Psychopolitik 2.0

It’d be nice if at least some of the people who (rightly) recognize the problem with a handful of wingnuts in Texas having such huge influence on the textbooks for public government schools realized the same issue would apply if it were a small group in D.C. making such decisions…

BTW: this has a bunch of stuff that the U.S. history textbooks omitted a long time ago.

Q) Imagine you work for a large organization.  As part of your job, you sell something your organization doesn’t own.  The stock is unavailable for replenishing, and your buyer cannot pick up the product anyway.  What is your job title, & what are you selling?

A) Politician.  The product is land:

wassa, Ethiopia — We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 50 acres* — the size of 20 soccer fields.

The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 1,500 foot rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tons of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13-million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 7.5 million acres of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.

Having trouble maintaining enough food for themselves with the land they have.   Yet it’s being sold, by the government, for food for other countries, worked by imported labor.   The only way this could avoid failing a laugh test for “free trade” would be if your definition of it was “I free you of your shit at gunpoint, then trade it”.  There’s more, read the whole thing.

Props.  BTW: Eerily I had the same reaction upon first reading it, w/r/t comparing it to Kelo.  Spooky…

-The first thing I thought (other than “…wtf?”) about this whole alleged suburban one-woman sleeper cell business was about how casually pro-ethnic-profiling sentiment had spread in regards to terrorism.  I don’t think you could’ve in a million years designed a case as forcefully showing that approach to be inherently ineffective, in addition to merely being bigoted, as this one.   I wonder how long the line of swarthy foreigners getting roto-rootered at airport security would’ve gotten before the plane carrying another Jihad Jane (that’s what she supposedly called herself) blew up.

-Behind many political statements that are taken for granted are implications that, sadly, never get discussed.  Take accusations of Chinese currency manipulation, for example: the claim is that the Yuan is artificially undervalued, giving China an advantage in trade.  If the value were to go up, then U.S. exports would become comparatively cheaper because it would take fewer Yuan to get a dollar worth of goods.  This means that to argue that the Yuan is undervalued is akin to saying the dollar is overvalued.  Note that China happens to hold a particularly large chunk of U.S. government debt, and you see where this is going.

-Y’know, as long as we’re going to have super-wealthy media moguls in this world, it’d be interesting to see what kind of shifts would be initiated in the U.S. media as a result of a Mexican joining the club.

-Joe Biden, while Israel was announcing new construction for East Jerusalem settlers: “progress occurs in the Middle East when everyone knows there is simply no space between the United States and Israel”.  Um, yeah, which is why they’re fighting over the same shit still after all these years.  Speaking of East Jerusalem, here’s how some of the residents celebrate their holidays.  Nice neighbors ya got there…

-The Cheneyite approach to terror suspects, which results in the kind of atrocities that Conor Friedersdorf describes here, among other things, can only be explained by one of two things: vengeful indiscriminate rage (that is, it’s all about expressing “don’t fuck with us!!!” at any and every opportunity that arises, accuracy be damned) or cultural hatred.

Shorter Charles Lane: “One doctor missing a potential warning sign when seeing the Pentagon shooter means medicinal use of marijuana is 100% BS.”

Lane suggests that a symptom common among schizophrenics was glossed over by the doctor in question, who recommended cannabis to address his insomnia.  Even if true it wouldn’t say anything about marijuana in this case, because the mans psychological problem was clearly not the one the marijuana was intended for.  If he means to hint that it made his mental stability worse somehow, then, well, science suggests otherwise thus far.  Nice try…

That said, I’m firmly in the “it’s no one’s business to give a fuck if you DO just want to get high” camp.

-This is why, when it comes to technology, you don’t want to be the first to buy anything.  Paying the most for the least reliability doesn’t seem so hip now, does it?

-Cops taser belligerent drunk driver, find out he’s a cop too.  Naturally he’s still on normal duty pending investigation, an odd courtesy considering he admitted he was drunk.  Rules are for little people.

-Shorter Will Wilkinson: “Y’know, maybe if the U.S. didn’t spend a fuck-ton on mass death…”

See what happens when everybody puts aside their differences & works together?:

The Senate voted Wednesday to extend for a year key provisions of the nation’s counterterrorism surveillance law that are scheduled to expire at the end of the month. In agreeing to pass the bill, Senate Democrats retreated from adding new privacy protections to the USA Patriot Act.

The Senate approved the bill on a voice vote with no debate. It now goes to the House.

Bipartisanship.  If it doesn’t have an entry in Urban Dictionary, then it needs one.

As in “I cannot”, in reference to Ioz’ remarks.  Well placed as usual…

At that other orgy of wingnuttery: gay “librul media” star Rachel Maddow shows up with a camera and is treated relatively nice.  A group of gay Republicans goes as far as to co-sponsor the entire damn conference & gets the man-on-box-turtle/Kobe Bryant walks into Union Oyster House post-game treatment.

No real point here, I just found the contrast funny.

Matt Yglesias, regarding cynicism about the motivations of politicians:

If a politician admitted on television “I’m running for office out of a lust for fame and power” that politician would be in big political trouble.

If a politician didn’t WANT fame and power, then they wouldn’t be a politician…

When you build up a monster & let it loose, the probability of a trail of destruction following it rapidly approaches one.

This one has been busy for awhile, even going as far as to cook the books for an entire friggin’ COUNTRY:

“Around 2002 in particular, various investment banks offered complex financial products with which governments could push part of their liabilities into the future,” one insider recalled, adding that Mediterranean countries had snapped up such products.

Greece’s debt managers agreed a huge deal with the savvy bankers of US investment bank Goldman Sachs at the start of 2002. The deal involved so-called cross-currency swaps in which government debt issued in dollars and yen was swapped for euro debt for a certain period — to be exchanged back into the original currencies at a later date.

Such transactions are part of normal government refinancing. Europe’s governments obtain funds from investors around the world by issuing bonds in yen, dollar or Swiss francs. But they need euros to pay their daily bills. Years later the bonds are repaid in the original foreign denominations.

But in the Greek case the US bankers devised a special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates. That enabled Greece to receive a far higher sum than the actual euro market value of 10 billion dollars or yen. In that way Goldman Sachs secretly arranged additional credit of up to $1 billion for the Greeks. (emphasis mine)

A nominally “private” company bailing out a government, and with funny money at that.  So THAT’s where they got the idea…

Props.