Psychopolitik 2.0

Mainstream media has plenty of flaws, but for me the worst one is that the requirement to reach a relatively wide audience begs of the medium a complete lack of context. For example, this article on Ben Bernanke, the new Fed chairman…

Congress should address the growing cost of entitlement programs in the federal budget to assure financial markets and give people time to adjust and plan their retirement, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday…

“It’s important to get that going soon, first of all to assure financial markets that Congress will be responsible and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, to give people the time they need to plan for retirement and make provisions based on any changes that you might decide to make,” Bernanke told the U.S. Senate Banking Committee in his first appearance before that chamber as Fed chief.

“The widening deficits over a period of years will reduce national savings, will probably exacerbate the current account deficit, may raise interest rates and will probably inhibit the dynamism of the economy,” he said.

Hooooo boy….let’s break this down, in reverse for the hell of it:

The national savings rate is already statistically ZERO — or BELOW according to some measurements. On average, when we pay for everything we get there is no money left, we dip into debt. This isn’t because of a recent shift, but because a long time ago the decision was made to emphasize (read: promote via government intervention) consumption. Chunks of industry were rampantly subsidized, policies were drawn up w/ the intent of making deliberate debt OK, & — here’s the key — the value of our money was changed from being at least partially backed up by gold to being backed up by….nothing. Thus, whenever the government felt like we weren’t spending money quick enough, they fired up the printing presses, stuffing the economy with “liquidity”.

Retirement planning? With what? People have been coming up with the thought in their head that saving is a handicap to having a comfortable life, if enough people had broken this cycle then we wouldn’t even be discussing entitlements, most wouldn’t be getting them anyway.

There’s the rub: the popular culture has been indoctrinated for decades to believe that what they did didn’t matter, they could always spend more, & in the end Big Brother would take care of them. Is it any wonder that such folks — even the ones that rant rhetorically about “big government” — vote for whoever promises them the largest free lunch? They outleap their wallet frequently, as they’ve been trained to do.

Logan Ferre reads the New York Times so you don’t have to, & shares with us the following:

New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

So this land, land that is rhetorically referred to as “public” despite it being held captive by the State, is being handed off for pumping at no cost. Gee, how convenient.

This is a perfect example of the problem with referring to government property as “public”. If it were public in the true sense of the word (i.e.: owned by the entirety of the people in the area) then whether they could get oil from there would be a matter of weighing their desires & the impact fulfilling them would have in comparison to what others might want to do on the land. Then, even if it was decided they could drill there then depending on the attitude of the ones in the area, they might ask to be compensated for the use of it. So, what is relevant here isn’t the outcome — for all we know, a different setup might’ve still allowed the drilling & pumping — but the process used. True “public” property brings to mind an entirely different structure.

Instead, an arm of the administration simply decided “sure, go ahead and get that oil! We won’t even charge!”, Thus Spoke Bushathusta.

Oil companies, already subsidized to ridiculous lengths, can just have at it on “public” land. Yet just try skipping a tax payment….

If the contradiction were recognized, then there’d be no such thing as “federal territory”, & people would be free to either allow or disallow whatever they wanted on their land, & if they allowed it they could charge for it. Easing up on one use of resources in deliberate spite of all others isn’t lessening government, it’s just shifting it onto other people. Makes about as much sense as trying to trick a scale into thinking you lost weight by standing on it w/ only one foot.

tags: US+politics, Oil, natural+resources]]>

The following will be all I’ll say about that:

-it served to bump serious issues aside in the media, so even if it was accidental it was beneficial to the administration.
-Dick Cheney seems like the type of person who would try to shoot someone & claim it was an accident. Not saying it was intentional, just that he’s the type to do that. Until I see a motive I’m not gonna say it was on purpose.
-it was yet another in a long line of true stories that sound so absurd that the jokes write themselves. This was like Christmas for comedians.

And with that, I leave you some expert testimony. Mr Knapp, take it away:

…let’s take a sober look at it. As a lifelong shooter, a graduate of the NRA’s hunter safety course when I was a kid, and a former Marine Corps marksmanship instructor who has conducted firearms safety training and served as a range safety NCO, I think I have my ticket punched to talk about this:

If you shoot someone, it’s not an “accident.” Period. It’s one of three things: It’s intentional, it’s negligent, or it’s a sign that the shooter is not competent to be handling a gun.

I don’t have to like Cheney to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he a) didn’t mean to shoot his friend and b) didn’t shoot his friend because he was being careless. But giving him the benefit of the doubt on those two counts narrows it down: Cheney isn’t competent.

Bush should look on the bright side: if he screwed up with a gun he’d probably shoot himself instead of someone else.

tags: Dick+Cheney]]>

independance!”

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald should investigate Vice President Dick Cheney and others in the CIA leak probe if they authorized an aide to give secret information to reporters, Democratic and Republican senators said Sunday. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called the leak of intelligence information “inappropriate” if it is true that unnamed “superiors” instructed Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to divulge the material on Iraq.

Sen. George Allen, R-Va., said a full investigation is necessary. “I don’t think anybody should be releasing classified information, period, whether in the Congress, executive branch or some underling in some bureaucracy,” said Allen, who appeared with Reed on “Fox News Sunday.” (emphasis mine)

This isn’t one of the so-called “mavericks” — McCain or one of the New England centrists — saying that. Allen is about as much of a loyal Bushite as you can find. Even if it’s a campaign trick, this says a lot. If there was a wave of pressure from within the GOP to deal with such blatant violations then the administration would lose the ability to claim every criticism was “partisan”, whether it comes because of principles or because of necessity in an election year (I personally suspect it’ll largely be the latter) that’ll be a net plus.

tags: US+politics, Republican+party, Dick+Cheney, George+Allen]]>

We all know that this is about more than some drawings. It’s actually about a concept we’re familiar with to an extent in the US: the idea that religious belief requires you to enforce your values on people who do not follow it. The ones raising a stink aren’t just “offended”, they don’t merely have hurt feelings. They’re effectively saying “How DARE you operate by rules other than those of Allah!”. Note the assumption central to this view:

Saudi Arabia’s top cleric called on the world’s Muslims to reject apologies for the “slanderous” caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed and demanded the authors and publishers of the cartoons be tried and punished, Saudi newspapers reported Saturday….

Speaking to hundreds of faithful at his Friday sermon, Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Seedes, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, called on the international community to enact laws that condemn insults against the prophet and holy sites.

“Where is the world with all its agencies and organizations? Is there only freedom of expression when it involves insults to Muslims? With one voice…we will reject the apology and demand a trial,” Al Riyad, a Saudi daily newspaper, quoted al-Seedes as saying. (emphasis mine)

This guy & his followers have a completely different interpretation of human rights than anyone of the West does. We’ve known that rights aren’t things that are granted to us from above by government, but abilities inherent by nature, & that the SOLE arguement for force if deemed necessary is to defend the use of those abilities. The “sheik” believes that there is no natural state of freedom, only rules & regulations that us infidels arbitrarily throw together in denial.

Oddly enough, this type of outburst actually shows how large of a gulf we’re being expected to cross by our neo-imperialist spreading-democracy-by-the-sword leaders. Here, only the lunatic fringe would call for legislation against some type of drawing, & our religious nuts even have a different arguement: rather than saying outright that freedom of speech doesn’t exist, they just have an extremely narrow definition of “speech”. To the popular way of looking at society in the middle east, most of our nuts are downright “moderate”.

This is undeniable: any movement towards political reform in the muslim world MUST take into account the degree to which religion & rights cross paths, or it will fail no matter what. A society in which a majority of people favor death for a drawing is not a democracy worth constructing.

tags: religious+extremism, muslim+cartoon, democracy, foreign+policy]]>

all over it, as usual…

Y’know, as common as it is for people to portray libertarians as being “paranoid”, the gradual uptick in this kind of stuff suggests to me that “they” are more woried than we are. I mean, c’mon, SWAT teams becoming a regular thing for the most mundane calls, urban warfare training in areas that couldn’t possibly pass for places where it’d take place (I haven’t been to Virginia, but something tells me it looks nothing like Iraq…), the military taking on policing duties…if that all doesn’t add up to a “Holy Crap!” moment I dunno what does.

Speaking of military policing, earlier today while flipping through channels I caught a CNN anchor — Kate something, some redhead chick — sloppily segueing into a mention of General Honore (sp?), the guy that ended up in charge of New Orleans when martial law was being imposed there. The way she did it got me: she favorably compared him to John Wayne & GIGGLED about it.

The more I see garbage like that, the more often I consider erasing every channel from my TV that does not show either Emeril, sports, or Law & Order. I get my news online anyway.

tags: police+misconduct, US+politics, US+military, US+constitution]]>

“monthly” surplus, despite that not being the number that matters:

The federal government ran a $21 billion budget surplus last month, the best January showing in four years, as both spending and tax receipts set records for the month.

The Treasury Department said the government spent $209 billion last month, a record amount for January and up 7.9 percent from January 2005. Government tax receipts, however, also set a record for the month of $230 billion, up 13.7 percent from January 2005.

You can tell how this could be exploited. Next thing you know you’d be seeing stories on the evening news raving about the “surplus” of last month, & in many minds the line between the end of defecit spending & a simple shift of spending to other months would be blurred.

tags: US+politics]]>

maybe that should change:

More than half of the US “war on terror” detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prison camp never committed any “hostile acts” against the United States, two lawyers said in a report.

Based on an analysis of government documents regarding the more than 500 people held at the US naval prison facility, lawyers Mark Denbeaux and Joshua Denbeaux estimated that 55 percent “are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies”.

Moreover, they said that only eight percent of the detainees were characterized in the documents as Al-Qaeda fighters, while 60 “are detained merely because they are ‘associated with’ a group or groups the (US) government asserts are terrorist organizations”. (emphasis mine)

I remember reading a story awhile back about someone who was turned in to coalition forces by an ex-associate because the guy owed him money for something. Sounded like a bad joke at the time….guess not.

Besides, I still don’t quite get this whole detaining shit. If they’re hostile then why risk more by trying to capture them at all? If they aren’t, then they don’t know anything anyway, why keep ‘em?

tags: War+on+terror, Guantanamo+Bay]]>

ToonGate:

The president spoke out about the controversy for the first time, signaling deepening White House concern about violent protests stemming from the publication of caricatures in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten and reprinted in European media and elsewhere in the past week.

“We reject violence as a way to express discontent with what may be printed in a free press,” the president said.

At the same time, Bush admonished the press that its freedom comes with “the responsibility to be thoughtful about others.” (emphasis mine)

You mean like how the US media was “thoughtful” in not blowing open the story on warrantless wire-tapping of US citizens while Bush was running for re-election? Heh….but enough about that for now.

As encouraging as our foreign policy is towards religious extremists (look how much more success they’ve had in the middle east), this type of implicit acceptance of the idea of applying your values to people that obviously do not follow them adds fuel to a suspicion I’ve had for awhile: the pumping up of thumpery may be intentional. At this rate, how long until Bush starts adding behind the mention of Muhammed “peace be upon him”?

tags: Bush, muslim+cartoon, Jyllands+Posten]]>

“Hmm…gee, that’s a toughie”…

tags: Alberto+Gonzales, Bush, War+on+terror]]>