Most interesting thing you'll read this week about foreign relations

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I wonder if there will be a "debate" on this one

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Kerry Doesn't Rule Out Boots On The Ground If Syria 'Implodes'

I wonder what he doesn't rule out when America implodes.

Unstated assumptions

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It would be helpful for purposes of coherence for the author to explain the unstated assumptions of this post and this one:

President Obama is "going to Congress" about Syria exclusively as an exercise in political theater. I'm old enough to remember his inspirational, New-Deal-type State of the Union message back in January, in which he made a lot of pretty noises about his intention to act on the wealth gap, climate change, and so on. His speech was to thank all the progressive-leaning suckers (including me) who voted for him in hopes that he would repay us by being a more liberal-minded president than Mitt Romney. For more than 4 years now, however, he has been consolidating a terrifying surveillance state into a permanent feature of our democracy. He has done nothing to keep banks from literally stealing houses and possessions from victims of financial racketeering (because "these cases are very complicated"). He has exercised no meaningful political muscle on behalf of basic liberal causes such as reproductive rights, voting rights, or card-check legislation to give union organizers a fair shake.

President North Star knows that the Congress will authorize any action against Syria that he likes. And he also "knows," as expressed by anonymous administration sources via authorized leaks, that he doesn't need congressional approval as long as Secretary Kerry can rattle off half a dozen justifications for military strikes in the style of former Ubergruppenfuehrer Powell.

Some time ago, US policy and media elites determined that The State need not be bothered by the collective opinion of its citizens in matters of military aggression.

President Peace Prize asks the world what he believes to be a tough question

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I listened to the President's statement today about the inevitable message that will be sent to Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-Assad in the form of Tomahawk cruise missiles that are certain to destroy a number of people not named Bashar Hafez al-Assad. I was listening out of a portion of the corner of one of my two ears, so my brain has no accurate transcription of his remarks, and I am too lazy to look them up. (Plenty of others are busy doing that right now, though, so go read their stupid blogs if you like your disingenuous political speeches to be quoted directly.)

Anyway, there came a point where President North Star asked The World if they were prepared to deal with the consequences of "doing nothing" about Assad's terrifying new way of dealing death to his citizens. I guess this was the President's way of challenging The World to justify the position that a nation should hold its fire until an achievable military objective can be defined and articulated. I suppose the President thinks his question is tantamount to The Riddle Of The Sphinx. It's not, really. One retort might be along the lines of "yeah, conducting chemical warfare violates the norms of 'civilized warfare.' And so does committing an act of war against a sovereign nation that doesn't pose one scintilla of a military risk to the citizens of the United States.

Also, does anyone remember President Peace Prize "sending a message" to the President of the University of California - Davis 2 years ago when her campus dicks waged chemical warfare against peaceful student protestors during the November 2011 Occupy sit-ins?

If the President wanted to "send a message" to Mr. Assad about using chemical warfare against his citizens, why didn't he do that 3 days before the attacks, since US intelligence agencies knew in advance that it was going to happen? Or, at least, why didn't he "send a message" to the intended victims of the gas?

Wait: do US citizens still get to ask rhetorical questions these days?

President North Star wants to send a message

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There may have been a bygone era when the pen was mightier than the sword. But that was then. Now, President North Star---the most peaceful Earthling of 2009*---evidently believes that the cruise missile is more powerful than a menacing diplomatic cable to a pipsqueak tyrant in the Middle East.

If it were possible to fly a few Tomahawks up the fundament of Bashar Hafez al-Assad and his senior staff in order to "send the message" that he needs to die, then war hawks and doves would at least have an issue to debate. But it seems more likely that the people who will be dying in the inevitable "surgical strike" on Syria had no meaningful role in the acquisition or use of banned chemical weapons last week. And, to me at least, it seems just as likely that Mr. Assad will go about his business using whatever materiel suits his purpose.

If President North Star would like to send someone a message, my suggestion would be to marshal his eloquence and aim it at Russia and China. Those are the actors who thwart the (potentially) constructive involvement of the only authority that has any business intervening with force against Assad's government, namely the UN. Why not spend a week or two letting the world know who provides Assad with his munitions and cover? Why won't President North Star use his pulpit to take the world to church on this crisis?

(Answer: because it might disrupt some corporate cash flows).
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* Unimportant observation: looking back at the text of the post I linked to above, I'll take a puny victory lap about the main point, but cringe at how naively I framed it. Yuck!

Maybe he could move to Arizona [updated]

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It may be the case that George Zimmerman now sees Florida's Stand Your Ground law as a sort of double-edged petard:

His brother said the former neighborhood watch volunteer was still processing the reality that he wouldn’t serve prison time for the killing, which Zimmerman, 29, has maintained was an act of self-defense. A jury found him not guilty of second-degree murder late Saturday night and declined to convict him on a lesser charge of manslaughter.

However, with many critics angry over his acquittal, his freedom may be limited. “He’s going to be looking over his shoulder the rest of his life,” Robert Zimmerman Jr. said during an interview on CNN.

Somebody should have thought about that before, as Johnny Cash once described it, he shot a man in Sanford just to watch him die.

It's a counter-intuitive outcome, though: when you "stand your ground" it comes to pass that your "freedom may be limited." Maybe even as much as Trayvon Martin's.

Update:  now, according to a musician's son, there's evidently stand your ground, freedom-of-expression style:

Lester [Chambers] was just assaulted on stage at The Russell City Hayward Blues Festival by a crazed woman after dad dedicated ‘People Get Ready’ to Trayvon Martin. He is on the way to the hospital now.

Tick tock Tick KOO-koo!

"As the nation searches for answers..."

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The title of this post quotes a rhetorical formulation that I'd already heard too many times long before the nation once again began last week to "search for answers" to the problem of "evil." The media love this formulation because it suggests that mass murders committed with military-style firearms are mysteries (like superstorms!!!) that not even reporters and celebrity pundits can shed light upon. It's convenient---helps editors avoid the assaults that right-wing thought leaders launch against facts, logic, and human decency.

Just because "Wayne LaPierre" goes on TV and presents his vile, deranged point of view, like he did this morning, it does not follow that such opinions "complicate" the task of legislating sane and reasonable arms-control policies. In fact, the NRA company line helps to clarify the matter. The fetishism his organization promotes for the benefit of the gun-peddling syndicate it serves verifies everybody's hunch (including LaPierre's) that some form of mental illness is at the root of gun violence. Josh Marshall assessed the contents of a recent SEC filing by a gun-manufacturing consortium like this:

You’ve got fairly candid discussions of male insecurity as a decent on-going growth opportunity, women as a new source of gun purchases and a general migration from hunting and target shooting toward gun ownership as a way of simply feeling more awesome.

In order that the public doesn't get suckered into turning an impulse to formulate civilized gun-control policy into an amateur witch hunt for the "mentally ill," I'd suggest trying to focus the mental-health piece of the discussion on gun-related mental illness.

In that connection---and considering that a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is being prepared---I think it should be a high priority for the mental health community of practice to identify and quantify the particular variety of paranoia that might be called something like "firearms obsession disorder." Yellow flags that indicate the probable need for counseling might include a subject's frequent verbal conflation of "gun rights" and "freedom," or "gun ownership" and "masculinity." Red flags that indicate the urgent need for immediate psychiatric supervision and possible involuntary confinement might include a subject's hoarding of firearms that have no inherent historic, aesthetic, or collectible value (and especially the hoarding of ammunition for such guns), or the repeated public expression that the solution to gun violence is yet more gun violence:

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

...

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Individuals with Firearms Obsession Disorder believe that "the only way to fight fire is with fire." Most of us regular people think that it is more rational to fight fire with water.

Saturday night

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No fish fry tonight; an elegy.



Christo Redemptor, Charlie Musselwhite (1967, from "Stand Back: Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite's South Side Band," Vanguard Records VSD-79232), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Sheltering in place

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I'm going to close the clamshell in a few minutes. I should probably stay offline until tomorrow, but I may check before I retire for the evening.

About the only thing I feel like saying right now is about what Gurlitzer said in a comment about the Mingus song posted below. So I'm delegating the bulk of tonight's writing chore to her (i.e., I'm plagiarizing her work):

Fuck the GOP and their just plain criminal behavior. And fuck the justice dept. for not doing anything about it. And fuck the corporate media who say no tax returns, Mitt? Well shucks, that's just fine with us. And while we know you are lying about everything, it's not our place to call you on it.

And Husted in Ohio now changes the rules on provisional ballots as just the latest in a string of attempts to curtail the vote. And no one will call it for what it is, blatant cheating. AND WE LET THEM ALL GET AWAY WITH IT.

And by the way, Watergate never really ended. These bastards will still do anything to win. 

Before I turned off the radio half an hour ago I heard an NPR news reader announce that his network projects a win for Bernie Sanders, an "independent" senator representing New Hampshire (he's a Socialist). I also heard two NPR newsgirls --- honestly, that's how they were behaving --- all giddy about the silly Republican county Supervisor of Elections in Florida who "accidentally" activated a voter turnout robocall a day late, possibly misleading some people to think they could vote on Wednesday. "Even ex-governor Charlie Crist's wife got a call!" one of them tittered. They were just tickled pink.

None of the accounts of election ratfucking in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (especially Philadelphia) seemed to be making it in any detail to NPR --- the general impression given by them is that other than a few hiccups everything is going fairly well, or something. So all the news about this I'm seeing comes from new media, basically, and Esquire online. All of those sources are well known to be skewed by liberal bias, so their reports can't be true. Phew! (Sorry about the lazy sourcing for the above; I want to get offline asap.)

I fear that there's a nontrivial probability that unsubtle attempts to steal the election have now moved from the planning to the execution stage, and that I will wake up tomorrow morning to a spectacle of drama where there should be a clear winner... and in which the corporate media give an Oscar performance of dumb-all-over. If that happens, it is feasible that we might not be looking merely at another 2000 in Florida or 2004 in Ohio (yes, it happened): a constitutional crisis could loom... one much bigger than the Sandra Day O'Connor Y2K junta.

In the shadow of a Magical Kingdom

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It seems that the Orlando, Fla., suburbs now have their own theme parks and "cast members." This one may be called ManslaughterLand, for all I know, but I could not confirm that as of press time. This attraction would appear to be an immersive first-person shooter in which the customer (after spending 40 minutes pacing back and forth in queue) may pick a fight with a kid, shoot him to death, and avoid arrest by telling the Nice Policeman you pulled the trigger in self defense. Since the menace 2 society is deceased and cannot contradict your claim, you get to go home and exult.

From what I read, ManslaughterLand could improve the realism of this attraction by arming the bad guy with a knife or a gun instead of Skittles and iced tea.

Editor's note: I will step out of character for a moment just to make it clear how sickening this news was to me when I heard it this morning on the radio. This morning CNN said:

Incredibly, the man who admitted to killing Trayvon, 28-year-old George Zimmerman, has remained free since the shooting because he told Sanford police that it was in self-defense. After questioning him, police bought his explanation and allowed him to return home. (Police said he has not been charged because there are no grounds to disprove his story of what happened.)

"There are no grounds to disprove his story of what happened"? I suppose an investigation might begin with the shooter's reported confession to the shooting, the corpse of an unarmed child, a bag of Skittles, and an unspecified quantity of iced tea. This evidence is suggestive of certain interpretations that may cast doubt on the decision to release the shooter.

The fall product rollout [update]

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A few days after I mused here about the new war for which the neocons and corporate media have formed their very own Occupy-style drum circle I had this idea, but I felt it would sound too silly to trouble you with before giving careful consideration to my choice of wording. Welp, as seen on Balloon Juice, it looks like someone has described the prospective conspiracy that corporate media would be expected to denounce as... "a conspiracy theory":

Here’s a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.

See, I think there are certain ideas that may be too dangerous for a nobody like me to fluff up on my crummy blog, but Andrew Sullivan evidently thinks his high profile as a celebrity blogger will protect him from right-wing opprobrium. We'll see about that.

You may remember back in January when the publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times had to "step down" for suggesting that maybe "Israel's most inner circles" might "order a hit" on Barack Obama in order to rid themselves of an unfriendly US president. So here's another approach that might amount to a fatal political hit if the "product" were rolled out as an October Surprise.

I don't think this idea is too insane to have been dreamed of, kicked around all hush-hush-like, or even to have arrived at some stage of planning. Because the marketplace of ideas is oversupplied with insanity. I'm sure the very idea quickens the pulse of many. And who knows: maybe certain people with the right connections and levers think they could get away with such a thing. But if that's the case, they are making one of the classic strategic blunders: underestimating the adversary.

As it happens, every President of the United States has his own "most inner circle," not to mention a heavy metal national security apparatus and---thanks to Richard Bruce Cheney and The Boy Who Would Be President---a carload of extra-constitutional surveillance and law-enforcement powers. And this one knows how to play 10-dimensional chess, so watch out.

Update: I forgot to state that any such conspiracy would not involve nobodies like Santorum, Gingrich, or Romney. But I do think it's fully plausible that it could involve Americans. I don't think there is any shortage of latent traitors on the far right.

The monsters have come to Maple Street

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As seen on Atrios, here's a dispatch from the front lines of the Bedwetter Wars.

I'm sure we all understand the potential dangers that lurk. They're the same as they were 30 years ago and 50 years ago. What's so different in 2012 that a Philadelphia suburb needs to put schools on lockdown because a stranger was seen waiting for a bus?

My first wild guess is that it has something to do with how deeply immersed most people are in electronic infotainment media. A critical insight published by Jerry Mander over a quarter of a century ago in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is that TV is a sensory deprivation technology. He asserted, and I agree, that the pictures, motion, and sound conspire to create an illusion of reality, but that the human mind is not fooled by the illusion for long because boredom sets in rapidly (as compared with sensational, tactile reality). And I will throw computers and mobile IT devices into that pot as well.

As people are immersed in the claustrophobic surreality of corporation-mediated "experience," actual, random reality may begin to seem foreign to everyday experience. And threatening. I wonder if a plurality of the population simply doesn't know what to make of life experience that isn't responsive to a remote control or a computer touchscreen.

Back in the good old days, if we saw a stranger standing on a corner doing nothing we'd never think of calling the cops; we'd just kick his ass seven ways for Sunday. (JK---ROFL!)

Lousy blogger

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Hi. How are you? I am fine!

In the past few days I've come to the conclusion that my experiment in civic engagement has failed and that I will abandon it in order to spend more time with my blog.

Two years ago I volunteered to serve on the board of a local organization dedicated to the preservation and conservation of historic buildings. A good cause, I thought then and still think now. But the whole episode began to disagree with me even before Day 1. And, unfortunately, my duties for this organization directly impinge on the mental resources I rely upon for my own creative output.

A week or so ago I started working toward a humane exit strategy in which I'd add a bunch of value for whomever is recruited to fill my sorry place on the board. As fate would have it, a matter of some consequence has arisen for my organization---a matter that must be handled with leadership, excellent communication, teamwork, and intelligence. Several days into handling this issue my hapless group has shown little of the four graces aforementioned in excess of what I have been able to provide... and I am the least-well-informed person among them. This is not to say that the people are bad, because they are not. But the organization is a helpless mess.

The events of this week have inspired me to tighten up my exit strategy. I'd originally planned to leave with a 50-50 blend of consideration and dickishness, but I've leaned-down the consideration blend to about 35-65 now as I waste time in nowhere email conversations. My Chinese penpal, Roflmao Zedong, warned me that my "friends" (as he referred to them) will not see my exit as merely 65% dickish, but will see it as 100% dickish. I explained to him that I was aware of that possibility, which is why I'm prepared to go 100% dickish in reality if they don't watch themselves and even if they do. I am temperamentally unsuited for working as part of a committee.

I'd much rather spend my evenings with you than worrying about how goddam far behind I am on the newsletter schedule. So it's coming. I am hoping for a significant uptick in blog activity within about 3 weeks. Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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During the so-called Summer of Love, this peculiar composition was "in the tube," chartwise, for The Beach Boys. I never understood the song at the time, but it's grown on me after 40-odd years. I still don't understand it, though. And just to make matters a little more inscrutable, here's an alternate version that didn't make it out of the studio until a few decades later. But it's the one Brian Wilson originally intended for you and me to hear.



This track was supposed to be part of Wilson's "psychedelic" masterpiece album, Smile. But his well documented crackup overtook him before he could get the whole thing right to his ears and ego. The completed pieces---the releasable ones, at least---were issued on a disc called Smiley Smile. Yes, "Good Vibrations" and "Heroes and Villains" were basically salvage material from the Smile project. The version of Smiley Smile that I own, a 1990 reissue that also includes the Wild Honey album, includes the present track.

Wilson, morbidly depressed over the whole matter, claimed to have destroyed all the 1966 - 67 Smile masters. He "reconstructed" the project in 2004, unwisely in my opinion. I've unintentionally heard snips from it, and prefer not to hear any more.

So here's a summer song for you, simmered in vinegar by Brian Wilson 44 years ago, presented to commemorate both our current brain-denaturing heat wave and the slide of much of our populace into a state of desperate mental illness. Brian was far ahead of his time on that score, as well.

Heroes and Villains (Alternate Take), The Beach Boys (issued 1990, Capitol C2 93696), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday After Hours

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About 40 minutes ago I sent the manuscript of the book I'm editing to the author. It's a monster job, and there will be plenty more editorial work to do after author revisions, but it should be much less intensive than what I've just completed. The immediate significance of this milestone should be a big drop in subliminal stress, a possible moderation of blood pressure, and a general boost to my quality of life. Also, slightly less-lazy blogging behavior.

Speaking of monsters, last night while trying to sleep I heard something very ungainly-sounding that was ratfucking the dirty dishes on my kitchen countertop. It sounded more massive than a mouse, and got into things that mice haven't gotten into before. Coming downstairs just now to call it an evening, I heard some more sounds, this time apparently coming from the basement. As I started to descend the stairwell to investigate, I heard some very peculiar sounds that may have been vocalizations---low and suppressed, short impulses mostly, that could have come from a bird (crow, grackle, or starling), a squirrel that is unhappy, or even a raccoon. I shut the basement door and won't think about it any more until the motherfucker has starved to death.

Enough. Nighty night.

"Calculated risk"

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"It would be hard to describe how alarming this is right now."

That's what a high-ranking US official told ABC News about the deteriorating nuclear reactor situations at Fukushima.

The difficulties caused by the evacuations were blamed for "escalating" the chances of a meltdown.

"They need to stop pulling out people -- and step up with getting them back in the reactor to cool it. There is a recognition this is a suicide mission," the unnamed U.S. official was quoted by ABC as saying. 

Yes sir, those "Japs" had better step up to the plate and get crackin' on that suicide mission of theirs so that anonymous high-ranking US officials, not to mention senior samurai at US Westinghouse, may sleep a little easier.

You see, they-all do the calculating and we-all do the risking.

Brutal.

Literally speaking

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I think this FireDogLake blogger takes John Boehner's "machine gun" imagery too seriously, as if this pickled Ohio sad sack was crafting some cunning subliminal message to god-knows-who about who-knows-what. I think a more straightforward interpretation of Bohener's remark is that people of his ilk are every bit as delusional as Colonel Qaddafi. One is left to wonder why the Times and the Post and NPR and [~] use Quaddafi as the gold standard for insanity and megalomania when we have so many competitors right here in the good old USA.

I'll acknowledge that the previous sentence was a mere rhetorical device: no one really is "left wondering" about that for very long.

Vandalizing the capital building?

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As seen on Eschaton, an AFL-CIO blog accuses "Governor Scott Walker" of welding capital windows shut to prevent outsiders from passing food through to protesters who have been occupying the building since Sunday.

True? Who knows? I haven't heard a peep about this elsewhere. But if it is, this tactic would seem to violate any reasonable state life-safety standards and possibly cross over into the realm of criminal damage to property. Unless state governors are allowed to do whatever the fuck they want when their "subjects" assemble to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Yesterday, Paul Krugman noted the eerie silence of mainstream (i.e., corporate) news shops about the historic political demonstrations in Madison---crowd sizes unprecedented since the Vietnam era. Getting to smell a lot like Red China around here these days.

"Barring info...speculation benefits no one"

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That is NPR's rejoinder about the Giffords shooter and his motives. They're concerned about "speculation."

Little "speculation" is necessary when facts are available.

Rep. Giffords's Republican opponent Jesse Kelly had campaign rally shoot-in to "help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office."

The federal judge shot dead in today's incident, John Roll, had previously received right-wing death threats by telephone that required intervention by the U.S. Marshals Service.

One account, a second-hand attribution to the Democratic National Committee Western States Director, posted by Atrios, has the perpetrator calling out the name of each victim he shoots.

Anybody following national news for the past several years knows that Arizona has a highly expressive right-wing gun culture that has normalized the concept of bringing firearms to political events. (Sorry, don't have time to find a link right now.)

So, NPR, why don't you take "political junkie Ken Rudin" off the pontification beat this evening and assign him try some real reporting on the alleged shooter's internet ramblings? Based on an initial look at samples posted to TPM, the shooter would seem to have been motivated to a large extent by psychosis. But in the few of his utterances I've glanced at so far there appears to be a stack of kindling cut fresh from the right-wing noise bush. As one would expect, those political assassination attempts that are not the work of paid hit men are typically the finale of a grand vision obsessing an individual who has lost his mind. We don't have to go too far out on the "speculation" limb to write a reasonable first draft of what went wrong in Arizona today.

Hideous

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And not only hideous, but very much foreseen and publicized by DHS over a year ago.

Do you remember what happened when DHS released that memo about the rising threat of right-wing extremism? And do you remember the howling about this from right-wingers at the time, like the samples captured at the bottom of the HuffPost article linked above?

And do you remember how DHS chief Napolitano fumbled against that right-wing pushback? And, finally, do you remember how, when questioned by TPM this past September about actual examples of right-wing domestic extremism over the year since the original DHS memo had been issued, she referred to it as "ancient history"? I do.

Right-wing celebrity pundits using mainstream communications media fire up haters with eliminationist rhetoric covered by a veneer of sick humor. Right-wing politicians refuse to disavow pigs like Limbaugh or Beck, and will even express sympathy for the seething fans who are infected with this violent, schizoid ideation. How many times have you hears a senior Republican establishment figure say something to the effect of "Well, I may not agree with the rhetoric, but I certainly understand why these people are so angry."

But "centrist" shape-shifters like Napolitano and President North Star, who always approach this topic without candor in order to spare themselves a scolding from John McCain and Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson, share in the accountability for this abominable political massacre. I'm sure that all we'll hear about this from Responsible Democrats in the coming days are abstract platitudes about the horror of it all in This Great Nation founded on principles of blah blah blah; and boilerplate expressions of how everyone's thoughts should "be with the families" of the victims. But not a goddam meaningful word about the hate mongers or their mesmerized audience.

Editor's note: yes, I am aware that we don't have many confirmed facts yet about the alleged shooter or his motives. I see no point in being "even-handed" at this point, but I will immediately apologize for jumping the gun when it is proven that the shooter is a smelly, card-carrying ACLU socialist vegan.