John Mortell’s blog

A really good History Channel documentary on the history of Marijuana and how racism, immigration issues, control of non-whites and attempts to ban alcohol led to marijuana becoming illegal:
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At least that’s the thrust of this article and while I doubt it’s fully accurate, if even half the figures and stories it says of what’s happening are true, then America will soon be running out of cash. Some of the more fascinating tidbits include:

The average federal salary (including benefits) is set to grow from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 in 2010, CBS reported. But the real action isn’t in what government employees are being paid today; it’s in what they’re being promised for tomorrow. Public pensions have swollen to unrecognizable proportions during the last decade. In June 2005, BusinessWeek reported that “more than 14 million public servants and 6 million retirees are owed $2.37 trillion by more than 2,000 different states, cities and agencies,” numbers that have risen since then. State and local pension payouts, the magazine found, had increased 50 percent in just five years.

These huge pension increases have eaten away at public finances, most spectacularly in California, where a bipartisan bill that passed virtually without debate unleashed the odious “3 percent at 50” retirement plan in 1999. Under this plan, at age 50 many categories of public employees are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay multiplied by the number of years they’ve worked. So if a police officer starts working at age 20, he can retire at 50 with 90 percent of his final salary until he dies, and then his spouse receives that money for the rest of her life. Even during the economic crisis, “3 percent at 50” and the forces behind it have only become more entrenched.

If I hadn’t read this article the same day as this Economist piece, I’d probably have dismissed it as a certain amount of ‘scare mongering’ but it has made me wonder, if the United States (which traditionally in theory, if not in practice, has been unfavourable to government expansion) has this much of a deficit problem, what’s it like in Europe?

Interesting (if biased) post on the current conservative movement placing the ‘birthers’ and their ilk in some historical context:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”

.. Is the fascinating headline from this foreign policy article. As you can probably guess from my other articles on the topic, I’m quite interested in the idea that military power (at least in terms of the ‘West’) can/is becoming more based on drones/remote power that is both cheaper and less intensive with regards to manpower. For example the article notes that

According to the Government Accountability Office, $24.5 million will purchase a set of four MQ-9 Reaper hunter-killer drones plus a ground station and satellite relay (while) .. The latest guess of the price for a single F-35 fighter-bomber is $100 million.

When the same article notes that one man can run four drones at the same time, this differential in manpower and price becomes obvious. Though as in pointed out in the other article I linked to, what such a difference in risk to your own soldiers means in terms of Western nations willingness to go to war is anybody’s guess.

Anyway, the foreign policy article has some interesting notes about Afghanistan, including the suggestion that current military planners are looking at the wrong lessons from history and should instead be looking at periods of ‘peace’ (relatively) in Afghanistan, rather than the British / Russian invasions…. All worth a look.

Just one of the things that U.S soldiers have thought Afghan children to say in this Liveleak video:

On one hand, its hard not to appreciate the frustration of (mostly) younger men stuck in the position these guys are in, but somehow, I doubt the U.S media handlers for the army appreciates this sort of thing….

Given Sarah Palin’s recent ‘I’m retiring… or am I?‘ presence in the news, I posted a twitter comment that covered my feelings in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if also honest manner. To quote:

Sarah Palin is gone! Woot! Tho now I’m worried that she’ll come back as a zombie politician…

Following this, I was asked on my facebook later why it is that I ‘hated’ the woman, with the same person also saying that he could not understand why so many people had such vehement hatred for her. But here’s the thing. I don’t hate Sarah Palin. I have problems with her politics as a general rule, and and as I said when she first appeared on the scene , I don’t believe that she’s the ‘maverick’ or ‘political genius’ that’s she’s been made out to be, but I will admit I find her commitment to her family and her pro-life beliefs to be an admirable characteristic at least.

Saying all of that though, brings me to the problem I have with her. Which isn’t really a problem with her, but rather with the narrative that exists around her.

(Full disclosure, I’m writing this post largely off my experience of two particular people I know who are strong Republican/Palin supporters, but I’m also trying to use my experience of what Republican followers seem to say anyway)

In this narrative, Sarah Palin is an honest, knowledgeable, hard-working politician who would have been a perfect Vice-President (and later in the narrative great future President) who, despite having as much, if not more ‘experience’ than Barack Obama, was not seen as a credible candidate with the reasons for this being either
A) That she was unfairly beaten down by the ‘Liberal (sneer when you say it for full effect) Media’
B) That she wasn’t given a fair shake because ‘Barack’s Black’ and he wasn’t questioned on things by a biased media/political class
C) Both of the above
D) She’s a woman
Etc.

And the thing is, this narrative continues. What bugs me about this, is that it’s not based on any objective facts. For example, was Palin given a hard time with regards to her CV? Yes. But in fairness, when the best Fox could come up with for her foreign policy skills was ‘she can see Russia from Alaska’ (see bottom of the linked post), what do you expect? Had John McCain even tried to run a campaign of two halves saying: ‘I’ll handle the International ‘stuff’, the VP is here for domestic’, the effect still would have been the same, as really the main thing Palin had was that she was doing an ‘ok’ job as a first term Governor. However, that is not a ringing endorsement for such a major job as Vice-President especially given that Palin really had no major strength’s as a domestic politician either.

Now, did Barack Obama have a CV that was as (if not even more) empty? Yes. Probably. But, and it’s a pretty big ‘but’, he managed to avoid gaffs like the Couric Interview and for the most part seemed to have the presence and knowledge that would be required for a national leader. I mean compare these:


I mean, interviews where Palin came across looking like she had no idea what she was talking about, where she can’t answer questions that really should be answerable by somebody running for the second most powerful job in the world do not exactly inspire confidence. And her attempts didn’t inspire confidence when you look at the results of the U.S election.

Now what about the points A, B and C? Firstly the ‘liberal media’ point.. This is a point I have never understood. Essentially it seems to be that any media that makes the case for liberal politics, or questions the Republican ‘view’ or even just asks questions is ‘liberal’. To a large extent it seems to be simply part of the persecution complex of many Republican politicians. I mean, look at this quote from the BBC article on Palin’s resignation:

At the same time, she said the response in the media to her surprise announcement was “most predictable” and “detached from the live of ordinary Americans”.
“How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country,” Mrs Palin wrote.

“Detached from the live (sic) of ordinary Americans”? What does that even mean? That ALL of the American news coverage of her has ‘attacked’ her on some level? Surely asking why a person resigns before the end of her term is a legitimate question?

B – the ‘Barack got an easy time of things because he’s a Black Man’ line. I’ve seen (otherwise sensible) people seriously use this argument which generally seems to run something to the effect of ‘Liberal guilt meant people elected an incompetent Black Man rather than a competent White Woman/Barack wasn’t asked ‘the hard questions because he’s black/etc.

I think I’ve covered this line pretty well in the rest of the post – but I will ask, if Barack was given such a ‘free ride’ by the ‘Liberal Media’ why couldn’t all the people who voted Republican the previous eight years see through the ‘Liberal bias’ and see how ‘useless’ he was? If he was given such a ‘free ride’, why wasn’t Hilary Clinton able to poke holes in his ‘obvious’ weaknesses?

And what about the coverage of the Jeremiah Wright affair? Essentially, Barack Obama was able to convince people that he not only knew what he was talking about, but that he was a good man capable of leading the United States. These arguments for Palin often seem to end up taking a very ‘anti-democratic’ element as the eventual stance of her supporters is that ‘the people’ ‘didn’t know what they were doing’.

The final, and biggest problem I have with Sarah Palin though, is this. She never pretended to even represent ‘all Americans’, but only those whose world-view was similarly narrow, religious and conservative. Though she eventually apologised for the comments, it is hard to not believe that they reflected pretty accurately the reality of how she viewed a lot of her fellow countrymen (and women).

Personally, I think that people that complain about how Palin was ‘treated’ miss the point. To me, their bitterness over the fact that Barack Obama ran a better campaign, and won a fair election has blinded them to many of Palin’s flaws. A woman who tries to claim that people who bomb abortion clinics AREN’T terrorists, who nearly seems willing to claim that anybody who isn’t a Republican isn’t an American, who runs a campaign that is designed to appeal to a very specific section of the population and who claims that everything negative said about her is down to media bias is NOT a national politician. Rather she is a sectional politician with national coverage.

Do I hate Sarah Palin? No. But I have find it hard to take seriously a woman who still seems to be claiming to have national ambitions, despite seeming to have no interest in educating herself as to international politics. A woman who has resigned from a high-profile (in political terms) Governorship before her term is finished and for no apparent reason. A woman who believes that media coverage that asks questions is ‘biased’ and regards not believing what Republicans tell you as ‘being anti-American’. I don’t believe asking these questions or saying these things are unreasonable, or show ‘hatred’ for the woman.

Unless somebody can tell me why I’m wrong?

Horrific idea here coming out of a Seymour Hersh talk to the American Civil Liberties Union which suggests that as a means of torturing female combatants who were arrested with children, the children were sexually assualted as a means of putting their parents under pressure.

The video of the talk can be found here with the important parts coming in at an 1hour 30 with a Guardian article here mentioning rape as an ‘interrogation tool’.

I have always been a bit suspicious of the idea that it is a good thing to use profiling as a means of catching criminals and/or terrorists and I was pleased to see this article that suggests that it actually is not the most accurate means of catching people:

According to new research, it is no more effective to profile strongly—that is, subject individuals to increased scrutiny in proportion to their presumed likelihood of malfeasance—than it is to randomly flag individuals in the general population when it comes to rooting out terrorism. The reason, says study author William Press, a computer scientist and computational biologist at the University of Texas at Austin: terrorists are vastly outnumbered by innocents, and it’s a waste of time and money to screen and rescreen the same benign people.

Does anyone else think the humour in this clip is really really dark?

Interesting interview from today’s Guardian with the woman most associated with the Abu Ghraib scandal. While there’s no major insights, it does show you a more human element to the workings of the people involved.

England’s sense of persecution is so advanced at this stage that the question of whether or not she is contrite has almost no meaning. In the most notorious photo, she holds a leash with a naked man crawling out of his cell on the end of it. In another, she makes the thumbs up sign behind a human pyramid. In another, she grins at a naked prisoner as he is forced to simulate masturbation.

After the photos came out, people looked at England’s childhood for some kind of explanatory episode, an early demonstration of cruelty, or else evidence that she had herself been abused. While Graner, the ringleader and the man who took some of the photos, has had three court orders secured against him by his ex-wife for alleged domestic violence, England, 10 years his junior, barely had a backstory at all. She was, she says, only in trouble at school once, when a boy in her science class talked her into writing a letter making fun of the teacher. “And I apparently left it on the floor in the classroom. She knew the handwriting. I was, like, he made me do it.”