We are told Social Security benefits should be cut (or made less accessible by raising the retirement age) because the government might run up debt, in the far future, to pay them. Never mind that most of us paid taxes all our working lives to fund the program. And never mind that very rich people, the top 3 percent, got a bonanza under President George W from tax cuts that forced the government to run up debt.
I am a Jew. I am an American. Today is Shabbos Shuva, the shabbos of turning between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is the shabbos of returning to what is right and good in oneself. ... This turning, this shuva takes action. First one must apologize to those whom we have hurt -- a sincere apology, which comes for the sincere desire to never make the mistake again. I apologize to my Muslim brothers and sisters. I apologize for being silent in the face of the rampant Islamophobia that is gripping America. I apologize for my lack of action, for being blocked from the action I should have taken, for being too busy to take the action, for being too afraid to take the action I should have taken -- too blocked or too busy or too scared to say the words I should have said to my fellow Jews and to my fellow Americans. ...I promise to learn about the Muslim faith, more than I know and to make a sincere effort to understand Muslim ways. Most importantly I pledge to never again remain silent if others speak against Muslims or Islam in public or in private. ...
Now that's a principle to honor on the anniversary of 9/11. This country doesn't do religious tests -- hey, it's right there in the Constitution."We've got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens in this country," Obama said. "They're going to school with our kids. They're our neighbors. They're our friends. They're our coworkers. ... We don't differentiate between them and us, it's just us. And that is a principle that I think is going to be very important for us to sustain."
The state secrets doctrine is so blinding and powerful that it should be invoked only when the most grave national security matters are at stake -- nuclear weapons details, for example, or the identity of covert agents. ... All too often in the past, the judges pointed out, secrecy privileges have been used to avoid embarrassing the government, not to protect real secrets. In this case, the embarrassment and the shame to America's reputation are already too well known.
It's true; we do learn more and more about what has been done in our name despite any legal obstacles. Lots of people were involved in the American torture regime, many of them quite ordinary soldiers who "just followed orders." They have told their stories, many privately and a few very publicly. Some are struggling with the moral dissonance they've brought back from their experience, the horror of striving to do right and feeling they've done very wrong.The memory still haunts him.That first day, as Brandon was putting an elderly man in his cage, he, as ordered, threw the man down on his knees inside the cage and began to remove his shackles. ...The detainee tensed up and tried get away. Brandon yelled at him to stop, but then as Brandon and his partner unlocked the first handcuff, the man jerked away. Acting on instinct, Brandon threw the detainee to the ground with allof his body weight. Each time the detainee tried to raise his head, Brandon bashed it back down on the cement floor, over and over. ...Brandon had the honor of being the first soldier to get to beat up a terrorist. That night, soldiers kept coming up to him to congratulate him. "Nice job, man, you really got some," they said, patting him on the back. It felt good to be getting so much praise, but Brandon says he was left oddly unsettled.
Chris Arendt was an unlikely and not very willing soldier who found himself at Guantanamo years later. He had joined the National Guard because"There has not been a day that goes by that I have not relived what I did or saw in Guantanamo or Iraq," he says. "It does not get any easier; it just eats you up inside, day by day."
He never quite fit, never thought much of the wars, never stopped feeling "a wimp," but found others like him and tried to keep his head down. Then, one day, as Chris was just doing his job ......for kids like him living in a trailer in Charlotte, Michigan, it was the only ticket out and a way to go to college like the rich kids. The way he saw it, it was either join the military, sell meth, or gamble on whether he could land a factory job.
Because Chris Arendt became involved with Iraq Vets Against the War, he took this story of abusing a detainee to the public. This didn't much help him sort out his feelings, but it plunged him into a complicated vortex of recrimination with the guys who had been his soldier friends -- was he condemning all of them? Eventually Moazzam Begg, a released (cleared) prisoner now organizing against torture, invited Arendt to join him in speaking tour in the United Kingdom. Arendt was surprised to find that in speaking with former detainees he felt "a strangely intimate relationship." (The words quoted are Sharrock's language.)they carried the detainee through the final sally-port to the interrogation room, they smashed the prisoner's head into a metal pole. He wasn't knocked unconscious or even bleeding, but it was a sickening blow. ...What Chris did that day may not sound so bad, especially compared to the large-scale atrocities of war. ...
Soldiers operating in combat zones have the understandable excuse that they have to make rash decisions to save lives and survive. Even killing innocent civilians when these people drive too close to checkpoints can be understood when soldiers are being blown up by car bombs. Trigger-happy soldiers who make mistakes are acting on hypervigilance, which is often necessary when sniper fire is imminent. But Chris and those other soldiers didn't even have the justification that they were softening up the detainee to make him talk. They had no defense for hurting prisoners, but they had no other channel for their anger or enthusiasm. Just like other soldiers, they were trained to be killing machines but were robbed of sanctioned opportunities to act out.
...Compared to other incidents of detainee abuse that have been reported, this incident was trivial. But it revealed something to Chris about who he is and what he is capable of. ... Few would see Chris as a torturer -- his worst offense was slamming someone's head into a wall. But for Chris it isn't the individual acts that make a man a torturer, but his role in the larger machine and his mentality toward the detainees. When Chris learned that he was capable of not caring what happened to the detainee, he saw a dark side of himself.
That certainly seems one of the right questions.How will the peace movement tackle covert and proxy war, with all its ills for the people in countries like the Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Algeria, Kenya, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, & Pakistan, to name a few of the 19 countries where this war is widening?
But none of this makes U.S. wars less bloody for us or their targets -- or more just. Responsible U.S. citizenship includes stopping these adventures. How do we go about it?1) A popular insurgency, armed with not much more than surplus AK-47's and artillery shells wired to disposable cell phones, can defeat the most powerful military machine on the planet. This is a lesson that is being reinforced in Afghanistan, and the U.S. military is taking note of it, even if it's not discussed much in public.
2) The U.S. still retains enough power to make defeat look like something else. President Obama has said that wars no longer end with a signing ceremony on the deck of a battleship, but they also don't end with people being plucked off the roof of the U.S. embassy by helicopter, either. The U.S. doesn't have sufficient military power to "win" (whatever that means) but it does have enough power to produce a muddled outcome which it can spin as victory. ...this is the most likely outcome for Afghanistan.
3) The public has learned the lessons of Iraq, even if our elites haven't. Opinion polls still show near 70 percent opposition to the war, despite a years-long PR campaign to spin the "surge" as a success and, now, to spin our departure as a victory. People aren't buying it, and this is a serious problem for elites, who can be expected to bemoan the presence of an "Iraq syndrome" that limits our ability to intervene militarily in the future.
4) U.S. wars are getting smaller. From nearly 700,000 troops and contractors in Vietnam in '68, the peak level of U.S. forces in that war, to less than 400,000 troops and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan combined (and troop levels in Afghanistan have probably peaked), the trend is clear: The U.S. no longer has the capability to send large numbers of troops into battle. Relatively small numbers of troops in Yemen and Somalia are probably about all the U.S. military is going to be able to muster in the future.
Since elections present a binary choice -- yes, we are stuck with Republicans or Democrats; other "choices" are fantasies -- the standard countermove to finding your party on the wrong end of a referendum on genuninely bad times is make the election a repulsion election. In a repulsion election, you win by tearing down the other side. Hey, we may be disappointing -- but the other guys are worse, much worse.None of this is entirely -- or even mostly -- this administration's fault, but that's sort of irrelevant. We are where we are.
I may think that is insanely unrealistic, inadequately appeciative of the ferocity with which people enjoying privilege will hold on to power at the expense of others. But the sentiments seem to be common and they make running a repulsion campaign problematic, at least in the longer term.What does a nation without negotiation look like? It's ugly. No one is happy and the entire country is pulled in different directions. The country would be plagued with martial law and civil wars. This is not our country. Our country has a long standing tradition of compromise. We were founded on the idea of protecting everyone's beliefs and creating the fairest possible system we could. ...
We understand that quality interactions with our counterparts advocating in good faith are more important than building huge e-mail lists based upon tactics of fear and hate. We talk to others, on this blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, and we do it with civility - or at least we try. We interact this way because we know others are watching and that everything we do and say is on-the-record. This does not mean that we don't stick to our principles and our values and voice our opinions. What it does mean is that we know that we are having conversations with people, other than those that just agree with everything we say. We're not about burning bridges; we're about mending them and building them out into the future.
There's nothing wrong with highlighting your opponents' positions. Even if the economy were going gangbusters and people were throwing health-care celebration parties, the Democrats would be well within their rights to point out that Republicans haven't changed their policy prescriptions as a result of the crisis but simply doubled-down on them.
Probably I would not have picked up The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout if I hadn't just read about the meaning-free massacre at Columbine. How do people who can do horrible things experience the world? Stout's book tries to tell us.Stout is a practicing psychologist. She works with survivors of psychological trauma, often of abuse inflicted by the sociopathic among us whom they've had the misfortune to run up against. She wants to give those of us who do experience conscience, who are able to grasp and anticipate empathetically what our behavior might mean for others, some tools for identifying the dangerous sociopaths among us. The tip off, she says, is "the pity play." Sociopaths are people who have learned to get their way by encouraging others to make up sympathetic excuses for behavior for which they would otherwise be condemned and shunned.About one in twenty-five individuals are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. ... Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all. ...
What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron -- or what makes the difference be;ween an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer -- is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions. ...
When scientists use brain imaging to measure the reactions of people who psychiatrists diagnose as sociopaths to emotionally laden cues -- like the words "kill" or "kiss -- they have discovered that the subjects' brains simply don't respond. However, these people do have to get by in the world, so they learn to act.For something like 96 percent of us, conscience is so fundamental that we seldom even think about it. ... And so, naturally, when someone makes a truly conscienceless choice, all we can produce are explanations that come nowhere near the truth: She forgot to give lunch money to her child. That person's coworker must have misplaced her briefcase. That person's spouse must have been impossible to live with. ...
But they never really "get" loving connections between people; they can't.Clinicians and researchers have remarked that where the higher emotions are concerned, sociopaths can "know the words but not the music." They must learn to appear emotional as you and I would learn a second language, which is to say, by observation, imitation, and practice. And just as you or I, with practice, might become fluent in another language, so an intelligent sociopath may become convincingly fluent in "conversational emotion."
Stout wrote this book in the close aftermath of 9/11, a time when she saw a vengeful lust for violence, a willingness to mindlessly maim and torture "the enemy," enjoying a distressing level of approval among many of her fellow citizens. She is clearly wrestling with the problem not only of individuals born without human empathy but also with whether entire countries can lose empathy. She's more than a little freaked by what she sees and hears around her -- something I have no trouble empathizing with....how is it that some societies have a positive impact on incipient sociopaths, who are born with an inability to process interpersonal emotions in the usual way? I would like to suggest that the overriding belief systems of certain cultures encourage born sociopaths to compensate cognitively for what they are missing emotionally. In contrast with our extreme emphasis on individualism and personal control, certain cultures, many in East Asia, dwell theologically on the interrelatedness of all living things. Interestingly, this value is also the basis of conscience, which is an intervening sense of obligation rooted in a sense of connectedness. If an individual does not, or if neurologically he cannot, experience his connection to others in an emotional way, perhaps a culture that insists. on connectedness as a matter of belief can instill a strictly cognitive understanding of interpersonal obligation.
Earth to Jerry: If that's your attitude, why bother? You are not convincing this progressive that fighting back against an isolated Whitman would be worse for the state than electing you.If you're looking for frugality, I'm your man," the California attorney general and former two-term governor said in a meeting with The Chronicle's editorial board. When he was governor from 1975 to 1983, he said, "I vetoed the pay raises for the state employees not once, but twice. I was overridden by 23 Republican votes.
"I called for the two-tier pension system in 1982," added Brown, 72. "Of course, the next four governors didn't do anything. I'm willing to get in the battle."... Brown, a Democrat who also served as Oakland's mayor from 1999 to 2007, sidestepped questions about his specific plans on the budget, as well as where he stands on the Democratic-controlled Legislature's proposals to resolve the budget impasse, which include raising $1.5 billion by increasing vehicle license fees, $600 million by taxing oil wells and $2 billion by suspending corporate tax breaks Instead, he reiterated his off-repeated stance on revenues: "No new taxes unless the people vote for them," he said.
A small U.S. factory is shutting down. All of the workers are losing their jobs, and to add insult to injury, they have also lost their last two weeks of pay and retirement funds, which were raided over the years to pay stock dividends. On the final day of work, a pregnant employee, suddenly overtaken with labor pains, sits down on the job. Interpreting this as an act of defiance, The Boss calls security. The situation escalates and before anyone has a chance to think, the Workers have accidentally occupied the Factory!
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E. B. Du Bois' classic 1903 work of vivid description and advocacy for African-American self-education and self-emancipation, is a wonderful book for "reading" by ear. What looks florid on the page comes across as appropriately dramatic, sometimes ironic and often deeply moving when fluidly declaimed by a talented reader. This auditory feast is available free from the Apple iTunes store via iTunes U. The full text of this volume is also available free on the web via Bartleby.comMy emphasis. He was right of course. Struggles against lynching and segregation of African-Americans on through a formally successful campaign for full voting rights and civil equality, global struggles against European and American colonialism -- that was the 20th century for people of all colors. Much progress was won and much remains to be gained.Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
The latter part of this observation is simply no longer true in most of the United States. Whatever the civil rights movement may and may not have won, Du Bois' "best" people of whatever color -- the most educated, the most well-off -- now do rub up against each other in daily life. This may be exactly (and all) it means that the United States has a Black president. Among young people of all races in any kind of "higher education," proximity happens, however uncomfortably.It is usually possible to draw in nearly every Southern community a physical color-line on the map, on the one side of which whites dwell and on the other Negroes. The winding and intricacy of the geographical color line varies, of course, in different communities. ...
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities. A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close proximity.
Sometime down the line, we're going to have to retire some of those lawns. The mini-gnomes will remain optional, I certainly hope.Landscaping currently accounts for at least half of all residential water demand, according to the report. Without new conservation efforts, the amount of water going to outdoor landscaping is predicted to rise by 1.2 million acre feet a year [by 2030] -- enough to serve roughly 4.8 million people. ...
... future shortages could be exacerbated by the dominance of single-family homes on relatively large lots in the state's fast growing interior -- particularly the greater Sacramento region, the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire in Southern California -- where much of the future projected growth is expected. ...
Bob Drobny, manager of Zamora Sod Farm in Chico, which sells sod from Yuba City to the Oregon border, said his company has been doing strong business as the inland population has boomed. "You almost can't buy a house that isn't landscaped in the front and back with grass being an integral part of it," Drobny said.
This small picket line on Thursday greeted the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention at the boycotted hotel. As seems to be true all over the world, a great many of the people who work in the San Francisco "hospitality industry" are gay. And Local 2 has long recognized the LGBT fraction of its members and protected them in its contracts. So this morning's picket was a gay affair, very much in the style of Sleep with the Right People.Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Hyatt Hotels Corp., the Pritzker family chain that raised $1.09 billion in an initial public offering last year, reported a second-quarter profit as demand for high-end lodging improved. ... Revenue at Hyatt rose 5 percent to $889 million.
More creepty that "neat" it seems to me, but we will undoubtedly live with more of it."It's just part of our 'cyber-existence' these days," said Dan Miller, a senior analyst at Opus Research in San Francisco, which has focused on voice verification. "The neat thing about biometrics is that you are the thing that identifies you."
So now that the U.S. Army is on the way out, who gets this collection of identity information? In a society that has mostly been ruled by dictators who employed a diligent and vicious secret police, this is not an idle question. The idea of one or another of the competing sectarian ethnic cleansing gangs that now label themselves political parties getting the data is scary. So is the likelihood that someday having had a close contact with the U.S. occupiers may be enough to get an Iraqi fired or even killed. Opinions differ on what passing on the data will mean:Nearly 7 percent of Iraq’s 29 million people are cataloged — their names, facial scans, and often other details about them, such as whether they were considered a friend or foe. ...
US forces started collecting fingerprints in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, as part of interrogations of agents of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The US military also helped computerize Iraq’s fingerprint files from Hussein’s era. US soldiers reportedly collected fingerprints and DNA samples from 80,000 detainees in their custody. (It is not clear how those samples have been used.)
After the military’s incursion into Fallujah in 2004, US soldiers collected fingerprints and iris scans of every resident as they passed through checkpoints to return. They wanted a record of the legitimate residents, so they could detect infiltrators. In parts of Baghdad, US soldiers went door to door, collecting information. They also enrolled entire villages at the request of tribal leaders.
For the Iraqis, the war isn't over, despite Oval office speeches.Iraq's ambassador to the United States, Samir Sumaida'ie, said he would like to see Iraq's government use it fight corruption. ...
But Sa'ad Al-Izzi, 36, a former New York Times reporter who fled Iraq after he was threatened for working with Americans, said he fears such intelligence cooperation between the United States and Iraq will cause problems.
"It is dangerous to hand this information to the Iraqi government and security forces, which are infiltrated to a great extent by militias and insurgency groups," he said. "It would be useful for a national trusted official security force. . . . But are they a professional, national, trusted security force? In my opinion, they are not."
