Psychopolitik 2.0

Gerri Willis, a bit ago during CNN’s “Issue #1″ — a thrown together show about the economy that’s been preempting “Your World Today” ever since the economy got Too Shitty To Ignore — immediately after a story about how 5 million people who normally don’t file tax returns haven’t claimed their “economic stimulus” checks, said the following:

“It’s free money!  I don’t get it, free money, who would they not get it?”

No Gerri, it’s not free money.  It’s a refund on tax dollars the government took previously.  It was given out under the naive assumption that giving everyone back a few hundred bucks will prompt everyone dealing with higher prices on essentials –  thanks to dollar manipulation & our economy being way more oil-centric than it should be at the WORST possible time  — to go buy a PS3.  In short, it is money they shouldn’t have had in the first place.  Free money does not come from money that used to be yours, free money would be a random stranger handing you money for no reason.

By her logic, if you get carjacked, and the culprit leaves you with the 20 dollars in your own pocket so you can catch a cab, you should be thankful, rather than being pissed off and considering getting a gun.  If she’s the best CNN can do when it comes to covering these issues, I’d hate to see who they rejected for her spot…

Spotted in the classifieds of my local paper an ad promoting a special event at this butcher shop/restaurant.  A line in the promotion mentioned a contest they were having: “Enter for chance to win 20 gallons of gas”.

…I got indifference, that’s what I got.

The Associated Press wants to charge bloggers a per-word rate to excerpt any of their content. Obviously this is the dumbest thing they could’ve possibly done, considering the traffic from clicking back the links benefits them & you can’t copyright straight-up news coverage (some have suggested that, due to this, their action is effectively an unintentional admission that their content is biased). They’ll learn, maybe the hard way, but they’ll learn.

Many bloggers, in reaction to a slight so obvious that I’ve witnessed the hell-freezes-over moment of radical libertarians AND mainstream liberals and even the far-right all being pissed off over the exact same thing, are already springing into action. Some are boycotting them, others are simply excerpting & yanking the link so they get no traffic from it, and some — Kos, for example — are excerpting as usual and openly DARING the AP to sue. However, in the course of reading on this I thought of the following:

• Their stated policy says they only charge for more than 5 words. At the same time…
• Their terms of use say you can’t use their content for the purpose of criticizing them.

So…what happens if you go the old-school movie ransom note route, take excerpts of 4 words or less from multiple articles & use the words & letters to spell out an insult to them?

Technically since they only charge once you hit 5 words from one article, they’ve already established they consider less than that to not be “use” as they interpret it. Imagine their reaction if there were a mass posting where everyone took random bits of AP articles & remixed ‘em into Fuck You posts, making it so the AP couldn’t react without destroying their argument. You used 4 words or less for each, so they can’t charge you, and if they bark about the criticism that changes it from them trying to unilaterally redefine Fair Use to outright silencing critique — which makes the anti-AP view so simple that even the least net-savvy people out there can run with it. When faced with a “choice” of either stretching the rules so hard that any judge not on crack would laugh in their faces or spreading the scorn to the general populace, they’ll crack.

It’s highly ironic that the Associated Press is doing this in the first place, considering what their role to the MSM is. Those of us with the resources, thanks to modern technology, are actually capable of scooping them on many stories, and shining light on things that the MSM won’t take seriously — or in many cases cover at all. The AP functions in principle as a news gopher for aggregate sites & newspapers that don’t feel like spending the time or money to actually do their own reporting. In the long run, we could make them entirely irrelevant, and probably will anyway. My recommendation to them in the meantime would be to enjoy their relevance while they still have it, rather than hasten its end.

The Atlantic has up an illuminating, and rather sad, article on the unintended effects of Section 8 vouchers & the move to disperse the population of the projects. First, just in case anyone has a bad memory, I’ll give a summary of how that went:

=============================

Government: “Wow, look at all this crime going on in the projects! We’ve been getting more aggressive, but it’s doing nothing, what gives?”

Sociologists: “We think it’s the concentration of poverty. Break them up and mix the neighborhoods, & they’ll learn Middle Class Values™ by osmosis.”

Government: “Eh, whatever, we’ll give it a whirl…”

~~~~~~time passes for the bureaucracy to get going~~~~~~

Random Bureaucrat (after knocking on door of project resident): “hey, you wanna move to the suburbs? We’ll help!”

Project Resident: “…interesting offer. I’ll mull it over”

Random Bureaucrat: “Oh yeah, did I mention we’re tearing these buildings down soon anyway?”

Project Resident: “Well damn, OK then.”

~~~~~vouchers get distributed, wrecking balls are swung, families are moved~~~~~~

Outlying area local resident (reading paper): “Odd, crime seems to be going up sharply. What happened?”

meanwhile…

Government: “WTF?!? Those damn eggheads said this would work! Oh well, at least we can still shoot them…”

===========================

Do read the whole thing, it’s worth it.

One interesting thing they touch on is how drastically misunderstood cultural structure among the poor is — a large part of the reason why despite all the crap that goes on in the ghetto people weren’t uniformly running for the exits (needless to say, the other part was fear of rejection wherever they DID go). Several people in the article had comments about how they had stronger bonds with people at the places they left behind, which doesn’t surprise me at all since it’s been a common theme of virtually every newer work I’ve come across on this, including Sudhir Venkatesh’s book I discussed awhile back. I would’ve thought it’d be common sense by now that taking a group that, for survival purposes, formed an insular subculture with its own rules outside what is declared as “Middle America”, and sprinkling them among a population that is predisposed to shy away from them at the LEAST, is not going to magically do away with the violence and dependency. They were already poor and isolated, making their isolation even more obvious accomplishes zilch unless your goal is to treat people like guinea pigs and get paid for it.

To me, the real issue is a relative lack of control on the part of people who want to improve their situation over just who that culture retains and who gets frozen out. Contrary to popular belief poor neighborhoods aren’t universally populated by scumbags; a few people can mark the difference between a working-class area and “tha hood”. Obvious undesirable types can undermine attempts by the rest of the population to improve their condition, and in the worst cases you get a regional Dictatorship of the Bangertariat like Sudhir described. Dealing with such a delicate concern on an internal basis is inherently a non-State task, so I feel that the possibility is there for the anti-state Left to have something helpful to contribute to the situation. After all, it’s not like the last several decades of handouts and treating them like animals has worked.

Shorter McClatchy News: “If you sincerely believe that everyone at Gitmo is a threat to the US…you have your head up your ass“.

I’m not normally one for googlebombs, but it’d be great if a search for Guantanamo Bay ended up pulling up that article.

The “No Duh” story: Iraqis don’t want a permanent U.S. presence in their country, and al-Maliki — in hopes of keeping his job — is listening:

The Bush administration’s Iraq policy suffered two major setbacks Friday when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki publicly rejected key U.S. terms for an ongoing military presence and anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for a new militia offensive against U.S. forces.

During a visit to Jordan, Maliki said negotiations over initial U.S. proposals for bilateral political and military agreements had “reached a dead end.” While he said talks would continue, his comments fueled doubts that the pacts could be reached this year, before the Dec. 31 expiration of a United Nations mandate sanctioning the U.S. role in Iraq.

The moves by two of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders underscore how the presence of U.S. troops has become a central issue for Iraqi politicians as they position themselves for provincial elections later this year. Iraqis across the political spectrum have grown intolerant of the U.S. presence, but the dominant Shiite parties — including Maliki’s Dawa party — are especially fearful of an electoral challenge from new, grass-roots groups.

That’s one unrealized quirk about the whole “spreading democracy” junk: Pandering means different things in different cultures.  For Iraq, we’re the illegal immigrants, and Sadr is Lou Dobbs in a turban.  Maliki has to shore up his base, y’know?

All that aside, I noticed something in the article that many people probably just glanced at:

Maliki’s comments came as Sadr called for a new armed wing of his Mahdi Army militia to fight U.S. troops. Sadr had ordered the militia to cease carrying weapons last August — a leading factor in the recent decline in violence — although U.S. military officials have asserted that renegade militia units have continued the fight under instructions from Iran. (emphasis mine)

The conventional stance of the mainstream media, as we know, is to take everything the government says at face value.  Military officials said Iran ordered attacks, so they pass it on, full stop.  However, in light of what they’ve been wrong about up to this point, this makes even LESS sense than it would absent the context.  So, thanks to them, someone out there is inevitably going to spot this and take it as sign that the war should cross the border — which is exactly why this comment was made.  Never mind that official encouragement of attacks by Iran would be just about the dumbest thing they could do, considering how they’ve gained something huge influence-wise through no effort on their part.  You see, thinking about why a regime we don’t like would or would not do something is for pansy latte-sipping intellectuals, real red white & blue manly men just smash things and justify it later, if at all.

Habeas Corpus is still in effect? Who knew?

A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Guantanamo Bay detainees can challenge their extended imprisonment in federal court, and struck down as inadequate an alternative review system that Congress set up.

Repudiating a key tenet of the Bush administration’s war-on-terrorism policy, the court’s 5-4 majority concluded that foreigners held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, retain the same rights as U.S. residents to seek writs of habeas corpus. The landmark ruling will permit several hundred accused enemy combatants to see the evidence that justifies their captivity.

“Some of these petitioners have been in custody for the past six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote. “Their access to the writ is necessary to determine the lawfulness of their status, even if, in the end, they do not obtain the relief they seek.”

Score one for some sort of restraint, for once. Now, this being a ruling that clashes with the Jack Bauer view of justice, the overly dramatic “doomsday scenario” criticism will be here in 3…2…1…

The court’s conservative wing — comprising Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented, at times with sharp words of its own.

“The nation will live to regret what the court has done today,” Scalia warned. (emphasis mine)

This is a sitting member of the highest court in the land, essentially accusing 5 of his colleagues of sending the US towards suicide. Think about that for a moment. He’s not saying “I think you’re wrong, and this is why” here, he’s unsubtly hinting The Downfall of Western Civilization has been triggered by allowing people being held to ask about the evidence. This is a concept that has existed in one form or another for at least 600 fucking years, yet its application gets Scalia going all Nationalist Chicken Little on us.

Nino needs his diaper changed.

Honestly, the entire “detainee” thing is muddled and ridiculous at best, somehow both blatantly criminal and plainly ineffective AND contradictory at the same time. If as the war-mongers say these people are all so obviously scumbags that they don’t deserve to be able to defend themselves, then why the hell are they even being detained? If you sincerely believe they’re all guilty then just shoot them in the head and get it over with. The only reason to capture and just hold would be that there is something to prove, and as there’ve already been horror stories of people being detained on mistaken or outright falsefied pretenses,
that explodes the assumption of danger from saying “let’s find out”.

Edit: via Reuters, more words of the unhinged:

Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent wrote that the American people “lost a bit more control over the conduct of this nation’s foreign policy to unelected, politically unaccountable judges.”

And Justice Antonin Scalia wrote of the ruling, “Most tragically it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving in a civilian court … that evidence supports the confinement of each and every prisoner.”

John: you are an unelected, politically unaccountable judge!  This issue came to your court, you discussed it, you decided.  Your side just lost.  When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is rhetorically ignoring his own status in order to use a tired right-wing trope about judges being an inherent class of bleeding-hearts, there is only one thing you can say to him — “WTF are you smoking, and could you pass it here?”.

As for Scalia’s lament about military commanders in a civilian court, that says more than he thinks.  The solution is clear: stop making gray areas where there aren’t any.  Either it’s a military/war matter and deadly force is the tool, or it’s a criminal matter and the tool is the law, period.

Awhile back, I linked to a couple of articles about a bacon-wrapped hotdog. Was curious about trying it myself. Well, the stars aligned, and I’m now eating this:

I stuck some toothpicks in to hold the bacon on while cooking, and added to the dog some jalapeño & mayo.  The verdict: delicious.

Here’s an angle on the subprime mortgage/housing meltdown that I didn’t expect the MSM to let out of the bag:

In 2004, as regulators warned that subprime lenders were saddling borrowers with mortgages they could not afford, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development helped fuel more of that risky lending.

Eager to put more low-income and minority families into their own homes, the agency required that two government-chartered mortgage finance firms purchase far more “affordable” loans made to these borrowers. HUD stuck with an outdated policy that allowed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to count billions of dollars they invested in subprime loans as a public good that would foster affordable housing.

Housing experts and some congressional leaders now view those decisions as mistakes that contributed to an escalation of subprime lending that is roiling the U.S. economy.

The agency neglected to examine whether borrowers could make the payments on the loans that Freddie and Fannie classified as affordable. From 2004 to 2006, the two purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans, creating a market for more such lending. Subprime loans are targeted toward borrowers with poor credit, and they generally carry higher interest rates than conventional loans.

Today, 3 million to 4 million families are expected to lose their homes to foreclosure because they cannot afford their high-interest subprime loans. Lower-income and minority home buyers — those who were supposed to benefit from HUD’s actions — are falling into default at a rate at least three times that of other borrowers. (emphasis mine)

So a government agency & two symbiotically-connected corporations, ostensibly aiming to help people into homes, ended up helping them out of them too. Nice…

Fannie and Freddie finance about 40 percent of all U.S. mortgages, with $5.3 trillion in outstanding debt. Owned by private shareholders but chartered by Congress, they are exempt from state and local taxes and receive an estimated $6.5 billion-a-year federal subsidy because they can borrow money more cheaply than other investors. In return, they are expected to serve “public purposes,” including helping to make home buying more affordable.

Housing.  Yet another market that is Way More Centralized Than You Think.  Even with the subsidies they’re in a crater so big it should’ve caused the earth itself to turn inside out & fly into the nearest black hole.

Getting the government in on treating debt as an investment tool: whose bright idea was this?

In 1995, President Bill Clinton’s HUD agreed to let Fannie and Freddie get affordable-housing credit for buying subprime securities that included loans to low-income borrowers. The idea was that subprime lending benefited many borrowers who did not qualify for conventional loans. HUD expected that Freddie and Fannie would impose their high lending standards on subprime lenders.

Banks typically back prime loans with customers’ deposits. But subprime lenders often rely on money from Wall Street investors , who buy packages of loans as investments called mortgage-backed securities.

In 2000, as HUD revisited its affordable-housing goals, the housing market had shifted. With escalating home prices, subprime loans were more popular. […]

In 2001, HUD researchers warned of high foreclosure rates among subprime loans.

“Given the very high concentration of these loans in low-income and African American neighborhoods, the growth in subprime lending and resulting very high levels of foreclosure is a real cause for concern,” an agency report said.

But by 2004, when HUD next revised the goals, Freddie and Fannie’s purchases of subprime-backed securities had risen tenfold. Foreclosure rates also were rising.

That year, President Bush’s HUD ratcheted up the main affordable-housing goal over the next four years, from 50 percent to 56 percent. John C. Weicher, then an assistant HUD secretary, said the institutions lagged behind even the private market and “must do more.”

For Wall Street, high profits could be made from securities backed by subprime loans. Fannie and Freddie targeted the least-risky loans. Still, their purchases provided more cash for a larger subprime market.

Politicians from both “major” parties agreeing on a policy where they’re both wrong?  Crap policy especially screwing already skeptical poor people and blacks?  Gee, who could’ve guessed?

Quick pop quiz: Take a look at the shirt below…

Who is that shirt being marketed to?

1. Gang Members
2. Hunters
3. Cops
4. First-person shooter game fans

Click here to check your answer.

Props.