The Adult In The Room

The interesting dynamic that is the relationship between Obama and Putin has a new twist, and it’s one we should welcome:

On Wednesday evening, when U.S. President Obama cancelled his upcoming visit to Moscow, the Russian reaction was perhaps most clear in the way that Vesti, the state’s main propaganda TV channel, conveyed it on the channel’s website. Buried about half way down on the page, underneath a story about Russian tourists in Turkey, Vesti announced: “The invitation for Obama stands.” Beside that was the somewhat diversionary headline: “Barack Obama will travel to St. Petersburg for the G20 summit.” The actual news — that Obama had decided not to meet with his Russian counterpart before, after or during the G20 summit in St. Petersburg next month — was clearly not something the official spin doctors wanted to advertise.

After a year spent honing their anti-American rhetoric — on issues ranging from the adoption of Russian children to missile defense in Europe and the civil war in Syria — the Kremlin message makers were suddenly eager to claim that President Vladimir Putin didn’t really mean for things to go this far. “Sure, Putin uses this rhetoric, but it’s not so much anti-American as anti-Euro-Atlantic,” says Evgeny Minchenko, a Kremlin-connected political strategist. “And keep in mind that he has tried to stop short of a head-on collision.”

So, shorter Kremlin: Holy fuck, he’s not that idiot Bushy BooshBoosh!

Indeed, he is not. And he’s not going to kowtow to the likes of a tin-plated moron who trades offices like a Southern governor.

Putin has played the US since at least 9-11, using our War on Terror as cover for all kinds of sins in Georgia and Chechnya, and let’s not forget the 130 Russians who died in a terorrist standoff in a Moscow theatre.

Yes, this is the guy Edward Snowden wants protecting him, but won’t give up secrets to. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Keep in mind that, as Bush pursued a unilateral American foreign policy with healthy servings of imperial aggression, without engagement or advisement from what could have been its strongest ally in fighting terrorists, Putin took both offense and advantage of Bush’s narrowed focus to become an active player in the Arab and Muslim world, particularly as the development of the Russian natural gas industry saw Russia become a major player in the energy field that previously had been dominated by the OPEC nations.

Putin began to develop ties to Venezuela, Syria, and North Korea, partly to further their own energy markets but also to assist them, it seems, in keeping America occupied. Our response?

To place a ballistic missile system in 2007 along the Polish border, nominally to protect against, errrr, Iranian and North Korean missiles.

This provocative move came a few short years after Bush removed us, again, unilaterally, from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaties in 2002.

While I cannot and will not defend Putin’s responses to any of these actions, in hindsight his motivation becomes clear: he saw a new Cold War starting up. I’m not sure that was an unjustified position to take.

So here comes Obama, tasked with both maintaining the façade of those missiles being vital to American security, while having to defuse Russian imperial ambition and coax (or bully) them on board with regards to Syria and Iran, and possibly North Korea.

Is ignoring a summit opportunity the way to go? Keep in mind that both Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will still be meeting with their Russian counterparts as part of the G-20 Summit and that both Obama and Putin will have opportunities to communicate, possibly even privately, while in St. Petersburg. So it ain’t over yet. The message is sent. Let’s see how Russia responds. As indicated by the Time Magazine article, the signs are hopeful.

When Is A Human A Factory?

When you’re a poor black woman who died 50 years ago:

Henrietta Lacks was only 31 when she died of cervical cancer in 1951 in a Baltimore hospital. Not long before her death, doctors removed some of her tumor cells. They later discovered that the cells could thrive in a lab, a feat no human cells had achieved before.

Soon the cells, called HeLa cells, were being shipped from Baltimore around the world. In the 62 years since — twice as long as Ms. Lacks’s own life — her cells have been the subject of more than 74,000 studies, many of which have yielded profound insights into cell biology, vaccines, in vitro fertilization and cancer.

But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, black and uneducated, never consented to her cells’ being studied. For 62 years, her family has been left out of the decision-making about that research. Now, over the past four months, the National Institutes of Health has come to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used.

[…]The agreement, which does not provide the family with the right to potential earnings from future research on Ms. Lacks’s genome, was prompted by two projects to sequence the genome of HeLa cells, the second of which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

What benefit does the Lacks family gain from this? Privacy. After all, sequencing the genome would reveal nearly the entire family’s genetic history, and expose her descendants to identification when they obtain genetic tests for whatever reason.

For instance, Lacks died of cervical cancer clearly contracted from the HP virus. Not that anyone should be ashamed of this, but it’s not something that should be publicized unless the heirs agree to.

But think about this: HeLa cells were vital to the development of the polio vaccine (admittedly, not exactly a profit enterprise originally), in vitro fertilization, cloning and mapping the human genome, among other important – and profitable – medical advances. I think the Lacks’ family is entitled to some reparations for that, don’t you?

WaPo Drifts Down the Amazon

Well, Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com, has purchased the Washington Post:

The Washington Post Co. agreed Monday to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations.

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to The Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will get a new, still undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without the newspaper.

The Post Co. will retain the building in Washington, as well as the online presence of subsidiary websites such as Slate.com and Foreign Policy magazine.

The newspaper business has had a rough time of it, adjusting to the online news presence of so many blogs, websites, and news outlets. Even the vaunted NY Times has had to eat crow and a billion dollars on what should have been a profitable endeavor, the purchase of the Boston Globe.

The Post made its own stupid decisions, most notably buying Newsweek magazine for a premium – which ironically was also sold over the weekend by IAC to IBT -- and a raft of television stations, none of which bolstered its flagging paper and only distracted resources and attention.

Bezos is generally acknowledged as a CEO’s CEO, one of the top two or three in the world. He also skews a little liberal (he’s a big supporter of Senator Patty Murray of Washington) which bodes well as a bulwark against the corporatocracy of Rupert Murdoch and other conservatives who own the “liberal” media. He’ll be keeping the paper privately owned, which means that he won’t be responsible to shareholders for quarterly earnings and may be able to build a media empire on this foundation.

If anyone can, it would be the guy who started the world’s largest bookstore.

Hm. Am I mistaken?

I thought guns made for a polite society?

 

Responsible gun ownership in action.

Exploitative Television

Normally, I look forward to this time of year. It’s Shark Week. If you don’t know or don’t care for it, Shark Week has some interesting programming about sharks, which is sadly interspersed with more and more exploitative programming.

They don’t just exploit sharks, they exploit you and me as well. Playing on our fears, reinforcing the worst about sharks, and drumming up crises where none existed before, all in the name of programming. They are the FOX News of popular science, and they suck about as badly.

Take last night, for instance. There was a “documentary” called “Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives,” which supposes that a extinct (by several million years) dinoshark called Megalodon still lives off the coast of South Africa. Done up in documentary style, along the lines of the equally egregious “Mermaids” on the sister network Animal Planet, Discovery essentially creates a fictional narrative and gussies it up with phony incidents and dubious experts in an attempt to attract viewers and…for what?

I watched a bit of it last night, and the more I watched, the angrier I got. Rather than talk about the megalodon as an abstract, rather than discuss its niche in the paleontological archives of history, or how it evolved into the modern day (and far less dangerous) shark, Discovery decided to go for grabbing you by the short hairs and twisting.

They ought to be ashamed. Discovery has long been a haven for science, featuring programming like “Mythbusters,” and yes, even Shark Week, which while it has long since become about scaring people out of the water again, and contributing to the wholesale slaughter of sharks, used to be about giving us knowledge and information about these mysterious and therefore terrifying creatures.

Sharks are beautiful animals and they have a place in the food chain that helps balance our ecology. Without sharks, our reefs would eventually die off. Sharks cull fish, keep population explosions in check, and otherwise help balance an environment that is rugged while beautiful. Nature is brutal, and the shark is about as perfectly descriptive of nature as any other apex predator, including man.

The difference is, we can do something about our brutalities. Sharks have a harder time. A lot of the behavior we interpret – anthropomorphise, to be frank – is just a shark’s way of exploring his environment. Sharks are highly intelligent creatures, with a brain-body mass comparable to humans, and that measure has long been a gauge of intelligence.

So why is Discovery Channel acting like an idiot?

If you are truly interested in sharks and their place in nature, watch SharkFest on NatGeo Wild. You won’t have to feel icky about yourself afterwards.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

It’s easy to get disheartened with the state of the nation today. We seem to be sliding back to a time when the country was superficially in a decent state, but had deep divisions and even deeper oppressions of the underclasses and minorities. Whether you were black or Hispanic, gay or a woman, you suffered enormously at the hands of the white male dominated culture.

And it seems that we’re headed back in that direction. I’m here to remind you, we ain’t.

If anything, we’re looking at the last gasps of a patriarchy that will devolve more and more quickly. But evolution, which is what we’re undergoing currently, is an incremental process.

Look to the youngest adults in our society: there lies your future. There is where we can invest, both the good and the bad, our hope.

Gay marriage didn’t come around because people of my generation changed our minds. It came about because young people started speaking up to their parents about their gay friends, and started interacting comfortably with gay men and lesbians.

Similarly, immigration reform isn’t coming about because a boatload of immigrants washed up on our shores and changed everyone’s minds. It’s coming because this is what we perceive as the right thing to do, as our kids accept their Hispanic and other immigrant friends.

Marijuana legalization is next: not because hippies woke up and realized the needle on this issue hadn’t moved in generations, but because kids these day see marijuana as a part of their experience. It’s illegal, but not hidden; it’s illegal in plain sight.

Gun control is not far behind, altho there will be more resistance here because the gun rights lobby is just fucking nuts. These folks have grown up with Columbine and Sandy Hook Elementary and Trayvon Martin and literally hundreds of other mass shootings in schools and malls and movie theatres. They get it: guns have no, zero, place in polite society. I stress “society,” because no one is suggesting that you can’t keep a gun at home for protection. But hell, even Tombstone, Arizona required you leave your gun with the sheriff when you were in town.

These are all small steps on the road to an enlightened society, and I may – probably will not – see even these steps all completed in my lifetime (and I plan to live a very long time) but they are coming, and beyond that lies a road of even greater riches of both the body and soul for all of us.

We are mere data bits in a stream of information that will overwhelm and flood ignorance. Take heart in this.

Why Poverty Happens to Good People

Lesson to learn -- it’s usually not their fault. Case in point:

Donald Cardin became a firefighter at age 20 in Central Falls, R.I., a town just north of Providence that filed for bankruptcy in 2011. He was making $60,000 a year as a fire chief before retiring at age 42 in 2007 to take care of his wife Lana, diagnosed with thymic carcinoma, a rare cancer with extremely low survival rates.

The couple relied on Cardin’s health insurance, which required no copay, to cover Lana’s $8,000-a-month treatment. Cardin worked a part-time contracting job to make up the difference between his $34,000-a-year pension and his former salary.

But that all changed in 2011 when Cardin, and his fellow firefighters and policemen, were called to a meeting at the local high school, where state-appointed receiver Robert Flanders warned them that the city would not have enough money to survive if pensions were not cut. Weeks later the city would file for bankruptcy.

“After a lifetime of service, with the stroke of a pen, Judge Flanders changes the rest of our lives and doesn’t care,” said Cardin.

So here’s a man who put in a lifetime’s work based partly on the promise that, in exchange for risking his life now, the city would help take care of him in his retirement. Nevermind that he retired at an age young enough to go find another job with a living wage and have a completely new career – which is not an easy proposition living in a small New England town, by the way, and that’s before considering his wife’s medical needs – that was the contract implied at hiring. Then, shortly after retiring, half his pension and half his medical insurance was taken away, leaving him making $17,000 AND paying $48,000 in medical bills, annually.

In a town of 19,000 people, it’s likely many if not most knew Chief Cardin, and other retirees who saw their lives brutalized by unfeeling bean counters, but you’ll notice in reading the article and doing further investigation, the subject of raising taxes never once comes up.

Until they emerged from bankruptcy in record time. They did this by shifting the bankruptcy burden off the town and onto the middle class pensioners, and increasing property taxes 25% over five years. Had it been discussed before the bankruptcy, perhaps those pensions could have been saved or at least, given a shave, not a beheading.

Manning Up

Attention, Edward Snowden: This is how you do it and maintain the higher ground.

FT. MEADE, Md. — Army Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted Tuesday of violating the Espionage Act and faces up to 136 years in prison, but his acquittal on the even more serious charge of aiding the enemy was hailed as a victory for the press and the Internet against the government's crackdown on leaks of classified information.

Manning's leak of more than 700,000 State Department cables, terrorism detainee assessments, combat logs and videos was the largest breach of classified secrets in U.S. history. Among the information was a now-infamous 2007 video of an Apache combat helicopter attack in Iraq in which U.S. soldiers fired on civilians and killed 12, including two Reuters journalists.

Manning becomes one of only two people ever convicted under the Espionage Act for making classified data available to the public; the other, Samuel L. Morison, a government security analyst convicted in 1985, was pardoned by President Clinton on his final day in office.

I would expect President Obama to do something similar on his way out the door, and Manning will not have to rely on the kindness of totalitarian dictators to eke out a survival existence, the constant threat of either retaliation by the US government or continuous monitoring by his “host” ever looming in the background.

The Manning verdict seems pretty fair: found innocent of aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States, but convicted of stealing and releasing classified information. We may agree with the spirit of what he did (or not), and we may welcome the exposure his information has gotten, but the law is the law. At least Manning, this frail looking Marine, stood up and took responsibility for what he did.

Which is why I’m persuaded to believe that Obama will end up pardoning him. It’s the right thing to do.

Your STFU List for Today

I’m tired, I’m pissed off, the Bag of Salted Rat Dicks I work for is trying to cause trouble for me, and I’m on deadline, so posting is a bit of an exercise is getting ahead of the curve.

Anyway, I realized this morning there is an entire list of people who need to shut up and go away. Dig a hole, climb in and sew it closed behind you. Get dropped in the middle of a tundra naked and alone. Close the door, and bolt it shut.

1) Anthony Weiner – JUST! SHUT! UP! You’re toast. Your candidacy is dead in the water. You’ve humiliated your wife again (altho she must have had plenty of warning which speaks really bad about her, as well.) I wanted to believe your comeback. Hell, I was ready to vote for you, along with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers, and elect you mayor. I wanted the reformation to be real. You may have had Bill Clinton officiate at your wedding, but you ain’t the Big Dog, the greatest President since FDR. You just ain’t.

2) In a similar vein, Eliot Spitzer – Dude, I will vote for you, but you have to get out of commenting on the mayor’s race unless you plan to switch races. By your own admission, you aren’t a saint and you made mistakes. If you expect us to forgive and forget, you have to lead by example.

3) Sarah Palin – Go away. Your fifteen minutes were over five years ago, except in your own slow spiraling descent into the black hole of obscurity that is your fate (that obeys the laws of physics, by the way: time does slow down near a black hole.) And you lied. The McCain campaign let you shoot your mouth off enough times that you shot McCain in the foot.

4) Mitt Rom…Romney? RomBot? Romalomadingdong? Whatever… -- OK, so you know how there’s videotape of you quoting you at length? Go lend a shoulder to your would-be queen wife, Ann. She’s been crying since last November.

5) Brooke Goldstein – Never heard of her before? Don’t worry, neither have I. Neither has anyone else. And with any luck, you don’t need to worry about this wanna-be Ann Coulter. She needs to dye her hair blonde and grow a set first.

6) Maureen Dowd – Huma Abedin is too, errr, mewling, to leave Weiner? Really? HILLARY’S Chief of Staff?

7) Sydney Leathers – Girlfriend, the NY Post is NOT your friend. Your time is up, you lost the story a week ago and with a body like this, you won’t even get the inevitable Playboy offer. Sorry, hon. You’re done.

8) George Will – Because African American single moms lent money to Detroit at usurious rates, and are sitting at home on the couch, clipping bond coupons, I bet. ARGH! SHUT UP!

9) Rand Paul – Not in my town, Brillo-top.

Angels Wanna Wear My Red Shoes

Well, well, well…this is a refreshing change of heart:

ABOARD THE PAPAL AIRCRAFT — Pope Francis reached out to gays on Monday, saying he wouldn’t judge priests for their sexual orientation in a remarkably open and wide-ranging news conference as he returned from his first foreign trip.

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis asked.

What? No “Burn in Hell!”? No “God hates fags!”?

Whatever is religion coming to?

God, is what.

Yes, there are plenty of things from yesterday’s Papal press conference(!) that we can criticize, such as the “investigation” into a monsignor on his staff on pedophilia charges, but this position, seemingly unqualified and unconditional, leaps off the page.

People of all colors, creeds and orientations struggle to find meaning in life. Even atheists have been known to try and answer what is essentially a spiritual dilemma: What’s the point?

For me, for this Christian, the Pope strikes the right tone about religion. It’s a voyage of self-discovery. It’s about finding a place for one’s higher power in one’s life, because let’s face facts, there are times you need one, and wish you had one. Maybe it doesn’t answer your questions or solve your problems, but a god or goddess or enlightened plane or what have you help you get ready to get through and then past a crisis.

Many of my friends, scientists and realists, are atheist (or at least agnostic) and I respect them for that, but a lack of a system of faith is, well, still a system of faith, since none of us can ever really know the answer to the ultimate questions we all have.

Even Francis has tacitly endorsed atheism. It’s not about holding a book or hands folded in prayer, it’s about how we all behave towards one another.

On that point, I believe we can all find common ground.

Nobody Asked Me, But...



1) They say history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce. The Weiner scandal has careered well past this point to reach all the way around to tragedy again.

2) Also, the young lady in question is going to milk this for all she’s worth, it seems. James Carville had it right: if you drag a dollar through a trailer park, you can get a lot of nibbles. Perhaps she and Edward Snowden can start dating.

3) As predicted immediately after the verdict was rendered, we’re starting to hear buyers’ remorse from the Zimmerman jurors.

4) And yet, Trayvon Martin’s parents continue to act with dignity and grace.

5)  All I can say is, thank God Michael Bloomberg is leaving, so we don’t have to listen to anymore crap like this. Your banker friends, the ones who made you fabulously wealthy, deserve every ounce of contempt we can muster and much much more. If it was up to me, there’d be a hot tar and feather concession at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets.

6) The driver of that train in Spain has been charged. The train was going twice the maximum rate of speed for that track.

7) This seems like a dumb publicity stunt, but you know what? Let Australia elect him, then see what happens.

8) The reason airplanes land butt-first.

9) Remember pepper spray cop? He’s appealing Worker’s Comp for emotional damage caused by, um, pepper spraying college kids.

10) BAN FOURTH TRIMESTER ABORTIONS! SIGN THE PETITION NOW!

Bad News/Good News

Altho it’s hard to find good news in this:

In a 205-217 vote, lawmakers rejected an effort to restrict the National Security Agency's (NSA) ability to collect electronic information.

The NSA's chief had lobbied strongly against the proposed measure.

The vote saw an unusual coalition of conservatives and liberal Democrats join forces against the programme.

I’m going to try.

Yes, the measure was defeated, but look at that vote total: if only six votes had swung the other way, this bill passes – and probably dies a slow painful death in the Senate. But for once, we could have been proud of the House.

Second, a coalition of ideologues from both wings of the nation – liberal and conservative – banded together. We finally found something to agree upon.

Given Congress’s abysmal ratings – HIV probably polls higher – the fact the House could get anything done is to be commended, which is a little like clapping for your tyke when he hits the toilet while sitting down.

But even in this good news lies a dark, nasty secret: this bill, supposedly advanced by a “renegade” conservative Republican…and really, how conservative do you have to be for Boehner to turn his back on you?...had some surprisingly establishment assistance:

Boehner opposes the NSA amendment. Leadership doesn’t care much for Justin Amash. But they were listening to complaints from a broad swath of Republicans who wanted to vote against the spying program, exposed by former security contractor Edward Snowden.

And even after GOP leadership privately determined Amash’s threats were likely empty — that he didn’t have the votes to keep the Defense appropriations bill from coming to the floor — top aides to Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) staff spent the week holding Amash’s hand, helping him turn an unworkable amendment into language that would effectively quash one of the spy agency’s most effective tools.

“Amash was out there acting like he was fighting against the leadership trying to shut us down,” one Republican involved said. “The reality is [leadership was] twisting ourselves in knots for a week trying to craft language that was germane and got at the issue.”

Oh. So it wasn’t that he was too radical for them, he was too big an iliterate douchebag nutcase. Got it now.

Darrell Issa Moron

Darrell Issa has a long-standing reputation as a self-indulgent obsessive criminal creep. This story might take the cake:

But Rep. Darrell Issa, the California Republican leading the House effort to save the postal service, wants more. He has made doing away with doorstep delivery a key part of his bill, which would require everyone to get mail at a curbside box or from a cluster box.

"A balanced approach to saving the Postal Service means allowing USPS to adapt to America's changing use of mail," said Issa, who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Moving away from door-to-door delivery saves a lot of money. Right now, 35 million residences and businesses get mail delivered to their doorstep.

It costs $353 per stop for a delivery in most American cities, taking into account such things as salaries and cost of transport. By contrast, curbside mail box delivery costs $224, while cluster boxes cost $160, according to a report from the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General.

Issa has been called a “pathological liar”, so it will come as no surprise when he goes all Nathan Thurm on this story as the backlash builds when he’s reminded that the USPS is the only government agency – hell, the only entity of any kind in the history of the nation – which has to fully fund in cash its pension obligations, and if we allowed them to do what every other frikkin’ entity uses, the USPS would be profitable: "I know that! You don't think I know that?"

He’d rather see the American people inconvenienced and their mail put in jeopardy: stolen checks, lost bills, important documents misplaced, than pony up and fix the real problem for the average American’s benefit. Issa moron. Nuff said.

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

Aren’t they supposed to prevent burns?

Third World Country?

Try savage jungle

First World Problems

Spoiled wine, from Hurricane Sandy

 

Look, when even the judge gets pissed off at you, you probably ought to just eat your losses:

Even the federal judge hearing the case scolded lawyers for the wine owners for their level of urgency. “There were thousands of victims of Hurricane Sandy,” he said, “most of which suffered a great deal more than your clients have.”

 

One Step Closer to Pitchforks and Torches

A curious little item in Time Magazine this issue:

If you are in any doubt about how little has changed on Wall Street since 2008, check out yesterday’s front page New York Times story about how banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley profited wildly by hoarding and slowing the supply of various commodity metals like aluminum, driving up prices on the global market in the process. It was a truly ingenious profit-making scheme, involving sophisticated arbitrage of complex global regulations, all of which resulted in lots of money for banks, and higher prices for companies and consumers.

This story put me in mind once again of the fact that many of the best minds on Wall Street still spend the majority of their time figuring out new and smarter ways to game the system, rather than how to grease the wheels of the real economy. Just look at the record profits posted by a number of the world’s largest banks last week. The six largest are on track to post a 20% earnings increase in the second quarter of this year. But the vast majority of that money came not from lending, but from trading. While the money spigots to the small and new businesses that create most of the jobs in this country are still tight — like last year, small business lending was down again this year, according to the Small Business Administration — trading profits are way up.

Clearly, finance is still disconnected from the real economy, which is one reason that the regulation battle rages on. A new proposal issued jointly a few days back by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency would require some of the country’s largest banks to hold double the amount of reserve capital that they currently do. This has prompted all the usual complaints from the industry about too much regulation. Former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, now the head of bank advocacy group the Financial Services Roundtable, said the new rules would make “it harder for banks to lend and keep the economic recovery going.”

Think about that anecdote again: a cartel of banksters collude (possibly conspire) to artificially jack up commodity prices, not on gold or diamonds, but on everyday items like aluminum, thus gouging an enormous profit from society.

OK, some basic economic theory here first: the theory is that market competition and free enterprise will expose inefficiencies in prices, thus creating opportunities for a company to step in and profit.

Theoretically, this occurs when a competitor steps in and, seeing how he can work more efficiently, sells his product for a lower price or with better features of some sort. That’s the basis of capitalism, as Adam Smith envisioned it. Smith must be rolling in his grave to think that industries are no longer run by entrepreneurs but by financiers, people who have zero concept of production, distribution or service.

They only know profit. The sole measure of their value to society is in a dollar figure. If anyone wonders whether that viewpoint erodes a society, one has only to look around oneself: clearly, it does.

Business schools pay lip service to reversing this trend by including courses on ethics and management strategies that don’t involve raping a community or its resources, but let’s be honest: the world is run by vulgarians, who mock ethical people.

Until, of course, they run afoul of the law as they inevitably do. Unfortunately, they’ve left a whole cadre of apostles behind who are more than happy to pick up the slack, buy off more of the government and media, and measure their lives in money.

New regulations, and a return of Glass-Steagal, will help, to be sure, and I fully support those, but here’s the thing: corporations now have enough money and enough entrenched power that they can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get around those legally. We have to find a way to defuse the mindset that they should. We can put up obstacles, but at the end of the day, persuading them not to try is our best inoculation against future economy catastrophies.

And make no mistake: we have many many more in the near future.

Ahhhh, the Republicans Must Be Back In Town!

Giant corpse smell pervades DC

Royal Baby

I’ll be very disappointed if a) they don’t name it Zaphod or Biggus Dickus or b) it’s not a squid.

Race to the Bottom

Wow. Such a busy news day. So many things I could write about: a royal baby, earthquakes in China, the name “Cheney” back in the news…but I want to focus on the powerful words of our President from Friday:

“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” Obama said, during extensive and deeply personal remarks that lasted for 18 minutes. “And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that — that doesn’t go away.”

Obama continued: “And I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it’s inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear.”

I wrote something similar to put the murder of Martin into a context even white people could understand, but perhaps this columnist can say it better than I can:

Trayvon Martin, the president said, could have been him 35 years ago. That would have been Barack Obama at age 17, then known as Barry and living in Honolulu. He had a bushy Afro. Hoodies were not in style then, or often needed in balmy Hawaii. His customary hangout outfit was flip-flops, called “slippers” on the island, shell bracelet, OP shorts and a tee.

Imagine if Barry Obama had been shot and killed, unarmed, during a confrontation with a self-deputized neighborhood watch enforcer, perhaps in some exclusive development on the far side of Diamond Head after leaving home to get shave ice. The news reports would have painted a complicated picture of the young victim, a variation on how Martin was portrayed decades later in Florida:

Lives with his grandparents; father not around, mother somewhere overseas. Pretty good student, sometimes distracted. Likes to play pickup hoops and smoke pot. Hangs out with buddies who call themselves the Choom Gang. Depending on who is providing the physical description, he could seem unprepossessing or intimidating, easygoing or brooding. And black.

On the inside, the young Obama had already begun a long search for identity — and by extension a study of the meaning and context of race. His mother and maternal grandparents were white. He was not. He lived in one culture, and the skin color passed along to him by his absent father placed him inalterably in another, in the eyes of others. How and why did race define him, limit him, grace him, frustrate him, alienate him, propel him and connect him to the world?

The President’s words had much impact: even a former opponent of his, Sen. John McCain, lauded the president and suggested that, indeed, perhaps Stand Your Ground is bad law and ought to be discarded. It’s a step. A small step.

Sadly, the reaction of other reactionaries is neither as measured or as sane.

The right wing is missing the forest for the trees: It’s not about the verdict per se. That’s defensible as the law is a bad law, and the jury made a bad decision, but the legal one. I’ve argued in the past that they could have, and perhaps should have, looked past the law, past the immediate crime, to the context and I still believe that is what might have transpired in a fairer state.

But the football spiking of the right wing, particularly whites, has been astounding. The one thing we can be sure of is it will motivate blacks and Latinos and women across the nation to vote next year, and vote the fascists out.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) Detroit filed bankruptcy yesterday. Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve visited that city, if you can call it that. No, this isn’t going to be a diatribe about the people who live there or who left there…well, maybe a little of the latter. It’s going to be a diatribe about a city that forced itself to be the car capital of the world.
It’s less of a city than a series of island-towns connected by enormous highways and broad boulevards. There’s downtown, right on the waterfront, with its monorail and arenas and hotels made famous in the movie Robocop.

If you want to get anywhere, say the industrial section of town (which is why I was visiting, doing an investigation), you have to get on a freeway and drive. And as you drive, you get a sense of place: inner cities, burned out and abandoned, littered along the highway like so many dumps, and then these grand and glorious suburbs, like Grosse Pointe. Beautiful little towns that suck the life out of the city proper.

So long as GM and Ford and Chrysler stayed local, in Dearborn and especially River Rouge, there was work to be had (yes, I know, Rouge is still there which may be the only thing that kept this from happening earlier.) And those plants didn’t just employ their own, they were responsible for lots of businesses around the city, which benefitted from the good union wages paid to workers, and in turn employed huge numbers of people.

The shame of Detroit is not mayors like Kwame Kilpatrick. The shame of Detroit is that folks like Roger Smith couldn’t give a damn about Detroit. Or America.

2) Stay classy, Batboy. Perhaps some “philanthropist” would be kind enough to start buying guns for the minorities in Florida. That’s what got gun control passed in the first place. Watch the NRA suddenly demand it.

3) Speaking of Florida, the DoJ has asked that the evidence in the Trayvon Martin case, including Zimmerman’s gun, be held while they investigate a civil rights case.

4) It was 84 degrees when I woke up at 4AM this morning. I think I moved to Nicaragua.

5) Speaking of New York, these may be the coolest photo-art I’ve ever seen.

6) As goes China, so goes the US economy. This may be a smart move for us.

7) Monkeys remember.

8) Do you smell a sex scandal? I smell a sex scandal.

9) Bankstahs may still do time.

10) John Hinckley did it better.

Hm. Buyer's Remorse?

An interesting interview on Anderson Cooper’s show last night with one of the jurors on the George Zimmerman panel:

The woman, known as Juror B37, told CNN's Anderson Cooper that when the jury began deliberations Friday, they took an initial vote. Three jurors -- including B37 -- were in favor of acquittal, two supported manslaughter and one backed second-degree murder. She said the jury started going through all the evidence, listening to tapes multiple times.

"That's why it took us so long," said B37, who said she planned to write a book about the trial but later had a change of heart.

Said “change of heart” was forced upon her, by the way as first her publisher, then her agent, dropped her like a shit-covered rock.

People disgust me, but I digress…or maybe not a digression. Let’s look further into the AC360 interview.

When they started looking at the law, the person who initially wanted second-degree murder changed her vote to manslaughter, the juror said. Then they asked for clarification from the judge and went over it again and again. B37 said some jurors wanted to find Zimmerman guilty of something, but there was just no place to go based on the law

Now, all that may be true, but it seems to me that if you stood your ground – no pun intended – the judge would accept the verdict, and appealing that verdict would be very hard for the defense. It’s easy to appeal errors in the trial, errors of procedure, but if a jury sifts through the evidence and determines that, despite the law, a crime was committed, then there’s nothing to be done about it.

Better legal minds than mine (e.g. actual lawyers…I’ve only played them on the TeeVee) have told me that the law gives this jury cover, and it’s true, it does.

Still, it wouldn’t be the first time a jury has broken ranks with the law to do the right thing. And that’s something this woman and the other two will have to spend the rest of their lives living with: a young man died, and they had the chance to punish the killer, but let him walk free.

Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

 

The Tragedy of the All-Too Common

As the anger builds over the verdict in the George Zimmerman case, one thing leaps off the page to this actor and public speaker: the prosecution.

Before I get to my thoughts on that, let me just say that it’s fortunate, I think, that the protests and demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful, with scattered violence. It makes it hard for the right wing to paste “savages” label over this and forces them to move mountains to do so.

Moving on…

The facts supported one slam-dunk verdict: manslaughter. A case could be argued for murder in that Zimmerman saw Martin, started stalking him, aggravated an assault then in a panic shot Martin dead, meaning that he brought this on himself with at least a felonious assault. Killing someone in the commission of a crime is by definition in most states murder, and I’m sure Florida has had enough fatalities during bank robberies and such that this statute exists there, too.

That’s a hard case to make when the victim can’t speak for himself, can’t give his side of the story and there’s precious little evidence – either forensic or eyewitness – that conclusively determines this is what happened.

Which brings me to my point.

The prosecution attempted to try this case strictly on facts, but they missed a golden opportunity to get the jurors’ sympathy for Martin, leaving Zimmerman and the families to be the only emotional totems in the entire courtroom.

His opening statement focused on the actions of Zimmerman, which it should, but he presented it from an objective, third party standpoint, and threw in a few obscenities to boot. On a jury of six southern women, this was a mistake. He needed to make an emotional connection with them, make them feel for Martin. Here’s what I would have said:

“Ladies of the jury, I want you to put yourself on the streets of Sanford that rainy, dark night. You’re walking home from the store, carrying a few groceries. Maybe you’re chatting with a friend on the phone, minding your own business, when you notice that creeping up behind you is a car you don’t recognize. It’s moving slowly. It makes no effort to pass you. If anything, it seems to be following you. You walk a little faster. Maybe you mention to your friend on the phone that there’s this car creeping behind you. You duck down a side yard, hoping to get away.”

You walk on a little further and realize now there’s a man walking behind you, following you. You don’t know who he is, but you recognize him as the driver of the car. You don’t know what he wants, but you’re scared, terrified. It’s a cold night and windows are closed, no one else is out on the street. You shout at him, more to get him to leave you alone than to find out what he wants. He yells back. Words are exchanged and you panic out of sheer terror, trying to force him to stop following you.”

“We’ve all been in situations like this. We’ve all been stalked, hunted, by someone who means to do us harm, no matter how nice we might be. It’s frightening.”

Imagine now, six women jurors. They’ve been to pools and beaches, walked past construction sites. Maybe they’ve had *that guy* as a boyfriend, the one who follows them after they break up, demanding answers. It made them angry. It was terror of the most personal and destructive kind.

And you’ve just won your verdict by being honest about Trayvon Martin.

A Bitter Pill

I fell asleep last night just as the jury in the George Zimmerman trial reached a verdict. I knew it would take another hour or so for all parties to gather and to announce the actual verdict, and I was pretty tired already. I'm glad I did. As it was, I only read about it this morning when I looked at my phone to see what time it was around 4 AM, and got so angry that I couldn't fall back to sleep.

A few thoughts:

1) Finding someone guilty on a charge of manslaughter entails two conditions: first, someone has to be dead and second, that death has to occur because of the deliberate actions of the accused. Unless you buy the ludicrous self-defense charge, that's clearly what happened here.

2) To buy the ludicrous self-defense charge means willfully ignoring the entire incident up to the point where the struggle between two men begins. It also means that the prosecution failed miserably to put the jurors in the scenario. A young boy is walking home, minding his own business, when a creep starts stalking him, first in his car, then on foot. He's terrified, not knowing who or what this is about. As he is still just a teen, he acts first and questions his actions later (sadly, he never gets that chance.) He turns and confronts his assailant, and demands to know what his problem is. Things escalate.

3) The trouble with the jury system is jurors. When your jury pool is the state of Florida, you are going to be hard pressed to find even six modestly intelligent people. That they asked to have the charge of manslaughter read back to them and then didn't respond to an admittedly stupid request of the judge, that told me the prosecution was in trouble.

4) My suspicion is the jury, unable to find sufficient cause to convict on murder (I might give them this. It's hard to know for sure that Zimmerman set out to kill this particular kid.) and completely confused about what constitutes manslaughter, threw up their hands because they wanted the trial over and to go home.

5) Zimmerman is far from off the hook. For one thing, the parents have recourse to a civil suit -- you may recall this was the trial that actually did find O. J. Simpson guilty -- which only needs a preponderance of evidence that Zimmerman caused the death of Trayvon Martin. For another, the Federal government could pursue a hate crimes case against Zimmerman, although that's a little unlikely given the paucity of evidence, some garbled phone transcripts.

6) Speaking of OJ, it's a bit ironic that just about twenty years after that verdict shocked America, here comes the Zimmerman verdict. I think the parallels will not end there. You may recall that OJ never really "got away with it," and although he gained his freedom, it didn't last. He's currently serving a prison sentence for another crime he committed and was convicted of and the judge in that case was none too kind in sentencing. Given the Zimmerman family propensity for criminal behavior, this is probably not the last time we'll see him in court. He'll try to get a book deal out of this, and in a worst case scenario, a movie, but in the end, he'll crash harder believing he got away with murder.

So a piece of advice, George: Not guilty is not the same thing as innocent. You killed a boy. You're going to have to square yourself with that.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) The trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin wraps up today, and the case goes to the jury. Many pundits believe that Zimmerman will be found not guilty and indeed, the prosecutors asked the judge (who said yes) to allow the jury to consider lesser charges, which indicates they think the case may not be as solid as charged. However, the summation given by the prosecutors yesterday – including a point made about Zimmerman being terrified of Martin, yet knowing he had a gun in his pocket, so he could equalize any confrontation -- was very forceful and punched holes in the story Zimmerman's defense team spun out. I think this is a 70-30 case with a guilty verdict rendered pretty quickly once a few hesitant jurors are persuaded.

Under any circumstance, I think Zimmerman's civil case will be the more damaging to him.

2) ♪ It's raining….glass?

3) If I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, it looks like Duchess Kate's baby will be born over the weekend.

4) The very Catholic Ireland has officially become more sophisticated than Texas.

5) If you were worried about being bored the next sixteen months, I have good news for you: Sarah Palin is running for Senate from Alaska. Assuming she lasts that long. Comedy gold, I tell you.

6) Well, I mean, you know….Mussolini made the trains run on time, too…

7) Frackquake!

8) Don't let the Potomac hit ya where the good lord split ya!

9) Terrorists, global warming, black teens with hoodies, squirrels. What are things Floridians are terrified by? I'll take paranoia for $1,000, Alex.

10) Finally, people putting solar panels on their roofs in Arizona may end up paying more for power supplied by the power company. This is not a typo.

Water, Water, Everywhere

And not a drop to drink. But you may drown:

Researchers from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, funded by ice2sea, a European Union project, tackled the question of how both processes will evolve and interact in the future.

This was done with a computer model, which projects the future ice sheet evolution with high accuracy using the latest available techniques and input data.

 They devised a method to generalize projections made in earlier research which concerned just four of Greenland's outlet glaciers. By doing so they could apply the earlier findings to all calving glaciers around the Greenland ice sheet.

Their results indicate a total sea-level contribution from the Greenland ice sheet for an average warming scenario after 100 and 200 years of 7 and 21 cm, respectively.

Well, this all seems…horrible. I mean, 21 cm doesn’t sound like much, not even a foot, but…

So why does it matter what happens to the ice sheets? Well, estimates from the National Snow and Ice Data centre (NSIDC) suggest that total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would, between them, release enough fresh water to increase global sea level by approximately 66m, of which Greenland’s contribution would be around 6m (other estimates vary).

Since it seems that the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet is proceeding at a pace that outstrips earlier projections, it’s safe to assume scientists here are being more hopeful than helpful. Now, look at those numbers again in that second quote. 6m is roughly 20 feet, so 66m is…about the height of a 20 story building.

I think there might be a problem, and it might be worse than even that:

A massive iceberg, larger than the city of Chicago, broke off of Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier on Monday (July 8), and is now floating freely in the Amundsen Sea, according to a team of German scientists.

The newborn iceberg measures about 278 square miles (720 square kilometers), and was seen by TerraSAR-X, an earth-observing satellite operated by the German Space Agency (DLR). Scientists with NASA's Operation IceBridgefirst discovered a giant crack in the Pine Island Glacier in October 2011, as they were flying over and surveying the sprawling ice sheet.

Keep in mind, it’s the coldest part of the year down there. This calved because of warmer sea water, driven by winds from the north, slid into the cracks and split the berg off. It would have happened eventually, but more likely when it was Antarctic summer.

Leading Indicators

I’m not sure what all this means, but certain events happened over the weekend that could be foreshadows of things to come:

1) Dozens Reported Killed In Egypt – Clashes between pro-Muslim Brotherhood protestors, angered at the ouster of President Mohamed  Morsi, and pro-democracy protestors, supported by the Egyptian military, clashed several times over the past few days. The Obama administration has wisely stayed above the fray, opting to wait and see before picking the wrong side to back.

As Egypt was one of the first of the Arab Spring protests to rise up a few years back, this is indeed troubling, particularly as Egypt (specifically its military) has been a long—standing ally to us in the region.

2) 5 Dead, 40 Missing After Train Explosion – Yes, the XL pipeline will be safe, huh? In case you missed it, a freight train derailed near a town in eastern Quebec province in Canada, leveling a small town. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper described it as a “war zone”.

3) Tales of Flying Cinnamon Buns, iPods, and Gaping Exit Holes – How does a Boeing 777 with presumably enough fuel to make the flight and then some, manage to crash flying at less than the minimum speed a jet that size should be descending at?

Given Boeing’s problems with its Dreamliner (the 787) are passengers now beta testing airplanes? Or pilots?

We’re sort of seeing a period of troubling instability across the globe and spanning economics and infrastructure as well as politics. Given the turmoil in the Middle East, including Turkey, and now in South America, it will be hard for anyone to focus on things like ensuring our bridges stay up and the trains and planes run on time safely.

Well, maybe our rescue will come from off-planet…