"Moral Blindness" - Does that Mean Not-See?

Before he got into politics John Conyers served in the Michigan National Guard 1948--50; US Army 1950--54; and the US Army Reserves 1954--57. Conyers spending a year in Korea as an officer in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and was awarded combat and merit citations.

As a congressman Conyers authored the Martin Luther King Day Holiday Act.

He was down in Memphis at the tribute today and had some words for John McCain who voted against Conyer's bill in 1983 to make MLK day a National holiday.

Conyers: When John McCain was my colleague in the House and I introduced the Holiday bill, he voted against it in 1983...Now I believe in forgiveness, but it's incredible that all he can do is show up on April 4th and think that everything is OK. We're not just African Americans, but we're most people.

Host: Rep. Conyers I think in all fairness we should say , perhaps you did not hear it but certainly John McCain did offer an apology for that first vote in 1983 when you did put forward that bill.

You had not heard that? He did make that apology sir so that he regretted voting that way back then.

Conyers: Yea, well look. I'm happy. That was in 1983, he didn't make any apology, he didn't make any apologies in 1987, so I guess I'm thrilled and forgiving that finally when he's running for President he remembers to apologize. No, that's great.

Host: Well, he has done so today and perhaps you'll take that as some sort of appeasement, but anyway...

This is a new one in my book. quoth McCain; "Moral blindness is not the same as moral badness"

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

The Hidden Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr

According to FBI memos, the Bureau aimed to paint King as “a fraud, demagogue, and scoundrel” in order to “take him off his pedestal.” FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover-who publicly dubbed King “the most notorious liar in the country”-wrote that he wanted “to neutralize or completely discredit the effectiveness of Martin Luther King Jr.” The FBI carried all this out under a covert Counter Intelligence Program known as COINTELPRO. Within this program, Dr. King was slotted under the “Black Nationalist Hate Groups” rubric, despite the fact that he preached love, not hate and that he relied on moral force, not physical force. The Hidden Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr

Policing Thought

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 is a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the 110th United States Congress. Its stated purpose is to deal with "homegrown terrorism and violent radicalization" by establishing a national commission, establishing a center for study, and cooperating with other nations.

The bill was introduced to the House on April 19 2007, and passed on Oct 23, 2007. It was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959. The bill defines some terms including "violent radicalization," "homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence," which have provoked controversy from some quarters. Although Section 899F of HR 1955 specifically prohibits "the violation of Civil Rights and Liberties in the enforcement of the bill," critics claim its enactment would pave the way for violations of Civil Rights and Liberties.

Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has said he believes the bill is "unconstitutional" and has referred to the bill as a "thought crime bill".

Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), addressed the bill in he House on Dec. 5, 2007 saying: "This seems to be an unwise and dangerous solution in search of a real problem. Previous acts of ideologically motivated violence, though rare, have been resolved successfully using law enforcement techniques, existing laws against violence, and our court system," despite the fact that this bill does not "solve" anything and enacts no new laws of or pertaining to speech in the United States.

BT and Phorm

BT has admitted that it secretly monitored customers' internet surfing activities in trials of new software in 2006 and 2007.

Channel 4 News at Noon first reported this story a month ago after being contacted by a concerned consumer. The data protection watchdog is investigating this possible breach of the law which could have affected thousands of BT customers. Our Money Reporter, Bridgid Nzekwu reports

Stephen Mainwaring from Weston Super Mare is one very angry BT customer. Last year, after noticing strange goings-on on his computer he contacted his internet service provider BT, who told him he had a virus. But in fact it was nothing of the kind. He'd been part of a secret BT trial to track customers surfing behaviour.

"I ran a lot of virus scans, updates and things. I even bought new PC, but as soon as I plugged it in started coming up with problem. BT kept insisting it was a virus, and it's not. It turns out they were doing secret tests." - Stephen Mainwaring, BT customer

The technology used was developed by a company called Phorm. Their software uses anonymous data gleaned from surfing activity and matches relevant adverts to people's interests.

Phorm claims it's a major benefit both to consumers and advertisers. But BT is now accused of spying and has admitted it didn't tell its customers what it was doing.

"It was individuals who suspected that this was happening to them, who then confronted BT and BT prevaricated for a very long time. It is only now at the beginning of 2008 that BT has admitted that's what were doing."Frankly that was disgraceful by BT to have done it, it would be huge diminution of our rights as individuals if this whole system is allowed to go ahead without us all being given the opportunity to opt in or out" - Don Foster

Cannibalism 2040

TED TURNER: Not doing it will be catastrophic. We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there'll be no more corn grown. Not doing it is suicide. Just like dropping bombs on each other, nuclear weapons is suicide. We've got to stop doing the suicidal two things, which are hanging on to our nuclear weapons and after that we've got to stabilize the population. When I was born-

CHARLIE ROSE: So what's wrong with the population?

TURNER: We're too many people. That's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people, they'd be using less stuff.

Uh Oh...,

Just watched this segment on the O'Reilly program. Of course this youtube snippet doesn't have the full interview in which Father Pfleger brought it in much greater detail, asking if O'Reilly had been a marine and what specifically his qualifications to opine on the matter are? I recommend looking out for additional controversy to accrue to the fiery Michael Pfleger who has shown the courage of his convictions in standing up for his friends Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright.

The faux news attack dogs accuse him of preaching "the politics of racial resentment". Agitating for the cardinal to "sanction" this fiery priest.

Oh Lawd........,

Reality Correction

That crunching sound you hear as you lie awake in the middle of the night worrying IS the sound of an ongoing reality correction, or maybe something else;

Shards of broken glass outside the basement window of 31 Vine Street hint at the destruction inside the three-story home.

Thieves smashed the window to break in and then gutted the property for its copper pipes -- a crime that has spread across the United States as the economy slows and foreclosed homes stand empty and vulnerable."They cut it here and then pulled it right out of the wall," real estate broker Marc Charney said, pointing to broken plaster near a wrecked baseboard heating system in the 2,774-sq-ft home in Brockton, Massachusetts, a working-class city of 94,304 people.

Similar stories are unfolding nationwide as a glut of home foreclosures coincides with record highs in the price of copper and other metals.

Real estate brokers and local authorities say once-proud homes coast-to-coast are being stripped for copper, aluminum, and brass by thieves. Much of it ends up with scrap metal traders who say nearly all copper gets shipped overseas, much of it to China and India.

In areas hit hardest by foreclosures, such as the Slavic Village neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio, copper and other metals used in plumbing, heating systems and telephone lines are now more valuable than some homes.

Don't believe it? Check out coinflation [ koin-fley-shuhn ]
noun. 1. A persistent rise in the metal value of silver and base metal coins. 2. An inflationary effect on coins. 3. The difference between the metal value and face value in coins. where you can track its progressive progress on a daily basis.

Soylent Green

Set in the year 2022, Soylent Green depicts a dystopian future in which the population has grown to forty million in New York City alone. The water and soil have been poisoned and airborne pollution has produced a year-round heatwave from the greenhouse effect. Most housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and impoverished homeless people fill the streets.








Food as we know it today–including fruit, vegetables, and meat–is a rare and expensive commodity. Half of the world's population survives on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation (from soy(bean) + lent(il)), including Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, which are advertised as "high-energy vegetable concentrates". The newest product is Soylent Green - a small green wafer which is advertised as being produced from "high-energy plankton". It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties, but it is in short supply, which often leads to riots.

Visual Hemispheric Dominance?

The enclosed is presented as an exercise for observing and reducing visual hemispheric dominance.

Lou Dobbs, you listening?

The spinning girl was an optical illusion illustrating something entirely different about the human visual system than what the newspaper article which popularized it advertised. The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion.

The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit - spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete - we see a 3-D spinning image.

By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.

Keep all these things in mind as we view and study the unfolding political and economic spectacle.

Lou Dobb's Subreal Moment....,

A priceless moment of American comedy gold.

On the Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer asked to pick Lou Dobbs brain on Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's description of racism in America as a "birth defect"

Dobbs passionately strode out into the tall cotton, but in the split second, somehow managed to catch himself.

Talk about a hemispheric tightrope walk, I would almost pay money to see an fMRI of Dobb's brain at the moment he stopped himself from cursing politicians giving voice to the issue of race as "cotton-picking".

Polarized America

Polarized America and the VoteView Project;

With few exceptions, roll call voting throughout American history has been simply structured. Only two dimensions are required to account for the great bulk of roll call voting. The primary dimension is the basic issue of the role of the government in the economy, in modern terms liberal-moderate-conservative. The second dimension picked up regional differences with the United States -- first slavery, then bimetalism, and after 1937, Civil Rights for African-Americans. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1967 Open Housing Act, this second dimension slowly declined in importance and is now almost totally absent. Race related issues - affirmative action, welfare, Medicaid, subsidized housing, etc. - are now questions of redistribution. Voting on race related issues now largely takes place along the liberal-conservative dimension and the old split in the Democratic Party between North and South has largely disappeared. Voting in Congress is now almost purely one-dimensional - a single dimension accounts for about 92 percent of roll call voting choices in the 109th House and Senate - and the two parties are increasingly polarized.

Polarization declined in both chambers from roughly the beginning of the 20th Century until World War II. It was then fairly stable until the late 1970s and has been increasing steadily over the past 20 years. Our (Poole and Rosenthal, 1997) original D-NOMINATE estimation ended with the 99th Congress. Interestingly, Congresses 100- 109, if anything, mark an acceleration of the trend (especially in the House). Note, however, that the acceleration is smooth and does not show a particular jump in polarization induced by the large Republican freshman class elected in 1994. Polarization in the Senate is now at the highest level since the end of Reconstruction. The level of Polarization in the 109th House is exceeded only by the Houses of 1895-96 and 1905-06.

The Economist Has No Clothes

It's so long overdue that this framework of systematized just-so storytelling gets a richly deserved debunking. In the April edition of Scientific American; The 19th-century creators of neoclassical economics—the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating activities in the global market system—are credited with transforming their field into a scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that these now legendary economists—William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Maria Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto—developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete. Unfortunately, it is clear that neoclassical economics has also become outdated. The theory is based on unscientific assumptions that are hindering the implementation of viable economic solutions for global warming and other menacing environmental problems.

City Subpoenas Creator of Text Messaging Code

Now see, it wasn't necessary to bring Kwame into the mix, but I just couldn't help myself;

the idea for TXTmob evolved from conversations about how police departments were adopting strategies to counter large-scale marches that converged at a single spot.

While preparing for the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston, some demonstrators decided to plan decentralized protests in which small, mobile groups held rallies and roamed the streets.

“The idea was to create a very dynamic, fluid environment,” Mr. Hirsch said. “We wanted to transform areas around the entire city into theaters of dissent.”

Organizers wanted to enable people in different areas to spread word of what they were seeing in each spot and to coordinate their movements. Mr. Hirsch said that he wrote the TXTmob code over about two weeks. After a trial run in Boston during the Democratic National Convention, the service was in wide use during the Republican convention in New York. Hundreds of people went to the TXTmob Web site and joined user groups at no charge.

As a result, when members of the War Resisters League were arrested after starting to march up Broadway, or when Republican delegates attended a performance of “The Lion King” on West 42nd Street, a server under a desk in Cambridge, Mass., transmitted messages detailing the action, often while scenes on the streets were still unfolding.

Messages were exchanged by self-organized first-aid volunteers, demonstrators urging each other on and even by people in far-flung cities who simply wanted to trade thoughts or opinions with those on the streets of New York. Reporters began monitoring the messages too, looking for word of breaking news and rushing to spots where mass arrests were said to be taking place.

And Mr. Hirsch said he thought it likely that police officers were among those receiving TXTmob messages on their phones.

It is difficult to know for sure who received messages, but an examination of police surveillance documents prepared in 2003 and 2004, and unsealed by a federal magistrate last year, makes it clear that the authorities were aware of TXTmob at least a month before the Republican convention began.

Text is forever...,

Sociometric Reality Mining

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, ­Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

The Journal of Social Structure

As above, so below, as within, so without;

Social Network Analysis [1] is an approach to studying organisations focusing on analysing the networks of relationships between people and/or groups as the most important aspect. Going back at least to the 1950's, it is characterised by adopting mathematical techniques especially from graph theory [2, 3]. It has applications in organisational psychology, sociology, and anthropology. An excellent overview of the field is given by Wasserman and Faust [1].

Social Network Analysis provides an avenue for analysing and comparing formal and informal information flows in an organisation, as well as comparing information flows with officially defined work processes. We are interested in applying Social Network Analysis to military organisations, and especially to military headquarters ranging from brigade to national strategic levels.

An important aspect of Social Network Analysis is the visualisation of communication and other relationships between people and/or groups, by means of diagrams. Visualisation of Social Networks has a long tradition, and an excellent historical survey is given by Freeman [4]. Visualisation of Social Networks is important because of the complexity of organisational structure, and the need for good visual representations of how an organisation functions.

A second aspect is the study of factors which influence relationships, for example the age, background, and training of the people involved. Studying the correlations between relationships is also important, since it offers insights into the reasons why relationships exists. These studies can be done using traditional statistical techniques such as correlation, analysis of variance, and factor analysis, but also require appropriate visualisation techniques.

The ultimate goal of Social Network Analysis is often to draw out implications of the relational data, in order to make recommendations to improve communication and workflow in an organisation. This is the major motivation for our Social Network Analysis programme. In previous work [5, 6, 7], we have applied Social Network Analysis to military organisations. In the course of this work, we have found conceptual distance to be the most useful construct in explaining relationships. This is partly because the human brain is skilled at thinking about and visually judging distances. In this paper we argue the benefits of using conceptual distance for analysing Social Networks, and demonstrate how to do so using a case study.

Table of Contents for the Journal in its entirety.

Gurdjieff's Theory of Laughter

This is about Jill Bolte Taylor, Shirley Q. Liquor, Cognitive Dissonance, and the American Tradition.

What It Do;

Gurdjieff offers us a theory of laughter, independent of any state of amusement (= humor), that nevertheless distinguishes between laughter as a physiological response and the organismic cause of it, which he also calls “laughter.” This organismic variable (O), though not necessarily the same as humor, is shown to be a complex structure that is radically different from the visible laughter that results from it. Since his conception of O, though outlined in a most rudimentary and concise form, provides us the basis of the most viable theory of humor that we have been able to elaborate and immediately brings into relief some of the most conspicuous features of this humor-theory, we find it both convenient and opportune to begin with his succinct formulation of the structure of the organismic variable responsible for both humor and laughter. The passage on laughter is reproduced below in full and much of this thesis may be considered to be a systematic interpretation of his theory of laughter, its integration into a general theory of humor, and a sustained exploration of its consequences in various domains. We shall ignore his references to other aspects of his system such as his theory of yawning, of accumulators, centers, and so on, except insofar as they are relevant to our proper understanding of humor.

The framed web presentation is very cumbersome, but the analysis is on point and is the likes of which you will never encounter in the ordinary literature....,

Gurdjieff’s Theory of Laughter

1. Though only a theory of laughter, and not of humor, it distinguishes between the binary-structured organismic variable (O) and its physiological resolution (R). O provides the basis of the most viable theory of humor even while preserving its link with laughter (R).

2. R is the discarding of superfluous energy due to O: an unstable structural opposition between two sharply contrasting simultaneous impressions, positive and negative, of a single stimulus (S). It is not the particular contents—cognitive, affective or motor—but the binary structure of the mutual neutralization that determines O.

3. R is pleasurable due to relief from tension and not due to amusement (as in humor); O may nevertheless have a painful element.

4. Though the convulsion O may be unerringly registered by the subject, the constituents and even structure of O may remain unspecifiable.

5. This laughter mechanism releases possibly pre-existing negative emotions through the negative component of O. Thus, culturally it is a ‘luxury reflex,’ simultaneously valorized for the relative freedom from fundamental biological instincts it provides and also devalorized for its necessary dependence on the same. Marks the ambivalent threshold between nature and culture.

6. Laughter being infectious, R in another can act independently of S for one’s own laughter (parastha-hâsa). Similarly, another’s laughter induces one to perceive the real S in terms of O.

7. The possibility and frequency of O’s occurrence is doubly determined: both by the effectiveness of the stimulus (S) and the subjective state of the individual (also his psychic constitution).

8. [61] Gurdjieff’s ‘behaviorizing’ theory of the psychology of the ordinary modern man is perfectly compatible with the traditional ‘psychology’ underlying brahmanical philosophy; just as the reversal of the ‘behavioral circuit,’ the finality of his system, is the counterpart of the ‘autonomy’ (svâtantrya) of the Trika ‘metapsychology.’ It is within this combined theoretical framework that humor-and-laughter, hâsa-and-hâsya, will be investigated in their universality.

9. Hâsa classified as a pleasant emotion despite the neutral character of O, because the resulting laughter (R) is pleasant.

10. Reduction of Freud’s ‘comic of movement’ to Gurdjieff’s ‘laughter in the moving-instinctive center.’

Stop Alien Abductions

The thought screen helmet

The thought screen helmet has effectively stopped several types of aliens from abducting or controlling humans. Only two failures from standard thought screen helmets have been reported since 1998 for people being abducted by aliens themselves. A third failure in 2005 was from a cloth helmet with a smaller area of Velostat which had a Velcro strap which was easily removed by an alien-human hybrid.

A fourth failure was with a frail woman who had her helmet removed by two alien-human hybrids who snuck up behind her, tackled her and forcedly removed it. The helmet still works for people being abducted by aliens, but not by their alien-human hybrids who are now integrating into our societies. blocks telepathic communication between aliens and humans. Aliens cannot immobilize people wearing thought screens nor can they control their minds or communicate with them using their telepathy. When aliens can't communicate or control humans, they do not take them.

Cognitive Dissonance Incompatible With Collective Psychology

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological state that describes the uncomfortable feeling between what one holds to be true and what one knows to be true. Similar to ambivalence, the term cognitive dissonance describes conflicting thoughts or beliefs (cognitions) that occur at the same time, or when engaged in behaviors that conflict with one's beliefs. In academic literature, the term refers to attempts to reduce the discomfort of conflicting thoughts, by performing actions that are opposite to one's beliefs.

In simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one's beliefs. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where "cognition" is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.

Shirley Q. Liquor

Charles Knipp is a self-described forty-five-year-old, fat, gay white man who believes he's on a mission from God. A mission that involves mimicking Black women as his alter ego character Shirley Q. Liquor.

The character is a favorite among his core audience whom Knipp describes as being “gay men, their moms, and rednecks.”

Some say this is not racist. Some say it's racist and are working to have it banned. It's clearly part of an American tradition going back generations.

What say you?

Fist tap to UCBM for posting on the American Tradition

The Krell

The Krell were natives of the planet Altair IV in the science fiction film Forbidden Planet. Two thousand centuries ago, their race died out when they completed their project to gain freedom from "instrumentality" - that is, freedom from the use of tools and devices. A Great Machine would instead, read their thoughts and instantly make them into reality. Unfortunately, the 8,000 cubic mile (33,000 km³) machine they created for this purpose also gave physical form to all of their subconscious hatreds - unfamiliar emotions that had seemingly been eradicated from their society, monsters from the id, and killed them all in the space of a single night. The unstoppable machine committed genocide.




The Krell were highly intelligent and cultured and their culture long-lived, having even visited Earth long before Man became a tool-user.

Unfortunately, eons of peaceful existence made them forget their baser selves, which ultimately destroyed a great civilization as it was about to achieve its apex.

Human history is littered with analogs to Krell self-destruction. Our present moment is one such instance, amplified by the industrial scale power of modern human civilization.

The Right Brain vs Left Brain Test ...

I'm not sure this is valid, but I'm curious just the same. Please click on the image and go to the source article where the animated .gif works (unlike here at blogger)

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Come back here and report your results. Thanks.

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

The Forbidden Planet

Synopsis; An expedition is sent from Earth to Altair in the constellation of Aquilae (some 17 light years from Earth) to discover what happened to a colony of settlers on its fourth planet, Altair-4. What they discover is how and why an alien race of geniuses (The Krell) destroyed itself overnight while leaving their technology intact at some point in the distant, distant past.

This is of course one of the greatest movies of all time. Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still set the mold for much else that would follow in the sci-fi genre. Both films set the bar very, very high for storytelling in the realm of humankind's possible psychological development.

It's a Heat Up...,

Mark Morford in the SF Gate;

So maybe the real question is not can we return to our former ill-gotten superpower glory, insular and unparalleled and reckless and arrogant, or even peaceful and defensive and ironclad. The true question is,

Some say this pain, this fiscal crisis, this enormous instability will last a few years. Some say no way, it will be at least a generation or two before we can right this ship of state again, so deep are the wounds and so insane is our national debt and so violent the damage to our reputation, our identity, our enfeebled infrastructure. But I'm more with those who say, no, the truth is we will never truly recover, that America's former ranking as Gilded and Irreproachable Empire No. 1 is dead and gone. India and China are dramatically changing the game, peak oil is nigh, fresh water is the new gold, the planet itself is in paroxysm, Mother Nature is quickly revealing her hand — or rather, maybe just that one big, stormy middle finger.

But maybe this is the best news of all. Because the sort of gluttonous empire Bush so disgustingly represented was doomed to failure. The center could not hold. Dubya may not have hastened the apocalypse like the evangelicals desperately prayed he would, but he certainly is hastening the end of the bloviated American ego.

and there I had the audacity to hope that my dissenting critique was at least a little bit radical...,

fist tap to UCBM for the banging atomic bird graphic.

Subreal to Hypereal

My man E.C. Hopkins tugged my sleeve last night about a NPR story on Moises Naim “Can the World Afford a Middle Class?”The interview is online at NPR. We introduced Moises Naim's thesis hereabouts on February 9th.

This morning, I was made aware that the Wall Street Journal saw fit on Monday to grudgingly make its readers aware of what's around that signpost just up ahead;

Today the old fears are back.

Although a Malthusian catastrophe is not at hand, the resource constraints foreseen by the Club of Rome are more evident today than at any time since the 1972 publication of the think tank's famous book, "The Limits of Growth." Steady increases in the prices for oil, wheat, copper and other commodities -- some of which have set record highs this month -- are signs of a lasting shift in demand as yet unmatched by rising supply.

As the world grows more populous -- the United Nations projects eight billion people by 2025, up from 6.6 billion today -- it also is growing more prosperous. The average person is consuming more food, water, metal and power. Growing numbers of China's 1.3 billion people and India's 1.1 billion are stepping up to the middle class, adopting the high-protein diets, gasoline-fueled transport and electric gadgets that developed nations enjoy.

The result is that demand for resources has soared. If supplies don't keep pace, prices are likely to climb further, economic growth in rich and poor nations alike could suffer, and some fear violent conflicts could ensue.

Given the market's dependence on psychology, I can understand their reticence to report reality, but in this case, the reality correction comes long after some painful market corrections with many more such shocking jolts yet to come.

Much More Than Race: What Makes a Great Speech Great

Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff weighs in on the subrealist artistry of Barack Obama's conciliatory Rev. Wright speech.

As a linguist, I am tempted to describe the surface features: the intonation, the meter, the grammatical parallelisms, the choice of words. These contribute to eloquence. I'm sure the linguistics community will jump in and do that analysis. Instead, I want to talk about the structure of ideas.

Any framing study begins with communicative framing, the context. Contextual frames carry ideas. Senator Obama is patriotic, and had to communicate not only the fact of his patriotism, but also the content of it. And he had to do it in a way that fit unquestionable and shared American values. Where did he give his speech kicking off his Pennsylvania campaign? Not in Scranton or Pittsburgh or Hershey, but in Philadelphia, home of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and at once home of one of America's largest African American communities. What building was it in? Constitution Hall. How did he appear onstage? Surrounded by flags. He is tall and thin, as were the flagstaffs, which were about the same height. He was visually one with the flag, one with America. No picture of him could be taken without a flag shaped like him, without an identification of man and country.

This is the first of a series by George Lakoff on The New Politics. Barack Obama's March 18, 2008 speech was about much more than race. It outlined a new politics that many Americans-candidates at all levels, activists, and ordinary citizens-have been speaking and writing about, and yearning for, for years. It is a politics that goes beyond the electoral horserace to the deepest questions about what America is as a nation and who we Americans are as people.

GI's and the Great Depression

The Bonus Army was an assemblage of about 17,000 World War I veterans, accompanied by their families and other affiliated groups, who demonstrated in Washington, DC, during the spring and summer of 1932. The marchers were seeking immediate cash payment of Service Certificates granted eight years previously by the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. Each Service Certificate issued to a qualified soldier bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment plus interest. The sticking point was that the certificates, similar to bonds, were set to mature a full 20 years from the date of their original issue. Thus, under existing law, the certificates could not be redeemed until 1945.

The Bonus Army veterans were led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant, and were encouraged in their demand for immediate monetary payment by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time. The marchers were cleared and their camps were destroyed by the 12th Infantry Regiment from Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment under the command of Major George S. Patton from Fort Myer, Virginia, under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur. The Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the U.S. military from being used for general law enforcement purposes in most instances, did not apply to Washington, DC, because it is one of several pieces of federal property under the direct governance of the U.S. Congress (United States Constitution, Article I. Section 8. Clause 17). Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a member of MacArthur's staff, had strong reservations about the operation. Troops carrying rifles with unsheathed bayonets and tear gas were sent into the Bonus Army's camps. President Hoover did not want the army to march across the Anacostia River into the protesters' largest encampment, but Douglas MacArthur felt this was a communist attempt to overthrow the government. Hundreds of veterans were injured, several were killed, including William Hushka and Eric Carlson; a wife of a veteran miscarried, and other casualties were inflicted. The visual image of U.S. armed soldiers confronting poor veterans of the recent Great War set the stage for Veteran relief and eventually the Veterans Administration.

About Smedley Butler

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "The Fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.

During his 34 years of Marine Corps service, Butler was awarded numerous medals for heroism including the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (the highest Marine medal at its time for officers), and subsequently the Medal of Honor twice. Notably, he is one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and one of only three to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor, and the only person to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two different actions.

In addition to his military career, Smedley Butler was noted for his outspoken anti-interventionist views, and his book War is a Racket. His book was one of the first works describing the workings of the military-industrial complex and after retiring from service, he became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s.

In 1934, he informed the United States Congress that a group of wealthy industrialists had plotted a military coup known as the Business Plot to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

War on Culture

The contrived Wright-Obama controversy mirrors - in domestic microcosm - a much larger and deadlier war in which the west has gotten itself embroiled. It is an intrinsically evil war which cannot be won in conventional terms.

Alastair Crooke in the Guardian;Calls for the west to use force to restore its values in the face of radical Islam reveal a profound detachment from reality.

Once, a man was held to be mad if he strayed from this discourse - even if his utterings were credited with revealing some hidden truth. Today, he is called "naive", or accused of having gone "native". Recently, the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) marshalled former senior military and intelligence experts in order to assert such limits to expression by warning us that "deference" to multiculturalism was undermining the fight against Islamic "extremism" and threatening security.

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in a recent interview with a German magazine, embellished Rusi's complaints of naivety and "flabby thinking". Radical Islam won't stop, he warned, and the "virus" would only become more virulent if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.

The charge of naivety is not limited to failing to understand the concealed and duplicitous nature of Hamas and Hizbullah, Iran and Syria; it extends to not grasping the true nature of the wider "enemy" the west is facing. "I don't like the term 'war on terror' because terror is a method, not a political movement; we are in a war against radical Islam," says Kissinger. But who or what is radical Islam? It is those who are not "moderates", he explains. Certainly, a small minority of Muslims believe that only by "burning the system" can a fresh stab at a just society be made. But Kissinger's definition of "moderate" Islam sounds no more than a projection of the Christian narrative after Westphalia, by which Christianity became a private matter of conscience, rather than an organisational principle for society.

If radical Islam, with which these experts tell us we should be at war, encompasses all those who are not enamoured of secular society, and who espouse a vision of their societies grounded in the values of Islam, then these experts are advocating a war with Islam - because Islam is the vision for their future favoured by many Muslims.

Mainstream Islamists are indeed challenging western secular and materialist values, and many do believe that western thinking is flawed - that the desires and appetites of man have been reified into representing man himself. It is time to re-establish values that go beyond "desires and wants", they argue.

Many Islamists also reject the western narrative of history and its projection of inevitable "progress" towards a secular modernity; they reject the western view of power-relationships within societies and between societies; they reject individualism as the litmus of progress in society; and, above all, they reject the west's assumption that its empirical approach lends unassailability and objective rationality to its thinking - and universality to its social models.

People may, or may not, agree, but the point is that this is a dispute about ideas, about the nature of society, and about equity in an emerging global order. If western discourse cannot step beyond the enemy that it has created, these ideas cannot be heard - or addressed. The west's vision for society holds power only so long as people believe it holds power. Do we really think that if force has not succeeded, that only more and greater force can restore belief in the western vision?

The Political Assassination of Eliot Spitzer?

While I know that right cortical hemispheres have ways and means of signalling and collaborating with one another, somewhat unbeknownst to left hemispheric narratization, I tend to be somewhat of a conspiracy skeptic. F'zample, in the matter of the disgrace of former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, I have commented elsewhere that if that reflected a plan, it was a plan executed exclusively at the level of his bank which pretended to value its stringent regulatory compliance over its lucrative relationship with a prestigious, very high net worth banking client. Once Spitzer's bank threw it's report over the fence to the IRS, it was all downhill from there - as the IRS criminal investigation division is systemically incented to respond to a report of this nature. What do you think?

Black Swans Everywhere

Black swan theory - In Nassim Nicholas Taleb's definition, a black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—"undirected" and unpredicted. He gives the September 11, 2001 attacks as an example of a Black Swan event.

The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.

James Howard Kunstler brings the hard-line on what's beyond that signpost up ahead;

It's too bad the current presidential candidates have been unable to address the unfolding economic nightmare. Their collective silence on the matter suggests that they don't have a clue what to say about it. As the nightmare plays out and black swans flock in to blot out the sun, and the hedge funds come a'tumbling down, and more big banks blunder into black holes, and businesses big and small across the land shutter up their operations, and the unemployment rolls swell, and families are thrown out of their houses even when bailouts are supposed to be saving them (but the bureaucracy can't get the paperwork done in time) -- well now, they are going to be one pissed off bunch of people. What will they do at the conventions? Our outside the conventions?

In the deeper background of all this is the all-important oil story that nobody in politics or the media wants to pay attention to. Notice that in the fervid unloading of assets this past week, as investors dumped their positions in the commodities markets, the price of oil remained stubbornly above $100-a-barrel when it was all over on Thursday afternoon.

Brace yourselves friends, Kunstler doesn't pull any punches. If you don't want to know what's going on, don't click the link and read his essay. I echo his concluding sentiment, however "It will be interesting to see what new machinations are unveiled this week. Whatever else this catastrophe is, it's a good show from the cheap seats."

Power Struggles in Tehran and Washington

Current Dar Al Hayat Analysis;

Who is, politically, in better shape? Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad or his implacable opponent, U.S. President George W Bush? Both leaders are conservative hawks. Both have recently crushed dissent at home and imposed their authority. But both face very considerable difficulties - political, economic and strategic.[...]One way and another, Iran seems better placed than the United States to retain and exercise long-term influence in the Gulf region. Once America's troops return home, and its calamitous neo-colonial adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are brought to a close - as they must be sooner or later -- Iran will be the neighbour with whom the Arabs will have to live, trade, work and coexist. Geography cannot be denied.

Fueling the Fourth Reich

I've been tricked, duped, hoodwinked and bamboozled. Back in February, I suffered a momentary lapse of judgement. Without following the hype to its ultimate source, I erroneously surmised that perhaps the USAF was on the cusp of a new era of conservation and alternative energy development. I was mistaken. Instead of charting a new course for the future of American energy security, the USAF is mining the ignominious past to bring Nazi and apartheid South African coal gasification into peak production as the mainstay of American energy security. The USAF is going to further enrich Sasol and set a grim mold for future American energy security. It is an endless and profound irony that the American military - and by extension America itself - is compelled to stake its energy future on methods devised and depended upon by the world's most evil and hated regimes.

It's not at all hyperbolic to observe that the apartheid regime picked up where the Nazis left off when it came to producing gasoline from coal. Nazism, apartheid, and international sanctions created a fuel source that might never have existed in a better world.

The circuitous travels of the Fischer-Tropsch process, a chemical technique to convert natural gas and coal into liquid fuels, provide an object lesson in historical irony. Used by the Nazis to make oil from coal during World War II, it was commercialized by the century's second-most-odious racial supremacist regime in the 1950s through South Africa's state energy company. Now, that privatized company, Sasol, may help liberate Western democracies (and non-Western ones, like India) from the grip of crude oil produced largely by loathsome authoritarian regimes.

Sasol is the ExxonMobil of South Africa, though its annual sales of about $10 billion are around what Exxon Mobil does in about 10 days. With 30,000 employees, including the largest number of Ph.D.s of any company in the Southern Hemisphere, Sasol is one of South Africa's largest employers. It produces about 38 percent of South Africa's fuel needs and accounts for about 4.4 percent of the country's GDP.

As the US Air Force continues engine testing in a drive to quench its huge thirst for fuel with synthetic blends, pioneering energy company Sasol of South Africa is nearing approval of a 100% synthetic jet fuel. Airlines are looking to coal-to-liquid and gas-to-liquid fuels as drop-in replacements for expensive and finite petrol­eum, and global development of facilities to produce these alternative jet fuels is well underway. Coal - the jet fuel of the future.....,

Are Jeremiah Wright's Sermons Blameworthy?

Considered in context, are Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons blameworthy in the manner warranting Barack Obama's disavowel of his words and distancing of himself from the man?

Jeremiah Wright..,

Truth beats the hell out of fiction EVERY SINGLE TIME....,














Hat tip to Truth About Trinity United Church of Christ

When Reality is Too Much

We humbly yield the floor to Manuel Garcia Jr.

Obama and the Psychic Auto-Shrink-Wrapping Called Race in America

Garcia has eviscerated the entire ersatz spectacle of political theater with such clinical aplomb - that everything else is reduced to mere conversation. The situation has gotten so deep and so orthogonal to our normative routine, that I feel obliged to provide the following complicated disclaimer;

(Though Garcia is sharply critical - I remain an Obama supporter because I find the folly of war with Iran, and, the sheer moral horror of what the Clintons may be fronting, far more radically repellent than business as usual. Having asserted throughout the democrat nominating process that Obama's primary value is as a psychological rorschach test for America, I believe that this dimension of his candidacy exhibits an emergent vector of an unanticipated magnitude. I am keenly interested in seeing where this emergent vector leads.)

commentary on racism is most incisive when it keeps its focus on the economic dimension -- which I believe is central -- rather than the emotionalism about "hate" wallowed in to excess by infotainment for the unthinking. It is better to focus on the intent and the purposes of the racism, which are to create and maintain economic disparities. From such focal points, one can advance policy and law enforcement arguments to eliminate these imbalances. Then, you are speaking about the here and now in a clear, unvarnished and rational manner. This can be extremely hard-hitting without being pitiful and cloying. This is in the spirit of Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, and that is momentum, that is self-respect, that is pride. If we got enough of this, it might also be revolution.

Yes, there is White-on-Black racism (along with many other forms), but its root is not primarily simple emotional hatred, rather it is both fear (of two kinds: xenophobia and the historical guilt over slavery that Thomas Jefferson admitted to) and greed. The mania for control is driven by greed, and the essential fear is the anxiety over the loss of that control. Ascribing White-on-Black racism to simple emotional hatred is the most comfortable overt explanation, as is clear from its prominence in the depictions of racism in popular culture (e.g., movies). The dominant culture finds it comforting to imagine that racism is confined to people with ungovernable hatreds and undisciplined minds. This relieves the majority who are comfortable with inequitable economic arrangements from any responsibility for the inevitable consequences of those arrangements; and even from any reproach in the eyes of recognized public opinion.

Racism is an instinctive tool to capture resources and deny them to competitor "species." This is why Obama is backed by the Wall Street bankers. To them, he is a tool to safeguard their fortunes against the rising tide of public resentment. They are excellent psychologists, and psychic abusers of the popular Black mind. They know, through their experts in PR (advertising and the management of the public mind), how the popular Black mind pines for symbols of "hope," for action heros on basketball courts and on the big screen -- Will Smith saving the fantasy worlds Hollywood conjures with smoke and mirrors. Any hero in any arena can be produced to distract and quell the masses, so long as it is not an actual hero in any arena of actual power.

Look at our Black "symbols" in those real arenas today: Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell; they've done precious little for Blacks in America, and have cashed in handsomely for precisely that reason. Most blacks are "supporting" (deluding themselves over) Obama for the same reason that older spoiled whiney white women are "supporting" Hillary: identification, they want what they see in the mirror to be honored, to be loved, to get attention, to be in control.

Obama may have some decent intentions beyond his blatant careerism, but clearly the careerism is primary, and for that he must reassure his sponsors that he can quell the public. The job he is applying for is to keep public affairs calm enough so the same select businesses and the same select gamesters can continue to make the same government-backed mega-profits. In business circles, this is called "maintaining a stable business environment." Obama says "change" but his sponsors know this to mean "stability." "Change" is what we'll get from the billions we are forced to pay into taxes and inflated prices that profit all too few.

It can appear to get very heated out here in the blogosphere. But fret not, that heat you think you feel is purely an artifact of your imagination. This is only text. As you read it, that voice you hear in your head is your own. If what it says to you makes you feel an uncomfortable friction, good. Use that friction and its accompanying heat to light up your own "work" toward understanding the reality of the situation in which we are embedded.