this would be in Florida or the United States.'"
Let's revel in our greatness. Long live the USA! Without peer, our people were created whole by God and deposited in this paradise to spread his Word over the earth. Our plates runneth over, and we share with the rest of the world gladly and without complaint. Our beacon of freedom lights even the darkest corners of the globe.
Our narcissism is without bounds.
Wednesday September 25, 2002
Who is America's best dissembler?
Ari is America's best dissembler!
Three cheers for Ari!
Ari! Ari! Ari!
(Start reading the linked transcript from the beginning of the question period.)
Saw this at MediaWhoresOnline.
My connection's back! Woohoo!
I saw Brit Hume on Fox News last night, saying that Gore had changed his tune on the removal of Saddam Hussein. Why am I not surprised to read in Counterspin Central that Brit Hume turns out to be a craven liar?
Tuesday September 24, 2002
Another Tuesday of great Op-eds in the NYTimes. First is Paul Krugman's piece on Bush's imperialism and warmongering. He ends with a paragraph backing up his previous description of Halliburton's pension plan changes as "scandalous".
Next is Nick Kristof's piece about the Iraq invasion's day after. He reminds us of what happened in back in 1991, at the end if the Persian Gulf War:
"With the central government tottering, a Shiite uprising began in Basra and quickly spread. Here in Najaf, rebels tossed officials out of the windows of the Baath Party headquarters to be hacked apart by others below. Rioters raped and killed children in front of their parents.
"Saddam's suppression two weeks later, as U.S. forces stood by passively, was equally brutal, with rebels hanged from lampposts and dragged to their deaths behind tanks. Not surprisingly, when I asked people in the bazaars about the uprising, they mostly turned pale and remembered urgent business elsewhere."
He also goes on to talk about the possible repercussions of handing the goverment over to the 60% Shiite majority in Iraq:
"More broadly, if the United States brings democracy to Iraq, it will mean seizing power from the 17 percent Sunni minority who dominate the army and government and giving it to the 60 percent Shiite majority. The upshot could be greater influence for Iran, a fellow Shiite country with close ties to Iraq's Shiite cities.
"Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spent 13 years in exile here in Najaf, and many top Iranian ayatollahs stayed for shorter periods. Iranian hard-liners are probably salivating at the thought of America naïvely creating a Shiite Iraq so that the two countries could pool their nuclear resources and build the bomb together."
Sorry, my internet connection is down. Typing this from a library computer lab. Joy joy.
I noticed that MediaWhoresOnline has picked up on the Bush temper tantrum over German Chancellor Schroeder's stand on the Iraq war. Not only has Bush declined to converse with the Chancellor, he also refused to give a courtesy "congrats" call after his victory in the elections a few days ago.
Monday September 23, 2002
Who will replace Saddam Hussein once he's overthrown?
How about General Nizar Al-Khazraji?
"ACCORDING to many human rights groups, he is the field commander who led the 48-hour chemical weapons attack which poisoned and burned 5000 Kurdish civilians in the northern town of Halabja in March 1988"
What do we think of him?
"...says Ambassador David Mack, a senior official in the US State Department who co-ordinates meetings of Iraqi opposition groups in Washington DC, General Nizar al-Khazraji has 'a good military reputation' and 'the right ingredients' as a future leader in Iraq."
Oh. Hmm. How about Brigadier-General Najib Al-Salihi?
"... Salihi played a significant military role in Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. He was also engaged in putting down the uprising against Saddam 's rule that followed the defeat at the hands of the US-led forces."
Argh. This regime change stuff is no fun at all!
Sunday September 22, 2002
Maureen Down: Culture War with B-2's.
"The administration isn't targeting Iraq because of 9/11. It's exploiting 9/11 to target Iraq. This new fight isn't logical — it's cultural. It is the latest chapter in the culture wars, the conservative dream of restoring America's sense of Manifest Destiny."
Here's a brief history of the Project for the New American Century and of its report Rebuilding America's Defenses which I mentioned in these two (one and two) previous posts. Despite what one reader tried to explain to me, that reports like Rebuilding America's Defenses are essentially a-dime-a-dozen, I doubt many have the history of this document, and hopefully few if any are spilling over with the same deranged megalomania.
"The Dominators dream of empire. Not only will it extend their temporal power, they believe it will also give them immortality. One of their chief gurus, Reaganite firebreather Michael Ledeen, says that if the Dominators reject 'clever diplomacy' and 'just wage total war' to subjugate the Middle East, 'our children will sing great songs about us years from now.'"
BTW, yes, that Michael Ledeen quote is real. It can be seen here at the Village Voice.
I think of all the parallels drawn between 1984 and the current administration, it's important to note that Bush wants to prosecute Saddam Hussein for thought crime.
Friday September 20, 2002
Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World has links to the Daily Show's take on that latest Bush gaffe: "Fool me once... Shame on... Shame on you........ etc etc". He links to two realvideo streams, for high or low bandwidth.
US allies take cash to free Taliban. When you have 5 times fewer peacekeepers than you have in Kosovo, this should be expected, no?
Thursday September 19, 2002
Here's a great opinion piece at the LA Times by Robert Scheer, which talks about the Bush administration's Iraq machinations, and shows how Bush seems to continually fall into rhetorical traps of his own making. From the article:
"Not to worry, though. If the inspectors fail to find weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration still is prepared to make the case for what it calls 'regime change,' a fine Orwellian phrase that certainly sounds more sanitary than the old-fashioned word 'war,' with all its nasty implications of death and madness. The trick is to make the lack of evidence of such weapons more convincing of their existence than real evidence would be.
"That extremely convenient cop-out was most absurdly expressed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has declared that 'absence of evidence' of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq should not be considered 'evidence of absence.'"
Wednesday September 18, 2002
I got chills listening to this bit of Bush audio (courtesy of MediaWhoresOnline - requires RealPlayer). For those not familiar with the saying, it goes "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
Thomas Friedman is for invading Iraq only "if we think that doing so can bring about regime change and democratization. Because what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works — a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region."
But wouldn't it be a hell of a lot less costly in terms of lives, infrastructure and time to maybe focus on making one of the more open countries in the area more democratic? Why do we have to wipe one country clean and erect a sandcastle to democracy? How will that be more stable and respected than a democracy that has its roots in the will of the people? Or is Mr. Friedman assuming that these people don't really want democracy, and the only way to give it to them is to make them an American colony?
"Because only by helping the Arabs gradually change their context — a context now dominated by anti-democratic regimes and anti-modernist religious leaders and educators — are we going to break the engine that is producing one generation after another of undeterrables."
But how does destroying a country and installing an American-dominated regime -- democracy by the gun -- bring about stability? The folly is to assume that this regime will somehow be a beacon and not a target. It's smart to remember (no matter how much we want to forget) that Osama cited American bases in Saudi Arabia as a reason behind his jihad. It doesn't matter how reasonable his conclusions are; what matters are his actions. Will installing an American-dominated regime in Iraq and siphoning out the oil to the west make "the Arab street" more angry or less?
I shudder to think what the Bush campaign has planned for the days and months after Saddam's overthrow. Because so far they seem to be winging it. They've been ramming their case down the throats of Americans and the rest of the world, unable to provide any context or evidence for war. They don't think they need it. Who can deny that the statement to the United Nations seemed more a slight than case-making? What evidence was supplied? And now Bush's statement to the UN seems even more perfunctory: they're talking of going ahead without the UN, because Saddam would just bog down inspectors in lies and deceptions. Why bother with the ruse of pretending that you give a damn what the UN thinks, if you're not going play along?
A parting thought. It's probably hard to build a democratic nation from scratch when you don't have the slightest clue how you're going to do it. It's doubly hard in that the administration has proven over the past two years that they have only a cursory understanding and respect for democracy. If the best Iraq can hope for is a democracy where people are detained without access to counsel, presidents are installed by judicial fiat and international law is scorned, one has to wonder if all the death and destruction is worth it.
Tuesday September 17, 2002
And for those of you who thought that yesterday's story was just too insane to be true, here's a link to the report. The quote I mentioned can be found on page 72 of the PDF (page #60 in the document).
Monday September 16, 2002
Via The Sideshow comes this scary-as-fuck story of a secret memo that the nascent Bush administration had drawn up -- before he was elected -- by the neo-con think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
"'New methods of attack -- electronic, 'non-lethal', biological -- will be more widely available ... combat likely will take place in new dimensions, in space, cyberspace, and perhaps the world of microbes ... advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool'."
You may want to read that again. "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
They're talking about weapons of targeted genocide, people!
Will we *ever ever ever* hear about this in our press? What the hell are they good for? Oh, yeah -- they're good for propping up the President.
Sunday September 15, 2002
David Corn @ TomPaine.com : Bush has tainted a tragedy
Boston Globe: US could strike in 3 weeks, some analysts say
Saturday September 14, 2002
The single most damning indictment of the Bush administration that I have ever seen in the mainstream press. Frank Rich of the New York Times. Here are some select quotes:
"But there is a widening credibility gap between the White House's marketing of the war and the known facts. The arrogance of this C.E.O. administration, which gives citizens no better information than companies like Halliburton gave to its stockholders, recalls the hubris of those Ivy League and corporate "whiz kids" on Robert McNamara's Pentagon team who saw themselves as better and brighter than the rest of us."
"Anyone who believes that Mr. Bush might turn back now has not been following the path of a president who, by his own account, never second-guesses a decision; indeed, we're already ratcheting up our longstanding military engagement with Saddam."
"Is Saddam our new focus because he's the most catastrophic threat or is there another agenda that should be spelled out, whether it involves oil or unfinished Bush family business?"
Back from a few days off. Seen at MediaWhoresOnline: a link to a 30 minute interview with the completely fearless Hunter S. Thompson.
Tuesday September 10, 2002
9/11/2002
I feel cheated. I feel that the emotion and the import of 9/11 have been taken from me and reduced to sound bites, TV specials, and half-baked political rhetoric. I feel empty. Not just because of the devastation that occurred that day, but because since then I've been told nothing but how to feel and react and behave. I was never given the choice. The news media told me exactly the emotions that I was supposed to be feeling, the endless parade of flags told me what my priorities were supposed to be, the acquiescent politicians let me know just how little I should value my rights as a citizen. All solemnity has been shattered with voice-over narration.
I listened to Salman Rushdie the other day on NPR explain to the listening public that we all (all Americans, I assume) are rewiring our brains to deal with the new reality that confronts us. That it's as if we were momentarily deranged when the attacks happened, when reality wasn't fitting into its mold. But was his meaning that somehow reality was shattered by 9/11? That somehow these murderous goons broke in from some anti-reality and encroached upon our sacred space? The opposite happened: reality burst in. And since that day we as Americans have been doing our best to cobble together our safe house again to protect us from the nastiness outside.
I'm tired of hiding. I'm tired of cowering behind ideological claptrap. Now should be the time for America, stripped bare for a short time, to look at itself and see things as they are: we are but a delineated space on a map, and the one thing that has held us together and lifted us up from the mud -- our ability to seek justice and freedom and a diversity of both opinion and people -- has been completely undercut by our ignorance of reality outside our borders. We paid a price on 9/11 for our short-sightedness and the utter lack of universality in our ideology. And from 9/11 we've moved forward in the same manner as before, making no attempt to use the tragedy as a means of engaging the world with our ideals. We fell into the embrace of a world that wanted to comfort us, and we could have fostered goodwill and forged new ties to overcome animosities and resentments. But we squandered it all. And we squandered our chance for a true peace.
Are we to blame for 9/11? No. People who destroy are responsible for the havoc they wreak. But we Americans haven't been asking that question to find out the truth. We want reassurance that we're good people and that what we're doing is right and just. "Are we to blame for 9/11?" is misleading. Because what we're really asking is "We didn't do anything wrong, did we?" We're accepting the answer to the former as the answer to the latter. And it just isn't so. Our dealings with other countries have no internal consistency, they're driven by no overarching set of goals or ideals, and, as we've seen over the past few weeks, we seem to have complete disregard for the concept of equality. We left Afghanistan to fester after the Soviet/Afghan war. We armed radical militants, and then left them to ransack their own country and set up a murderous repressive regime that hosted terrorist training camps. We have an extension of the American arsenal ensconced in the Middle East. We coddle dictators when it suits us, and support undemocratic behavior when our interests are at stake. We supplied Saddam Hussein's army with training and weapons of mass destruction in their fight against Iran while at the same time we were aware of his atrocities using chemical weapons. There isn't a direct causal link between our actions in the Middle East and 9/11, but we can state clearly and forcefully that our behavior was sickening and wrong. Unfortunately, we're the only ones who don't want to hear it at all.
"We are all humans, and all equal, but Americans are more equal than most." Given comments on CSPAN, one could be lead to believe that maybe Americans themselves feel that. But that feeling is being daily expressed by our current administration, and our administration is solely to blame for the bad blood welling against us in the world. At every turn, as representatives of the American people, they have sought to abrogate treaties, shun coalitions, and weasel out of any international obligations that America has agreed to in past administrations. Our latest actions again have shirked responsibilities to the world community, by changing the default acceptable behavior by civilized countries to include pre-emptive attacks against other nations, even with no evidence of possible aggression. No one should be surprised when the world reacts negatively to this news. Our allies aren't pro Hussein, no matter what the neocon hawks want to make of their oil arrangements in Iraq. (That line of reasoning opens up the counter-argument that we're going in only for the oil.) As Chirac said to the New York Times, "It's not Schröder and I on one side, and Bush and Blair on the other; it's Bush and Blair on one side and all the others on the other side." It's time for the Bush administration to come clean, and lay out what they feel is their vision for the new world, because most of their actions have been filling the world and a good portion of the American population with dread. Many of us see an America moving more in the direction of hegemony, or what Mark Crispin Miller terms "a demented Caesarism". Do we have more of this to look forward to? Will someone in this administration step up and state plainly what they're really about? Or will they continue to hide behind patriotic slogans and slowly move further and further down the present path, until no one can doubt their real intentions? Will Americans have any recourse at that point?
I feel cheated out of the possibility for a better world, for a more just world, for a safer world. I feel cheated because the machinations and the disturbingly secretive philosophies of a few are guiding our country further and further away from the world community, provoking anger and resentment and even war without a concern for the consequence. I feel cheated by an American press corps cowed by an intimidating administration. And I feel cheated because none of these people are accepting accountability for their actions.
Monday September 09, 2002
In the NYTimes, an incredibly harsh assessment of Bush's performance since September 11th
Media Whores Online has an interesting piece on the Republican's efforts to change history by denying their stated attempts to privatize Social Security. Included is a strange quote praising Pinochet for his privatization success.
(Unfortunately, MWO doesn't have any permalinks - so you might have to hunt a bit.)
This Modern World: One Year Later: What the President has Learned Since 9-11
The Washington Post mentions the issue of the non-evidence of nuclear buildup by Iraq. But there's no reaction from anyone to the news.
Sunday September 08, 2002
Jeb! for Governor. Sponsored in part by Cokeheads. First heard of this at Counterspin Central, which also has a link to reporting regarding Jeb's latest lies.
Like father, like son. Bush misstated report on Iraq (MSNBC is so nice to the Bush administration; I think "Bush lied about report on Iraq" is much more appropriate). From the article:
"BUSH AND BRITISH Prime Minister Tony Blair talked to reporters before opening about three hours of talks at Camp David...
"...both leaders mentioned a 1998 report by the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, that said Saddam could be six months away from developing nuclear weapons...
"...Contrary to Bush’s claim, however, the 1998 IAEA report did not say that Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear capability, NBC News’ Robert Windrem reported Saturday...
"...In a summary of its 1998 report, the IAEA said that 'based on all credible information available to date ... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its programme goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material...'
"...A senior White House official acknowledged Saturday night that the 1998 report did not say what Bush claimed. 'What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report,' the official told NBC News’ Norah O’Donnell.
"...Meanwhile, Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the U.N. agency, disputed Bush’s and Blair’s assessment of the satellite photograph, which was first publicized Friday. Contrary to news service reports, there was no specific photo or building that aroused suspicions, he told Windrem."
So, we've come to this. After all the talk, all we have to convince even our staunchest ally is a trumped up story about nuclear capabilities using fabricated evidence. But although this report is from MSNBC, I doubt that it will make news on any of this morning's talkshows (or any news beyond this single story). September 11th is just 3 days away, people! Where are your priorities?
Saturday September 07, 2002
Is there a point where we can actually call the Bush administration negligent for ignoring warnings about September 11th? Because here's news of another warning, this from an emissary of the Taliban.
The Christian Science Monitor is running an article on the dubious intelligence that was used to justify action in the last Iraq war, Desert Storm.
They even mention the famous "incubator" story (where Hussein's army stole incubators from a hospital, leaving the babies on the floor to die) and how it was exposed as a lie. That's funny, because it was either Fox News or CNN that just the other day showed Bush 41's speech referencing the incubators, without any reference to its falsehood.
And there's this:
"'My concern in these situations, always, is that the intelligence that you get is driven by the policy, rather than the policy being driven by the intelligence,' says former US Rep. Lee Hamilton (D) of Indiana, a 34-year veteran lawmaker until 1999, who served on numerous foreign affairs and intelligence committees, and is now director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Bush team 'understands it has not yet carried the burden of persuasion [about an imminent Iraqi threat], so they will look for any kind of evidence to support their premise,' Mr. Hamilton says. 'I think we have to be skeptical about it.'"
Also, Tom Tomorrow has a post about his family's reaction upon hearing the incubator story years ago.
I know that I feel so much safer knowing that Dubya is in charge.
Despite the fact that ABCNews successfully managed to sneak depleted Uranium into the country.
Don't you feel safer?
Friday September 06, 2002
Just saw this at Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo:
"A tape has emerged in which Netanyahu's wife Sara tells another Likud activist, inter alia, 'Bibi is a leader who is greater than this entire country, he really is a leader on a national scale. We'll move abroad. This country can burn. This country can't survive without Bibi. People here will be slaughtered.'"
Boy it would be nice if this was the final nail in his political coffin. Now if only the same could happen to Sharon and Arafat.
The Onion scares the hell out of me sometimes.
Thursday September 05, 2002
We're going to be as effective as the Israelis at stopping terrorist attacks. So much for bringing stability to Afghanistan. Was that ever even a serious goal of this administration? Or has this all been a pretense, leading up to war with Saddam Hussein?
Wednesday September 04, 2002
If you are interested in finding out more about Dubya's peculiar afflictions and the insanity of current American politics, this audio interview with Mark Crispin Miller is a must-listen. Requires Real Audio. From the interview:
"I do believe, with all sincerity, and with every patriotic fiber of my being that these people are fascists at heart. And I'm talking about the Italian model of fascism. They believe that the government should be run by a business elite, on corporate lines, that any kind of interference should be dealt with, in whatever way they can deal with it. They're obsessed with their own power, they have utter comtempt for democracy, they have utter contempt for the constitution and if you continue to read all of what Bush says these days... you can see the evidence that came from his own mouth; the Bush Dyslexicon [Mr. Miller's book] is full of evidence like this.
Tuesday September 03, 2002
I've added a link to economist Max B. Sawicky's weblog, MaxSpeak, at left. Here's a line or two from the end of one of his latest posts.
"The conservative movement, in short, seeks a reverse ratchet. Lock in deficits, then let spending get squeezed. My adjective 'conservative' could be a little misleading, since this is an extremist, destabilizing strategy -- a deliberate effort to wreck the finances of the U.S. public sector."
(Personally, I think that the new Homeland Security Agency is another step in this direction. See the end of the "A Vacuous Sac" piece, available via the new "Previous Musings" box to the right.)
Monday September 02, 2002
Atrios points out that Bush's Labor Day Weekend radio address makes no mention of labor or Labor Day.
In response to the question, "Is the Bush administration in 'disarray' regarding Iraq?", CSPAN listeners are responding with near unanimity that the administration is in utter disarray, and many listeners are calling the situation a "wag the dog" scenario.
The dissenters have been calling in saying that CSPAN's "bias is showing" by the simple asking of the question. "The question is expecting an affirmative response," one caller stated.
Sunday September 01, 2002
A mainstream article (the Washington Post) on the diminishing of America's power in the world (which I wrote about just a few days ago).
"'This administration has too many ideologues and too many people that come with baggage. They come with an ideology that is confrontational, that is 100 percent sure of its righteousness,' said [Ahmed] Maher, the Egyptian foreign minister."
"Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, described Bush's vision of an international system run according to U.S. interests and values as 'the new Rome.' But, she said, 'My reading of history is it doesn't work. . . . . History shows that being the most powerful nation means that others gang up on you.'"
"'You can go all over Latin America and you will find disappointment,' said Jorge Montano, a political consultant in Mexico City who served as ambassador to Washington from 1993 to 1995. 'The behavior of this administration has been extremely erratic, proving their ignorance about what is going on in the region.'"
Shibley Telhami, a Middle East specialist at the University of Maryland: "Think if you apply that same strategy and principle to your own lives and your social relations, if you take that attitude as a strategy of winning, where you don't take people's wishes in consideration and calculations into account," he said. "How much resentment builds up awaiting the right moment?"
