Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in TheBlackWolf's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
10:00 pm	Now this is how you do a propaganda film http://www.robpongi.com/pages/comboKIMJONGIL.html (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, November 26th, 2004
11:27 am	Orwell would be proud This is just fucking creepy http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/11/22/215244.shtml Congress Funds Psychological Tests for Kids Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004 One of the nation's leading medical groups, the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS), decried a move by the U.S. Senate to join with the House in funding a federal program AAPS says will lead to mandatory psychological testing of every child in America – without the consent of parents. When the Senate considered an omnibus appropriations bill last week that included funding for grants to implement universal mental health screening for almost 60 million children, pregnant women and adults through schools and pre-schools, it approved $20 million of the $44 million sought, Kathryn Serkes, public affairs counsel for AAPS, told NewsMax. This $20 million matches a like amount already approved by the House, Serkes advised. While the funding cut of some $24 million was a little good news, suggested Serkes, whose organization has zealously opposed the the measure, she said the organization was most worried about the failure of Congress to include “parental consent” language sought by the AAPS. Last September, AAPS lifetime member Rep. Ron Paul, M.D., R-Texas, tried to stop the plan in its tracks by offering an amendment to the Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Act for FY 2005. The amendment received 95 “yes” votes, but it failed to pass. According to Serkes, Paul is now mulling offering stand-alone legislation in the next session to once again try and get a provision for parental consent. The federal bill on its face does not require mandatory mental health testing to be imposed upon states or local schools, explained Serkes. However, the HHS appropriations bill contains block grant money that will likely be used – as is often the case with block funding – by the various states to implement mandatory psychological testing programs for all students in the school system. The spending bill has its roots in the recommendations of the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, created by President Bush in 2002 to propose ways of eliminating waste and improve efficiency and effectiveness of the mental health care delivery system. Although the report does not specifically recommend screening all students, it does suggest that “schools are in a key position to identify the mental health problems early and to provide a link to appropriate services.” The bottom line, explained Serkes, is that a state receiving money under this appropriation will likely make its mental testing of kids mandatory – and not be out of synch with the federal enactment. The other telling point, said Serkes, is that although the relatively minimal funding at this point is certainly not enough to fund mandatory mental testing for kids countrywide, it’s an ominous start: “Once it’s established and has funding, a program exhibits the nettlesome property of being self-sustaining – it gets a life of its own. More funding follows.” Officials of the AAPS decry in the measure what they see as “a dangerous scheme that will heap even more coercive pressure on parents to medicate children with potentially dangerous side effects.” One of the most “dangerous side effects” from antidepressants commonly prescribed to children is suicide, regarding which AAPS added, “Further, even the government’s own task force has concluded that mental health screening does little to prevent suicide.” Meanwhile, Rep. Paul says the mental testing scheme is a looming feature of "Big Brother" that if unchecked will push parental rights out of the picture: “At issue is the fundamental right of parents to decide what medical treatment is appropriate for their children. The notion of federal bureaucrats ordering potentially millions of youngsters to take psychotropic drugs like Ritalin strikes an emotional chord with American parents, who are sick of relinquishing more and more parental control to government. “Once created, federal programs are nearly impossible to eliminate. Anyone who understands bureaucracies knows they assume more and more power incrementally. A few scattered state programs over time will be replaced by a federal program implemented in a few select cities. Once the limited federal program is accepted, it will be expanded nationwide. Once in place throughout the country, the screening program will become mandatory. “Soviet communists attempted to paint all opposition to the state as mental illness. It now seems our own federal government wants to create a therapeutic nanny state, beginning with schoolchildren. It’s not hard to imagine a time 20 or 30 years from now when government psychiatrists stigmatize children whose religious, social, or political values do not comport with those of the politically correct, secular state. “American parents must do everything they can to remain responsible for their children’s well-being. If we allow government to become intimately involved with our children’s minds and bodies, we will have lost the final vestiges of parental authority. Strong families are the last line of defense against an overreaching bureaucratic state.” http://baltimorechronicle.com/100704SheldonRichman.shtml Bush's Brave New World by Sheldon Richman President Bush's little-publicized New Freedom Commission on Mental Health has proposed comprehensive mental-illness screening for all Americans. If this proposal is carried out, which is Bush's intention, no adult or child will be safe from intrusive probing by "experts," backed by drug companies, who believe that mental illness is woefully underdiagnosed and therefore that many millions of people ought to be taking powerful and expensive psychiatric drugs. Schools and doctors' offices will become quasi-psychiatric monitoring stations. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas tried to forbid the federal government from funding mental-health screening, but the House turned down his amendment to the appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services. Paul, a physician, said the program was a usurpation of parental rights, pointing out that parents can already be charged with child abuse for refusing to give their children Ritalin for alleged attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He said, "Psychotropic drugs are increasingly prescribed for children who show nothing more than children's typical rambunctious behavior. Many children have suffered harmful effects from these drugs." Another physician, Karen Effrem, also opposes the plan: "Universal mental-health screening and the drugging of children, as recommended by the New Freedom Commission, needs to be stopped so that many thousands if not millions of children will be saved from receiving stigmatizing diagnoses that would follow them for the rest of their lives. America's school children should not be medicated by expensive, ineffective, and dangerous medications based on vague and dubious diagnoses." People wrongly assume that psychiatric diagnoses are like medical diagnoses. They're not. Medical diagnoses are ultimately based on objective biological evidence. Psychiatric diagnoses, as retired psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz shows, are based on what people say and do. This means that such diagnoses are moral and political, not medical, judgments. It begs the question to say that brain science is still in its infancy: Why is one kind of behavior interpreted as a sign of mental or brain disease but not another kind? Besides, Szasz writes, behavior has reasons not causes. That principle is at the very core of what we mean by personhood. (Brain-scan technology cannot refute this principle because it does not identify causes of behavior. Correlation is not causation.) Thus the New Freedom Commission recommendation that everyone be screened for mental illness whenever he goes to the doctor and that children be monitored for mental illness in the government's schools is simply a plan to stigmatize people for "inappropriate" behavior and speech. It is also a plan for the widespread drugging of adults and children under government supervision. Besides the Huxleyian aspects of this idea, there is also reason to fear improper influence by drug companies. Allen Jones, formerly of the Pennsylvania Office of Inspector General, revealed that a similar program was started in his state after drug companies curried favor with state officials. According to the British Medical Journal, "In July 2002 Mr Jones was appointed lead investigator when he uncovered evidence of payments into an off-the-books account. The account, earmarked for 'educational grants,' was funded in large part by Pfizer and Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Payments were made from the account to state employees who developed formulary guidelines recommending expensive new drugs over older, cheaper drugs with proved track records. One of the recommended drugs was Janssen's ... Risperdal--a drug that has recently been found to have potentially lethal side effects." In a statement last January, Jones said, "The industry was influencing state officials with trips, perks, lavish meals, transportation to and first-class accommodations in major cities. Some state employees were paid honorariums of up to $2,000 for speaking in their official capacities at drug-company-sponsored events." Jones was relieved of his duties after blowing the whistle. In court papers challenging the state's move, he said the government was attempting to "cover up, discourage, and limit any investigations or oversight into the corrupt practices of large drug companies and corrupt public officials who have acted with them." The New Freedom Commission has gotten little publicity. One hopes that as Americans learn about its ominous proposal for wholesale mental-illness screening and psychiatric drugging of them and their children, they will vehemently object. (Comment on this)
Monday, October 18th, 2004
10:17 pm	Who I'm voting for, and why After a long deliberation I've decided who I'm voting for. And though it might seem a tad presumptous on my part to believe people would want to read a thread about my reasons why, I thought I'd mention them First of all, I want to discuss the issues. First, Economics Health Care: Both Bush and Kerry have good proposals. Both proposals if actually implemented I think would help out this country in ways that need to be. Bush's though is more realistic and more likely to be implemented, but it covers far fewer people. Kerry's is more ambitous, covers more people, yet I doubt it will ever be passed. So advantage: Bush Energy: Once again I see good points in each. Both have advocated alternative fuels. Bush has pushed for hydrogen fuel cars, and other innovative sources. Kerry has followed suit. Yet though I trust Bush's intentions, I don't trust his follow through. I think he is too entangled into cooperate interests which would dillute his intentions; Advantage Kerry Environment: Bush has I think an unfairly harsh record here. He has done some good for the environment which has gone unnoticed. However, they have been compromised and diluted by other initiatives that favor businesses. Now I don't have a problem with proposals favoring businesses in themsleves. But they seem more politically motivated, than policy motivated. And of course either way I think Kerry will do a better job. I am a bit worried that he will overregulate, but I think the Republican party will keep him in check: Advantage Kerry Taxes: Seeing that our economy is slowly recovering, any tax increases or rollbacks, even towards the rich, worries me. On the other hand, Kerry's cuts do seem to be directed more towards small businesses. However, I am highly interested in Bush's plan for Tax Reform, as I think it is highly important, and I believe Bush would push for it: Advantage Bush Education: Here I actually favor Kerry, but not for the reasons others would. I think NCLB will be effective. I think it is too soon to evaulate it's effectiveness. I think the charges that Bush hasn't funded it at the level he said he was are unfair. Although I am sympathetic towards the idea that he is not fundinging at the level he should. What makes me interested in Kerry's plan though, was an article I read a few months ago in the Washington Montly. Where Kerry advocated proposals that would reward teachers based on merit, and would encourage Teachers to perform better, among other things. I'm interested to see his proposal implemented: Advantage Kerry Job training, initiatives: I have been highly impressed with Bush's plans. It warms me greatly to see a Republican who believes in the importance of job training. And I think many of his proposals will help those who previously couldn't get effective job training to receive it. I don't really know much about Kerry's at this point, but I would think he would carry in the tradition, since Bush's plans are somewhat similar to Clinton's.: Advantage Bush Science: First of all, I really don't know whether all the charges made against Bush are true or not. However even if they aren't, I think it is plainly obvious Kerry believes in science and values it more than Bush, and will be better at pushing for advances in science and techology. Plus I think he will help curb the power of groups like the RIAA and MPAA who are encroaching on the freedom of the net.: Advantage Kerry Drugs: Kerry has talked about the legitimacy of decriminalzing marijauna. A massive win for him: Advantage Kerry Crime: Kerry believes more in rehabiliation, in prevention, than deterrence and incarceration. Bush is an old-school Republican, who believes in stiffer sentances. Avantage Kerry Okay, now Foreign Policy, specifically the war on terrorism This has been the tough one for me. I think Bush gets the fundamental causes of terrorism. I have heard him speak eloquently about it, although not in forums where many people heard him. I have read interviews with him about it. I have read speeches by his staff. I think they get it. I also think this idea that they are only focused on miliatary initiatives has been way overblown. There are many positive proposals Bush has tried to push which would have helped out various Middle Eastern countries through non-violent means, through pushing education reforms, and providing funds to help build their country. So I trust Bush has the right vision. However, what about his ability to execute that vision? Well, currently one of the main problems is Bush's own lack of credibility. We saw this problem cause him to not be able to push his Greater Middle East Initiative, which would have provided funds and various reforms to middle eastern countries. And it has caused him problems in getting other countries to support his ideas. Along with that, the post-war problems in Iraq are great cause for concern. Now I still don't know why the failures happened, and whether Bush is really at fault. It is quite possible that there is info that is not common knowledge, that if held would put Bush's decisions about post-war Iraq in a more favorable light. However this is a massive question mark, which causes me great distress Now for Kerry: Kerry I view the opposite. I trust his ability, it's his vision I'm not sure I can trust. Kerry has throughout his career been cautious to push proposals which could upset stability. Now these are understandable, but in my mind we are in a situation where we have to take risks. Although we should obviously take every step necessary to make sure the risks are minimial. However various things Kerry has done in the past, not voting for the first Gulf War, not voting for the war in Bosnia, makes me worry about whether he has the courage to take risks. There will probably come a time where Kerry won't have much time to deliberate, and a risky course of action will be on the table. And I'm nervous about his abilities to go forth with it. I'm also unsure whether he gets the causes of terrorism, specifically radical fundamentalist islam, and is prepared to do what's necessary to fight them. Going after terrorists is just putting a band-aid on the problem. We need to get at the root causes. If we don't, all the work we do is just a delaying tactic. I'm nervous about Kerry's ability to do the work that's necessary. However, recent info has made me believe Kerry does get the causes, and even if he doesn't necessarily have the will to push for them, at least sees the importance in them. Advantage: Draw So given all of this, who am I voting for? Well there is one thing I haven't mentioned, and this, more than anything, is what has affected my decision. And that is I can't trust Bush. I have read too many articles that worry me. I've read articles that he only plays by "gut". I've read articles that he doesn't listen to those who oppose him, or creates a situation that prevents opposing views from being heard. I've read articles that make me believe he relies more on personal feelings and emotion than logic. I've read articles that those who he surrounds himself with are distrustful of experts, and dismissive of other opinions. I've read articles that say he has taken several drastic steps which harm the fabric of democracy. Now this isn't to say I believe them. It's that I can't be sure. And it's this uncertainty that make me believe that Bush is too much of a risk. I look at things on a worst case scenario basis. To me, the worst case scenario of Kerry is not nearly as drastic as a worst case scenario of Bush. If all of my fears of Bush are realized, the next 4 years could be disasterous. If my worst fears of Kerry are realized, to me we'll just see the status quo. I do think Bush has more potential for good than Kerry. In fact deep down I think a second Bush presidency will be better than a Kerry presidency. However, I can't roll the dice this election. There is too much at stake. And because of that I'm voting for Kerry (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 25th, 2004
9:04 pm	The Christian's role in society: The "two kingdoms" vs the "kingdom of God". The recent discussion about religion and politics has gotten me to think about the Christian's role in society further, from a theological perspective. And so I thought I'd post my thoughts about how traditional Christian theology has influenced the Christian's role, and why there might need to be a rethinking of not just the role, but the theology behind it. Much of traditional Christian thought, if not Christian doctrine, was heavily influenced by platonic dualism. This way of thinking says that "spiritual" matters are more important than "earthly or physical" matters. Dualism focuses on the desire to escape out of our physical make-up, into a more spiritual existence. Also, because "spiritual" matters are more important, what happens to people on this earth tends to take on less importance than what happens in that spiritual realm. This way of thinking heavily influenced how Christians interpreted the Old and New Testament for centuries. So when Jesus talked about the "Kingdom of God", it was thought to be referring to a spiritual kingdom. Also, since spiritual matters were more important than physical matters, this affected how Christians interacted with the world. So it was ok to go on massive crusades, because even if people physically suffered, what was more important was their eternal soul. (In fact the concept of a "soul" as seperate from the body is not a Jewish concept, but one that came about through dualism). Things like human rights, social injustice, and treatment of the poor were neglected as these were "physical" matters, and had nothing to do with spirituality. This also affected how people perceived Luther's doctrine of the "two kingdoms". Now what Luther was trying to say has been widely debated and also misinterpreted, but one of the prevailing interpretations of Luther's idea was that there were two Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the world and the Kingdom of the church. Each of these Kingdoms had their own rules and way of governing, and that the rules of the church shouldn't interfere with the rules of the world, and vice-versa. Now while there may be some truth to that, the dualism in Christian thought led people to believe that the rules in Christianity had to do with spiritual matters, and the rules of the world more earthly. Jesus commandments had little to do with how we are supposed to act in the world. The sermon on the mount for example were seen as near-impossible rules to follow, ones that showed our own human depravity which makes us realize our need for salvation. But had little practical impact in our interaction with the world. This way of thinking finally culminated in many in the Lutheran Church in Germany to sit idly by while atrocities happened to the Jewish people. Hitler was the leader in Germany, and so people in the Church thought that since Hitler's government had been esablished by God, they were supposed to obey. Besides, what was happening to the Jewish people only had to do with earthly matters, not spiritual. It was the utter apathy of the Christian Church though that caused a major rethinking of the Christian's role in Society. Dietrich Bonhoffer blasted the Church, saying it was the Christian's duty to stand up to injustice, even dying for his beliefs. Reinhold Niebhur said that God is the God of all, and his rules apply to the whole world, not just the spiritual realm. However it has only been lately that there has been a new perception of not only the Christian's role in society, but Christ's purpose in coming to earth and dying in the first place. One that is heavily grounded not in dualistic thinking, but understanding the cultural context of 1st century Judaism. The Jews in the first century lived in exile. While in some ways this was physical, in the sense that many jews were no longer living in the holy land, it was more of a theological exile. Pagans now lived in their country, opressing the people. The Jewish leaders were collaborating and compromising with the pagans. God no longer seemed to dwell among the people and had abandoned them. However the Jews believed in a time where God would come, free his people, would dwell among them, and that he would establish his kingdom not just over Israel, but the whole world. And the entire world would be able to experience the fellowship with God that the Israelites did. A time where all the world would be reconciled together. This was known as the eschaton, what all of Jewish history had been leading up to. This was the world Jesus was born into. And only by understanding this can we understand Jesus message. For what Jesus preached was that "the Kingdom of God was at hand". Meaning that with the coming of Jesus, he was ushering in that eschaton, that with the coming of Jesus God was establishing his kingdom ON EARTH, and was reconciling the entire world through him. Therefore when Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God, this wasn't some spiritual reality which we hope to eventually achieve, this was an actual physical reality that was happening now, and is happening now. Jesus message then was what this entails for the Jewish people and all of humanity. For while Jesus ushered in the kingdom, it was going to be through the work of the Jewish people , and eventually the church, that would make it achieve it's culmination. Therefore much of his sayings were on both what this represented, and what the Jewish response should be. What did this Kingdom entail? God's kingdom was one where social and economic injustices, such as the plight of the poor, were fought and eradicated. Where people were no longer divided, but one where we can be reconciled to our former enemies. Where one did not have to seperate from the "unclean" to be holy, for that holiness would come through Jesus own death on the cross. And finally where all the world can be reconciled to God and each other. A key to all of this is to understand the word "righteousness". Righteousness in Jewish thought did not mean, as many in the western world think, being just and holy. It meant more something like "community-restoring justice." Being righteous was not a decleration of God that you were just, but actively participating in restoring community, in fighting social and economic injustices, etc.. Therefore when Jesus tells the people to be righteous, this isn't stating that they must be holy otherwise God will punish them, he is stating how the individual can joyously participate in bringing his kingdom about. And so when he preached on the Sermon on the Mount, these were not harsh rules that showed human depravity, these were proactive steps that the Jewish people could take to help God's kingdom reach it's culmination through promoting social and economic justice. His sermon was meant to be empowering, not enslaving. Martin Luther King understood this, which is why he used the Sermon on the Mount as his basis for his theory of non-violent direct action to fight the injustices being perpetuated on the blacks. Notice how much this has to do with matters of the world. Jesus message was not just focused on the state of the individual's eternal soul, but what is happening to their own physical existence now. The "good news" of the gospel doesn't just have to do with spiritual matters of our eternal soul, but things of earthly importance that matter to us now, such as the plight of the poor, the emnity that causes divisions among people, the suffering of the needy and the oppresed. And ultimately it has to do with all of humanity being reconciled to God and each other. With that in mind, the Christian's role in society takes on a new perspective. The role of the Christian is to help in the further strengtheing and growth of this kingdom. How is the Christian supposed to go about this? By following what Jesus preached. Loving your enemies, caring for the poor and needy, being peacmakers in the world through proactive initiatives, not just passivity. The fundamental guideline of all that we do being to "love the lord your God", and "love your neighbor as yourself". And ultimately helping people be reconciled to God and each other. In regards to God, we are to be the witnesses of God to the world. For Christians are God's representatives to the world. Just as Jesus revealed God through the incarnation, Christians reveal God through their daily interacting with the world. Not just by talking about God and preaching of the gospel, (although that is necessary) but revealing the Kingdom through our actions. Showing God's love and forgiveness by being loving and forgiving. Showing God's compassion for the poor by caring for the poor. Showing how God grieves over injustices by fighting them. However we are also supposed to be reconciling the world. This means we are supposed to be peacemakers. Christians should be on the forefront of working out non-violent resolutions in regards to conflicts between people and nations. Christians should be helping people and nations understand each other and work out differences. And to acknowledge and affirm the valid needs of respective parties. We are supposed to be promoting understanding and tolerance, not close-mindedness and intolerance. We should be focused on uniting, not dividing. There are times of course where the Christian will need to take a stand that might seem divisive. However these stands should always be rooted in love for God and each other, with the purpose not to judge and divide, but to restore justice, fairness, and ultimately reconciliaiton. The sad thing though is that the world hardly sees this new kingdom as "good news." And why should they? Instead of the Church being the leaders in fighting against the suffering of people, it has largely perpetuated it. I don't blame the world from turning against Christianity, for the Kingdom I write about seems largely absent today. This is why I think it is imperative that Christians understand this way of thinking. Finally, what does this mean for Christians who enter the political arena? Well as I've said the mission of the Christian is to help the kingdom grow and flourish. And so of course this desire will influence his policies. Two things however. First of all, everything that the Christian does should be guided by the principle foundation of all his actions, "love your neighbor as yourself." Anything that violates this is going against God. Any law that would discriminate against a group of people for example, would violate this law. Anything that doesn't take into consideration the suffering of individuals if such a law is proposed violates this. Second of all, I believe these values that guide the Christian's actions are not just found in scripture, but in nature. For example, the importance of the need for the weak to be protected is not only scriptural, but logical. In fact we've just had an entire thread that shows how a careful understanding of nature helps us develop our morals and values. Therefore, every policy can and must have a logical basis for it outside of scripture. In fact if a person can't make a strong case for it outside of scripture, i'd question whether it's even scriptural. I think much of what I've said is probably common sense for the average non-christian who has read the Bible. Sadly non-christians seem sometimes to understand the Bible better than Christians do. Our church has been contaminated by an incorrect view of scirpture for centuries, and it will take a long time to restore it. For we are fighting against centuries of tradition, and firmly entrenched institutions. Fortunately the exodus of many from the Church has caused a rethinking of it. I think a Church that has a firm foundation in accurate scriptural tradition will make the Church grow more than it has in centuries. Of course the tendency is to conform to the world. But people don't want the Church to conform to the world, otherwise, why go? People want the Church to be that which stands out, as a great leaders have stood out over the centuries. One that people respect and try to emulate. Now I'll admit that scripture is always subject to interpretation, one of the problems the Church has had. And so it's difficult to determine just what an "accurate foundation of scripture" is. Which is why I'm gratified to see people now trying to go back to it's historical roots. To me the more I see the Jesus of history, which is sometimes vastly different than the Jesus of the Church, the more I love and try to emulate him. For the Church to progress, it needs to look back in time, to trust the historical methods going on, not poo pooing them as people trying to subvert scripture. For Christ was God revealed in history. To understand the historical Jesus is to ultimately understand God. And the more we understand this Jesus, the more we see his message was ultimately one of hope and reconciliation, not hatred and division. I should clarify though that while I believe in promoting tolerance, that I also do believe that ultimately people are reconciled to God through Jesus. Now whether this means one must have faith in Jesus I'm not certain. I believe it is, and my actions will be guided by that belief, but I can't say with certainty anymore that it's true. And so Christians should spread the gospel. But this includes the entire gospel. Not just that Jesus died so you can be with God, though that's part of it, but the entire Kingdom message. And ultimately showing that the Kingdom has come through our actions. And so I cannot at this time say that I fully approve of a church that treats all beliefs as equal. However I also believe as I've said before that part of this tolerance and understanding is to enter any discussion of religion with the willingness to admit that you might be wrong, and to realize all beliefs on some level have something to add which will help us have a clearer picture of who God is. (Comment on this)
Monday, July 19th, 2004
10:38 pm	The New Republic nails it again Another dead on critique of the Bush administration. With so much ammo that can be used against Bush, it baffles me that the Dems keep wasting the best Last summer, President Bush and the Republican congressional leadership had a problem. The legislative linchpin of the president's reelection effort, a bill to add prescription-drug coverage to Medicare, lacked the votes in Congress, where conservative Republicans were chafing at the expense. GOP leaders finally secured a bare majority by consenting to the demands of 13 Republican House members, who agreed to vote yes if the cost would not exceed $400 billion over ten years. But that created another problem: The administration knew the bill would cost considerably more--$534 billion, to be exact. The only non-loyalist who seems to have known the real number was Richard Foster, a 31-year veteran of the bureaucracy who was serving as chief actuary of the Department of Health and Human Services. The job of putting a lid on Foster fell to his boss, Thomas Scully, appointed by Bush to run Medicare. Scully instructed Foster not to reveal the number, or even to answer queries from Democrats, without his approval. Foster later said he understood Scully to be operating at the White House's direction. In one e-mail obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Foster asked Scully for permission to answer congressional queries that "strike me as straightforward requests for technical information." No, replied Scully's assistant, who then warned, "The consequences for insubordination are extremely severe." (Scully, by the way, later admitted to having negotiated a job with lobbying firms while he helped craft the bill, in which they had a massive interest.) The Medicare bill was therefore widely understood to cost $400 billion when, at three o'clock in the morning on November 23, the House of Representatives assembled to vote on it. Surprisingly, a majority voted no. In response, the GOP leadership violated the customary time limit on votes, holding the vote open for nearly three hours and twisting enough arms to reverse the result shortly before dawn. (A hint as to their methods of persuasion came from retiring Republican Representative Nick Smith, who offhandedly revealed a few days later that certain "members and groups" had offered to contribute $100,000 to the congressional campaign of his son Brad, who was running for Smith's seat, if he voted yes.) When Democrats controlled Congress, they had extended a vote once, in 1987, for 15 minutes, after a member inadvertently caused a budget bill's defeat and then left town--provoking spasms of indignation from Republicans. The three-hour Medicare vote, congressional scholar Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute later wrote, was "the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House." To ensure that it received proper credit for the new law, the Bush administration employed similarly unconventional means, hiring a pharmaceutical lobbyist to help sell it to distrustful voters. The advertising campaign included $9.5 million in TV advertising--which, astoundingly enough, was financed not by Bush's campaign, but by taxpayer dollars. Promotion of the law also involved the production of "video news releases," in which a "reporter"--actually, a p.r. agent--touted the virtues of the new Medicare law. The General Accounting Office (GAO) later concluded that the videos amounted to an illegal use of government money to produce propaganda, but not before 40 TV stations had already aired them. Here we have a sample of the style of governance that has prevailed under Bush's presidency. It's not the sort of thing you would find in a civics textbook. Bush and his allies have been described as partisan or bare-knuckled, but the problem is more fundamental than that. They have routinely violated norms of political conduct, smothered information necessary for informed public debate, and illegitimately exploited government power to perpetuate their rule. These habits are not just mean and nasty. They're undemocratic. What does it mean to call the president "undemocratic"? It does not mean Bush is an aspiring dictator. Despite descending from a former president and telling confidants that God chose him to lead the country, he does not claim divine right of rule. He is not going to cancel the election or rig it with faulty ballots. (Well, almost certainly not.) But democracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he's abandoning American democracy, but that he's weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency. There are many definitions of democracy, but let us begin with one supplied by Bush himself. A democracy, he told Al Arabiya television in May during an interview on the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, is "where leaders are willing to discuss it with the media. And we act in a way where, you know, our Congress asks pointed questions to the leadership. In other words, people want to know the truth. That stands in contrast to dictatorships. A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this." It's ironic that Bush used this definition because, by this measure, he has run the least democratic administration of any president since the advent of television and radio. Since Franklin Roosevelt made press conferences a regular feature, Bush has held fewer of them than any president--14 solo press conferences, as compared with Bill Clinton's 41 and George H.W. Bush's 77 at this point in their presidencies. When he does appear before the press, Bush routinely refuses to answer difficult questions. (Why did he insist that Vice President Dick Cheney appear by his side before the 9/11 Commission? "Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9/11 Commission is looking forward to asking us. And I'm looking forward to answering them.") The president is so evasive that his technique has become a point of pride for his admirers. "Watching President Bush's press conference Tuesday night, you could see why he drives the press crazy," wrote Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard this April. "No matter what they asked, his answer was invariably the same." Bush's attitude typifies his administration's general refusal to speak candidly. Every presidency, of course, tries to formulate a party line. But, before Bush, the spin was usually counterbalanced by off-the-record candor. "In other Administrations, the chief of staff and key deputies--people like [Michael] Deaver and James A. Baker III, during the Reagan-Bush years, and John Podesta and Leon Panetta, under Clinton--have usually been open with reporters; they've even courted the press," Ken Auletta reported in The New Yorker this January. "In the current White House, [Andy] Card and [Karl] Rove usually don't return calls, and staffers boast of not answering reporters' questions." Some Bush supporters explain this reticence as a justified response to a biased media. Yet Bushies show no more willingness to answer pointed questions from Congress. Last month, Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to release the administration's memos on the use of torture and refused even to offer a legal basis for his refusal. These sorts of incidents have become routine. In 2002, the administration denied requests to have Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge testify on Capitol Hill. That same year, Medicare Director Scully refused to appear at a hearing where witnesses with different points of view were allowed to testify. Last fall, the Bush White House declared it would not answer any questions from Democrats on the Appropriations Committees unless those questions were first cleared with the Republican chairmen. (This latter demand was so outrageous that the administration had to drop it after even congressional Republicans objected.) The best single measure of Bush's unwillingness to submit to pointed questions may be his disposition toward the 9/11 Commission. First, he fervently opposed creating the Commission. When that failed, he threw up impediments to their work. He sought (unsuccessfully) to prevent national security adviser Condoleezza Rice from testifying. Bush himself initially refused to testify and blocked the Commission's access to important documents. Later, after agreeing under pressure to testify, he refused to do so under oath. He sought to limit his testimony to one hour. He sought to block commissioners other than the co-chairmen from attending his testimony. He demanded that Cheney appear alongside him. He allowed only a single staffer to take notes. And he barred the presence of a transcriber. Who else has the White House tried to keep in the dark? Oh yes: the public--the people who Bush says "want to know the truth." "For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters," concluded a long investigation by U.S. News & World Report last December. "The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government." Consider just one example. Bush's 2004 budget cut grants to the states (outside of Medicaid, which rises automatically) by 2.4 percent. After statehouses complained, the administration announced it would cease publishing Budget Information for States, which documents how much states receive from various federal programs. (The administration claimed it did so to save on printing costs.) The result, as Alysoun McLaughlin of the National Conference of State Legislatures told The Washington Post: "There's no one place in the public domain for this information anymore." The administration has not confined its mania for secrecy to obscure policy wonkery; it has been essential to selling most of its signature policies. The Medicare bill would not have passed Congress had the administration shared its true cost. And both Congress and the public might have been more skeptical of the administration's repeated claims that Iraq's oil could, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz put it, "finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon"--and of the case for war in general--had they been allowed to see a secret government study that painted a decidedly bleak picture of Iraq's oil industry. Yale's Robert Dahl, America's foremost democracy scholar, suggests another definition of democracy. "Opportunities to gain an enlightened understanding of public matters are not just part of the definition of democracy," he writes in his book On Democracy. "They are a requirement for democracy." It is not terribly controversial to suggest that democracies function best with an informed public, and the administration's inaccessibility and penchant for secrecy obviously hinder that. But Bush has done more than keep the public in the dark: He has actively sought to mislead it. One particularly egregious example is the administration's persistent effort to cultivate in the public mind a connection between Iraq and the September 11 terrorist attacks in order to justify a war to oust Saddam Hussein. As one White House adviser told The New York Times, "If you discount the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, then you discount the proposition that it's part of the war on terror. If it's not part of the war on terror, then what is it--some cockeyed adventure on the part of George W. Bush?" So the administration led Americans to believe that Iraq had aided in the attacks on us. Cheney, for example, repeatedly referred to an alleged 2001 meeting between September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague--even though the CIA determined the meeting never took place. Cheney would suggest Iraq's involvement in September 11 in more subtle ways as well: "If we're successful in Iraq," Cheney asserted last year, "we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on September 11." This statement is not false--the terrorists were, in fact, geographically based in the region of which Iraq is the heart--but it is designed to give the false impression that the September 11 terrorists were based in Iraq. Similarly, in his letter to Congress requesting authorization for war with Iraq, Bush wrote that such action "is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." This campaign of misinformation succeeded. During the run-up to the war, a large majority of Americans implicated Iraq in the September 11 attacks. Even if you supported the Iraq war (as I did), this fact must be considered a serious problem for American democracy. Bush did not obtain, or even seek, the rational, informed consent of the public. But the Iraq war was a model of enlightened deliberation compared with the process that resulted in Bush's signature tax cuts. Again, setting aside the substantive merits of the tax cuts (which, regular New Republic readers may vaguely recall, I did not support), two pieces of public opinion data stood out in 2001. First, only 20 to 30 percent of voters deemed tax cuts their highest fiscal priority--the rest preferred increased spending or debt reduction. Second, polls showed that the public preferred tax cuts distributed far more evenly than Bush desired. The most popular option was to give every taxpayer an equal-sized rebate--an option several orders of magnitude more progressive than what actually passed. The administration confronted both problems by mounting an elaborate disinformation campaign. Bush's approach is thrown into stark relief by a White House memo instructing Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill how to communicate the administration message during his March 2001 appearance on "Meet the Press." "The public prefers spending on things like health care and education over cutting taxes," the memo warned. "It's crucial that you make clear that there are no tradeoffs here." In this case, the phrase "make clear" serves as a euphemism for "lie." More money for tax cuts necessarily entailed less for health care and education. Falsehoods were embedded in nearly every aspect of Bush's sales pitch: his claim that his tax cut would amount to just one-fourth of the projected surplus (his own figures showed one-third); his assertion that "by far the vast majority of my tax cut goes to those at the bottom" (in fact, some 40 percent went to the wealthiest 1 percent); and his repeated claim that a waitress earning $20,000 a year was the paradigmatic beneficiary of his tax cut (in truth, most such waitresses got nothing from Bush's plan, and the few who did benefit received about $125). In previous years, the effects of such propaganda would have been blunted by official computations by number-crunchers at the Treasury Department and the Joint Committee on Taxation, who used to release figures on who would benefit from various changes in the tax code. But, when they took control of the White House and Congress, Republicans put a stop to such inconvenient wonkery. True, Republicans could not prevent the Congressional Budget Office from estimating the cost of their tax cuts. But they could, and did, render such estimates meaningless by larding up their tax bills with gimmicks, such as sunset provisions, that obscured the true cost of the cuts and forced public debate to revolve around numbers--as in a "1.3 trillion dollar tax cut"--that experts on both sides understood to be fantastical. Don't all politicians fudge the truth from time to time? Sure. The difference is that, over the last few years, misinformation has become fundamental, rather than incidental, to the political process. As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution puts it, "What's striking is the extent of [manipulation] in this administration. The most ambitious and fundamental proposals have been cloaked in language that's designed to mislead." This dishonesty is necessary because the policies do not reflect the will of the majority. As a forthcoming paper on the 2001 tax cut by Yale's Jacob Hacker and Harvard's Paul Pierson notes, "For those committed to core principles of democratic governance, the picture that emerges is unsettling. On the central questions of how large the tax cut should be and how its benefits should be distributed, the preferences of a majority of voters appear to have been systematically ignored. Far from ruling the polity, average voters proved vulnerable to systematic and extensive manipulation." Democracies are also characterized by limits on the use of government power to ensconce the ruling party. Indeed, limits on such abuses are a key determinant of a democracy's strength. This is why we don't allow the president to, say, force federal employees to donate to his campaign, or sic the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on his critics. If the incumbent could turn the entire government into an apparatus of his political party, then dislodging incumbents would become prohibitively difficult. That's precisely what happens in weak democracies--classic "one-and-a-half party" states like Singapore and Paraguay--where ruling parties can hold power for decades despite superficially free elections. But, if democracy requires a distinction between the interests of the government and the interests of the party that happens to run it, Bush and his allies have little regard for such discrimination. Bush's use of the Department of Health and Human Services to fund propaganda on behalf of its Medicare bill was not an isolated instance. After cutting taxes in 2001, the IRS mailed out promotional notices to the public, gushing, "We are pleased to inform you that the United States Congress passed--and President George W. Bush signed into law--the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, which provides long-term tax relief for all Americans who pay income taxes." (Larry Noble of the Center for Responsive Politics told the Times, "I've never heard of anything like this, certainly not from the IRS, certainly not with this rah-rah tone. It's outrageous.") When the checks did arrive, they were helpfully emblazoned with Bush's catchphrase, "Tax relief for America's workers." The Bush administration has been just as brazen about misusing its powers over state secrecy. While the White House has restricted access to vast swaths of material--even classifying decades-old documents that had never previously been classified--it has been extravagantly liberal in releasing information that suits Bush's partisan interests (see "Secrets and Lies," page 7). In 2002, Bush embarrassed his predecessor by declassifying portions of the transcript of a conversation in which Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak asked Bill Clinton to pardon fugitive tax-evader Marc Rich. When Clinton asked Bush to declassify the rest of the transcript, arguing that additional context would make him look better, the White House refused. This spring, the administration declassified a steady stream of memos and briefings all for the purpose of rebutting criticisms raised by the 9/11 Commission. (For instance, it declassified a 1995 memo by Commission member and former Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick in an attempt to embarrass her.) "Bush is the first president since Richard Nixon to try to brandish declassification as a political weapon," concluded John Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, in an article for TNR online. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Republicans draw little distinction between their partisan interests and the national interest; they have all but said so. As the Iraq war began last year, Republicans argued that patriotism required the passage of Bush's tax cuts. "When our troops are over there fighting," GOP Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison put it, "we don't want partisan bickering to be what they see on television from back home." Once you have equated the security of the state with the welfare of a political party, it's no great leap to turn the former into an instrument of the latter. In May of last year, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay ordered the Department of Homeland Security to track down an airplane carrying Democratic legislators fleeing Texas in order to foil a GOP redistricting effort. Last July, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas ordered Capitol Police to break up a meeting of Democratic representatives. (DeLay's request was heeded; Thomas's was not.) But the most effective use of self-perpetuating power has been the particularly undemocratic way Bush's party has run Congress, especially the House of Representatives. It's hardly new, of course, for the House majority party to run roughshod over the minority. But, with Bush issuing orders to DeLay, the trampling of minority rights in the last few years has "been carried to a new extreme," as Mann told my colleague Michael Crowley in the latter's definitive report on the subject ("Oppressed Minority," July 23, 2003). The GOP, for example, routinely denies Democrats the right to propose or amend legislation. As a result, popular reforms--such as allowing the importation of prescription drugs from Canada--have never come to a vote, even though a majority of representatives support them. Republicans restrict debate to an hour or less on major legislation. They bring bills to the floor minutes before they are to be voted on, allowing members (and reporters) almost no chance to understand the details before they are passed. That the Medicare vote took place between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. is not unusual--the House does its business in the dead of night, literally and figuratively. The import of such procedural tactics becomes clear if we consider a couple of examples. Last year, the administration proposed a rule change allowing companies to deny more of their workers overtime pay. Under public pressure, the Senate and the House both voted to bar the change. But then a conference committee--which, by rule, may only iron out differences between the House and Senate, not rewrite provisions on which the two chambers agree--inserted it into a bill anyway. The same thing happened in March, when a conference overturned a vote by both the House and Senate to stop the Federal Communications Commission from weakening regulations on media concentration. The beauty of this end-run tactic, for the GOP leadership, is that they get the unpopular policies they desire, but politically vulnerable Republicans can tell their constituents they voted against them. Democracy only works if voters know who to blame if they don't get their way. Today, however, Congress is run specifically to prevent that from happening. And, at the direction of the White House, Republicans are working to make sure it stays that way, using--you guessed it--undemocratic means. In 2003, Republicans in Texas and Colorado, at the urging of DeLay and Rove, violated a long-standing tradition by redrawing the congressional map to their benefit without new census data. Both parties have engaged in gerrymandering throughout U.S. history. But, in Texas and Colorado, Republicans have taken the practice beyond the previously accepted norms. We've grown accustomed to thinking that such excesses, both in governing style and ideology, invariably lead to a correction. The consensus could be summarized in a single line: "The system works." But, in fact, it was the very flaws of the system that gave Bush the means, motive, and opportunity to govern so undemocratically. Bush's election, through no fault of his own, depended on a series of undemocratic quirks in our electoral process. First, the United States is the only democracy in the world that allows a popular-vote loser to win an election. (Whether or not this arrangement makes sense, a system that sometimes awards the election to the candidate who receives the second-most votes is, by definition, less democratic than a system that never does.) Moreover, the electoral college gives disproportionate power to citizens of less populous states. The combined population of the Gore states exceeded that of the Bush states, but, since Bush had more small-state support, he won the electoral college. (And, again, whatever the general merits, giving more voting weight to some citizens than to others is inherently less democratic than giving equal weight to all.) Finally, unlike parliamentary or run-off elections, our elections offer no way for third-party voters to register a second choice--resulting in perverse outcomes such as a right-of-center candidate winning despite two left-of-center candidates combining for an outright majority. Had any one of these quirks not existed, Bush would not be president, and a platform lacking popular support would not have been thrust to the top of the national agenda. But they didn't exist, and Bush, in power but without public backing, found duplicity an effective tool. Normally, the consequences of an electoral fluke would have been limited by a Congress sensitive to public opinion. But Congress is not completely democratic either. The House has been gerrymandered to the point where competetive elections are rare and GOP control is all but immune to voter dissatisfaction. And the Senate--reflecting an even more pronounced small-state bias than the electoral college--gives the citizens in the 30 states Bush won in 2000, which comprise slightly less than half of the U.S. population, 60 seats. The 20 states Gore won comprise a narrow majority of the population, but they get only 40 seats in the Senate. Even with this skew, Democrats captured nearly half the seats; balance the scales, and the Senate would have a solid Democratic majority. Republicans therefore ended up running the presidency, the Senate, and the House, despite a lack of evidence that voters wanted them to control any one of the three. At the beginning of 2001, the conventional wisdom held that Republicans would court a backlash if they exceeded their limited mandate. The common metaphor is a pendulum that, if tilted off center, inevitably swings back. The more apt (and less comforting) metaphor, however, may be a feedback loop. Facing a lack of public support, Bush and his allies circumscribe normal democratic procedures to enact their agenda. The Republican Congress, in turn, spares Bush from paying a price for his anti-democratic endeavors, and this protection only encourages further abuses by the White House. Indeed, Congress has ceased to provide a check on the executive branch, functioning instead as the legislative arm of the White House. Bush is the first president since James Garfield not to veto a single bill. Whereas the Democratic Congress held hearings about Whitewater, it's simply impossible to imagine today's GOP Congress investigating Bush's past business dealings. Even Republicans confess that their party has essentially abandoned its duty to oversee the executive branch. "Our party controls the levers of government," GOP Representative Ray LaHood told Congressional Quarterly. "We're not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to try to cause heartburn." And so, where the Republicans have broken rules--say, using the Treasury department to disseminate political advertising, or employing conference committees to write laws from scratch--the enforcement mechanisms are essentially controlled by the perpetrators themselves. If Republicans stand together, there will be no investigations. (Or, at least, no serious investigations.) If there are no investigations, there is no process for the media to cover. If there's no media coverage, there's no public outrage to constrain the GOP. After the GAO ruled that the administration broke the law with its Medicare videos, Democrats in Congress demanded that the money spent on the ads be refunded. But Republicans simply ignored them, and the story disappeared. In any case, most of the abuses under Bush--things like suppressing cost estimates, or redistricting more than once a decade--have violated norms, not rules. When you violate norms, you're limited only by your sense of shame and your party's willingness to stick together. Which suggests the most frightening lesson of the Bush administration: The institutional restraints on an anti-democratic presidency are weaker than we believed. When we say "the system works," we think of Nixon's various shady machinations against his foes, or Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing scheme, both of which were duly foiled. But those anti-democratic excesses were foiled not merely by "the system," but by the people who inhabited that system and the particular political circumstances of the time. Nixon's crimes were uncovered by a Democratic-controlled Congress, whose investigations gained bipartisan legitimacy when many Republicans (including members of Nixon's own administration) turned against him. Unlike Nixon, FDR enjoyed unified control of Congress, yet his fellow Democrats were fractious enough to stop him from bullying the Supreme Court. Had those presidents, like Bush, enjoyed the benefits of a subservient Congress and a staff that never spoke out against their excesses, they might have done a lot of damage. How much damage will Bush ultimately do? The answer is still to be determined, and the biggest single thing that will determine it takes place on November 2. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 15th, 2004
9:51 pm	In this post I attempt to answer what seems to be an unanswerable question Somebody asked in another forum for someone to say something good about George W Bush. And even though I probably won't vote for him, I can think of some good he's done. So this was my reply. For those that don't want to read it all just skip to the summation at the bottom One of the things I learned in graduate school was that what's best for other nations is also often in our best interest. A freer and more prosperous country can actually benefit us in the long run. Foreign aid isn't just an altruistic humanitarian good, it is a necessary action for the security and prosperity of our own country. This is one of the things Clinton understood, and the Republicans in the 90s who constantly criticized him for his "police actions" didn't. What the Republicans saw as wasteful foreign spending and needless military interventions, Clinton saw as a ncessary step for our own long term survival and prosperity. Poverty and opression breeds instability and violence, and terrorism. It also creates a building resentment towards those nations who are more prosperous yet do nothing to help When Bush was campaigning in 2000, I was disappointed that he sounded like he was following the typical Republican mantra of only intervening in foreign affairs when it suits our own interests. Such a philosophy is a recipe for disaster in the long run. And his actions towards the beginning of his term didn't really make me feel much better. However after 9/11 something happened. Although it didn't become apparant to me till months later. Bush suddenly discovered what I had learned, that America cannot go on pretending that it can act in it's own selfish interests, without concern for the rest of the world, and think that it will still be safe and prosper. We can see this new way of thinking expressed eloquently in what I believe is Bush's most important speech he ever gave, the speech at the National Endowment for Democracy. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/rele...20031106-2.html In there he expresses that our habit of supporting dictators and ignoring human rights cannot continue, because not only is it wrong on humanitarian grounds, but it is also to our own detriment. And he also expresses what I believe is one of the fundamental reasons why we went into Iraq, that the opression and impoverished lifestyle of the Middle East is what breeds terrorism, and if we are truly going to fight terrorism, we must push for a more democratic middle east. These are words that John Edwards has also uttered, and to his credit even before 9/11. Now before his speech in 2003, he didn't talk about this new philosophy much, but there are signs that what was said in 2003 was already guiding policy shortly after 9/11. For example, he enacted a little known piece of legislation called the Millenium Challenge Account http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2002/fs_mca.html This not only increased financial aid to developing nations by 50%, but would also tie such aid to only those nations that showed they were upholding human rights and were addressing social concerns, such as education. For a Republican to do this was a massive change. For Republicans beforehand had often been leery of spending money on foreign aid. (Edwards has also proposed a similar idea) But Bush did more than just spend money. In several instances, he intervened for humanitarian concerns even though it didn't seem in our short-term interest, and in some cases might have actually been potentially harmful. For example, during the buildup to the Iraq War, right when we were trying to garner foreign support, Egypt captured the most prominent promoter of democracy and human rights in that country. What did we do? Did we turn away for fear of causing Egypt to not back us in the war? No, instead Bush personally and publically criticized the Egyptian government, and withheld aid until the prisoner was released. And the prisoner was released. The New York Times even praised the administration for it's actions http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstra...4DB404482&n=Top%252fOpinion%252fEditorials%2520and%2520Op%252dEd%252fEditorials     quote: To its considerable credit, last year the Bush administration froze additional aid to President Hosni Mubarak's government over Dr. Ibrahim's treatment. This pressure, and the efforts of human rights groups worldwide, helped persuade the government to back off and prosecute the case less aggressively Now this is not to say that the administration has been pushing for human rights as much as it should. There are times I've been disappointed that our own interests have seem to come at the expense of aiding others. Although this is a fault of every president. Even the most humantarian presidents often fail to act in cases of human rights abuses. Look at Jimmy Carter, probably the most humatarian leader we've had in the 20th century, and his failing to act in Cambodia during Pol Pot's reign of terror. Indeed we saw the same thing in Bush being slow to react to genocide in Sudan. Yet to his credit, it is the U.S. that is now at the forefront of pushing for intervention in Sudan. Without the U.S. guiding the way, I doubt the UN would be taking the steps it is taking now. Bush also proposed and tried to get through a massively ambitious program called the Middle East Democracy Intitiave. This was a plan to get nations involved in helping people in the Middle East become more educated, prosperous, and free. It pushed for human rights concerns and economic wellbeing, and called for various nations, including the U.S., to provide financial service to bring this about. While the Middle East rejected it because it was Bush proposing it, Bush got the G8 to sign off on a similar proposal. http://usinfo.state.gov/ei/Archive/.../09-319840.html Without Bush pushing this agenda, it's doubtful the other nations would have taken up the cause. Who knows what this will accomplish, but it is a major step in changing the climate of the Middle East. Interestingly enough Edwards proposed a very similar idea even before 9/11. But Bush has done something also that I don't think people have noticed, and that he has radically changed the direction of Republican foreign policy. Where before Republicans were only interested in protecting our own interests, we now hear them talking about the need for humanitarian intervention. What was intially a more liberal cause, has become a cause throughout the government. Not only does John Kerry and John Edwards talk about pushing for democracy and human rights, various Republican leaders do. The debate now in Washington isn't so much about whether America should be concerned with promoting human rights and democracy, it's what steps are necessary to bring that about, and just how ambitious we should be. I don't think people realize the radical shift that has happened. Granted part of this is just out of response to 9/11. But without Bush being so vocal about the issue, I don't think the Republicans would be on board as much as they are. And an America that that is farily united in it's concern for human rights will do the world much good. Obviously there are still some massive flaws with the way that Bush has pushed for these concerns. And I do believe that maybe it'd be best for another person to take up the charge that Bush has laid before us. This is why I am so excited about John Edwards. I think there is a very good chance Edwards will bring to fruition what Bush has started. And that in 10 years or so, we might see a radically different Middle East. One that is taking the first steps towards freedom and prosperity. An environment that has been the most dangerous part of the world, may begin to slowly reform, and peace may start to be brought to that region. When that happens, Edwards, or whoever is in charge, will rightly get the credit, but I think history will look at Bush as the individual who began the process. And for all his flaws, it is that part of his legacy that he can always be proud of. Short version Changed the focus in Washington to human rights and promotion of democracy Increased finanical aid to foreign nations Intervened in several situations for humanitarian reasons, even at the expense of our own interests Proposed an ambitious model to bring about democracy and prosperity to the Middle East, which the G8 have signed off on May have helped usher in a new more peaceful and prosperous era in the Middle East Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 11th, 2004
1:24 pm	School closes on account of demon attack Where's Buffy when you need her? This is from Uganda's largest daily and Sunday newspaper. [http://www.newvision.co.ug/ As you can see it's a serious journalistic newspaper. So I guess demons attacking schools is a credible and legitmate news story in Uganda http://allafrica.com/stories/200407070035.html Primary school in Kiboga district was closed in May after parents reported that their children were being attacked by demons. Bisika Primary School, located in Butemba sub-county, was later re-opened but the pupils continued to live in fear. Another demon attack was reported on June 29, in the same school. Bisika, a government-aided day primary school, is located five kilometres from Kiboga town. The well-furnished four-building school has 450 pupils. The parents accused Isma Sserunkuuma, a man, who lives near the school, of bringing the demons locally known as mayembe. They said Sserunkuma wanted the demons from a witchdoctor to help him acquire wealth. Acting on the parents' report, the Kiboga resident district commissioner (rdc), Margaret Kasaija, ordered for the arrest of Sserunkuuma and the closure of the school until the demons would be driven out of the school. Sserunkuuma is still in detention. "I wonder why people really acquire demons and resort to bewitching others," Kasaija lamented before she cautioned the public against acquiring demons. At the time of arrest, Sserunkuuma said he could not afford the demons' enormous demands. He said the demons demanded for 300 virgin girls and cows to provide them with blood for sustenance. Sserunkuuma added that when he failed to provide the virgins and cows, he set them (demons) free. They then attacked the pupils. He pleaded that he had no intention of harming the school, but only failed to control the demons. The demons reportedly affected primary four, five, six and seven pupils below 12 years. When attacked, the pupils gabble and run around the compound. Others undress and foam around their mouths. They also shake violently as if shocked by an electric current. Parents also said they had to tie their children on pegs with ropes to avoid their disappearance. The national chairman for traditional healers, Ben Ggulu, performed traditional rituals before the school was re-opened in May. He also healed 15 pupils, whose mental abilities had been affected by the demons. Ggulu would hold herbs atop the pupils' heads to invoke the demons out of them. Using traditional charms, Ggulu spoke strange languages causing bark cloth-wound cow's horn to move around the place, a ritual he said he did to search for the demons. "Sorcery has become a common practice in this district, especially in Ntwetwe, Kapeke, Kyankwanzi and Butemba sub-counties," Ggulu, who is also the Kapeke sub-county chairperson, said. He noted that many people acquired demons without knowing their nature, adding that, "harmless demons do not ask for blood and human sacrifices." Ggulu said some people use harmful demons to kill others in the struggle to gain wealth. He said the Police had let the public down in handling witchcraft cases because they had failed to investigate such cases properly. He asked the Police to contact him in such cases. "In such cases, the Police should be very careful because there are people who falsely accuse their neighbours of possessing demons for other interests," Ggulu said. Ggulu appealed to parliamentarians to review the witchcraft law, which he said was weak. Residents, some of whom, have migrated to other places in fear of the demons owned by their neighbours, said they were tired of endless mayhem caused to them by demons. One Bisika resident, Isma Sserugya said Sserunkuuma's demons had not yet affected residents and boys in the school, arguing that they were convinced to believe that the demons were interested in virgin girls as Sserunkuuma disclosed on his arrest. The district Police commander, Okwot Obwona, said most incidents of mob justice in Kiboga district were against witchcraft suspects. The Bisika LCI chairperson, Diriyam Lukwago said, "I will not accept the practice of acquiring demons to go on in this village. We have even come up with a by-law to evict any one who will be found with demons." Asked about the spiritual history of the residents, Lukwago said most of them were staunch believers, who did not believe in demons, adding that the Muslim community constituted the largest percentage. The chairman asked residents to cooperate with his council to fight sorcery. The district director of health services, Dr. John Bosco Serebe, confirmed the incident but declined to comment further, saying the cases were still being examined in the district (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 10th, 2004
10:03 pm	Read the full Senate report on Iraqi intel http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf O k, after an entire year of flinging accusations back and forth at each other, each side convinced they are in the right, we now have the most exhaustive analysis of just what the pre-war intel was. Therefore I think each side should take the time to actually read the report. I've read some of it already, and can safely say that pretty much everybody has the truth wrong in some way or another, myself included. And if we are going to make accusations, we owe it to make sure our accusations are correct. And so far both sides accusations have been shown to be somewhat incorrect based on what I've read. Don't trust the media to accurately represent this, I've already seen tons of inaccuracies in even the most reliable media sources. Read the report for yourself. And then you will have a much firmer ground to stand on. If you don't, then you have no justfication for feeling certain in your conclusions.. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Friday, July 9th, 2004
7:24 pm	John Edwards is destined to be one of the greatest presidents in modern times I am becoming more convinced of that the more I read about him. This Washington Post article pretty much sent me over the top. I might just vote for Kerry as a lay-up for an Edwards presidency http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37644-2004Jul8_2.html[/url] In his Senate years and primary campaign, vice presidential candidate John Edwards has emerged as a politician willing to push beyond conventional foreign policy ideas and introduce imaginative proposals that often do not meet with swift approval.         In one typical case, Edwards in January called for the United States to draw up a "freedom list" that would identify dissidents jailed for political or religious expression in an attempt through "name and shame" to persuade other countries to free political prisoners. He also proposed linking U.S. aid to progress on human rights and democracy -- a practice that, if implemented, would almost certainly disqualify many key U.S. allies, such as Egypt and Pakistan. In the summer of 2001, when much of the Republican and Democratic policy community was obsessed with missile defense, Edwards urged more attention to terrorism. The North Carolina senator had such limited luck pitching an OpEd article on terrorism to major newspapers that the piece, warning of poor cooperation among federal and local law enforcement, ended up in the weekly Littleton Observer, circulation 2,230 -- four weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. Edwards's approach and style are in contrast to those of running mate John F. Kerry, who after years steeped in foreign policy has recently become more of a pragmatist whose positions shy away from bold ideas -- in some cases differing from Bush administration policy only by degrees. Republicans are hoping to make Edwards's foreign policy positions, which have received little scrutiny until now, a key issue in the fall campaign. They charge that his credentials are relatively thin, with accomplishments limited to his position on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and proposed legislation on counterterrorism. Even some Democrats concede that he did not flesh out his own broad national security platform until the primaries -- and even then sometimes tried to dodge foreign policy questions or interviews or provide general answers in early debates. For all the energy and voter appeal he may have added to the campaign, Republicans say Edwards will be particularly vulnerable when he goes head to head with Vice President Cheney, a former defense secretary and White House chief of staff. Some are already salivating over the prospects of the fall debates. "If you liked the [1988] Quayle-Bentsen debate, you'll love the Cheney-Edwards debate," said Ed Rogers, Republican political consultant, referring to vice presidential candidates Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen. "The contrast with Cheney just couldn't be more stark on this issue. Who's going to be tougher on terrorists who want to kill you and your family? Cheney or Edwards? It is just going to be laughable." But Democrats are coyly confident that Edwards, who consistently played well among voters during the primary debates, will surprise the electorate. "Bring it on," said Richard C. Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador during the Clinton administration and now a senior foreign policy adviser to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. "I would say Vice President Cheney is a man of the Cold War generation who still thinks in Cold War terms. He is knowledgeable but rigid. He shows no ability to adjust to new 21st century realities," he said. Over the past three years, Edwards has scrambled to organize crash tutorials, roundtable discussions with foreign policy analysts at his Georgetown home, trips to hot spots abroad and meetings with foreign leaders to prepare for his presidential campaign, aides and advisers said. Democrats note that Edwards's foreign policy experience matches or exceeds the credentials of Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter when they were nominees. "He understood in the post-9/11 world his national security credentials would be challenged from the get-go," Holbrooke said, adding that Edwards tried to avoid being pulled too far left during the primaries. "He was very thoughtful in trying to find a balance in national security priorities and how to present them effectively" as former Vermont governor Howard Dean appeared to be running away with the nomination. To gain first-hand foreign experience, Edwards toured Israel and Egypt in 2001. As part of a tour to South and Central Asia, Edwards traveled to Afghanistan in 2002 shortly after the U.S.-led war to oust the ruling Taliban and destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda camps. He also visited Britain and twice visited NATO headquarters, in 2002 and 2004. He has met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, campaign aides said. Edwards surprised participants in 2002 meetings with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and European foreign policy experts, said William Drozdiak, executive director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund who helped organize the Brussels sessions.   "He was hungry for some foreign policy exposure and experience," Drozdiak said. "I was fairly skeptical. I expected a lightweight, but I came away with a favorable impression. He asked a lot of smart questions and actually listened, which is not a noteworthy quality of the Bush people."         On key national security issues, Edwards has increasingly staked out a centrist and occasionally hawkish policy, making terrorism his top focus well before Sept. 11, 2001, and pressing for a global push on democracy before Bush made it a cornerstone of his Middle East policy. Because he had been working on legislative proposals on counterterrorism, Edwards introduced a broad bill within a week of the Sept. 11 attacks to tighten seaport security, including provisions for special Coast Guard units, the use of sea marshals and inspection of high-interest vessels. A month later, he co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) to improve preparedness against chemical and biological terrorism. He also proposed legislation to hinder cyberterrorism. None of the three made it to the floor for a vote, but elements were included in subsequent legislation. In one of his more controversial ideas, Edwards introduced a bill to create a domestic intelligence agency, like Britain's MI5, on grounds that law enforcement and intelligence should not be in the same agency -- an idea that has met stiff resistance from the FBI. Campaign advisers predict Edwards may be ahead of his time, since the Sept. 11 commission report due out this month is certain to criticize the intelligence community -- and may even make recommendations on this issue, said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel who has advised Edwards. "If there is another terrorism attack, the question will be brought to the fore: Why don't we have what everyone else like the Brits and Germans have? He's put out a thoughtful bill that should be the basis for discussions," Smith said. On the world's deadliest weapons, Edwards staked out "the most comprehensive and far-reaching" position of any other Democratic candidate, according to a survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And on Iraq, the North Carolina senator was a staunch supporter of the Bush administration's argument that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, co-sponsoring the resolution authorizing the war against Iraq. "We know he has chemical and biological weapons. . . . We know that he's doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal," Edwards said on the Senate floor on Oct. 10, 2002. On Capitol Hill, Edwards won particular attention for his role in the Sept. 11 joint inquiry when he used his experience as a trial lawyer to press law enforcement officials to admit that their failure to understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prevented them from issuing a warrant that could have gained access to information about two of the Sept. 11 hijackers and the Hamburg cell of al Qaeda that planned the attacks. He came off as a tough questioner who was occasionally hostile when he did not receive clear answers, congressional intelligence staff members said. In dealing with intelligence matters generally, Edwards brought a "healthy level of skepticism" to the job, a congressional staff member said. "What happens to new members is that they're like kids in a candy store. It's 007 whiz-bang stuff," he added. "But Edwards struck me as a member who's been in a lot of courtrooms and knows when he's being snowed. A lot of the members are lawyers but haven't seen the inside of courtrooms in decades and it shows. He asked tough questions." On one issue, Edwards and his running mate take strikingly different positions: how to promote democracy. While Edwards outlines ambitious programs and goals, Kerry has stuck largely to promoting free trade, public diplomacy and reinvigorating the Middle East peace process -- steps not far from the Bush administration formula. In contrast, Edwards outlined a "strategy for freedom" in January that included establishing a "democracy caucus" at the United Nations to punish nations that fail to embrace democratic reforms to exclude them from powerful positions. He also proposed an "organization for security and cooperation" in the Middle East, modeled on the former Helsinki process that pushed for freedom in Eastern Europe. The Bush administration later promoted a similar idea that was watered down after Arab protests. Edwards also suggested linking Russia's membership in the Group of Eight wealthy nations to improving democratic practices -- a position Kerry rejected during a recent interview with The Washington Post. What's amazing is that he often has tbe same general goals that Bush does, yet I trust his ability to carry out those goals far more than Bush.  With Edwards influencing Kerry, I'm feeling much more comfortable about a Kerry presidency. Even almost somewhat excited. Current Mood: excited (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 6th, 2004
7:50 pm	Saddam writes romance novels.....seriously http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/1589396138/qid%3D1089164755/ref%3Dsr%5F8%5Fxs%5Fap%5Fi1%5Fxgl14/402-4157599-8292901 And here's a Guardian article about our romantic Heroes and villains Saddam Hussein's romantic novels are not the first examples of a dictator turning his hand from politics to fiction. Jo Tatchell on the burgeoning genre of 'dic lit' Tuesday July 6, 2004 The Guardian In an isolated prison cell, an ageing, mustachioed gentleman sits writing at a small canteen table. Recent months have seen a stark change in his fortunes. Gone are the Gucci suits and the French hair dye. Gone is the entourage of supporters. He has no idea if the novel he is working on, an epic allegorical tale of passion and revenge, will ever be published. Provisionally entitled The Great Awakening, his fifth novel will emerge into a very different critical climate from that which greeted the others. In his home country, his works were acclaimed, with sales said to run into millions. One was made into a 20-part TV series. It had been announced that his books were to become part of the national curriculum. And then the regime changed. For eight years, Saddam Hussein has been carving out an alternative career as a writer of romantic and fantasy fiction, full of thinly veiled political allegory, grandiose rhetoric and autobiography. He has published four novels in less than five years - prolific for someone whose day job was, presumably, fairly demanding. Many statesmen and revolutionaries have been consummate writers of prose and poetry. Saddam, however, is part of a less honourable tradition of despots who have turned their attentions to the arts. From Nero to Napoleon, Hitler to Mao, there is sufficient output to suggest that we acknowledge this as a genre in its own right: dictator literature. As with any genre, the range of dic-lit talent runs from the literary to the populist. Fellow Middle Eastern autocrat and dic-lit star Colonel Muammar Gadafy has built a literary reputation based on a 1998 collection of short-story fiction entitled The Village, the Village, the Earth, the Earth and the Suicide of the Astronaut. An international edition, retitled Escape to Hell and Other Stories, included a foreword from Pierre Salinger, one of JFK's press spokesmen, who said the writings provided an insight into a unique mind. Saddam's writing is at the other end of the dic-lit spectrum, following a populist family tradition. His uncle, a former mayor of Baghdad and an influential local tyrant himself, contributed to the genre with a book entitled He Created Them By Mistake: The Persians, Jews and Flies, published in 1974. His masterstroke was to make 20,000 Iraqi schools purchase 50 copies each. Result: a million-seller, and no marketing spend at all. What motivates dic-lit authors? They know critical reaction to their work is unlikely to be genuine. It may be that the act of creating "art" is an extension of the urge to control. Fiction in particular offers the author a malleable world. But just because he was a brutal dictator, should Saddam be excluded from a place in literary history? Many great writers were not great human beings - perhaps Saddam merely had more scope to realise his vision. Of Saddam's four novels - Zabibah and the King, The Fortified Castle, Men and the City and Be Gone, Demons! - the first remains the best known and best-selling. Published in 2000, it is a torrid, romantic tale with an obvious political analogy. Zabibah, the heroine, represents Iraq; her cruel husband is America; and the strong but vengeful king is Saddam. "Once upon a time," the fairytale-like story opens, "there was a great and powerful king ... His influence was widespread ... He was surrounded by respect, peace, love, and trust as well as awe and fear ... This king was obeyed by his people, either willingly or by force." Zabibah, unhappily married, falls in love with the king and they develop an intimate friendship. " 'Do the people need strict measures from their king?' he asks. 'Yes, your majesty,' she replies. 'The people need strict measures so that they can feel protected.' " Such exchanges may be understood as Saddam exploring his personal demons. The king always has the last word as their discussions range over themes of power, cruelty, justice, nature and tradition. Then, one night, Zabibah is attacked and raped by a hooded stranger. The stranger turns out to be her husband (the Americans!) and so the incident offers the king an opportunity to take vengeance. A great battle follows, coinciding with the 1991 Desert Storm assault of the Kuwait war. But in this case, US forces are symbolically defeated, as the vicious husband is killed. Order is restored, though, tragically, neither Zabibah nor the king lives to see it. On the back of this tour de force came The Fortified Castle which, like Zabibah, also veils a political agenda with romance. Set after the 1991 war, it tells the story of an ex-soldier who falls for a girl from northern Iraq (balm to Saddam's actual policies against the Kurds). The subplot - a servant running off with the master's sister - is a clear reference to Saddam's feelings of betrayal by the Kuwaitis. The third, a biographical novel, Men and the City, is based on the rise of the Ba'ath party. It features a tableau of relatives, including Saddam's uncle and grandfather. But it is in the fourth novel that Saddam focuses on his favourite genre: military literature. Be Gone, Demons! follows an Arab nobleman, Salim, in his battle to defeat his American and Jewish enemies (both recast as ancient-style foreign tribes) in a mission that mirrors the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. By this point in Saddam's literary career, US and Jewish hegemony has become an obsession. With the book completed in the run-up to the 2003 war (no wonder Iraqi forces had no strategy), the presidential publisher Al-Hurriah (meaning "freedom") managed to print just 40,000 copies of Be Gone, Demons! before the fall of Baghdad to US forces. As with all his books, Saddam's name is absent from the cover. He prefers the phrase: "A novel written by its author." It is easy to see why the CIA, MI6 and Mossad have analysed these outlandish tales in detail. Avi Rubin, an ex-Mossad agent, believes that Saddam's past is at the core of his anger against seemingly broader targets such as western civilisation and Jews. "In reality," Rubin argues, "he is speaking about the pain of his own childhood and upbringing." Indeed, that childhood is as freakish as any of his fictions. Saddam's mother was a prostitute, he was gang-raped by homosexuals at the age of 10, and as a teenager was refused admission to Iraq's top military school. The inspiration for Zabibah was probably his fourth wife, Iman, 40 years his junior, whom he adored and married a few years ago, aged 63. So dic-lit may be seen as a confessional genre. But what of the writing? Does Saddam have talent in the romantic fantasy genre? I sent extracts of Zabibah and the King "blind" to some experts. The editor at Mills and Boon, after agreeing to comment, backed out when she discovered who the author was. But JoJo Moyes, winner of the Romantic Novelists' Association novel of the year award, agreed, and was alarmed by the style. With the first four paragraphs of the book containing no less than 13 rhetorical questions, she pointed out that the author was not interested in his readers. "I had a fear that it was by Osama bin Laden or Alastair Campbell," she said, trying to guess the author. "Once I knew who it was, it all made sense. His writing was the literary equivalent of those lurid fantasy murals he had painted all over his palaces." Tina Phillips, a consultant researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, is surprised that Saddam chose the novel at all, as in wider Islamic culture it is the poet who is most revered. And in Iraq, fiction was all but banned by Saddam. Perhaps, in any case, he was not the real author of the works. There are rumours that a ghostwriter was poisoned to keep the truth secret. But even if Saddam did not write every word then, he is certainly writing them all now. The obvious conclusion from the work is that we are looking at an author who is insecure, untalented and delusional. Is he alone among dic-lit authors? Clearly not. But Colonel Gadafy, by comparison, is an authentic voice who has carved out a new narrative form derived from traditional popular culture. His writing has shades of Russian literature interestingly transposed on to an environment of modern urban decay and psychological pollution. "By the nature of city life, one's purpose becomes self-interest and opportunism. And one's norm of behaviour becomes hypocrisy," Gaddafi has written with, if not great originality, then at least some perceptiveness. Saddam's writing seems more a consolation for his political failings. He knew that his career as an overlord was on the wane after the 1991 Gulf war, and it is no coincidence that this is when his literary endeavours began. His translator, Sa'adoon al-Zubaydi, maintains that, fuelled by the good notices for Zabibah, he began to retreat into his own internal world. He increasingly came to use body doubles rather than meeting his armed forces face to face. The Iraqi poet Nabeel Yasin argues that the mixture of fact and fiction in his books is there to create an emotional and political utopia (like fellow jailbird and fantasist Jeffrey Archer, Saddam bases his novels on the reinvention of the facts of his own life). And according to Zubaydi, Saddam "longed for a return to some original state of purity". As one literary Jordanian put it: "He writes about the world as he would like it to be. The lost Kurdish girl can fall in love with the disbanded Iraqi soldier, and the king can rule on in peace, loved and respected by his people." For now, we can only speculate about whether his inner life will sustain the former Iraqi leader, like Archer or Oscar Wilde, through his incarceration and trial. Knowing Saddam's writing, however, he won't be giving us The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, July 5th, 2004
1:15 pm	Thought for the day Does anybody note the irony that many of the arguements people use to defend Michael Moore parallel the arguements Bush supporters use to defend his selling of the war in Iraq? "Well Moore didn't technically lie in his movie. Sure it seems he was implying things that aren't true. But we can't be sure that he meant to imply that." "Well maybe Michael Moore twists the truth. But he's doing it for an important reason. To create discussion, and to defeat Bush". All I ask is for consistency people (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 3rd, 2004
12:09 am	Closing of the Presidential Mind: A brilliant look into the mindset of the Bush Administration This is the best article analyzing the ideology of the administration and how it affects policy that I've ever read. It is really quite devestating, although in some ways it actually defends against some of the harshest accusations against the administration. However, in many ways it shows how the problems of the administration are so rooted in ideology that it's near impossible to rectify. A must read In February 27, 2001, George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. When the president had last ventured to the Capitol for his inauguration 37 days earlier, he had delivered a homily urging the nation to move past the sting of the Florida recount. This time, he dispensed with the magnanimity and unveiled his agenda, delivering a speech filled with promises to cut taxes, pay down the national debt, study Social Security privatization, and deploy national missile defense. If commentators had been allowed a peek inside the West Wing in the days before Bush's address, they would have noticed that the speech didn't just set policy priorities; it defined the administration's intellectual style. During the Clinton administration, wonks immersed themselves in the preparation of State of the Union addresses. In the months leading up to the speech, academics--from Michael Sandel to Robert Putnam to Alan Brinkley--suggested themes. During the last fevered weeks, speechwriters sat at their keyboards while government economists cycled through their offices to fact-check language and tweak proposals. Michael Waldman, Clinton's chief speechwriter, described the process in his memoir, Potus Speaks, as repeated "grill[ing of] policy experts" and "[boiling] gallons of advice into a few tablespoons of intense sauce." In the Bush administration, it didn't quite work that way. As former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told journalist Ron Suskind, the administration was so "distrustful of the agendas of expert staffers in the various departments" that they were simply removed from the speechwriting loop. Treasury economists, for example, had no opportunity to double-check the president's numbers and therefore couldn't purge a disingenuous understatement of the amount of redeemable U.S. debt--a $700 billion understatement that conveniently made the president's large tax cut seem less fiscally onerous. According to O'Neill, the phobia of experts led the White House to      "circulat[e] final drafts of the State of the Union to almost no one outside the West Wing." In nearly every corner of the administration, examples of this derisive attitude toward experts abound. Bush has stripped the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of his title "assistant to the president"--a migration down the organizational flow chart that requires him to report through White House aides rather than to the president himself. The Bushies have evicted the Council of Economic Advisers, an office renowned for its nonpartisan calculations, from the White House complex--a relocation that The Washington Post described as the "political equivalent of being sent to Elba." And those are just the symbolic shots. Seemingly everyday, newspapers run stories about experts whose opinions have been either ignored or stifled. Last year, Medicare chief Thomas Scully reportedly threatened to fire one of his agency's actuaries if he provided Congress with accurate estimates of the cost of the administration's prescription-drug benefit. When the administration planned to loosen the regulation of mercury emissions from power plants last year, it never consulted Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) experts. "E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order," according to the Los Angeles Times. And, in May, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) overruled the recommendation of a scientific advisory panel that had reviewed 40 studies and 15,000 pages of data, refusing to permit over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill. You can even tell the story of the postwar failures in Iraq by recounting the episodes of experts scorned. Throughout 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon prohibited its officials from participating in interagency planning for reconstruction. According to The Atlantic's James Fallows, when the CIA convened Iraq specialists to imagine worst-case scenarios that might follow Saddam Hussein's defeat, the Defense Department forbid its officials from joining the exercise. Across the river in Foggy Bottom, the State Department's Future of Iraq Project produced a 13-volume report, based on a yearlong collaboration with over 240 Iraqi exiles. But, when General Jay Garner--the first head of postwar Iraq reconstruction--wanted to borrow ideas from these findings, his Pentagon bosses ordered him to ignore State's work. A shame, one Garner aide has lamented, since they had desperately needed it. "We had few experts on Iraq on the staff," he told The New York Times last October. Even the shortage of troops on the ground traces back to the Pentagon's dismissive attitude toward experts. In his book Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward documents how General Tommy Franks kept providing Rumsfeld with war plans produced by top military planners, only to receive knee-jerk exhortations to revise the blueprints so they required fewer bodies. The most common explanation for this animus is that the White House overflows with political hacks uninterested in the nitty-gritty of policy. But the administration's expert-bashing also has deep roots in ideology. Since its inception, modern American conservatism has harbored a suspicion of experts, who, through adherence to inductive reasoning and academic methodologies, claim to provide objective research and analysis. To be sure, this social-scientific approach has its limits. Conservatives have raised genuinely troubling questions about its predilection for downplaying the role of "culture" and "values" in shaping human behavior. But the Bush administration has adopted a far more extreme version of this critique: It takes the radically postmodern view that "science," "objectivity," and "truth" are guises for an ulterior, leftist agenda; that experts are so incapable of dispassionate and disinterested analysis that their work doesn't even merit a hearing. And the results have been disastrous. Ever since the progressive era, the American policy establishment has believed, as my colleague John B. Judis put it in The Paradox of American Democracy, "that the way to a disinterested social policy was through the application of social science to national problems." At the close of the nineteenth century, the government began stocking the bureaucracy with economists, sociologists, statisticians, and other experts. First, they arrived in Washington in dribs and drabs to perform technical tasks--the Bureau of Labor, created in 1884, began compiling data on wages and working conditions. Then, at the height of the progressive fervor, government experts started exerting control over whole swaths of the national economy. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Reserve Board in 1913 so economists could manage the circulation of money. Over the ensuing decades, the world wars, the cold war, and the war on poverty all swelled expert ranks. By 1978, a National Academy of Sciences report found that 180 government bureaus and agencies spent $2 billion annually on social-science research. Hostility to this government-by-experts didn't begin with Bush. The disillusioned liberal intellectuals who clustered around The Public Interest journal in the mid-'60s and came to be called neoconservatives--including Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and James Q. Wilson--developed the most comprehensive critique of the experts. At first, they didn't reject the progressive vision of government. They just disliked the way it had been applied. If there was a theme to their complaints, it was that social science focused too much on material "fact" and ignored the importance of "culture" and "values." So, for instance, when Moynihan analyzed the problem of black poverty, he focused on the decaying family structure. And, when Wilson studied violent crime, he emphasized that the root problem wasn't so much economic deprivation but policing that turned a blind eye to low-grade infractions like jaywalking and public drunkenness, creating a dangerous tolerance of deviancy. Neoconservatism may have begun as a friendly critique of the bureaucratic experts--pointing out "the limits of social policy," as Nathan Glazer titled a 1971 essay--but it soon became a hostile one. The events of the late '60s and early '70s, especially the revolts on university campuses, decisively alienated the neocons from their liberal colleagues. Drifting further rightward, they increasingly echoed Barry Goldwater's libertarian attacks on big government, and they began describing its experts more ominously, lumping them with New Left radicals. Essays in The Public Interest and Commentary denounced social scientists as avatars of a "New Class" of "intellectuals." Their supposed objectivity, the neocons argued, was merely a cynical guise for them to seize power and pursue a liberal agenda. "Though they continue to speak the language of 'progressive reform,'" Kristol wrote in 1976, "in actuality they are acting on a hidden agenda: to propel the nation from that modified version of capitalism we call 'the welfare state' toward an economic system so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the anticapitalist aspirations of the left." By the mid-'70s, the Public Interest crowd hadn't just grown hostile to experts. It had grown hostile to social-science itself. As Judis writes, the neocons came to reject "the very idea of a dispassionate and disinterested elite that could focus on the national interest." In the end, they sounded a lot like their enemies on the far left. "While the new left rejected social science as being implicitly 'probusiness' and 'promilitary,' the new right and its think tanks rejected it for being 'antibusiness' and 'left wing.'" The term "New Class" has faded from intellectual fashion, but this conservative animus toward social science has only grown. Under Bush, a president who happily dismisses government experts as "bean counters," it has become a guiding ideology. From its inception, the CIA has been staffed by devotees of the social-scientific method. Legendary Director Allen Dulles--who picked the Agency's tweedy motto, "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free"--intended the Agency to be an ivory tower, where analysts, protected from political pressures, would produce disinterested findings. As the Yale historian Sherman Kent, the longtime director of the Agency's Office of National Estimates, wrote in a seminal 1949 textbook on intelligence, "[W]e insist, and have insisted for generations, that truth is to be approached, if not attained, through research guided by a systematic method. In the social sciences ... there is such a method." These pretensions made the CIA a ripe target for the New Class critique. Nobody raised graver doubts about the Agency than Albert Wohlstetter, the University of Chicago political scientist who mentored both Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard Perle. In 1974, Wohlstetter published an essay in Foreign Policy, charging that the U.S. government chronically underestimated the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Over time, conservatives developed a theory to explain this alleged undercounting of missiles: The Agency was biased--stocked with graduates of elite liberal colleges who were schooled in secular rationalism and the mores of the New Class. Richard Pipes, the Harvard historian who chaired Team B--a panel of outsiders the CIA eventually invited to reexamine its intel on the Soviet threat--wrote a 1995 Commentary essay portraying the archetypal Agency analyst like this: "Such a person does not understand and therefore is unable to take seriously ideological or religious fanaticism; he interprets behavior that does not serve his conception of enlightened self-interest as either affectation or the result of material want and social injustice." Abram Shulsky, a rand Corporation analyst who ran the Pentagon's controversial Iraq war-planning outfit, the Office of Special Plans (OSP), has made this critique at length in essays and in Silent Warfare, a book he co-authored with Gary Schmitt. Instead of trying to understand tyrannical regimes on their own terms, Shulsky and Schmitt argue, CIA analysts have been trained to believe that "people are fundamentally alike and want the same things"--that all of humanity can be studied with the same models that economists and sociologists apply to farmers in South Dakota. There's something to this critique. According to rand's Greg Treverton, a former vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, "[A]nalysts too often assume that America's adversaries have rational motives." (The Agency is well aware of this flaw, which analysts call "mirror imaging.") But, rather than simply using this critique as a basis for prodding analysts, Bush officials have taken a more extreme position. One former colleague of Wolfowitz and other top administration officials told me that "they so believed that the CIA were wrong, they were like, 'We want to show these fuckers that they are wrong.'" Public statements, naturally, aren't nearly so vituperative. Still, there's a long history of dumping on the Agency. At a 1994 seminar, Wolfowitz charged CIA analysts with perpetrating a classic New Class trick: They present their findings as objective "sanctified intelligence judgments" when they really conceal "ignorance of facts" and "policy bias." To correct for these deficiencies, the administration has sought to make analysts more subservient to policymakers--"even though," as Wolfowitz put in 1994, "some in the Intelligence Community seem to think this is a bit like bringing infidels into the mosque." In late 2001, Rumsfeld's Pentagon created the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which would evolve into the OSP headed by Shulsky. It charged the group with reanalyzing the CIA's raw intelligence and scouring for instances of Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism that the Agency had been too biased to catch. As Perle described the justification for the group in a July 2003 interview with PBS's "Frontline," "If you're walking down the street, [if] you're not looking for hidden treasure, you won't find it. If you're looking for it, you may find something. In this case, [the CIA] hadn't been looking." Perle's metaphor, however, crumbles almost instantly. For starters, it's not like the CIA hadn't spent thousands of man-hours searching for an Al Qaeda-Iraq nexus. As Clinton terrorism specialist Daniel Benjamin has exhaustively documented, the CIA searched intensely and found little significant evidence. And that's the problem with Perle's analysis. He wanted forgone conclusions built into the intelligence analysts' assumptions. (The treasure must be hidden!) This methodology led the Bush administration to look past the CIA's caveat-riddled assessment of Saddam's WMD programs, overrule the Agency's doubts about whether Iraqi agents had tried to buy Nigerien yellowcake, and uncritically swallow testimony from defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress. The infidels had entered the mosques. Wolfowitz's belief in policy-maker supremacy is typical of the administration. Over the last four years, it has tried to transform bureaucratic experts from independent arbiters into authors of administration talking points. Consider the case of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which was founded in 1974 as part of a post-Watergate spree of good government reforms. It was intended to keep the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which was lodged inside the White House, honest. The CBO has guarded its apolitical bona fides fiercely, hiring an ideologically diverse staff and refraining from public punditry that might cast doubts on its independence. It has consistently issued reports disputing the rosy budgetary assessments emanating from the White House. The Clinton administration, for example, spent its first term suffering CBO rebukes. When the CBO tallied up the costs of Clinton's health care plan, its analysis showed that the program would swell the deficit by $74 billion--a far cry from the $58 billion in net revenue that the Clintons had promised it would generate. "They are a fact-checker that keeps the administration honest," says the Urban Institute's Len Burman, a veteran of both the CBO and the Clinton Treasury Department. From its creation until last spring, the CBO calculated the effects of tax cuts and estimated growth using careful, consensus-minded econometric models. Conservatives derisively termed this method "static analysis." In its place, they wanted the CBO to adopt their more "dynamic" model--one that assumes, as supply-siders do, that cutting top marginal tax rates will dramatically increase incentives to work, spurring growth rates higher than any Keynesian would dare imagine possible. As conservatives describe it, this model would show that tax cuts would also give a healthy boost to government revenue. That is, when a tax cut is calculated dynamically, conservatives hope it will be shown to cost less money--an adjusted price tag that will make such cuts easier to sell the public. The conservatives' campaign succeeded, and, in the spring of 2003, the CBO used dynamic scoring for the first time. But "static analysis" was part of the CBO's tradition of neutrality. When cobbling together its models for protecting economic growth, the CBO operated within the best progressive tradition of disinterested policy-making. It has, historically, based its predictions on a modest set of assumptions. While the CBO calculated the economic effects of government revenue lost from tax cuts, it steered clear of both Keynesian and supply-side models, which would require contentious predictions about how tax cuts influence savings and work. The CBO approach left much less room for individual economists to impose their own ideological and theoretical agendas. And, in the end, the method was a concession to the limits of economics: There's not much that the discipline can predict with great certainty, so static analysis limited itself to the few variables around which there was broad agreement. The campaign to impose "dynamic scoring" is an effort to transform the CBO from an honest broker--one that uses calculations partial to neither the left nor the right--into an engine for supply-side economics. When conservatives attack government economists, who mostly oppose dynamic scoring, they level the classic criticism of the New Class: The experts are biased and corrupt. Attacks on the office by The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal editorial pages have accused the CBO of using models that seem centrist and uncontroversial at first glance, but, in fact, are merely a ruse to distract from its closet Keynesian biases. Writing in the Journal, supply-sider Bruce Bartlett has charged, "Although the CBO would today deny being a bastion of Keynesianism, it continues to use methodologies devised during its early days, and many of its key players are still on board." The result is "an agency that has over the years been so supportive of the Democrats' agenda." During previous Republican administrations, these arguments remained on the ideological fringe. But, in the Bush administration, they emanate from the very agencies that were supposed to house neutral, objective arbiters. The then-head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Glenn Hubbard, testified before Congress on the cause's behalf in May 2002 and made the case on the Journal op-ed page. Unfortunately for the Office's critics, the economy's performance over the last two years has demonstrated that the CBO's old methods predict economic performance far more accurately than dynamic scoring does. In 2000, Stephen Moore and columnist Larry Kudlow challenged the CBO's predictions of surplus, dismissing them as far too modest. Describing their own calculations in The Washington Times, Kudlow wrote, "Using historical growth trends, budget surpluses over the next decade could easily rise to $7 trillion, 50 percent above the CBO estimates." Needless to say, as this year's projected $370 billion deficit evinces, their analysis was a tad too dynamic to capture economic realities. And that's the point: Their method isn't about advancing toward an objective analysis; it's about advancing policy goals. The administration's assault on the hard sciences has been even more audacious. Take its stance on global warming. When Bush arrived in Washington, he announced, "My administration's climate-change policy will be science-based." But, every time the bureaucracy assesses the science on which such a policy could be based, the administration stifles it. In May 2002, the EPA submitted a report to the United Nations documenting the human role in the accumulation of heat-trapping gases. But, after industry began carping about this document and its implications for policy, Bush publicly dismissed it as "a report put out by the bureaucracy." A few months later, the administration purged the section on climate change from the EPA's annual air-pollution assessment. The following year, it bowdlerized the EPA's first-ever Report on the Environment--a document that the Agency's administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, had intended "to be a hallmark achievement in identifying indicators that can be used to measure EPA progress in protecting human health and the environment." Originally, it included a long section on the risks posed by rising global temperatures. "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the report read. But then the OMB and the White House applied their red pens. They excised this statement and tinkered madly with the rest, inserting phrases implying that cooling is as grave a threat as warming. And, throughout the report, they inserted the words "potentially" and "may," implying uncertainty on subjects about which there is broad agreement. After all these revisions, the EPA felt its report "no longer accurately represent[ed]" scientific opinion. Instead of releasing such an error-riddled paper, the EPA dropped its climate section altogether, replacing it with a paragraph that a New York Times editorial described as "pablum about the complexities of the issue." There are dozens of similar examples of scientific abuse. Last year, top EPA officials quietly blocked dissemination of a report analyzing the efficacy of congressional legislation limiting the release of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury. The administration quashed the report because it would have highlighted the necessity of imposing regulations it opposes. In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that the National Marine Fisheries Service hired six leading marine scientists to study the health of West Coast salmon and steelhead trout species. But the service stripped almost all of the scientists' recommendations from its official report. While this suppression seems like naked pandering to the administration's industry friends, there's an ideological superstructure to justify its behavior: Conservatives contend that even scientific conclusions stem from ideological bias. Politicizing Science: The Alchemy of Policymaking, an anthology published by the Hoover Institution and the industry-funded Marshall Institute, is the critique's clearest distillation. The book contends that scientists are driven by a "love of power and domination." They produce studies that show environmental crises, for instance, because these crises spur Congress to spend money on the EPA--which, in turn, finances their research. In other words, as with budget and intelligence analysts, scientists may style themselves as objective, but they are anything but. It's an argument that the Bush administration repeats often: Officials argue that policy should flow from "sound science," not "junk science." There may be instances of government funding genuinely junky science. But the genealogy of the Bushies' argument has dubious roots: It was pioneered by the tobacco lobby. Documents procured in recent litigation show that, in the early '90s, cigarette companies wanted to cast grave doubts on government scientists' capacity to produce fair research. But they didn't want to be too closely associated with this debunking. Instead, tobacco quietly formed a coalition of industries that would challenge every aspect of government science, from its studies of global warming to auto safety. They called their group, formed in 1993, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition. As the University of California, San Francisco's Stanton Glantz and Elisa Ong have described, "The 'sound science' movement is not an indigenous effort from within the profession to improve the quality of scientific discourse, but reflects sophisticated public relations campaigns controlled by industry executives and lawyers whose aim is to manipulate the standards of scientific proof to serve the corporate interests of their clients." Despite its cynical motives, tobacco's sound science coalition acquired a broad following. Interior Secretary Gale Norton advised the group, and its approach has found its way into the Bush administration. The "sound science" argument has been most prominently invoked by Harvard Professor John Graham, who heads the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (oira). Last summer, Graham proposed restricting the bureaucrats' power to assemble peer-review panels--which assess the validity of science used to make policy--and transferring it to the OMB. Worse, his proposal suggested that most scientists who received funding from a government agency be prohibited from peer-reviewing any science used by that agency. Industry-funded scientists, by contrast, would be subject to no such restrictions. Tufts University's Anthony Robbins, the co-editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy, fulminated that the new process "could ultimately destroy integrity in science as we know it." Because the response to his original proposal was so strident, Graham scaled it back, largely removing restrictions on government-funded scientists. But a revised proposal released last April still has the same effect. It shifts responsibility from expert bureaucrats to political appointees. The same people who had decried the politicization of science will have been more responsible for it than any policymakers in American history. There is a great irony in all this. The Bush administration's leading lights, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, reached political maturity in the Nixon-Ford years--in retrospect, a golden age of social scientific policy-making. During that bygone era, experts were more than tolerated. They were given unprecedented access to the Oval Office. Paul O'Neill has described how Nixon would summon middling OMB staffers and demand they prepare lengthy "Brandeis briefs," brimming with data and detailing both sides of an argument. "Pray God you didn't leave out some important point or counterpoint," O'Neill recalled to Suskind, "Nixon would call you on the carpet." In part, this greater intellectual honesty could be chalked up to Nixon's and Ford's personal politics. Their moderate ideologies--or lack thereof--demanded far fewer ready-made solutions and, therefore, necessitated a greater study of options. The high-water mark of this era came when Gerald Ford quietly brought John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman to his office for a session of gladiatorial combat over economic policy. In keeping with the more intellectually honest spirit of the times, the Nixon and Ford White Houses found a place for a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He captured the best part of the old ethos. Moynihan's neocon comrades allowed their critique of social science to metastasize into a far more radical theory of policy-making: They lost faith in the ideal of progressive government altogether, treating policy-making as a brutal war of ideologies. Moynihan had good reasons to join them in this view. When he wrote his famous report on the black family for the Labor Department in 1965, the liberal social science community blasted him for encouraging "a new form of subtle racism," as the Harvard psychologist William Ryan put it in The Nation. But, as much as this rebuke wounded, Moynihan couldn't bring himself to endorse a sweeping critique of the New Class. Instead, he proposed an entirely different response to social science's shortcomings: to cling more tightly to the ideals of social science and the earliest spirit of The Public Interest. "The best use of social science is to refute false social science," he once quipped. For the rest of his career, he crusaded for creating conditions in government that allowed for better social science. His battles ranged from the relatively arcane (pushing for a more accurate Consumer Price Index) to the all-encompassing (railing against government secrecy, which he argued "hugely interfer[es] with the free flow of information" upon which sound analysis depends). As inadequate as he found social science, he considered the alternative--a rejection of empiricism--more frightening. In other contexts, conservatives have been just as eloquent in denouncing the onslaught of relativism and ideology. Describing the attitude of the professoriat, Lynne Cheney wrote in a 1995 column: "As they saw it, the traditional scholarly mission--the pursuit of truth--was a task that only the naïve or duplicitous would undertake, because truth does not exist. What we think is true is merely a construct, a creation that the powerful impose on everyone else. The intellectual's obligation is thus to construct new versions of truth to achieve social and political goals that have gone unmet." She's right, of course, to decry and resist this pervasive relativism; empiricism deserves preserving. But, if it's worth defending in the classroom, why do her husband and his colleagues in the administration value it so little in pursuit of the national interest? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
12:54 am	Is it possible for our consciousness to alter reality? Most of us view reality as something external to us that we can not influence, outside of our normal daily interaction. However a Princeton research team since 1979 has been conducting research on the ability of the conscious mind to control physical reality. This is the summary of their experiments The most substantial portion of the PEAR program examines anomalies arising in human/machine interactions. In these experiments human operators attempt to influence the behavior of a variety of mechanical, electronic, optical, acoustical, and fluid devices to conform to pre-stated intentions, without recourse to any known physical processes.  In unattended calibrations these sophisticated machines all produce strictly random outputs, yet the experimental results display increases in information content that can only be attributed to the influence of the consciousness of the human operator. Over the laboratory’s 20-year history, thousands of such experiments, involving many millions of trials, have been performed by several hundred operators.  The observed effects are usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but they are statistically repeatable and compound to highly significant deviations from chance expectations.  These results are summarized in “Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program.” (view PDF) A number of secondary correlations reveal structural features within these human/machine databases.  In many instances, the effects appear to be operator-specific in their details and the results of given operators on widely different machines frequently tend to be similar in character and scale.  Pairs of operators with shared intentions are found to induce further anomalies in the experimental outputs, especially when the two individuals share an emotional bond.  The data also display significant disparities between female and male operator performances, and consistent series position effects are observed in individual and collective results.  These anomalies can be demonstrated with the operators located up to thousands of miles from the laboratory, exerting their efforts hours before or after the actual operation of the devices. These random devices also respond to group activities of larger numbers of people, even when they are unaware of the machine’s presence. “FieldREG” data produced in environments fostering relatively intense or profound subjective resonance show larger deviations than those generated in more pragmatic assemblies. (view PDF) Venues that appear to be particularly conducive to such field anomalies include small intimate groups, group rituals, sacred sites, musical and theatrical performances, and charismatic events.  In contrast, data generated during academic conferences or business meetings show no deviations from chance. Elaborate analytical methods have been developed to extract as much understanding as possible from all of these results, and to guarantee their integrity against any experimental or data processing flaws. Also, According to an analysis of their findings The group's research shows an even more puzzling result. A participant can influence a random event even if he or she is thousands of kilometres away from the device. Even more provocative, the effects seemed to transcend time itself. Mental willing produced positive results even when the experiments were performed 73 hours before to 336 hours after the machine operation. In summary, experiements have conducted where human beings tried to influence a machine without using any phsyical action, and they have discovered that the human's conscious thought influenced the machine. Often these are subtle, but they exist nonetheless. Not only that, but these influences seem independent of either space or time. This has varous ramifications as they outline here Basic Science Accommodation of the observed anomalies within a functional scientific framework will require the explicit inclusion of consciousness as an active agent in the establishment of physical reality.  This expansion of the scientific paradigm demands more courageous theoretical structures than exist at present, guided by more comprehensive empirical data than is now available, acquired via more cooperative interdisciplinary collaborations than are currently practiced. PEAR has enduring roles to play in all three aspects of this search. Technological Applications Despite the small scale of the observed consciousness-related anomalies, they could be functionally devastating to many types of contemporary information processing systems, especially those relying on random reference signals.  Such concern could apply to aircraft cockpits and ICBM silos; to surgical facilities and trauma response equipment; to environmental and disaster control technology; or to any other technical scenarios where the emotions of human operators may intensify their interactions with the controlling devices and processes.  Indeed, the extraordinarily sophisticated equipment that generates much of the fundamental data on which modern science is based cannot be excluded from this potential vulnerability.  Protection against such consciousness-related interference could become essential to the design and operation of many future information acquisition and processing systems.  On the positive side, since these same research results provide important technical evidence of the precious process of human creativity, they offer the promising possibility of a new genre of human/machine systems that will enable more creative performance in all manner of applications from medicine to management, from manufacturing to communications, from education to recreation. Cultural Implications Beyond its scientific impact and its technological applications, clear evidence of an active role of consciousness in the establishment of reality holds sweeping implications for our view of ourselves, our relationship to others, and to the cosmos in which we exist.  These, in turn, must inevitably impact our values, our priorities, our sense of responsibility, and our style of life.  Integration of these changes across the society can lead to a substantially superior cultural ethic, wherein the long-estranged siblings of science and spirit, of analysis and aesthetics, of intellect and intuition, and of many other subjective and objective aspects of human experience will be productively reunited. Their research has amazing ramifications for how we view our selves related to the external world. Obviously their findings are challenged and disputed among some other scientists. And so far it remains to be seen just how true their findings are. But it does make one wonder just where the boundary between our conscious mind and external reality is. More info can be found here http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/ Oh and here's the staff, to show this isn't just a bunch of kooks           PEAR Staff Robert G. Jahn, Program Director Bob is an emeritus Professor of Aerospace Sciences and Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, who has taught and published extensively in advanced space propulsion systems, plasma dynamics, fluid mechanics, quantum mechanics, and engineering anomalies. Brenda J. Dunne, Laboratory Manager Brenda is formally trained as a developmental psychologist but regards herself as a generalist whose principal task is the integration of the multiple scholarly vectors that bear on PEAR’s various activities. York H. Dobyns, Analytical Coordinator York is a theoretical physicist who designs and implements PEAR’s data processing and analytical strategies, and contributes to the development of its theoretical models. Lisa Langelier-Marks, Administrative Assistant Lisa maintains the general office and financial framework that permits PEAR’s many program operations to function in a systematic fashion.  In addition, she assists with the design, implementation, and maintenance of a database management program. Elissa Hoeger, General Factotum Elissa provides a broad range of logistical support for all other staff members, including copyediting all of PEAR’s publications. Emeritus Members In addition to its current resident staff, PEAR continues to benefit from the enduring interest and service of three of its former members: G. Johnston Bradish, Technical Coordinator John is an electrical engineer who designed, constructed, and maintained many of the PEAR experimental facilities, and continues to service them on an as-needed basis. Arnold L. Lettieri, Jr., Communications Director Arnold is formally trained in counseling and education.  From 1997 to 2003, his principal responsibilities involved overseeing PEAR’s contacts with the media, as well as interacting with individuals and organizations who expressed professional or personal interest in our work. Roger D. Nelson, Operations Coordinator Roger is an experimental psychologist whose long PEAR experience in experimental design, statistical modeling, and data interpretation continues to supplement our ongoing efforts. Current Mood: excited (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
10:32 pm	Somebody wasn't careful http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=4905490646&indexURL=2&photoDisplayType=2#ebayphotohosting check out the background of the photo Current Mood: mischievous (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 16th, 2004
9:19 pm	Hahahahahahaha Not going to say anything, just click http://www.clubneko.net/junk/Joousama_-_Joousamamonogatari.mp3 (Comment on this)
Monday, June 14th, 2004
5:40 pm	Neoconservatives losing influence with Bush, realism replacing ambition This comes from the liberal political magazine The New Republic. Some of you who were disturbed by Bush's ambitious foreign policy may find that this article actually makes you somewhat relieved. Although if you're like me and  believe in the importance of bringing freedom to the Middle East, you may find this also quite disheartening. America is at a crossroads in regards to it's foreign policy. However it looks like both parties might be heading down the same path. http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040621&s=kaplan062104 In Summary Hopes for democratizing the middle east are giving way to "stabilizing" it Regime change in Iran is no longer foreign policy The Defense Department and the Neoconservatives, who had dreams of democracy, are being stripped from their power, and being given to the more pragmatic State Department There is increasingly becoming less difference between the Kerry and Bush administration in regards to foreign policy, except maybe ability to carry out said policy, whick Kerry would probably be better at Clinton's Wilsonian foreign policy is giving way to Kerry's more pragmatic and less ambitious foreign policy in the Democratic Party Our best chance in a while for transforming the Middle East may be rapidly closing and coming to an end. Why is this depressing? I think this part of the article sums it up well [i]But the United States is entitled--on September 11, the aim of a democratic Middle East became a matter of our national well-being, even survival. And the United States is obligated--because either pressure for democracy in the Arab world will come from the United States or it will come from nowhere at all. For the source of America's entitlement, look no further than the region's "friendly regimes." Not only has repression fueled terrorist movements in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the very governments we prop up have sanctioned the worst elements as a way to deflect popular anger from their palace gates. The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export." This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists." Unfortunately, according to the U.N.'s Arab Human Development Report, not a single Arab state offers such freedoms. One could plausibly have argued before September 11 that this was none of America's business. But, on that day, the Arab world's predicament became our own--thrusting the United States into a war of ideas to which realism has no adequate response.[/i] In short, as I mentioned in my post below, the only way to truly defeat terrorism is to get at it's root causes, one which is the lack of freedom and empowerment of citizens in the Middle East. To neglect that for some short-sighted goal of "stability" will just continue to feed terrorism and threaten the security of the U.S. in the long run Current Mood: depressed (Comment on this)
12:20 pm	U.S. film industry to the American public, you're idiots http://www.foxjapan.com/movies/irobot/trailers/large.mov First trailer that has made this movie look good. Because the trailer actually respects the intelligence of it's audience. Unfortunately the audience it's targeted for is Japan. It's sad that american film industries think they need to dumb down trailers for american audienes Current Mood: annoyed (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 13th, 2004
11:54 am	What Iraq has to do with 9/11 I posted this on another board but I thought it was adequately informative enough that I'd post it here. One of the main questions people have is what going into Iraq has to do with 9/11. The answer to that question is somewhat complex. And it doesn't help that we have a President who simplifies complex issues. But I'll try my best 1. One of the biggest beefs Al-Qaeda has with us is our prescence of troops in Saudi Arabia. One reason we have them there is to prevent Iraq from moving against the Saudis. A potential threat to Saudi Arabia causes instability in the region. This has several undesirable effects, including higher oil prices. As long as Saddam was in power our troops would be in Saudi Arabia. Now that Saddam is gone, we're pulling our troops out of that region, thus taking away one of the primary reasons for Al-Qaeda attacking us. 2. One of the major causes of terrorism is the impotence many feel in the Middle East to effect change in their country, due to their country being ruled by dictators. And also a poverished lifestyle which creates a sense of hoplessness and a lack of will to live. Therefore joining yourself to a cause that seeks to change the situation in the Middle East, and possibly blowing yourself up in the process, doesn't sound like such a bad thing. Our hope is that if we can create a democratic Iraq, it will start to have a ripple effect through the region, thus causing major sections of the Middle East to become more democratic. If that happens, one of the primary causes of terrorism will be reduced. You can't end get rid of all terrorists, you can only hope to remove some of the primary causes of it. That's what we're hoping a democratic Middle East will do 3. Saddam Hussein did support terrorists, though probably not Al Qaeda. However if you read the State Department's findings on terrorism, you will find several terrorist organizations Saddam supported. One of these was I believe the Abu Nidal organization. This organization used to be the biggest international terrorist network. They also in the 80s attacked Americans. Recently though this network had diminished in power, some saying it no longer exists. Regardless though, Saddam had a history of supporting terrorists, therefore he was contributing to terrorism as long as he was in power. Current Mood: thoughtful (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 12th, 2004
9:51 pm	Cybersex gone wrong, or hilariously right depending on your perpective http://www.quq.dk/cybersex.htm A sample So I was having cybersex the other day. It was pretty good I guess. Here it is: bloodninja: Baby, I been havin a tough night so treat me nice aight? BritneySpears14: Aight. bloodninja: Slip out of those pants baby, yeah. BritneySpears14: I slip out of my pants, just for you, bloodninja. bloodninja: Oh yeah, aight. Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat. BritneySpears14: Oh, I like to play dress up. bloodninja: Me too baby. BritneySpears14: I kiss you softly on your chest. bloodninja: I cast Lvl. 3 Eroticism. You turn into a real beautiful woman. BritneySpears14: Hey... bloodninja: I meditate to regain my mana, before casting Lvl. 8 Cock of the Infinite. BritneySpears14: Funny I still don't see it. bloodninja: I spend my mana reserves to cast Mighty F*ck of the Beyondness. BritneySpears14: You are the worst cyber partner ever. This is ridiculous. bloodninja: Don't f*ck with me bitch, I'm the mightiest sorcerer of the lands. bloodninja: I steal yo soul and cast Lightning Lvl. 1,000,000 Your body explodes into a fine bloody mist, because you are only a Lvl. 2 Druid. BritneySpears14: Don't ever message me again you piece of shit. bloodninja: Robots are trying to drill my brain but my lightning shield inflicts DOA attack, leaving the robots as flaming piles of metal. bloodninja: King Arthur congratulates me for destroying Dr. Robotnik's evil army of Robot Socialist Republics. The cold war ends. Reagan steals my accomplishments and makes like it was cause of him. bloodninja: You still there baby? I think it's getting hard now. bloodninja: Baby? Yeah it was pretty sweet. bloodninja: Ok baby, we got to hurry, I don't know how long I can keep it ready for you. j_gurli3: thats ok. ok i'm a japanese schoolgirl, what r u. bloodninja: A Rhinocerus. Well, hung like one, thats for sure. j_gurli3: haha, ok lets go. j_gurli3: i put my hand through ur hair, and kiss u on the neck. bloodninja: I stomp the ground, and snort, to alert you that you are in my breeding territory. j_gurli3: haha, ok, u know that turns me on. j_gurli3: i start unbuttoning ur shirt. bloodninja: Rhinoceruses don't wear shirts. j_gurli3: No, ur not really a Rhinocerus silly, it's just part of the game. bloodninja: Rhinoceruses don't play games. They f*cking charge your ass. j_gurli3: stop, cmon be serious. bloodninja: It doesn't get any more serious than a Rhinocerus about to charge your ass. bloodninja: I stomp my feet, the dust stirs around my tough skinned feet. j_gurli3: thats it. bloodninja: Nostrils flaring, I lower my head. My horn, like some phallic symbol of my potent virility, is the last thing you see as skulls collide and mine remains the victor. You are now a bloody red ragdoll suspended in the air on my mighty horn. bloodninja: Goddam am I hard now. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
2:42 am	One of the better flash animations I've seen http://62.210.133.184/melon/cometogether.swf (1 Comment |Comment on this)