“I have been familiar with Professor Churchill’s work for a number of years now. I have cited his work approvingly in an essay I wrote for the journal Ethics in 1995 published by the University of Chicago. This journal is probably the oldest and most prestigious journal in the field of ethics and political philosophy published in the the United States. Later, I revised and published a portion of this essay which included the parts that referred to Professor Churchill’s work in my book, Three Challenges to Ethics, published with Oxford University Press in 2001. At the time, I asked Professor Churchill to write a blurb for the back of this book which he graciously did. Both Oxford and myself were pleased to have his endorsement of my book. All of this is evidence of my belief, and the beliefs of the editors of Ethics and Oxford University Press in the excellence of Professor Churchill’s work. There is not even the hint of incompetence here. It is excellence all the way down.”
Not quite as much the fringe lunatic that talk radio would have you believe he is…….or even some of the left-liberal mainstream.
China executes ex-chief of food and drug agency…
BEIJING – China executed a former director of its food and drug agency Tuesday for approving fake medicine in exchange for cash, illustrating how serious Beijing is about tackling product safety, while officials announced steps to safeguard food at next summer’s Olympic Games.
The measures include ensuring athletes’ food is free of substances that could trigger a positive result in tests for banned performance-enhancing drugs. Many of China’s recent food woes have been tied to the purity of ingredients, flavoring, artificial colors and other additives.
During Zheng Xiaoyu’s tenure as head of the State Food and Drug Administration from 1997 to 2006, the agency approved six untested drugs that turned out to be fake, and some drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, according to state media reports. One antibiotic caused the deaths of at least 10 people….”
Now that’s a thought…
Funding Islamic creationism….
A fascinating post from Ali Eteraz on the origins of Islamic science and its present day funding:
“Suddenly, I took another investigative turn and found that none other than Mustapha Aykol, the Turkish writer who believes in the compatibility of liberalism and Islam and human rights and is all over the place on Daniel Pipes’ Frontpage Magazine, American Enterprise Institute (Wolfowitz and Rummy), National Review (Kristol and Right-Wingers like Bernard Lewis), and the Washington Times (right-wing, establisher as conservative alternative to Washington Post, founded by this Church, see Wiki), is massively connected to Islamic Creationism (the link to his website is below)…..
President Bush’s National Emergency – is it yours?
“By Presidential Executive Order, we’re living in a state of national emergency.
Because the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, the national emergency first declared on November 14, 1994, must continue in effect beyond November 14, 2006. In accordance with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared in Executive Order 12938, as amended.
This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.
GEORGE W. BUSH
THE WHITE HOUSE,
October 27, 2006. [emphasis added]
Betcha didn’t know that..
The most egregious nuclear proliferator on the face of this planet is Pakistan, in the person of A.Q. Khan.
Khan’s network provided nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
Much as President Musharraf would like to claim that Mr. Khan’s efforts were after hours and on his own dime, the North Korean transaction involved not the payment of cash to Mr. Khan’s private bank account but the delivery of North Korean No Dong missiles and technology to the Pakistan government.
Awkward.
Makes it look like the Pakistan government was proliferating nuclear weapons technology-the type of activity that, if Kim Jung Il’s experience was any guide, would provoke the formation of a worldwide alliance to destabilize and if possibly destroy the culprit’s regime, at the very least cut off its supply of cash and cognac, etc. etc. etc.
But since Pakistan is our ally in the war on terror, the nature of the transaction-and the character of the crime-were neatly reversed.
As the Bush administration saw it, the offense was North Korea’s supply of the missiles to Pakistan…and the fact that they got paid for them with nuclear weapons equipment and technology was of secondary importance.
Actually, it was no laughing matter.
The State Department had to step up and pre-emptively define the transaction as a missile purchase and sanction Khan’s laboratories itself. Otherwise, Pakistan would have been vulnerable to much more serious, legislative sanction-a total cutoff of aid under the Solarz Amendment–as a proliferator….”
More juicy analysis by China Hand at Counterpunch...
Bashing the Chinese and begging them…
“This week, bond rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s finally announced downgrades on billions of dollars of bonds backed by subprime mortgages. Though the cuts will certainly not reflect the full weakness of the bonds, and will not include nearly as many issues as they should, they nevertheless amount to the beginning of the end of the phony mortgage investment market and the unrealistically high home prices that it helped support. In a sign of desperation, the U.S. has dispatched Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson to Beijing to beg the Chinese to use some of their $1.3 trillion in foreign reserves to buy more U.S. mortgage backed securities. Talk about chutzpa! We bash them publicly, but behind the scenes we go hat in hand seeking their help. If the Chinese have any sense they will send the Secretary packing. After all, why should they use Chinese taxpayer money to bail out the U.S. housing market by purchasing securities that no American would touch with a ten-foot chopstick?”
More by Peter Schiff at 321gold.com.
[With the caveat, of course, that that’s a site where gold-bugs, bulls and a few opportunists too, are pushing their stuff. Still, on the whole (and with plenty of caution about their buy and sell signals), I haven’t found them to be fundamentally wrong about the questions they raise…]
Murray Rothbard: a libertarian society….
“For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: “There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice…. There was no trace of State-administered justice.”9
How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All “freemen” who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath’s members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their “kings.” An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, “the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension.”10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed property rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associations which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary members. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland.
But what of the elected “king”? Did he constitute a form of State ruler? Chiefly, the king functioned as a religious high priest, presiding over the worship rites of the tuath, which functioned as a voluntary religious, as well as a social and political, organization. As in pagan, pre-Christian, priesthoods, the kingly function was hereditary, this practice carrying over to Christian times. The king was elected by the tuath from within a royal kin-group (the derbfine), which carried the hereditary priestly function. Politically, however, the king had strictly limited functions: he was the military leader of the tuath, and he presided over the tuath assemblies. But he could only conduct war or peace negotiations as agent of the assemblies; and he was in no sense sovereign and had no rights of administering justice over tuath members. He could not legislate, and when he himself was party to a lawsuit, he had to submit his case to an independent judicial arbiter.
Again, how, then, was law developed and justice maintained? In the first place, the law itself was based on a body of ancient and immemorial custom, passed down as oral and then written tradition through a class of professional jurists called the brehons. The brehons were in no sense public, or governmental, officials; they were simply selected by parties to disputes on the basis of their reputations for wisdom, knowledge of the customary law, and the integrity of their decisions. As Professor Peden states:
… the professional jurists were consulted by parties to disputes for advice as to what the law was in particular cases, and these same men often acted as arbitrators between suitors. They remained at all times private persons, not public officials; their functioning depended upon their knowledge of the law and the integrity of their judicial reputations.11
Furthermore, the brehons had no connection whatsoever with the individual tuatha or with their kings. They were completely private, national in scope, and were used by disputants throughout Ireland. Moreover, and this is a vital point, in contrast to the system of private Roman lawyers, the brehon was all there was; there were no other judges, no “public” judges of any kind, in ancient Ireland.
It was the brehons who were schooled in the law, and who added glosses and applications to the law to fit changing conditions. Furthermore, there was no monopoly, in any sense, of the brehon jurists; instead, several competing schools of jurisprudence existed and competed for the custom of the Irish people.
How were the decisions of the brehons enforced? Through an elaborate, voluntarily developed system of “insurance,” or sureties. Men were linked together by a variety of surety relationships by which they guaranteed one another for the righting of wrongs, and for the enforcement of justice and the decisions of the brehons. In short, the brehons themselves were not involved in the enforcement of decisions, which rested again with private individuals linked through sureties. There were various types of surety. For example, the surety would guarantee with his own property the payment of a debt, and then join the plaintiff in enforcing a debt judgment if the debtor refused to pay. In that case, the debtor would have to pay double damages: one to the original creditor, and another as compensation to his surety. And this system applied to all offences, aggressions and assaults as well as commercial contracts; in short, it applied to all cases of what we would call “civil” and “criminal” law. All criminals were considered to be “debtors” who owed restitution and compensation to their victims, who thus became their “creditors.” The victim would gather his sureties around him and proceed to apprehend the criminal or to proclaim his suit publicly and demand that the defendant submit to adjudication of their dispute with the brehons. The criminal might then send his own sureties to negotiate a settlement or agree to submit the dispute to the brehons. If he did not do so, he was considered an “outlaw” by the entire community; he could no longer enforce any claim of his own in the courts, and he was treated to the opprobrium of the entire community.12
There were occasional “wars,” to be sure, in the thousand years of Celtic Ireland, but they were minor brawls, negligible compared to the devastating wars that racked the rest of Europe. As Professor Peden points out, “without the coercive apparatus of the State which can through taxation and conscription mobilize large amounts of arms and manpower, the Irish were unable to sustain any large scale military force in the field for any length of time. Irish wars… were pitiful brawls and cattle raids by European standards.”13
More from Murray Rothbard, “For a New Liberty,” Chapter 11, at the Mises site.
Speculation Nation: housing bubble denial continues….
“The Press Telegram. “Don’t try to tell Dick Gaylord it’s a down housing market, or that there’s a housing slump, and don’t dare mention the word ‘bubble.’”“The congenial Long Beach man, who will assume the role as the nation’s head Realtor next year, [my emphasis] will argue vehemently that the market ‘isn’t down but just returning to normal.’”
“‘I don’t know that there’s ever been a bad time to buy,’ Gaylord said. ‘If people will hold on, there’s no bad time to buy in real estate…..”
More at the Housing Bubble Blog.
[And after that, I have a little swampland in Georgia I’d like you to take a look at….]
Cheney pushing for Iran strike….
“The handwriting is on the wall here. All these reports from unnamed sources about Iranian support for Iraqi “insurgents” of this or that faction. The display with much fanfare of captured weapons in Iraq identified as of Iranian manufacture. All these confident allusions to a nuclear weapons program Iran denies exists, for which the IAEA finds no evidence. All these assertions that Iran plans to cause a second Holocaust through a nuclear attack on Israel. Norman Podhoretz’s Wall Street Journal op-ed piece praying for the U.S. to bomb Iran. John McCain’s crooning “Bomb-bomb-bomb Iran.” The disinformation, distortion, even vilification of Iran in popular culture. The propaganda barrage is reminiscent of that which preceded the criminal invasion of Iraq.”
How Propaganda Works: By Erasing Context…
An article I wrote in 2005 on the Monthly Review website about how the liberal press (NY Times, in this case) and the neo-conservative press (National Review) BOTH rewrote the story of Abu Ghraib to make it fit the establishment agenda.
WHY?
BECAUSE IF YOU BLAME JUST THE LAWS, THEN YOU CAN CHANGE THEM BUT STILL KEEP THE POLITICAL CULTURE. THE PARTIES IN POWER CHANGE BUT THE POLICIES STAY THE SAME. WE ARGUE ABOUT DIFFERENT THINGS AND SEE DIFFERENT FACES ON OUR SCREEN BUT NOTHING CHANGES — THE STATE ONLY GETS BIGGER….AND BIGGER……AND BIGGER…
“The Failure of Liberal Journalism on Abu Ghraib“
(November, 2005)
” Eliminate the real details of what went on at Abu Ghraib, substitute a handful of strangely artistic nudes, and it’s only too easy for the National Review to make its case that the chatter about legal memos is simply a Victorian swoon by liberals. This is exactly what [Rich}Lowry does……
…Andrew McCarthy is right in concluding in a January 2005 National Review article that Alberto Gonzales’ “position on this matter [of treatment of detainees from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban at Gitmo] is not a radical view.12 It’s America’s view.”
The right even claims that the 1977 Protocol I to the Conventions that protects non-state actors was simply a partisan addition tacked on by Democrats and that the national liberation movements they were meant to protect were simply terrorist organizations.
Given that, why would today’s resurgent right-wing embrace a legal doctrine championed by Democrats and rejected by their hero Reagan? Why should we expect any other outcome except the “promotion of the promoter of torture” as one conservative publication put it?13
Again, one cannot state too often that the law is part of the problem for conservatives (and for much of America) and that liberals who fail to see this becomes no more than unwitting co-conspirators with conservatives in the legitimizing of torture…………
As long as movements for political and economic liberation are characterized as terror and state terror is disguised in the language of liberation theology, Abu Ghraib is always going to be acceptable to an inflamed population as necessary to “security.” As long as state terror is unacknowledged or normalized or hidden in covert actions, violent acts by individuals can be exaggerated so that they seem to throw up a monstrous irrational shadow against which surveillance and espionage and their other face — torture — can be justified as the state’s rational response.
And it’s finally the political context of this state surveillance — the pervasive presence, both explicit and subliminal, of an infinite voyeurism that replicates and circulates its power in every transaction in society — that permits and finally sanctions the pornographic violence of the state.
This is the context which is fragmented or erased altogether by the media. This is the context without which Abu Ghraib — and in Arabic, Abu Ghurayb means the father of the raven, a bird of ill-omen — becomes no more than isolated and senseless acts rather than what it is literally — a prefiguration of things, a dark messenger from the future, a sign of evil to come.
Related:
1 American Civil Liberties Union, “Government Documents on Torture” (records the government has released under court order in response to the ACLU’s FOIA request).
2 T. T. Reid, “Guard Convicted in the First Trial from Abu Ghraib,” Washington Post (15 January 2005).
3 Rich Lowry, “Thug at the Prison,” National Review (14 June 2004).
4 Anne Applebaum, “Does the Right Remember Abu Ghraib?” Washington Post (5 January 2005).
5 Lowry, op. cit.
6 T.R. Reid, “Case Against Soldier Is Presented: Two Ex-Detainees Describe Alleged Abuse at Prison in Iraq,” Washington Post (12 January 2005).
7 Lowry, op. cit.
8 Lowry, op. cit. Neil Lewis and Eric Schmitt, “Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush,” New York Times (8 June 2004).
9 Neil Lewis and Eric Schmitt, “Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn’t Bind Bush,” New York Times (8 June 2004).
10 “Action Memorandum from the General Counsel of the Department of Defense” (2 December 2002); see also “Memorandum for the General Counsel of the Department of Defense” (15 January 2003).
11 Rich Lowry, “Bring It On: the Real Gonzales Fight,” National Review (7 January 2005).
12 Andrew McCarthy, “Should We Make a Treaty with al Qaeda?” National Review (5 January 2005).
13 Lee A. Casey & David B. Rivkin Jr., “Gunning for Gonzales,” National Review (31 December 2004).
14 Co-authored with John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor.
15 Peter Brooks, “The Plain Meaning of Torture? Literary Deconstruction and the Bush Administration’s Legal Reasoning,” Slate (9 February 2005)
Frederick Douglas on freedom…
From Nonviolent Jesus, a blog by a member of the Catholic peace movement:
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass