Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
The funniest thing to come through lately came from Dan Schwartz, the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries," such as the Communist Manifesto, Chairman Mao's little Red Book, the Kinsey Report, the Feminine Mystique, and why not, Nietzsche and Keynes. Those fine people at Human Events, a batty rightwing journal, have done it again with their panel of righteous judges. Darwin, Mill, Nader, Gramsci and Adorno were also noted as dangerous writers.
Lebanon: Robert Mayer on PubliusPundit.com has a good summary of the complexity of Lebanese electoral politics. I am a little sketched out by the wave of 'pro-democracy' talk purportedly coming from Lebanon, but nonetheless I like the picture at the top of their site because like mine it features riot police and people showing the victory sign. Also reported on the voting. Not sure who Mayer is or what his political orientation is. ok.
So something about the filibuster: FilibusterFrist.com hails the compromise as a victory. When discussing the vote, an anchor at FOX was caught referring to the Republican Party as "we" (see the FOX Freudian slip in a Movie!) James Dobson calls down hellfire.
Random blog: Security Awareness, angry about something in OS X.
Local Music: A friend of mine named Dave is starting up a record label called The Firm Records. He's working with his friend Jared to get an album released under the name "The Beckoning." You can hear some cuts on their site.
Media makes me cry: A Pie Fight that you can edit yourself on a site promoting "The Real Gilligan's Island." I don't understand what the hell this is.
Piss-Off-Nixon Dept. Deep Throat is out and about in his walker. It is marvelous to hear G Gordon Liddy and Patty Pat Buchanan tell us about what a bad deed it was to harm that paragon of virtue Richard Nixon. On a somewhat related topic, the intelligence analysts responsible for the aluminum tube nonsense got rewarded! Of course, people made fun of this. Who will be the deep throat for this Pentagon? Does Karen Kwiatkowski have to do everything around here?
Misc: A Republican congressman attacks Bill Maher. Shocking. "What a social security deal might look like." The left's fear of money?
Stand at the Apocalypse: Who knows what's happening with Bolton? Steve Clemons at TheWashingtonNote.com. Sen. Reid comments on it. But of course, we still got Jesse Helms: ""John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."
Peak oil: There's a lot about the Peak Oil problem from Kevin Drum at WashingtonMonthly.com. This Matthew Simmons character is some sort of expert as featured in this Agonist post (or this one).
GWOT Part III... Oh great, the lens of the War On Terror is going to be widened, because, believe-it-or-not, Al Qaeda is not really a concrete organization and there are many other people the government would like to kill. Apparently Bush's top terrorism advisor is named Frances Fragos Townsend. Sounds like an alias. Thomas Friedman says "Just Shut it Down" as Guantanamo is rapidly corroding America's values and generating legions of people who hate us even more for our crazy policies.
...but Part II isn't over! The vaunted "Operation Lightning" that coincided with Memorial Day is not getting a lot done. Raimondo has a funny column about his confrontation with Nancy Pelosi, the winged goddess of victory. Of course she is caught up in trying to appear mega-Super Tough in the War Against Evil, and this is leading to a certain moral erosion... And don't forget her exciting speech to AIPAC!
We need whistle-blowers: It is said that Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who performed some painful whistleblowing upon the FBI, may run for Congress in Minnesota against the rightwinger John Kline, most well known for being trustworthy enough to carry the nuclear launch codes at some point in his military career. Sibel Edmonds has a strange case, the translator who tried to stop craziness inside the Department of Justice at least has herself a website.
Star Wars projects into the Real World: A whole freakin lot of people commented on how Star Wars fits into the national debate. Orson Scott Card of the "Ender's Game" sci-fi series commented that Jedi-ism is not a very good religion: "in the new movie, the knights are elitist, dictatorial, and unconvinced that good is an absolute." (although he is surprisingly anti-media as well) I don't really feel like writing more on this subject now, even though I went to go see the movie a second time with Cheng Diggity last night.
Rat Race Status: This NY Times article about how people chase elusive class status symbols in America today really hit home for me. Alison sent it to me, noting its connection to what we learned about Marcuse's theories of the one-dimensional man, propelled by the false needs of a society designed to appear as if it catered to his every desire, while actually trapping him. A related very interesting "info Marxist" column by the generally senile Mr. Brooks. At the least, this proves that neo-cons are still old leftists.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system.
[.....]
The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.
Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means of education.
More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down.
A few sites to look at: American Hajji is apparently the blog of a soldier who just got dumped into Mosul, fresh from the U.S. He also has posted a lot under "nameless soldier" on DailyKos.com.
Always look at the Agonist, a sort of open-source-model news aggregator that I've been looking to since the war started. They posted my submission of the AIPAC story a few days ago. A statement about Chinese currency manipulation from a Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), direct to their site. Also a rather overwrought bit about dirty money in the global economy by UK journalist Nick Kochan.
When to start a bombing? Congressman John Conyers has a sweet blog entry @ DailyKos (pretty good user range, ya?) about how the recent British memo that got released about the intelligence being "fixed around the policy" is helpful, but Conyers adds that the Americans were bombing Iraq in 2002 with the specific intention of antagonizing Saddam Hussein into retaliating. This early bombing, preparing the "battle space" as they called, was a particularly illegal action intended to provide a legal pretext, which ultimately failed to work. So they had to dream up the niger-uranium type stuff instead....
GoreTV: Al Gore's rumored cable news station has finally resurfaced as... drum roll... Current (not to be confused with our new MPR operation). As Business2.0 reported:
Gore took the wraps off his long-awaited foray into media moguldom, Current, a cross between video blogging and the early days of MSNBC. Starting Aug. 1, hipster hosts will introduce streams of blip-length clips, created by the viewers themselves, focused on music and other suitably hip subjects. The channel's first call for entries offered a tempting $3,000, three-segment "studio development deal" as a prize for the best submissions. The East Coast liberal elite expecting DNC-TV or endless reruns of Charlie Rose and Topic A With Tina Brown were left scratching their heads.
Meanwhile, Google's Larry Page sent reporters scurrying when he offhandedly mentioned during a panel that the company would begin accepting amateur video search submissions "in the next few days." Sure enough, Google's video service is now accepting files for upload and review, although the company is offering few details on when and how someone might ultimately be able to watch them, not to mention how much Google might someday charge viewers for the privilege. Ignoring the stated restrictions on what could be uploaded, the wits at Slashdot immediately saw right through what Page described as an "experiment in video blogging": This was Google's back door into the porn business. Amateur video indeed.
Then Google and Gore announced a deal with each other. Google's "Zeitgeist" feature, which compiles the top 10 most searched terms at any moment, will become the organizing principle of Current's news programming.
They have jobs available.
BagNewsNotes digests news imagery and the various methods of political spin contained therein. For example, the recent cover of Mother Jones, a crappy Schwartzenegger ad, a disturbing photo of a soldier writing on an Iraqi's head, or Queer Eye for the Pregnant Guy. NewsCorpse.com has an amusing name altho it seems pretentious.
Censorship: A batshit Poli Sci professor in Hawaii thinks that censoring the media is a fabulous idea. I don't feel like dragging myself through the details of the recent Amnesty report about our shiny new gulag system, but good ol' Sidney Blumenthal has something about the great international secret torture conspiracy®©.
Ukraine's New Boss is about the same as the Old Boss. They are going right back to old-school socialism under the new patronage of the United States, in Raimondo's view.
Fahd hospitalized? When this duffer of the desert finally goes, it'll be a mess fo sho.
The Avian Flu is coming!!! AUGH!! This horrible post from the DailyKos construes a future America laden with refugee camps and pandemic. Awful. More about it.
Libertarians: Check out LewRockwell.com, libertarian blogging and so forth. With interesting stuff from (non-libertarian) reporter Jim Lobe about the messy state of the US military, and another article about that disturbing Housing Bubble we've heard about.
I always say read Juan Cole (not to be confused with John Cole) and these days it's no different. In this case, thoughts about a recent suicide bombing against Iraqi Sufis. Also, uhm, some southern Iraqis want to reorganize the provinces into a super-province of Sumer, in reference to the very ancient civilization once sited there:
Al-Hayat says that its sources in Iraq describe an ongoing dispute between the Kurds, who want an Iraqi federalism that gives "states' rights" only to Kurdistan but not to other provinces, and the Shiites, who want a federalism that would apply geographically throughout the country. The Shiites want to create a southern super-province to serve as a counter weight to Kurdistan. Shiite leaders are planning a congress that can establish the instrumentalities for creating the region of "Sumer" in the south, which will consist of 3 consolidated provinces.
[....]
The plan is opposed by Iyad al-Samarra'i of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, who said that the IIP is willing to recognize a Kurdistan but that otherwise the present provincial boundaries should be kept. He said that if the Kurds and Shiites did go ahead with their schemes for large federal regions, the Sunni Arabs would be forces to consider creating one for themselves, as well.
The Shiites' use of "Sumer" as the name of the southern confederation is a reference to the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia, based in the south near the Gulf, who had writing as early as 3500. It is always a bad sign when people revive ancient place names, since it points to a romantic nationalism, the most virulent, false and ugly kind. (The people of southern Iraq didn't even know about Sumer two centuries ago-- modern archeologists recovered that part of history. It was perhaps the one success of Saddam's educational system that he instilled a craze for ancient Iraqi civilization in the students, as part of his nationalist agenda).
Apparently the Brits want to hand over security in their sector within a few months — de facto security control has mostly been in the hands of various Sadrists, the Dawa Party militia and other Shiite characters for quite a while.
A subject I always find alarming: the idea that God is acting to drive the gears of miscellaneous things that happen in the war, an essential element in the messianic narrative of our days. Good old Oliver North put together a book about "A Greater Freedom: Stories of Faith from Operation Iraqi Freedom." Another book, "The Faith of the American Soldier" by Stephen Mansfield, has a seemingly more rational description of itself on Amazon:
Since men and women in battle not only face the prospect of their own deaths but also must fashion a moral rationale for killing, the battlefield is often a place of tremendous religious transformation.
Do men and women at war revert to the faith of their youth or do they gravitate to the spirituality around them? Do they lose all faith in the face of horror, or do they piece together an informal faith that simply gets them through the fight? Are they better warriors and do they experience less post-traumatic stress if they believe their war is righteous and that they are agents of good?
The French and Dutch resoundingly rejected the European Union Constitution, a baffling document of about 400 parts. The Union is in Crisis and the Trade Federation and its droid army are lookin for trouble. Anger spreads. Chirac looks like a caricature of himself. Looking over this document, I think I found a snag that your everyday European nationalist finds objectionable:
Article II-15: Freedom to choose an occupation and right to engage in work
1. Everyone has the right to engage in work and to pursue a freely chosen or accepted occupation.
2. Every citizen of the Union has the freedom to seek employment, to work, to exercise the right of establishment and to provide services in any Member State.
3. Nationals of third countries who are authorised to work in the territories of the Member States are entitled to working conditions equivalent to those of citizens of the Union.
And so essentially the French don't want Turkish Muslims to be able to move into their country in huge numbers, shocking as that may be. European nationalism is still a Potent Force to Contend With, even in the 21st century. I got a email from Stratfor.com about the very subject:
[The growing hostility to EU unity] is a dramatic shift in Europe. During the 1990s, the emergence of a transnational European state appeared to be a foregone conclusion. The introduction of the euro seemed to make this inevitable. The new currency made it possible to place control of Europe's money supply in the hands of a transnational central bank. It made little sense to have a European currency without a European state -- it was like wearing a tie without a shirt. Therefore, since at least part of Europe accept the euro with relative ease, it appeared to follow that the framing document -- a constitution -- would readily follow.
But there is a huge difference in the ways political systems function in relatively prosperous times and in more austere times. Things that are acceptable when the economy is healthy become less tolerable -- or intolerable -- when the economy is weak. This does not mean that the primary issue is economic. The chief obstacle to an EU constitution in France and elsewhere is political and social -- it is the unwillingness to abandon sovereignty. This sensibility is always there, but it is activated when the political ambitions of the new regime interact with hard times. This is doubly the case when people believe that their own problems and votes might have no bearing on the actions or policies of the new political system.
This dilemma is symbolized by the nature of the new constitution -- it is 300 pages long. A constitution must define the regime. It must define institutions and the limits on those institutions. It must define individual rights and, in a federal system, the rights of nonfederal governments. Above all, it must be terse. The more complex it is, the less the ordinary citizen can trust it.
A 300-page constitution, by dint of its very size, sums up the first problem facing Europe: The EU is governed by a bureaucracy whose ways cannot be understood by ordinary citizens, and which does not intend itself to be understood. It is therefore not trusted. A second problem is that the constitution is made up of a series of staggeringly complex compromises that defy clear understanding. If American constitutional law is complex, European constitutional law, as written, is beyond comprehension, let alone debate.
The voters simply don't know what they are voting for. Even if they did favor the principle of European unification, no one really knows, under this constitution, precisely what they would be committing to. This is not a solvable problem. The complexity is inevitable. It derives from an understanding of Europe that relies on specialists rather than citizen-politicians, and an uneasiness among nations that has resulted in a compromise of bewildering complexity. The Europeans either have an incomprehensible constitution, or they have no chance of agreeing on one at all.
Beneath the complexity of the task lies politics.
There were two reasons for creating the EU. The first was to build institutions that would prevent a fourth war between France and Germany. The catastrophic record of European statesmanship created the impulse to tie the hands of European politicians by creating overarching institutions. In other words, transnationalism was designed to overcome Europe's ruinous nationalism.
Second, the European Union, and the European Community before it, were designed to facilitate European prosperity. It was reasonably assumed that a Europe without protectionist barriers would do better than a Europe fragmented into multiple, exclusionary markets. On this level, the EU had a purely utilitarian goal: It was designed for economic ends, and the only justification for its existence was how readily it achieved those ends and how universally it could distribute those benefits across national lines. The European Union was designed to allow Europe to be competitive in the global marketplace.
Preventing war and generating prosperity are not trivial goals, but they lack the moral drive possessed by the great revolutionary regimes -- France, the United States, the Soviet Union. What binds the EU together is a dream of peace and prosperity. One might argue that this is a more reasonable goal than "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite." But it is also judged by a different standard: It is possible to sacrifice all to "Workers of the World Unite" or "We hold these truths to be self-evident ." But a regime founded on the principles of safety and prosperity cannot demand sacrifice that threatens either. The idea of a united Europe is not a moral project -- it is a mutually beneficial contract that has no moral hold once those benefits are no longer safeguarded.
This gives the idea of Europe a fundamental fragility. A political system that has no basis on which to justify hardship cannot endure hardship, and hardship is the one certainty that comes to all regimes. In this immediate case, Europe -- or at least France, Germany and Italy, the center of gravity of Europe -- is in serious economic trouble. Growth has slowed to only 1.5 percent per year while unemployment has climbed into the double digits. For these three countries, the EU model is simply not delivering on prosperity.
[....]
The reason [for French opposition] has to do with the first goal of the European system -- security. The old threat to security was a continuation of Europe's wars. But now a new threat -- immigration -- is perceived. Immigration appears threatening on two levels: Economically, it increases competition for jobs; socially, it increases diversity. From an economist's point of view, job competition increases efficiency, while social diversity is a non-quantifiable irrelevancy. They miss the point, to say the least.
[.....]
There is a deeper level to this. France is France. France was very happy to go to Algeria and declare it "France." Its people have been much less happy to have Algerians come to France and declare it "Algeria." Whatever the irony of it, France is changing demographically, with the inevitable result that many French -- particularly those outside the corporate elite -- don't want their country to change. Even more to the point, some feel that they are losing control of their country to immigrants, and that they no longer have the sovereign right to determine the kind of society they will have.
The EU constitution institutionalizes that powerlessness. The doctrines embedded in the EU recognize the right of immigration from one country to another: Once you have citizenship somewhere, you have the right to go anywhere within the union. This might make sense from an economist's view of labor markets, but it means that France no longer controls its fate. When Turkey enters the EU, the perception is, an avalanche of Muslim immigrants will sweep France, and the European government's bureaucrats will celebrate the shift instead of stopping it. The guarantees of security are being kept in preventing nation-states from fighting, but not -- it is perceived -- in protecting the traditional way of life in France and other countries.
...The deeper issue is sovereignty. The government of France is asking its people essentially to transfer major elements of sovereignty to a state that France cannot control. The French do not see a common identity with the rest of Europe, and the rest of Europe does not see a common identity with France. The EU is rooted in an alliance of convenience that is rapidly becoming inconvenient.
Well hopefully the Illuminati at Stratfor will not be too furious that i pulled a major quote out. Oh well. It's the information age and if you aren't pissing off a private intelligence corporation, what are you really getting done?
Consider this libertarian argument about the decline of centralized power structures:
The top-down, command-and-control machinery of state power has run head-on into the forces of spontaneity and autonomy that are life’s processes. Vertical systems of centralized power are being replaced by horizontal patterns of interconnectedness. Coercion is giving way to cooperation; the pyramid is collapsing into networks; Ozymandias’ rigid structures are eroding into formless but flexible systems, with names such as "Google," "Yahoo," "WebCrawler" and "Mozilla," that mock the solemnity we once gave to the dying forms.
Efforts to understand the dynamics underlying transformations in our world have produced the studies known as "chaos" and "complexity." Along with earlier theories of quantum mechanics, the mechanistic and reductionist model of society as a "giant clockwork" to be directed by state authorities toward desired and predictable ends, has been dealt a fatal blow. We now have ideas to help us enunciate what we earlier knew intuitively, namely, that a complex world is too unpredictable to become subject to state planning; that social conflict and disorder are the necessary consequences of interfering with spontaneous systems of order.
Decades before "chaos theory" became a popular buzzword, the late Leopold Kohr had an insight into how the increased size of political systems correlated with the expansion of warfare and repression. In his book, The Breakdown of Nations, Kohr developed what he called the "size theory of social misery." In his view, "wherever something is wrong, something is too big." It is inevitable, he goes on, for large state systems to "sweep up [a] critical quantity of power" where "the mass becomes so spontaneously vile that . . . it begins to produce a quantum of its own." A reading of both Kohr and Randolph Bourne flesh out the dynamics that led the latter to observe that "war is the health of the state."
Our biological history should have informed us of the allometric principle that the appropriate size of any body is relative to the nature of the organism. A fifty-foot tall woman may make for amusing science fiction, but an eight foot, eleven inch Robert Wadlow was unable to live beyond his twenty-second year. Likewise, the massive size of the dinosaurs did not provide them sufficient resiliency to adapt to the environmental changes brought about, presumably, by the earth’s collision with a comet. In Kohr’s words, "[o]nly relatively small bodies . . . have stability. Below a certain size, everything fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a certain size, everything collapses or explodes."
A European Union is a futile effort on the part of the established, institutional order to resist the changes that are dismantling its power structures. In much the same way that the Bush administration’s empire-motivated "war on terror" is a cover for trying to shore up the collapsing foundations of a centrally-managed society, the EU may be the last hurrah of men and women who are driven by unquenched appetites for power over others.
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