Category Archives: Ideology

New Blinds On The Old Broken Window

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The colorful face of empire:

“With a black first family in the White House and a diverse group of appointees and Cabinet nominees, the all-white dinner party feels all wrong. Certain hosts are suddenly grappling with a new reality: They need some black friends. Overnight, black politicians, lawyers and journalists are hot properties, receiving engraved invitations from people they never got invitations from before. (emphasis mine)

“This article, trumpeting the latest blend of powerbrokers, is about as far from the mark of what the real problem is as you can get without entering a vegetative state.  As if we’re supposed to be all Woo Hoo! because the percentage of beltway players that could use a tan has gone down.  Please…

See, the issue here isn’t what the people with influence look like.  Their overwhelming whiteness has been historical coincidence due to previous factors, which is being dealt with already.  No, the issue is this: as long as the same ideas and the same worldview are in charge, nothing will change, no matter how loudly the mainstream press cheers.  If accepting the status quo is the price of admission then functionally we’ve not moved, and are merely sticking new blinds on a broken window….”

Read the rest of the post by libertarian blogger, Psychopolitik

Comment:

 Now, tell me why you never hear this slant from most of the African American community’s representatives in the media? Instead, you get the voices of the “welfare establishment” – those who think the community must always look to Washington to address its problems. Less frequently, you hear the voices of conservatives, but they also think you need to have someone with a gun and a slogan as some kind of prop for their religious views.

You hear someone with libertarian or antistate views rarely.

 But then, of course,  why would you, with a media mostly beholden to the gun-makers correction: weapons industry and the sloganeers?

Update:Rereading this, I find it sounds as if I am opposed to gun ownership. I am not. I meant the weapons industry, as in weapons of war.

I’m all for responsible gun ownership and nurse unending dreams of  that handy revolver I’ll have some day, hidden snugly in a hip pocket….

 

 

Propaganda Nation: Some Inequalities Are More Unequal Than Others…

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“If inequality in things that matter is important, there is a basic inequality that the worriers about inequality should be paying attention to: the inequality in life expectancy between men and women. In 2005, life expectancy at birth was almost seven percent higher for American women than for American men (80.4 years for women vs. 75.2 years for men). Governments could certainly reduce this life-expectancy inequality by redistributing medical research funding on women’s health to research on men’s health, and general medical care funding from women to men. Consider that men are more likely to die from prostate cancer than women are from breast cancer. Yet in 2005 federal expenditures for prostate cancer research were $390 million compared to $698 million for breast cancer research, and the American Cancer Society contributed almost three times as much for breast cancer research ($98 million) as for prostate cancer research ($36 million).

When I talk to people, I find that they generally agree with, and rarely strongly oppose, forcible government transfers of income from the rich to the poor to reduce income inequality. But when I suggest that the government transfer medical expenditures from women to men to reduce life-expectancy inequality, I get a very different reaction. Often, the listener will simply give me a strange look and quickly depart. Those who do respond verbally, however, typically say that I couldn’t possibly be serious because my idea is outrageously silly. I agree. It is silly. But I am completely serious in suggesting it.”

More at the Library of Economics and Liberty.

Comment:

To forestall anyone who writes to me anxiously that this sort of argument – even tongue-in-cheek – is dangerously sexist and anti-feminist, let me just say I am a feminist, if feminism means advocating that women be treated as individuals and as fully human. I am enough of a feminist to recognize that women and men are biologically and culturally different and have different histories that need to be taken into account.  

But if feminism means declaring the other half of the species the enemy –  and some of what is passed off as progressive opinion on this topic is just that – I’ll say no to the label. There’s a kind of feminism out there that’s just public posturing by people who get social and economic benefits from doing so that they wouldn’t be able to get otherwise.

And if they were to gain equal benefits from holding the opposite bias, they would switch sides in an instant….

Note: I said some progressive opinion on this…

Are We In For George W. Obama?

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Glenn Greenwald on bipartisan venality: 

“With passage of the Act, Democrats delivered to the Bush administration everything it wanted — and more. GOP Sen. Kit Bond actually taunted the Democrats in the Times for giving away the store: “I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get.” Making matters much worse, by delivering this massive gift to the White House, the House undid one of its very few good deeds since taking over in 2006: its galvanizing February 2008 refusal to succumb to Bush’s rank fear-mongering by allowing “The Protect America Act” to expire instead of following the Senate’s lead in making it permanent.

Adding the final insult to this constitutional injury, Barack Obama infamously violated his emphatic pledge, made during the Democratic primary, to filibuster any bill containing telecom immunity. With the Democratic nomination fully secured, Obama blithely tossed that commitment aside, instead joining his party’s leadership in voting for cloture on the bill — the opposite of a filibuster — and then in favor of the bill itself. The photographs of the celebratory, bipartisan signing ceremony that followed at the White House — where an understandably jubilant George Bush and Dick Cheney were joined by a grinning Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman and Steny Hoyer — was the vivid, wretched symbol of what, in 2008, became the fully bipartisan assault on America’s basic constitutional guarantees and form of government.”

The Silence of the Swiss..

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“Have you ever heard of the elections in Switzerland?
Have you ever heard of any Swiss political party?
Do you know the name of any Swiss political leader?

They are a true democracy in this vital sense: politics does not consume their lives.

Democracy there sings the “sounds of silence.”

Indeed, when I attended the Geneva Auto Show, I made it a point to ask any Swiss citizen I met the name of their great country’s president. I am proud to report that not a single one of them – and I must have asked hundreds – knew the name of their president…

 ….Some years ago I reviewed Sumantra Bose’s great book on Kashmir; a book that reads as a thriller. Anyone who wants to know about Kashmir should read the book – and also visit the state, as I did in 2002.

During that visit I had a chance to meet the then minister of finance of the J&K government. He said that 90 per cent of his budget expenditure comes from New Delhi.

Wake up all you dunderheads!

This is not Democracy.

This is Political Clientelism. ”

More by Sauvik Chakravarti.

Propaganda State: What Happens When You Don’t Listen to Everybody..

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“Two years ago, for example, when the now-beleaguered Morgan Stanley was trumpeting a 61 percent jump in profits, Grant wrote a pessimistic analysis titled “over the cliff with Morgan Stanley.”

Notes the Washington Post.

Comment

Yes, there were lots of people who saw this coming. The Post mentions two of them – Nouriel Rubini from the Stern School of Business and James Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. I can name dozens: Kevin Phillips, Richard Russell, Bill Fleckenstein (another perma bear, but none the less right), Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, The Daily Reckoning crew….

And yours truly way back in 2006, even pointed out that Fanny and Freddie would be at the heart of the problem:

“Why It’s Time to Sell Goldman,” Money Week, July 2006.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government shows a keener understanding of sound money and the free market than our money men:

“According to numerous Chinese state media news sources today, the Federal Reserve’s continued zeal for propping up the market by injecting illusory liquidity is part of an agenda to gain trust and grease the skids for increased government intervention in financial markets. China Finance, China News and Chaobao Financial News, all state owned media outlets, slammed the Fed for taking action that will only make long term economic conditions worse and devalue the dollar by “creating money that does not exist which leads to the inflation of liquidity, ” a policy contrary to China’s position as a holder of vast reserves of US dollars.”

Nice to see that the Chi Coms are more in synch with the best tradition of this country on the need for sound money. Shows you that our worst enemies are right here at home.

And Anatole Kaletsky states the obvious: Paulson was willing to destroy shareholders in Bear and Lehman but he rushed to defend his old firm.

Democrats might have racist attittudes? Naaah…..

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“Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton’s white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes….”

More at MSN.

Comment:

What a relief. Democrats are racists too. All along we thought that went with being a Republican, along with with country club membership, subhuman IQ and a multi-million dollar bonus.

When you make caricatures of people and ideas, don’t complain when it comes back to bite you.

(Full disclosure: I vote neither Republican or Democrat)

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Hacking Sarah Palin: Way to Go, Civil Liberties Champs!

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Update:

Says Yahoo, “According to reports in Knoxville’s Tennessean, Democrat State Representative Mike Kernell admitted that his son, David Kernell is being questioned by authorities in connection with the crime. The Secret Service and the FBI launched an official investigation on September 17. ”

Suggesting it might have come  from a party operative or someone in politics politics wasn’t so far wrong, was it?

_________________________________
“WASHINGTON – Hackers broke into the Yahoo! e-mail account that Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin used for official business as Alaska’s governor, revealing as evidence a few inconsequential personal messages she has received since John McCain selected her as his running mate.”
Comment:

If this hacking proves to have came out of the Obama camp, I must say their claim to be champions of civil liberties is damaged. Whoever the thugs who did this, I hope they realize they are damaging the credibility of their campaign. I haven’t been all that much taken with Ms. Palin. But she is going to get a sympathy vote out of this, and rightly so.

Solzhenitsyn on the Cancer of Conformity

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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn died today. For most of his life, he was the conscience of the Soviet Empire. Some of the most forceful passages in his writing were directed against the intelligentsia who allowed themselves to be puppets for their rulers:

“A man sprouts a tumor and dies — how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?” he asked questioning the complicity of ordinary Russians in the crimes of Stalin’s era.”

More at MSN

Media-Trix: Suspect In 2001 Anthrax Attacks Commits Suicide….

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“Federal prosecutors investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks were planning to indict and seek the death penalty against a top Army microbiologist in connection with anthrax mailings that killed five people. The scientist, who was developing a vaccine against the deadly toxin, committed suicide this week.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, worked for the past 18 years at the government’s biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md. For more than a decade, he worked to develop an anthrax vaccine that was effective even in cases where different strains of anthrax were mixed, which made vaccines ineffective, according to federal documents reviewed by the AP.

U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing grand jury investigation, said prosecutors were closing in on Ivins, 62. They were planning an indictment that would have sought the death penalty for the attacks, which killed five people, crippled the postal system and traumatized a nation still reeling from the Sept. 11 attacks….”

More at FOX on a tragic twist in a bizarre case.

Comment:

For those of you who didn’t follow it, here’s the gist.

In 2001 Anthrax-laced mailings killed 5 people and led investigators to the government’s bio-defense labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Originally, the mailings looked like they were written by a Middle Eastern or Pakistani person. Relying on a novel technique of literary analysis created by an English professor and written up in Vanity Fair, the FBI shifted suspicion to a bio-terrorism expert, Stephen Hatfill, who was placed under 24-hour surveillance.

Hatfill later sued Vanity Fair and the English professor for the allegations. He also sued the government for leaking the charges that led to his hounding in the media. This June, the government settled (without admitting guilt) for a multi-million dollar figure. Now, another scientist, Bruce Ivins, who has been under investigation for the same attacks, has killed himself.

Hmmm.

So many killer scientists and so little anthrax….

What should we make of this?

Here’s my novel investigative technique. Leaning back in my chair and putting my finger tips together in my best Sherlock style ( I haven’t got a Stradivarius around to saw on…….let alone cocaine), let me pronounce judgment.

Could it be that our dear (almost departed) government was busy concocting “evidence” (with your tax dollars) to bolster their global-crazed-Islamicist-preemptive-porky-military-boondoggling case for going to war in Iraq? And that it didn’t quite fly….

That is to say, the suspicious-Paki-letter-writer part..er… bombed (overlook that imagery, please..).

And could it be that they then tried to distract attention by publicly fingering assorted scapegoats, leading to one of said scapegoats accidentally turning into sacrificial kebab?

And could it also be, dear reader, that I have a future as an FBI consultant….or at least, a Vanity Fair theorist?

For more on this, see Glenn Greenwald’s blog. Greenwald’s raised questions about the anthrax scares earlier.

Media-Trix: Rehearsing Our Rulers

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“The most interesting of the seminars was presented by Dr. Vincent Covello, a crisis communication expert who told us an amazing story. His group had rehearsed former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his officers in how to respond to situations that included planes hitting the World Trade Center. Statements had been prepared and rehearsed way in advance of September 11, 2001. Suddenly, the poise and leadership that Giuliani was admired for seemed hollow.

Every eventuality, said the crisis expert, should be prepared for and rehearsed so that those in charge look cool and confident when it happens. In fact, said the expert, nothing should be left to chance. Former Gulf War Commander Norman Schwarzkopf had rehearsed the famous tear he shed during a Barbara Walters interview when she asked about the casualties of the first Gulf go ’round.

More in an interesting post at The Congress Blog.