Let Them Eat Cake

I’ve been thinking about the French and Russian revolutions lately. The world has largely given up its actual monarchies, or reduced them to cartoon forms. In some places, Scandinavia and Britain, we continue to have monarchies, but mostly they lack any of the attributes, i.e., power over the people, that drove events like revolutions. So, one could conclude, I guess, that revolutions of the bloody sort, as in the French and Russian varieties, are a thing of the past.
But two sets of information keep flowing at me, causing me to wonder about that supposition.
Set One: The banks, the health insurers, and the other super-monied people continue to act like Marie Antoinette—“Let them eat cake”. The entire financial system in this country, and in other nations, has created a class of super-rich who are in most important ways, our royalty. We have no kings or queens, I guess, but lots of dukes, barons, et al who rule our lives in ways large and small. Mostly, they extract money from us and then hoard it, or use it in ways designed to piss off those of us who are not in their little world. That most of them are republican/conservative goes without saying, but their politics is not their most important attribute, since democrats seem to offer homage to them almost as much as republicans. We have learned from the bank-and insurance industry bailouts that both political parties are willing to serve up public monies to this class, without expecting much in return. Too big to fail is their mantra.
Set Two: A very large part of the US population is highly annoyed, one might even call them enraged at what they see occurring. The fake tea parties organized by monied republicans, while faux grass roots events, have surfaced genuine anger. Currently, that anger is directed mostly at democrats in general and President Obama in particular. The focus of the angry people on the Dems is mainly because of Fox News, and the right-wing politicos like Sarah Palin (who has only one actual belief—“make me rich and powerful”). But at some point, I assume the angry people may begin to get the point that the rich people and the political whores with whom they are aligned, are their real enemies. They are the ones who are making their lives miserable, by rigging the system such that they continue to suck money out of the global system for the sole purpose of making themselves rich. Greed, completely unrestrained, keeps driving that group of very rich folks.
So, if that ever happens, if the angry people ever begin to understand, we may get to observe the 21st century version of the Russian revolution, this one directed at the very rich financial barons and dukes and their right wing political allies, by the heavily armed army of pissed off Americans. It’s that second amendment thing coming home to roost. Watch for it on the six o’clock news.

News and the Internet

Today I received yet another lesson about the basic unreliability of the Internet. The specific lesson concerned a claim posted and widely circulated about a roll of film left in a brownie box camera for 68 years, revealing, when developed recently, a host of amazing photographs of the Pearl Harbor attack. The pictures were indeed impressive, and, had they been taken by one sailor using his brownie box camera, it would have indeed been amazing. I failed to check it out before sending it on to my grandson. Happily, he sent it on to his history teacher who checked it with Snopes, who debunked the assertion. Had I been careful, I might have done the same thing, but I was too lazy. Mainly, I saw these pictures and thought of the technology involved—Kodak film developed after 68 years, plus this fantastic quality taken with the types of lenses common to box cameras. Indeed, yet another example of, if it seems to good to be true . . . it is.
Exactly why someone would go to the trouble to collect together a bunch of pictures from Naval archive files and then put together this story of the brownie box camera is not immediately clear. I understand that people who attempt to circulate widely some tale about a fantastical software virus that will erase your entire hard disk if you don’t pass the warning on to thousands of people simply get off on conning thousands of gullible people. I suppose, in the final analysis that is all that is involved here—yet another piece of evidence that we who use the Internet are mainly lazy fools easily conned.
It was a valuable lesson for my grandson. But I wonder whether this isn’t another nail in the coffin of the news business. I know, I know, the Internet isn’t news. It’s merely a pipe for whoever wishes to send out stuff. But the model for the news business being widely discussed is an Internet model—as newspapers and print magazines die out, they will be replaced by their Internet equivalents. And these hoaxes help to breed people who basically can no longer believe what passes across their desktops and laptops. Because people are too busy, or too lazy to validate what comes across the Internet, they may slowly not believe anything they read from that source, or, worse yet, believe everything. It may become akin to having nothing on your TV except Fox News, and the Daily Show. Of course, the Daily Show is closer to real news every day.
Isn’t it??

Religious Tests

Interesting article in this morning’s newspaper about how an elected Asheville, NC city councilman was being challenged by a local citizen, who asserts that the councilman should be denied office because he is an atheist. Turns out that the NC constitution, written in 1868, and revised as recently as 1971, still contains language that states a person cannot hold public office if he does not believe in God. That language is, of course, unconstitutional under the US constitution, but that rarely seems to matter to some folks. Whether the challenger actually believes that atheists should be denied public office, regardless of things called elections, is unclear. It may be, as the councilman notes, that some people are simply trying to overturn an election result that went against them. So, like War, religion may just be politics by different means.
But it makes me wonder why religious believers seem so easily threatened. Are they really all so insecure? Kind of like their war against gay and lesbian marriages. I have never understood how the marriage of two men, or two women as life partners would even in the slightest threaten the “sanctity of marriage”. Having been married for 54+ years, I confess to never feeling threatened by the prospect of homosexual weddings. I have often thought and said that heterosexual weddings seem to be a larger threat to the sanctity of the institution of marriage than anything homosexuals could possibly do. I refer, of course, to the high (50%??) divorce rate, and the continue high rates of domestic violence in which heterosexuals seem to think it’s ok to abuse their spouses and children.
Maybe we need something else to weed out threats to public institutions. Perhaps we need psycho-social tests that could demonstrate a person’s mental health status (with emphasis on potential violence traits). Or perhaps we should insist on intelligence tests as a requirement to hold public office (though, that might weed out ¾ of our current office-holders).
I always believed that this nation’s great strength was its plurality. We created and built this nation on the notion that all men (and women) are created equal. We need to celebrate that notion by eliminating these absurd religious tests, and by ignoring, perhaps even ridiculing, the silly folks who insist on applying them.

Peace

The continued fuss by our conservative commentariat in this country about the Obama Peace prize really seems to provide all the evidence one needs for the depravity of the right wing. Rather than rejoicing in the notion that at least one part of the world holds out hope for America as a beacon of peace, they continue to blab on about how undeserving he is. Well, people, he already said that. He knows he isn't Nelson Mandela. We all know that. But some of us continue to believe, despite Afghanistan troop orders, that Mr. Obama is all about doing good in the world. He was willed an awful mess by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a mess that will not yield easily to even Herculean efforts.
So, I continue to wonder about the savage efforts by Fox News to demean the President. Why do I wonder? Well, I can see nothing good coming from Mr. Murdoch's efforts to tear down this Administration. Apparently, Mr. Murdoch, an Australian, objects to anything that might get in his way--taxes, regulations, anything that will cause him to slow down in his effort to destroy the very essence of what made America a great nation. Mr. Murdoch, why don't you and your Fox robots return to whatever spiderholes you occupy and let this country begin to heal itself?

Guns vs. Butter

Afghanistan is beginning to weigh heavily. The longer I consider the President’s decision, the more distressed I become. The thought of dispatching 30,000 additional troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaida begins to sound like the definition of insanity—“doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result.”
I no longer even can be sure how we would know success. For a large part of my career, I taught and practiced that arcane field called program evaluation. We were taught and we attempted always to practice the art by starting with a definition of success on which all the participants could agree, and for which we were confident in our ability to measure objectively the outcomes. We also focused in this art on the intervention that was being put in place to achieve the desired ends. Our first question always was, “is the intervention plausible?” If the answer was, “No”, then we would stop, because proceeding with an evaluation would be pointless.
When our right-wing antagonistas, such as John McCain, insist that we should never leave until “Victory” is achieved, I keep wondering whether they/he has any idea how we might know whether “Victory” was at hand.
But even beyond the simple issue of measurement, and our ability to know whether what we are doing is likely to succeed, I keep asking myself whether we have learned anything from our own experiences in Vietnam, and our predecessors and our own experience in Afghanistan, mainly the British and the Russians. They shot up the place fairly dramatically, yet, in the end, they gave up and walked away with their tails between their legs. Now, to be fair, we provided substantial material assistance to the Taliban, the first time around, to help assure the Russian defeat. We assume the reverse is not operating now. Mainly, though, it is becoming clear that, short of killing everything human in Afghanistan, we probably cannot subdue a population by killing innocents and true enemies willy nilly. We never really seem to know the difference, so in the end, we seem to make as many enemies as we kill or subdue.
We also seem to be incapable of moving the Afghan population very far beyond their 14th century lifestyle, so they may never adopt our view of a democratically stable nation. I do imagine that the Afghan people would prefer a government that doesn’t cheat them, and doesn’t threaten them routinely, and, since we support corrupt, essentially evil national governments, it seems unlikely that we will “win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.”
But perhaps my biggest problem is what we should do instead of shooting up the place. Walking away seems a non-starter, mainly because, after nine years, our past investment of blood and money really would be simply wasted, much as our investment of blood and money in Vietnam was wasted. So we seem faced with two equally awful alternatives. I keep hoping some third alternative will suddenly occur to one of our resident geniuses, although why I keep hoping is beyond me.
What might an alternative look like, I wonder? I keep thinking schools, hospitals; some global cooperative economic development program would be preferable to gunslingers. Certainly, a strong police force, either local, or international would be needed, to keep the thugs from blowing up the schools. But that should be different from drones shooting missiles at wedding parties. I wonder whether anyone has consulted anyone on this strategy beyond our generals and retired military minds. Wouldn’t hurt guys.

Advisory Guys

The experts in the USA capable of crafting anti-terrorism policies, or climate change policies, or economic development policies to arrest our deterioration and correct for our national indebtedness, always amaze me. I wonder why we bother to debate such topics within the ranks of, say the White house, or the halls of Congress, when we have the likes of George Will, or Charles Krauthammer, or even, for heavens sake, John McCain. I mean, he’s such an expert on everything, it isn’t clear to me why he deigns to bother his head with these mundane issues. But, whenever we need advice, we ought to simply ask any one of them what our new policies should be. I mean, John McCain says that our policy in Afghanistan should be Victory, period. We will leave after we achieve Victory. Timetables are clearly the wrong tactic, since the opposing forces will simply outwait us. Well, everyone knows that! But only John McCain can articulate such a clear-headed vision. I mean he was so clear about Vietnam. We would have won, had we only been willing to stay the course until Victory had been achieved.
Apparently John, and George, and Charles, and of course that old dog Joe Lieberman, held off on their clear-headed vision until Shrub and Dickie-Bird had left Dodge City and the new Sheriff arrived. I guess they didn’t want to embarrass the old guard dogs with their inherently superior knowledge of everything.
It’s really comforting knowing that we have all these experts to shore up our national leadership whenever the Dems take charge. And to know that, if the big Guys ever falter, we have Sarah Barbie standing in the wings, ever ready to advise us on any and all global crises, just as soon as she is finished with her book signing. I mean, first things first, huh?

Afghanistan

So, we watched last night. The Prez made his case, convincing enough to those who are open to being convinced. The jackasses of course will never be convinced by anything he says. I noted several things.
1. He was, as always, brilliant at saying what had to be said. He was speaking to a tough audience, some of whom seemed actually to be dozing off—odd I thought.
2. I believe he is correct in asserting that both Afghanistan and Pakistan are places on our globe that are potentially dangerous to the United States. But then so is Somalia, and a few other places that are not really nations, more spots of dirt on the globe open to any thugs or robber gangs who have enough arms to grab some the territory for their own.
3. Fundamentally, I believe that nation-building is a chimera. It is likely never to happen in Afghanistan, Somalia, or western Pakistan in our lifetimes. These are places deeply rooted in the 14th century. Democracy isn’t as high on their agenda as getting enough rice or potatoes to eat for the next meal. Also, they are sufficiently befuddled by their views of their religion that they have no concept of an open society with democratic values. We are surely wasting our time, money and blood.
So, basically, I think the faster we can execute a quick march out of Afghanistan, the better. Having said that, however, I am still awaiting some pronouncement from the Prez on the subject of the aftermath. That is, what do we plan to do, perhaps what does the world plan to do about terrorism once we all leave the Afghans and the Pakistanis to themselves? If the Taliban regroup and come roaring back in Kabul and they allow Osama (remember him, that guy who Bush allowed to escape??)to begin organizing terror again, what will we do—begin viewing Afghanistan as a free fire zone, as we did in Vietnam (remember Vietnam?)? We had this brief period after 9/11 when the entire world, even for heaven’s sake Iran, was aligned with us. We could have organized a world-wide effort to eradicate Islamic terrorism, mainly because it was in everyone’s best interest, including most of the Islamic world, to get rid of thugs like bin Laden. But no, our Neo-Con ship of fools decided to attack one of the Islamic nations uninvolved in 9/11, just because they thought they could. And then they forgot about the guys who brought us 9/11, and they allowed the world-wide support to evaporate.
So, now of course, all the idiots in our nation who acted as cheerleaders for Shrub’s gang of thugs are now decrying Obama’s considered decision.
I continue to hope that he is correct in his latest decision. I know that, unlike Bush, he at least used his considerable brain in reaching that decision. But his decision is a high risk one. Of course, so would a quick march out of Afghanistan. Remember that last helicopter leaving Vietnam?