The Most Important Issue in the U.S. Elections? Bullshit!

It’s kind of creepy the way that ‘fake’ news like The Daily Show, the Onion and the Colbert Report are actually more realistic than most of the ‘real’ coverage of this election:

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Myth of the Liberal Nanny State

I’ll really have to stop posting links from Alternet soon but before I get there…

Among the most fanciful is the notion that conservatives are self-reliant actors who embrace a private sector free from government meddling. Supposedly, the right is content to take on the free-market with strength and skill, and let the chips fall where they may, while liberals look to the state to be their protective nanny, there to iron out the wrinkles of a dynamic, entrepreneurial society

A quick example of how the deck is stacked in certain ways:

Now what they could have done — and this would have been a true free trade policy — they could have said, “Look, there are a lot of very smart people in Mexico and China and India. And they can be doctors, lawyers, accountants and economists, and they would drive down costs in those areas enormously.” We’d get our health care for much, much less — we’d save hundreds of billions of dollars per year — our college tuition would fall, because we’d pay college professors much less. We could make the whole thing transparent — set up standards to make sure that we get the same quality of doctors.

Enormous savings for the United States — a great free trade story — but instead of putting downward pressure on the wages of our auto workers, we’d be putting downward pressure on the wages of our highest earners. If we brought our wage structure for doctors just down to European levels, you’d be talking about saving $80 billion per year. That’s a big chunk of our health care bill right there. But no one talks about that, and that’s a classic example of framing the debate about what “free” trade is.

You can read the article here and download the PDF book here

Just some quick thoughts on the BBC interview with George W. Bush

It’s a pretty good interview and you can see the whole thing here.
Just a few things that I found interesting -Bush has a very utilitarian ‘end’s justify the means’ view of a lot of his policies. It just comes across in a lot of the things he says and the language he uses, especially relating to Iraq but also to Africa. There’s also the oddest echoes of Jimmy Carter in terms of how he talks about the ‘higher realism of helping Africa’ in the sense that securing African well-being safeguards America’s national interest. What’s also interesting to see is how surprisingly affable Bush is. Nearly too much at times such as when he off-handedly refers to the ‘Dali Lama crowd’ & uses the word ’suicider’ which is just .. awkward. Anyway, I still think he’s a horrible excuse for a President but it’s worth a look.

Is it wrong that I *really* want this t-shirt?

Original site here. Also,what do people think of the new theme? Also, Gavin has the bulk of the photos from the last time this was topical. Enjoy

Is ‘the Surge’ working for reasons other than advertised?

While I’m somewhat dubious about the source (my own personal opinion of Alternet is that they let too much of their opinion creep into their articles rather than let the facts speak for themselves) these paragraphs in the middle of a piece attacking John McCain caught my attention

The “surge is working” narrative’s not reality-based, and when it comes to Iraq, we’ve seen the spin give way to the ugly facts time and time again.

That the troop escalation has been anything but a success is not an ideological claim, as supporters of the occupation charge, but numerical and chronological. The surge began last February, and there was something approaching a consensus at the time that the addition of about 20,000 combat troops — the rest were support personnel — would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 25 million people. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey said at the time: “I personally think the surge of five U.S. Army brigades and a few Marine battalions dribbled out over five months is a fool’s errand.” But the troop build-up continued in March, April and May.

The period that followed was a bloodbath — last June and July were the most violent summer months of any year of the occupation. August was one of the bloodiest months, period. Then, that month, the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army to stand down. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths fell by about 50 percent the next month and decreased again in October and November. The militia is estimated to be 100,000 strong and is arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq after the U.S. military. While the change can’t be wholly ascribed to any single factor — the violence has also decreased as a result of communities that have been fully “cleansed” of one or another ethnic or sectarian group — it’s clear that al-Sadr’s order, not Bush’s “surge,” was responsible for most of whatever “success” there may have been.

Finally, there is the masterpiece of propaganda known as the “Sunni Awakening.” Spun as a sign of success, the reality is that the U.S. military turned over some of the areas where they’d encountered the most violent resistance to local Sunni authorities — many of whom they had condemned as “terrorists” previously — and started paying their fighters to stop shooting at U.S. troops. In other words, the U.S. was defeated and surrendered territory to the “enemy,” effectively paying reparations to local populations and suffering fewer casualties as a result. There are many ways to define success, but defeat and surrender are not among them. Yet, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, after four years of saying that Iraq was mostly stable aside from a few local areas and the Sunni “Triangle of Death,” the administration simply stopped using the phrase and replaced it with talk of a “Sunni Awakening.” We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

In summary - is the ‘Surge’s’ success based on the U.S claiming success while it’s retreating? It’d be rather like ‘Tricky Dicky’s’ way of dealing with Vietnam where the aim was eventually not to win, but rather to stop the South Vietnamese falling immediately after the U.S pulled. Food for thought anyway…

Reasons to be cheerful?

Very interesting article from the Economist as to why the world is getting better:

In China 25 years ago, over 600m people—two-thirds of the population—were living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less). Now, the number on $1 a day is below 180m. In the world as a whole, a stunning 135m people escaped dire poverty between 1999 and 2004. This is more than the population of Japan or Russia—and more people, more quickly than at any other time in history.

Poverty alleviation has gone hand in hand with improvements in basic services. Digging canals and building water-treatment plants has increased the number of people with access to safe water: in South Asia, for instance, the number of those without clean water has been nearly halved since 1990. Thanks to this, and to better public-health provision, the rate at which people die from infectious diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis is falling in most poor countries, Africa excepted.

That in turn has cut child mortality. In 2007 Unicef, the United Nations child-welfare body, said that for the first time in modern history fewer than 10m children were dying each year before the age of five. That is still an awful lot but it represents a fall of a quarter since 1990. Life expectancy has increased a bit in low- and middle-income countries. The long march to literacy is nearing an end: three-quarters of people aged 15-25 were literate in 1975; now the rate is nearly nine-tenths.

The Future Belongs to Islam?

I remember reading this article by Mark Steyn over Christmas, and it had a tremendous effect on me at the time. While, on reflection I have to wonder about a lot of the things said in it, there a number of ideas contained in the article that are great food for thought.

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a “moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation — or pseudo-nation — of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the “Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.

Certainly, the article makes a good case for certain areas having major problems in the future with regards to ‘the demographics of society’ and it’s well worth thinking about things like Palestine in that context, however, there are plenty of areas where his thought process becomes oversimplified like this example here:

Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Granted, in some ways he has a point, but to suggest that ALL Africans are tribal in nature in somewhat simplistic, it is as much about the corruption of political institutions as it is about tribalism in many areas, Kenya at the moment being a good example. Also , the AIDS comment doesn’t take into account the continuing successes in treatment across Africa, and finally, Steyn ignores the recent growth in Chinese investment in Africa and what that means for the development of the continent.

There are plenty of interesting things within the ideas contained in the article, not least of which is the claim that given that there is not such a thing as ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Dutchness’. When this is compared to the sense of identity that comes with being ‘American’ it becomes possible to imagine that Europe will find it very hard to assimilate the incoming immigrants from the Muslim world.

Towards the end he makes a very good point which I have to agree with regarding the unwillingness that many ‘liberals’ have shown when dealing with Muslims and their claims:

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

As a final comment on his article, I just have to wonder about his seeming lack of care regarding the fact that nearly a third of the worlds population live in China and India, neither of which are Muslim countries, and at least one of which is a (relatively) healthy democracy. As a gap in the argument it is pretty large. Still though, the article is well worth a look.

Up until the 1990’s you could set off the British nuclear arsenal with a bike lock-key:

Unbelievable:

PALs (Permissive Action Links) were introduced in the 1960s in America to prevent a mad General or pilot launching a nuclear war off their own bat - the Dr Strangelove scenario.

And this was apparently all you needed to do if you were any British soldier wanting to set off WW3:

To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.

Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.

The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.

Hunter S. Thompson

A short audio interview given about ‘hells angels’;

and the problem between the blurring of fantasy and reality:
gonzovision:

Shooting War trailer

I’ve talked about this book before, but it’s out to buy now and theirs a pretty sweet trailer out with it too: