Bring them home

It's on the table now. A bill in the US Senate says to withdraw US troops from Iraq. This is binding legislation—a legal mandate.

The legislation commences redeployment of U.S. forces no later than May 1, 2007 with the goal of removing all combat brigades from Iraq by March 31, 2008, a date that is consistent with the expectation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

The bill was introduced by Barack Obama, whom I'm relieved to see giving up his triangulation act.

Fruitcake

Leftover from the Yuletide season—ho ho!—I have competing links on the subject of fruitcake.

BBSpot reports: “RFID Tag Technology Confirms One-Fruitcake Theory.”

Meanwhile, pro-fruitcake partisan Teresa Nielsen Hayden answers the question, “what is it with fruitcake?”

Raise my taxes

I often say, with a grin, that the way for a politician to win my heart is to promise to raise my taxes. Really. Taxes buy things like fire trucks and bridges and schools and libraries and forest rangers and space probes and Sesame Street and hospitals and train stations.

I like those things.

Via Poputonian at Hullaballoo, I learn that Thomas Geoghegan says the same thing in the pages of In These Times.

... in a rich country, if we spend them on ourselves, taxes make us happier. That’s the point of a new book, Happiness, by a British economist Richard Layard. You can find much of the same thing in John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Consumers can’t buy happiness—only taxpayers can.

Our New Democrats? They don’t get it. Kerry or Gore or Clinton will propose a tax increase, but only to be “responsible.” It’s a Boston Puritan kind of thing, like castor oil. We do it for the sake of rectitude. We do it because policy wonks at Harvard and Yale think we’ll be the better for it. God forbid it give us any pleasure. No wonder we keep losing: If we have to raise taxes, why make it so joyless?

We propose to rob Peter, in the top 1 percent, without ever getting any fun out of paying Paul. I say: Let’s give it to Paul, just to give him joy. Here’s how we have to sell a tax increase: Not to be fiscally responsible, but to be a little happier. Be like the Europeans. Have a little fun.

Let’s indulge in this higher GDP per capita. In richer countries, a strange thing happens: the higher the tax, the nicer it is to live there. And the more interesting life is.

Geekiness test

I thought I should alert readers geeky enough to care that this image is available on hoodies and t-shirts for a limited time.

RAW

Via The Wild Hunt, I learn that there will be a memorial service for Robert Anton Wilson in Santa Cruz on Sunday 18 February.

Join Together at the Robert Anton Wilson Cosmic Meme-Orial & Lasagna Levitation Celebration!

Hail Eris! All Hail Bob!

Celebrate the life, work and continued multi-dimensionality of Robert Anton Wilson by joining us in a giant, jammin' Translation Celebration and 8th Circuit Soiree!

In case you're into that sort of thing.

Also, I see that libertarian Reason magazine noted his passing. How about that.

Very, very wrong

Via Infinite Perplexity, I offer you a nice, piping hot bowl of ice cream.

Today's quote

From Adlai Stevenson:

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Dolchstosslegende, again

Digby at Hullaballoo has a good post about a favourite subject of mine, the function of the dolchstoßlegende about Vietnam in colouring contemporary politics. Digby traces where the legend came from and the unhappy consequences today.

I worry greatly that as a result the man people will look to to lead us out of the quagmire will be the war hero John McCain. He can be McGovern without the hippies, Nixon without the slush fund, a hawk who supported the war but by 2008 will have reluctantly decided that he needs to step in to end it. With a secret plan, no doubt.

Lots of great links, quotes, and analysis, if you like that sort of thing. Check it out. As Digby says:

Young people, educate yourselves.

(And now's a good time to get hooked on Digby all around. This week has been a week of kicking out the jams. We not only got that good post on the myth of Vietnam driving Iraq now, there's also cracking good posts on the language of contemporary conservatives' racism, Dick Cheney's dreams of an imperial presidency, how the Surge has hopefully ruined McCain's strategy for '08, how George W. Bush shows all the signs and weaknesses of a pathologically angry father, how the Scooter Libby trial reveals the Bush Administration's stragetgy for governance is to get away with murder through sheer deceitful audacity. )

A little observation

Lance Mannion recounts tales from Chris the Cop.

“She's a wild one. That one. Caused her father a lot of gray hairs over the years.”

The father, he went on, deserved to have a daughter like that. A former state trooper. Real jerk.

Seems that fathers who deserve to have daughters like that get them. What a coincidence.

Hmmnn. I knew that, but didn't know that I knew.

Republic

Remember this?

Via Warren Ellis, I learn that Stéphane Kelly, writing in the Toronto Star, takes the idea seriously. As a Canadian, of course Kelly calls this an annexation of New England.

If the annexationist vision is imaginable, it is because there is a good historical ground for it to thrive upon. And we have underestimated this ground for a long time. We wrongly thought Canadians had always been anti-American.

After the Revolution of 1776, the elite of the Loyalist colonial towns of New England changed their point of view on the matter. In Canadian towns, people started distinguishing between bad Americans (southerners) and good Americans (northerners). These Canadians criticized southern politics, subjugated as they were by the radical republicanism of the Democratic party under Jefferson and Madison (allied with Revolutionary France). Northern Americans were judged acceptable because of their sympathies to England.

As well, in New England towns, resentment toward Canadian Loyalists ebbed ....

I can imagine worse futures.

Geek dream car

Brent makes a good point.

Freedom archipeligo

From Corrente

Sid [Blumenthal] says that Wilkerson, Powell’s old chief of staff, believes that the correct number of victims in secret Bush prisons is 35,000, only 5% of which “may” have to do with terrorism.

I am embarassed to admit that I had imagined a number in the hundreds or low thousands.

28%

President Bush's approval rating reads in the 20s for the first time.

There's probably some statistical noise in there; the next poll will probably have him at 30%.

Still. Notice the shape of that graph. Ezra Klien has a disconcerting observation.

Bush has had precisely two serious and sustained bumps. One came after a horrifying attack on the country, the second after he launched a horrifying attack on Iraq. His presidency, then, has been vampiric in nature, thriving when the republic waned and the body counts mounted. He has received precisely no big boosts for domestic policy priorities or achievements. And the trend, after 9/11, is down, down, down.

Assuming there's no bump coming to rescue him, the shape of that graph suggests that when the next President takes office, Bush's approval rating should be around 20%. Though I doubt it will really get that low. Nixon bottomed out at about 25%.

Dymaxion

The Buckminster Fuller Institute has a store! I want one of each.

Update: This post inspired a reader to pass along a helpful guide to reading Buckminster Fuller's opus Synergetics which has me itching to take a crack at it. Like I don't have enough other projects I'm neglecting.

Health care policy

Say, did you really hear President Bush talking about a health care program in the State of the Union?

A future of hope and opportunity requires that all our citizens have affordable and available health care. When it comes to health care, government has an obligation to care for the elderly, the disabled, and poor children. .... But many Americans cannot afford a health insurance policy. And so tonight, I propose two new initiatives to help more Americans afford their own insurance.

Amazing!

So I checked the blog of Ezra Klein, who to my surprise had confessed before the speech that the rumoured health care proposal didn't sound so shabby. Turns out, he says, the actual announced plan is worse than just shabby.

The Bush administration's health plan is a trap. I'd counsel Democrats to oppose it, but that'll hardly be necessary. The surprising outcome would be if they even notice it.
....
It's almost laughably wrongheaded, and won't survive an instant in Congress

Jonathan Zasloff has more on the fundamental principles and efficiencies, the latter with a link to some simple statistics that will blow your mind.

Reference book

Via John Coultart at Feuilleton I learn that the complete Codex Seraphinianus has been scanned in for viewing on Flickr.

This does not reduce my desire to own a copy.

Exit strategy

Guess who said this.

Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is.

And this.

I think it’s also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn.

No really, guess.

Then go see.

Terror theatre

Hip marketing guru Seth Godin has some observations about airport security during the recent holiday season.

Just on the other side of the line are the bureaucrats at the TSA. They tell a story too, but it couldn't be intentional.

“No Cake!” the screener yells. “No pie either!” and they make the person traveling to her family throw out her home-baked cake.

We got up to the line. I had an ounce of gel left in a five ounce bottle. They made me throw it out because the label said 5 ounces (though it was clearly more than half empty).
....
No Cake!

Is this the sort of government we want? We deserve? We should pay for?

There are 583 ways to hurt yourself and your fellow passengers onboard an airplane. Gel (and cake) are exactly two of them. How many more are we going to protect ourselves against? If the best our bureaucracy can do is scare us with cries of “No Cake!” and “too much gel,” then I think we need a new bureaucracy.

As I have said before, airport secuirty is a total f#$%@ing waste of time, money, and attention.

Mouse party

Via Rivet Pep Squad, I offer you Mouse Party, a Flash demo of the neurological mechanisms behind many common recreational drugs, featuring cute animated cartoon mice.

See if you can guess which drugs the mice in the vivarium are on before you click on them.

Remember, kids: illegal recreational mood-altering drugs (like stimulants and opiates) are bad, while prescription mood-altering drugs (like stimulants and opiates) are good. Or something like that.

Dawkins

Smashing Telly has the BBC documentary of biologist Richard Dawkins' new book The God Delusion, with the provocative subtitle “The Root of All Evil?”

Dawkins delivers a vigorous, well-articulated, and unflinching rendition of the hard atheist scientistic Enlightenment position. In Part One he articulates why being surrounded by people driven by faith rather than reason gives him the willies. A few interesting things stand out for me.

There's an amazing little interview with creepy Evangelical (former!) leader Ted Haggard. Dawkins and Haggard spar over the usual questions—how could the eye have evolved?—and when Dawkins tells Haggard that he has never met an evolutionary biologist who believes the things that Haggard attributes to them, Haggard reveals a well of resentment.

You do understand that this issue right here of intellectual arrogance is the reason why people like you have a difficult problem with people of faith. I don't communicate an air of superiority over the people, “Because I know so much more. And if you only read the books I know, and if you only knew the scientists I knew, then you would be great like me.” Well, sir, there could be many things that you know well. There are other things that you don't know well. As you age, you'll find yourself wrong on some things, right on some other things. But please, in the process of it, don't be arrogant.

Seeing Haggard and Dawkins' contempt for one another escalate is worth checking out; the interview starts at the 22 minute mark.

Dr Dawkins has a very narrow conception of what “religion” means, conflating it with the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam ... which in turn are conflated with religion as a system of religous belief. The other religions of the world, and religion defined by practice rather than belief, aren't on Dawkins' radar.

Which means that a syncretic worldview doesn't occur to him as a possibility, a blind spot which turns up in an interesting way during his tidy description of the logical basis of atheism at the very end of Part One.

Science ca’n’t disprove the existence of God, but that does not mean that God exists. There are a million things we ca’n’t disprove.

The philosopher Bertrand Russel had an analogy. Imagine there's a china teapot in orbit around the Sun. You cannot disprove the existence of the teapot because it's too small to be spotted by our telescopes. Nobody but a lunatic would say, “Well, I'm prepared to believe in the teapot because I ca’n’t disprove it. Maybe we have to be technically and strictly agnostics, but in practice we are all “teapot atheists.”
....
There's an infinite number of things like celestial teapots that we ca’n’t disprove. There are fairies. There are unicorns. Hobgoblins. We ca’n’t disprove any of those. But we don't believe in them, any more than nowadays we believe in Thor, Amon-Ra, or Aphrodite. We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.

I know I have readers who are chuckling because they in fact are not atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Fairies, Thor, Amon-Ra, and Aphrodite? Count ’em in! Unicorns and hobgoblins? Sure, if you have something interesting to say about them.

I suspect that this would surprise Dr Dawkins. Even more so, I think he'd be astonished to learn that many of these Pagans, like many Buddhists, are vigorously opposed to faith and in favour of skepticism, just like him.

Mad king

Novelist Jane Smiley speculates on the psychology of the President and the people who put him in power.

... what I think happened is that when the Bush/Scowcroft/Baker faction decided to use Little George as their presidential poster boy to expand their Middle-East-based wealth and power, they didn't reckon with Cheney and Rumsfeld. They thought their boy would be personable and easy to control.

The key moment was when Cheney went looking for a vice-presidential candidate and found himself. Once they had given him the opening and he had publicly used it to aggrandize himself and his agenda, B/S/B realized that for the sake of party solidarity, they had to live with it. When Baker engineered the coup that was Florida (and I do think one of the “perks” Bush offered as a candidate was that Florida was guaranteed ahead of time by Jeb and K. Harris), I think that B/S/B and C/R found themselves in an uneasy alliance—goals were the same, but temperaments were different. Right there at the pivot was Little George.

It's pretty clear that Little George requires a constant stream of flattery and cajolery to keep him going, and this was to be supplied by Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes, and Condi Rice.

This is consistent with a speculation I've voiced myself.

I think that Bush was originally chosen by the kingmakers of the conservative movement as an empty suit with name recognition that they could use to get their team into place in government, but once Bush was President, those same kingmakers, being conservatives, felt compelled to respect Bush's authority.

Smiley's take on this almost makes it sound like one of Shakespeare's histories about the Plantagenets. And she goes on to say that in the struggle between the courtiers, they have further empowered the king ... and driven him mad in the process.

She makes it sound plausible. I pray that she is wrong.

Today's quote

Roger Ebert takes a detour from his review of Metropolitan.

It is strange how the romances of the teenage years retain a poignancy all through life—how a girl who turns you down when you're 16 retains an aura in your memory even long after you, and she, have ceased to be who you were then. I attended my high school reunion a couple of weeks ago and discovered, in the souvenir booklet assembled by the reunion committee, that one of the girls in my class had a crush on me all those years ago. I would have given a great deal to have had that information at the time.

I think we all know the feeling.

If chins could kill

Via Cherie Priest, if you happen to know who Mr Bruce Campbell is, then I have a silly little present for you.

Gulag

Today I have a passage from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of the gulag is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the gulag.

If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Aleksandr in this gulag whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees here suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the Soviet Union.

Whoops. Actually, no, that's not Solzhenitsyn, it's a letter from Guantanamo detainee Jumah al-Dossari which I found via Al at In Pursuit of the Mysteries.

I changed a few words. Alexandr for Jumah. Gulag for Gitmo. Soviet Union for United States.

I am horrified that this is possible. I am ashamed that this is possible.

There's another passage I want to quote.

I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen.

I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, “I do not need you to thank me.” I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.

I honor Mr al-Dossari's magnanimity of spirit. But I hope that he will forgive me a disagreement with his sentiment.

I do fault all Americans. We have not done enough to stop this. I have not done enough to stop this. I know because it is still happening.

Collapse gap

Dmitry Orlov's talk Closing the Collapse Gap is fascinating, sweeping, witty, and terrifying. It's long and troubling, but strangely entertaining ... and worth your time.

I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.

My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the “Collapse Gap” — to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War.
....
My conclusion is that the Soviet Union was much better-prepared for economic collapse than the United States is.

He makes a good case, unfortunately.

Klingons redux

Remember that thing about the geeky metaphors for the Bush administration? Via Thomas Roche, I learn that The Daily Show has their Senior Star Trek Analogies Correspondent on the case.

“Wait, how did the Vulcans get into this?” I hear you ask. The New York Times has an explanation.

Mainstream discourse

Over at Daily Kos, ThereIsNoSpoon introduces us to the Overton Window, which is a powerful VRWC propaganda technique.

the GOP knows that the middle DOES matter. They know that by playing to their base in very well-crafted ways, they can shift the very definition of what the middle is. By introducing radicalism into the public discourse (and taking initial heat for it), whatever used to be radical within this context becomes moderate by comparison.

Spoon argues that the most Democrats badly misunderstand the implications of this for how they should play to their base.

Snarky expression of the day

The Transportation Safety Administration is fighting a War on Moisture.

Syncreticism

Via Dragon Lady Flame, I learn that there's a controversy about Shinto shrines' use of the net. Apparently many shrines have been setting up websites, performing prayer services and offering blessed amulets via email, and so forth.

The shrine association, the Jinja Honcho, disapproves, and says there'll be no more of that.

No Shinto god exists on the Internet.

No?

Some syncreticism Shinto turns out to be!

Today's quote

Comics writer Warren Ellis on sometime science fiction novelist Chairman Bruce Sterling.

I love how Bruce, in a totally arse-backwards and unexpected sort of way, has gone from fulltime sf writer to the kind of steely, omnivorous, worldhopping and determinedly groundbreaking futurist people always misguidedly thought sf writers were. His career is an inspiration, a treasure, and a source of some envy to me.

Strewth.