Obamas Adopt 2nd White House Dog, Name Her Sunny AP. Oh, come on.
Super-Fast Quantum Computers? Scientists Find Asymmetry in Topological Insulators Science Daily
Experts surer of manmade global warming but local predictions elusive Reuters (Bloomberg; Times).
Not Too Big to Jail: Why Eliot Spitzer Is Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare Web of Debt
JPMorgan probed on US power markets FT
Judge endorses use of fraud law against Bank of America Reuters. FIRREA.
Fed advises US banks to lift capital targets FT
Rail Traffic Picks Up Some Momentum Pragmatic Capitalist
Stock Break From Herd Online WSJ
Shale Grab in U.S. Stalls as Falling Values Repel Buyers Bloomberg
Rupee tumbles as India concerns grow and emerging markets turmoil builds FT
Why The Indonesian Stock Market Is Cratering Business Insider. (Watch for the rupiah at 12000?)
Govt slashes GDP growth projection Bangkok Post
Capital Flowing Back to Advanced Economies as Asia Markets Slump Bloomberg
Can an Ice Wall Stop Radioactive Water Leaks from Fukushima? National Geographic
Buffett-Style Dinner Auctions Lure Chinese Seeking Just Society Bloomberg
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
Journalist’s partner interrogated at Heathrow for nine hours ‘WAS carrying encrypted documents from Edward Snowden spying leak’ Daily Mail. David Miranda: “I knew my country would protect me, and I believe in my husband and knew that he would do anything to help me.” And see Yves here.
U.S. had advance notice of Britain’s plan to detain reporter Glenn Greenwald’s partner WaPo
David Miranda detention legally sound, says Scotland Yard BBC
Greenwald Partner falsely detained as Terrorist: How to Create a Dictatorship Juan Cole
David Miranda, schedule 7 and the danger that all reporters now face Alan Rusbridger, Guardian. ‘I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.'”
Britain’s botched use of terror laws Editorial, FT
Manning and Snowden made secrecy impossible Andrew Bacevich, Carroll County Times
Surveillance States and the End of Freedom Ian Welsh
Obama administration asks Supreme Court to allow warrantless cellphone searches WaPo. Most transparent administration in history!
Changing IP address to access public website ruled violation of US law Ars Technica
Michael Grunwald and the Assange Precedent Problem The New Yorker (The Atlantic).
Egypt Erupts
Egypt arrests Muslim Brotherhood’s top leader Al Jazeera
Concerned Israel quietly backs Egypt’s military Reuters. Headline should read: “In shocker, Concerned Israel…”
Gulf Islamist Dissent Over Egypt Foreign Policy
America’s Libertarian Moment The Atlantic. “… England, the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong, which are all approximately libertarian societies …” That one claim should suffice to remove David Boaz from the ranks of the serious, but of course he’s a made man in the political class by now. What a pile of dreck.
We need crime prevention, not militarization: Ursula Rozum Syracuse Post-Standard (bob). Another Bearcat. More fun with SWAT teams (radleybalko).
Content economics, part 3: costs Felix Salmon, Reuters (parts one and two). But DeLong: In Which We Watch Felix Salmon Vanish into the Weeds of the Economics of the Washington Post…
How Ludwig Wittgenstein helped me get over my teenage angst Guardian
Youth Studies Understanding Society
Violence, suffering and denial Billy Blog
Antidote du jour (furzy mouse):
206 comments
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Alan Rusbridger’s article (he’s the editor-in-chief of The Guardian newspaper) is the most frightening piece I’ve read in my lifetime. We are a hair’s breadth from a repeat of 1930s fascism. I truly don’t know how much longer we’ll have freedom of the press. Yves’ sense of a disturbance in the force was dangerously prescient.
Yes, but with plenty of socially relevant semantics to make up for it:
“I believe in my husband and knew that he would do anything to help me.”
Do you ever think that soon they’ll start banning books? Uh why even bother, who reads them, and who that does read them has any real power anyway? The people? Yea right.
But why climb the mountain? Because it’s there. Why abuse power? Because they can. Hoarding a pile of subversive books ….
On the face of it, Rusbridger seems quite the fox —
“It was a rather bizarre situation in which I explained to them that there were other copies and, as with WikiLeaks, we weren’t working in London alone so destroying a copy in London seemed to me a slightly pointless task that didn’t take account of the way that digital information works these days,” said Rusbridger.
“Given that there were other copies and we could work out of America, which has better laws to protect journalists, I saw no reason not to destroy this material ourselves rather than hand it back to the government.”
Rusbridger added that the alternative to destroying the computer hard drives would be “essentially surrendering control of that material” to the courts while fighting a lengthy legal case with only a small prospect of winning.
“It seemed to me fruitless to go through that exercise of fighting that case, which would have meant that we could not write about the Snowden material when there were other copies. So it’s simply a matter of transferring our reporting to America,” he told The World at One’s Martha Kearney.
Frivolous comment: I don’t think they gave a crap about the hard drive. They were just looking for some dirt in the backpack to toss to the tabloids.
Thanks to professional fluffer and ersatz journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, the son of Joan Ross Sorkin, a playwright, and Laurence T. Sorkin, a partner in a law firm, today we learn that:
Hiring the Well-Connected Isn’t Always a Scandal
Well at least he had the decency to not mention the Hilton sisters or Jaden Smith.
Andrew Ross Sorkin Is Such a Wall Street Bootlicker Sometimes
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the whiz kid-ish New York Times Dealbook reporter, sometimes gets unfairly characterized as a bootlicking Wall Street suckup who wants only to ingratiate himself with the powerful. Other times—like today—that characterization is completely fair.
I mean, this shit right here is scarcely believable: “Hiring the Well-Connected Isn’t Always a Scandal,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Backslapping Apologist For Every Shitty Undemocratic Practice of the Wealthy Plutocracy. This is literally a column in which Andrew Ross Sorkin, the rich son of a powerful corporate lawyer and the best media pal to the Masters of the Universe, dismisses out of hand any concern that weirdo nitpickers might have about the fact that the children of society’s most rich and powerful people routinely land the most well-paid and desirable jobs. What sort of hippie freak would care about a thing like that, right?
The news peg for this column is the fact that JP Morgan Chase is currently being investigated for hiring the children of highly placed Chinese officials. To do so in an attempt to win business would, of course, be against the rules. The normal reaction of a business reporter to such news might be: “Let me look into this story to see if I can find any wrongdoing by the bank.” Andrew Ross Sorkin’s reaction was: “Let me write a lengthy column larded with chummy anecdotes which justifies this plainly fishy practice!” After all, who would suspect a Wall Street bank of doing something dishonest or duplicitous? Not Andrew Ross Sorkin.
http://gawker.com/andrew-ross-sorkin-is-such-a-wall-street-bootlicker-som-1171613192
Well then, it’s high time to start looking backwards to what WAS, no? https://twitter.com/doubledeckerpot
The UK government thought they could stop the leak of documents by destroying the Guardian’s hard drives. Stupid? just thuggish? Or both?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/19/u-k-government-thought-destroying-guardian-hard-drives-would-stop-snowden-stories/
While it strikes me as entirely possible they thought that, I assume this is a power and intimidation play that’s part of a larger bid to discourage other publications from stepping out of line.
I guess this mean that the first “payment” from the insurance policies Mr. Snowden put in place will be arriving shortly.
Fire up the popcorn.
Indonesian Rupiah at 10680. The Central Bank is in a bind, if it increases interest rate it will probably slow down the domestic economy which is already below target.
quotes from the guardian editors article
“The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”
nice show of the power mentality!
and
“so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian’s long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian’s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. “We can call off the black helicopters,” joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters
really!
the spooks are acting like they have no idea how to stop it and the frustration is getting the better of them.
reminds me of that Adam Curtis link on M15 from a few days ago
BUGGER
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER
Yes, these people really are as dumb as they look.
No, they’re smart, hiding behind good old Reinhold Niebuhr:
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10595
“Hiding behind good old Reinhold Niebuhr?”
You know, charles sereno, the sort of anti-intellectualism which you and folks like this Max Blumenthal exhibit sometimes goes beyond the pale.
Instead of descending into the moral and intellectual sewer along with the neocons, did you ever consider trying to rise above it?
+1k
Whew! I wondered if I’d get a reply. Thanks. I hope you (and AbyNormal) attended the RealNews segment. It’s theme was Niebuhr’s “paradox of grace.” In my more unmannerly moments, I’ve called it a “theory of the lesser evil cum lipstick.”
Given that Reinhold Niebuhr was the most influential Christian theologian of the last 100 years, it doesn’t surprise me that folks like Obama, Bush, and David Brooks would want to cash in on his good name and reputation, as well as the Classical Realism he espoused.
There is nothing new about this. As Andrew M. Lobaczewski writes in Political Ponerology:
Lobaczewsk goes on to explain the ways in which an ideology is vitiated into what he calls a “masking ideology.” The ideology
The ideology of psychopaths, sociopaths, and characteropaths is thus “generally composed by slipping a different meaning into the same old names,” Lobaczewski conlcludes. “Average people succumb to the…suggestive insinuations for a long time before they learn to understand.”
So what we have in the case of Bush, Obama and Brooks is their highly immoral neocon ideology being floated under the guise of Niebuhr’s Classical Realist ideology (which is also known as Moral Realism).
Which brings us to folks like you and Max Blumenthal. Is your unjust condemnation of Niebuhr and the ideology he espoused due to human error at the epistemological level, or the result of human deceit at the ontological level?
To the latter charge, Lobaczewski gives you an easy out:
I think I agree. I’m aware of the danger of great ideologies for small minds (see Lobaczewski) because I fret (along with billions of others, I suspect) about lifting myself up. Ponergerics might be a bootstrap.
Did you mean panegyrics?
Joe, I’m utterly green with envy. If only I had said “Ponergerics (Panegyrics).” Darn!
I wasn’t trying to be snarky, there should be an emoticon that signifies “not trying to be an asshole”.
I just wasn’t familiar with the word and I like to look ’em up when I don’t (increase your word power and all).
Did you mean ponerogenic? Here’s a great synopsis of Andrew Lobaczewski’s (pre-Obama) book, Political Ponerology, on the genesis of evil (a disease):
http://www.ponerology.com/evil_2b.html
Lobaczewski vividly describes the dynamics of the Bush regime and the Neocons, where Bush’s power was overestimated (misoverestimated?).
Of course Z–nism immediately springs to mind, but this also fits Obama (as “spellbinder”) and the current predatory-parasitic kleptocracy like spandex. The US government under Obama has morphed into a highly sophisticated illegitimate criminal enterprise more deadly than the Mafia, a nuclear Mafia inseparable from Israel.
Did you mean ponerogenic? Here’s an excellent synopsis of Andrew Lobaczewski’s (pre-Obama) book, Political Ponerology, on the genesis of evil (a disease):
http://www.ponerology.com/evil_2b.html
(Earlier longer comment was eaten, desaparecido; perhaps forbidden words)
Lobaczewski vividly describes the dynamics of psychopathic political cabals, esp the Bush regime and the Neocons (with close association to [Sc]ionism). But this also fits Obama and the current predatory-parasitic kleptocracy like spandex. The US government under Obama has morphed into a highly sophisticated illegitimate criminal enterprise more deadly than the Mafia, a nuclear Mafia, conjoined with a certain ME country.
Thanks. I did mean “ponerogenic” and I won’t blame it on a typo.
not to take his name in vain, but Jesus you do keep coming up with the goods…thanks for the effort!
And, yes, this does come from years of steadfast, practiced ignorance and only the most platitudinal of superficial study, but…
Seems to me Niebuhr is the Christian equivalent of Rushdoony (provocative, no?) and the Grand Inquisitor:
They all represent the temptation and seduction of the Church (think: bride of Christ, think Eve, you know, just to be sexist, right) into the third (depends on how you count) temptation of Christ: people (polis) power.
…And, you know, isn’t power a puzzle for all of humanity? So, someone had to answer these questions, right? Someone had to step up with some intellectual fortitude. Otherwise it’s a bunch of primitivism and happy-go-lucky happenstance that keeps things together, right? What kind of an intellectual theory is Christianity: God’ll figger it for ya! Shoot. I mean “grace”? “It is finished”? But, but, we were just getting started! Let’s start with “paradox” instead. What’s the sound of one hand flapping at the moon? Now we’re getting somewhere! You know, gosh knows we need to do something to fill time waiting for ol J.C.-come-lately. Takin his sweet time!
As you were!
“theory of the lesser evil cum lipstick.”
My mind is small and dirty, don’t go there, don’t go there …
Mind my Latin, now.
Max Blumenthal seems an unlikely candidate for the “neoliberal” label, except in some sort of vague “We’re all neoliberals” sense. Perhaps you were thinking of Max Boot?
Am I missing something here?
Did someone call Max Blumenthal a “neoliberal”?
Too long upthread: Neocon. In which case my point applies even more forcibly.
Well again, am I missing something?
Did someone call Max Blumenthal a “neocon”?
(Regret can’t begin to describe what I feel when my fuc*ing ISP blacked me out at 3:30 pm. Perhaps for the best.)
“You know, charles sereno, the sort of anti-intellectualism which you and folks like this Max Blumenthal exhibit sometimes goes beyond the pale.
Instead of descending into the moral and intellectual sewer along with the neocons, did you ever consider trying to rise above it?” (from Mexico)
You did call Max an anti-intellectual, but not a neoliberal (the distinction is best left for another time). However, do you consider him a neocom? That depends on whether you think he’s joined me in the “moral and intellectual sewer.” For my part, I’d be happy in his company.
When I spoke of “the moral and intellectual” sewer, what I was speaking of is the way Blumenthal, you, Brooks, Obama, and Bush play fast and loose with the truth, and the way you and Blumenthal bend over backwards — either through ignorance, mendacity or ideological conceits — to parrot the neocon’s claim that they are operating in the tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr. It’s people like you and Blumenthal who allow the neocons to “hide behind good old Reinhold Niebuhr.” At no point did I ever call you or Blumenthal a neocon, or lump you and Bloomenthal together with the neocons as neocons.
This was made doubly clear in my 11:47 a.m. comment, which was posted in the thread hours before Lambert unleashed his straw man, and where I very explicitly separated you and Blumenthal from the neocons. Here’s what I said:
And in the Wikipedia link Lambert provided on Blumenthal, there’s another example of the sort of dishonest rhetorical strategies Blumenthal uses:
This form of manipulating content is called “misleading vividness”: Describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is a rare occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. It is throwing a spotlight on a small sample size, knowing full well that anti-Jewish bigots will assume it applies to all Jews.
Here’s what Amitai Etzioni had to say about the sort of tactic Blumenthal used:
charles sereno said:
That doesn’t surprise me at all.
Apparently, you think you did not. I suppose that’s one reading of what you wrote. Again, please don’t try to make me responsible for your sloppy writing.
I like “unleash a straw man,” though. I wasn’t even aware that such a thing was possible. Possibly that’s because the nature of this alleged straw man is never disclosed. In any case, good to know.
Lambert Strether says:
That comment was made in reply to this comment:
So, Lambert Strether, can you point me exactly in that comment to where I labeled Blumenthal a “neoliberal” or “neoconservative”?
See immediately below. And above, the neo* was a typo; perhaps I didn’t write clearly enough!
According to your correction, it was “liberal” that was an error. To wit:
But I had already accounted for your correction in my question (which I asked immediately above), which was as follows, and which I will ask again:
See here.
Quoting your original thoughtful comment:
My reading was that those who had descended into “the moral and intellectual sewer along with the neo-cons” in paragraph three were Charles Sereno and Max Blumenthal in paragraph two. “Along with” implies affinity, to me; I didn’t imagine that that Sereno and Blumenthal were trying to pull the neo-cons out of the sewer, having gone into it to rescue them.
That’s certainly a reasonable reading. If it’s not what you meant, please don’t try to make me responsible for your sloppy writing.
NOTE Not sure what “anti-intellectualism” means in this context, except a ritual term of abuse. I quoted the interview; it’s certainly an open question whether Blumenthal is an “anti-intellectual.” I mean, unless the litmus test is giving the ol’ thumbs up to some sort of reading list.
Again, the question is as follows:
I gave you my reading. Pro tip: If you’re going to make a claim that somebody is in a “sewer,” take care to make it (a) crystal clear that somebody is not a member of the NC commentariat, or (b) why they are. Again, please don’t try foist off your sloppy writing on me.
And who says that the writings of Augustine are Scripture? They aren’t.
It’s just like that dinner table game* where one sees how quickly a message can be distorted in its retelling.
*One whispers a message to the person on the right (or left) of himself who does likewise until the message returns to him at which time he recites aloud the original message and its last retelling.
F. Beard, who in Gehenna ever said that “the writings of Augustine are Scripture?” Paul Jay certainly didn’t. You know something we don’t? I fondly remember reading Augustine’s De Trinitate. It was a pleasant respite from his moralistic ramblings.
I fondly remember reading Augustine’s De Trinitate. charles sereno
I’m not fond of any extra-Biblical doctrine since it has only stood in the way of my understanding (such as it is) of the Bible, the supposed source of it anyway.
A minute reading Augustine (or Calvin, Luther, etc), is a minute better spent reading the Bible itself.
Charles, thanks for the link; it’s interesting. Here’s an extended quote of the Niebuhr discussion, since what Blumenthal actually said seems to be absent from the discussion, for some reason:
“The paradox of grace” seems to resonate both with the post on McKibben and leadership, and also with the “lesser of two evils” discussion constantly had with Obama loyalists.
Adding: I don’t see any contradiction between being a famous Christian theologian and a faithful servant of empire. Happens all the time. Whether it happened in Niebuhr’s case, I’m not familiar enough with his intellectual history to know.
Lambert Strether said:
That’s exactly what I was thinking. But not only the McKibben post resonates, but also today’s post “China Prepares to Bail Itself Out.”
Both posts deal with power: who has it, whether they should have it, and, if they have it, how and under what circumstances they should use it.
Neoconservatism, as John J. Mearshiemer has noted, is the marriage of military power with idealism:
“The Romantic belief that the world can be reshaped by an act of will” is the ideal that informs neoconservatism, writes John Gray in Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern. “American/style ‘democratic capitalism’ is destined to spread everywhere,” he explains, and as “it does, a universal civilization will come into being, and history will come to an end.”
Realism, on the other hand, is the marriage of state power (military, economic, financial, police, etc.) with realism.
For pacifists, whose opposition to the of use of military power is absolute, both neoconservatism and realism would of course be unacceptable.
Reinhold Niebuhr had been a pacifist, but experienced a change of heart and resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940. It “was Niebuhr more than any other Christian thinker-activist who was able to turn the American Protestant ‘establishment’ away from its considerable indifference to the moral-political threat of Nazism – often couched in terms of pacifism – by arguing that the Nazis and their ideology had to be actively opposed, even if that meant going to war against Hitler and his minions.” (David Novak, “Idolatry and injustice: A Jewish appreciation of Reinhold Niebuhr”)
Niebuhr had publicly expressed alarm over the Nazi threat as early as 1931:
Niebuhr came to believe that Nazi Germany posed an existential threat to the United States, and to civilization, which required a military response.
In his Gifford Lectures, delivered in Scotland on the eve of World War II in 1939, he inveighed against Nazism with a warning that is just as fitting for today’s neoconservatives as it was for the Nazis then.
“In the life of every political group,” he says, “whether nation or empire … obedience is prompted by the fear of power on the one hand and by reverence for majesty on the other. The temptation to idolatry is implicit in the state’s majesty.” He then speaks of “the claim of moral autonomy by which the self-deification of the social group is made explicit by its presentation of itself as the source and end of existence.” And most succinctly he states, “The nation pretends to be God.”
The rise of Nazism jolted Niebuhr back to the reality of transcendent evil, and he steadfastly endorsed World War II, even while criticizing the Allied bombing of German cities and questioning the atomic attacks on Japan. Later, he supported Western resistance to Soviet communism, though he opposed the Vietnam War almost from its start.
Niebuhr’s anti-communist liberalism was in sync with Hubert Humphrey’s until the Vietnam War, which Niebuhr opposed as “fantastic.” Niebuhr’s described his friend’s adherence to President Johnson’s war policy as “very sad.” (Mark Tooley, “Niebuhr and Obama”)
Niehbur, along with almost all realists in the United States except for Henry Kissinger, opposed the Vietnam War.
Equally, almost all realists in the United States — except for Henry Kissinger — opposed the war against Iraq.
Max Blumenthal equates Niebuhr’s realism with Bush’s, Obama’s and Brooks’ neoconservatism. This is an empirical claim, one which is demonstrably and patently false.
The passage which most strikingly illustrates Blumenthal’s ignorance, or his mendacity, is this one:
@FMexico,
Quire… is it your assertion that folks have been bastardizing (Un/Knowingly) Reinhold Niebuhr for ideological reasons (moving the window to justify political ends) et al and in your learned opinion would you classify the Niebuhr school of thought as form of Exceptionalism.
skippy… hope you can clarify.
Sorry about the slow reply, skippy. I was wanting to use a quote in my response to you, so I put you on the back burner, and then it took me a good while to find the quote.
Blumenthal is just doing a hatchet job on Niebuhr, and it’s done with empirical claims which are distortions and half-truths. Blumenthal’s arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. Asserting that we should defend ourselves against a threat to the life of the nation (Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia) is not the same as saying we should go fight a war of imperial conquest in Vietnam or Iraq. Niebuhr made those sorts of distinctions, and he supported the war against Nazi Germany and the Cold War, but he spoke out against the Vietnam War. To claim that Niebuhr supported the Vietnam War is a lie. The neocons make no distinction between the need to fight Nazi Germany and the need to fight Vietnam or Iraq, but Niebuhr did.
Blumenthal admits he’s “not a student of Niebuhr.” So if he has no knowledge of what Niebuhr actually said and wrote, then how can he be so all-fired sure that Niebuhr is guilty of all the things he charges him with?
As to your question as to whether Niebuhr was an Exceptionalist, I will answer with this quote of Niebuhr’s, which I believe places him well outside the neocon camp and its championing of American exceptionalism as well as preventive war:
@FMexico,
Sorry old mate… but I find the rhetoric… apologetic.. especially in light of the factors that allowed that bit of history to take flight.
Lest we forget
“H. Richard Niebuhr argued for a principled “inactivity” based on radical trust in God. He wrote: “The inactivity of radical Christianity is not the inactivity of those who call evil good; it is the inaction of those who do not judge their neighbors because they cannot fool themselves into a sense of superior righteousness. … It is not the inactivity of the noncombatant, for it knows that there are no noncombatants, that everyone is involved, that China is being crucified … by our sins and those of the whole world. It is not the inactivity of the merciless, for works of mercy must be performed though they are only palliates to ease present pain while the process of healing depends on deeper, more actual and urgent forces.”
“But Reinhold Niebuhr disagreed: “Love may qualify the social struggle of history but it will never abolish it, and those who make the attempt to bring society under the dominion of perfect love will die on the cross. And those who behold the cross are quire right in seeing it as a revelation of the divine, of what man ought to be cannot be, at least not so long as he is enmeshed in the processes of history.”
Skippy… fooking hell… brothers thingy… so many have no clue~
Here’s Niebuhr in 1966 on Vietnam. From the perspective of almost 50 years on, he reads like just another imperial counsellor, perhaps more nuanced and wiser than many.
Was Niebuhr “the man who really shaped the Democrats’ post-World War II agenda during the Cold War”? Maybe, though it’s more likely a “thought collective” of which Niebuhr was a part did. Is that the claim that makes Blumenthal mendacious? It’s impossible to tell from your comment.
@ Lambert Strether
For the life of me, I can’t see anything Niebuhr said in that piece that bolsters your, charles sereno’s or Blumenthal’s argument. In fact, it takes a wrecking ball to it, and reinforces what I have argued. Nazi Germany posed an existential threat to the United States. North Vietnam did not. From your link:
So he’s a wiser imperial counsellor, as I said. Your point?
@FMexico,
Are my questions not worthy of answer?
Skippy… Samantha Powers is an cytotoxic of your main man.
History in the making:
“Niehbur, along with almost all realists in the United States except for Henry Kissinger, opposed the Vietnam War.
Equally, almost all realists in the United States — except for Henry Kissinger — opposed the war against Iraq.” (from Mexico)
Are you serious? I give Niebuhr more credit than that. He was a rather lonely realist.
You know, charles sereno, there are people in the world who have knowledge of that which they speak, and don’t just make up stuff to fit their preconceived notions.
The empire has a portfolio of ideologues, or probably of networks of ideologues; their “stock” has different values at different times. Realists, nominalists, alchemists…
Hi. I’m back online once more (I haven’t been hiding). I’ve just caught up with your exchanges with Lambert. What surprised me was your reference to Mearsheimer. You quote him as follows (at 9:51 pm) in response to me:
“Morgenthau, along with almost all realists in the United States – except for Henry Kissinger – opposed the Vietnam war.”
And after an intervening sentence:
“Equally, almost all realists in the United States – except for Henry Kissinger – opposed the war against Iraq.”
Except for Niebuhr replacing Morgenthau , the two sentences, which I cited and commented on, were not yours as I was led to believe. If I knew I was contending with Mearsheimer, I would have tailored my remarks with reference to his notion of “realism,” not yours. It may be that you and he have an identical view. That’s beside the point. I need to know how he would define a realist. I’m also not that persuaded by an argument from authority (one who knows). For fun, I looked up “realism” in Wikipedia. There were 13 definitions. This one seemed appropriate —
Realism (international relations), the view that world politics are driven by competitive self-interest
The only thing that proves is that both sides have to agree on the meaning of terms, if not on truth value.
When you’re trying frantically to distract people from the universally-accepted moral and legal imperatives of jus cogens, it gets a little old dredging up the same old just war proverbs from a dark-age horndog and patron saint of brewers. So Brennan’s taught his protege Obama to mix it up, drop the name of a modern thinker, a professor of applied christianity (a successful vo-tech program for the crucial workforce skills of crusading, inquisition, simony, mass hysteria, and fcking altar boys.) When the facts and the law are against you, religion’s very helpful. The discipline is advancing by leaps and bounds. When Scalia has decomposed into a puddle of grease and hair, the CIA puppet rulers of tomorrow will be quoting him.
I was in the US Peace Corps some 40 years ago. One of the favorite pastimes of the volunteers in country was called Pin the Tale on the Spook. It grew boring after a while because the spooks were so easy to identify.
read the bbc article about inefficiency of British spies within UK
Most of it is true in other countries too…Counter inteligence operations are too difficult to carry the guy peter wright wrote a good book “spycatcher”about MI5 spy rings..seems like from 1940-1990,most of the english administration was penetrated by rusians but americans were more efficient in preventing russian spies to enter directly in govt..read mitrokhin archives..but that doesn’t mean MI6,CIA,FBI,DEA,NSA are inefficient in other countries…
Those who visited aren’t necessarily (and in fact, most likely not) at the highest echelons … There are security clearances, and security clerances all compartmentalized, and I haven’t figured out how it might all work. Those who visited might have mortgages, bills to pay. Those two employees are themselves under control of higher echelons, all the way to Oztralia!
I’m referring to the two GCHQ employees who checked that the hard drives on the Mac were totally destroyed.
“hierarchal and lateral echelons” … do i see a typo? hierarchal … ?
The way they joke around is such classic fascism that it just stuns. History doesn’t even rhyme it just repeats. I’ve seen this movie before, this isn’t even the remake – it’s the same @#$# movie.
But it repeats the second time as farce? Yes it repeats as SELF-CONSCIOUS fascism, not with the real genuine appeal the orginal had (whatever that was), but as fascism that knows it’s fascism, that knows it takes from a playbook everyone hates and regards as the worst possible example. And it doesn’t even care. Fascism as farce.
Groklaw to shut down over surveillance fears: “There is no shield from forced exposure”.
“My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it’s possible. I’m just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can’t stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I’ve always been a private person. That’s why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours.
Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world’s economy would collapse, I suppose. I can’t really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is over.
So this is the last Groklaw article. I won’t turn on comments. Thank you for all you’ve done. I will never forget you and our work together. I hope you’ll remember me too. I’m sorry I can’t overcome these feelings, but I yam what I yam, and I tried, but I can’t.”
How deep does the rabbit hole go?
Oddly, if everyone did that, leap off the Internet, the world’s economy would collapse
I’m waiting for somebody to point out that all digital commerce is utterly insecure.
All.
Any and all financial information is routinely collected. Anyone at all can be disappeared and their assets confiscated in total secrecy. So far there has been no mention of official or rogue security operatives starting up lucrative side businesses, but that is only a matter of time.
You might like to think about taking some short positions, starting with Amazon.com.
This here next is pretty dark (black hole) material/theory, so I’ll be cautious… don’t want to be droned-out come the end of the month. So, here’s a link to the booklet, and in Re: Inslaw/Octopus/Cassolaro/Cabazon/Wackenhutt/money-laundering, ca. 1980s-1990s: (chapter 6 at: (I set up their virtual dead-drops)) , http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/last_circle/6.htm
Groklaw to close its doors, cites ‘no shield from forced exposure’: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
Came here to post this very link! Just contemplating quitting the internet is difficult. It’s a doozy. Could I only use it for work?
Any business your employer conducts online is insecure and completely exposed.
Plant potatoes. Don’t think of them as vegetables. Think of them as insurance.
Groklaw’s influence in exposing corporate abuses of patent, copyright, and IP law in general and in mobilizing technical and legal experts against those abuses cannot be overstated. Thus, PJ’s reasonable concern for her and her collaborators’ privacy poses not only a setback for informed civic discourse but also for economic efficiency. Two sad thoughts:
1. While technically-knowledgeable folks were always aware that email is generally subject to eavesdropping, I don’t think many believed that the US government was systematically eavesdropping on, archiving, and indexing virtually everyting on the Internet. I’m confident that Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and friends can cobble together enough pretzel logic to find this constitutional, but it surely and fundamentally violates the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
2. Once again, US can-do technology wins! East Germany had to recruit, manage, and compensate hundreds of thousands of Stasi agents to keep an eye on everyone in a much smaller and more restricted society. The NSA now has less expensive and even more reliable intelligence (no middle man to distort things … they get the facts straight from every horse’s mouth) on a much bigger scale. Big Brother is fully automated!
Looks like it’s time to rent the DVD of “The Lives of Others” and mentally re-cast it to today’s USian society.
Estimates of the size of the Stasi are based on the number of reports filed — which have since been determined to have been written by aggrieved neighbors denouncing each other over petty grievances.
In the tough times ahead, we would do well to remember that we can either pull together or we can pull apart.
That is a real shame. Groklaw was terrific. Maybe they should be looking at Bitmessage.
The Youth Studies link is not working.
Correct link for Youth Studies–
http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/youth-studies.html
Thanks, fixed.
Seemed a little Monty-Pythonish to me, the mundane bureaucrat doing the basement wack-a-mole with a wink-wink.
Steely-voiced phone calls, then altogether down into the bowels of the fourth-estate, smashing “truth” into fragments, whoopwhoop, then sweeping it up companionably with broom/pan while mentioning China, and then remarking on black helis on the way back up and out.
Everyone knew it was ceremonial. “Just letting you know we can do this.” The Guardian merely demurred. They also want the statement heard, and afterwards Rusbridger hovered in comments under his editorial to reinforce it.
I prefer my fright with a dose of doop-de-doo.
Oops, meant as response to grayslady.
There is nothing “wink-wink” or “ceremonial” about what happened at Guardian. But you go ahead and keep your head buried in the sand.
Hear hear grayslady…..turning everything into a joke is a powerful kind of denial.
Who hasn’t cringed at the abject denial evinced by, say, Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator, really?
Oy!!! I am not eliding the meaning of the situation here. I am only saying that from *my perception*, it seemed like old-fashioned British humor, a kind of ceremony of wits rather than a freak-out or display of stupidity.
I do not believe Curtis’ shtick that Brit intelligence is merely a bunch o’ bumblers (although I am sure that some are). Nor do I believe that this particular situation (including Heathrow/Miranda) was aggressive pique like happened with the Morales’ plane. This appears more like chess. YMMV
But anyway, I DO prefer my fright with doop-de-doo. It helps me live with it. Maybe its the last paroxysms in my few-remaining English genes? lol
Of course, there must be division inside the British gov’t (as there also must be in ours even though silent). This may be reflecting that. Rusbridger is delighted to sacrifice a Macbook Pro or two to letting it all hang out because it is ridiculous and we must effin’ do something about it.
Humor can be very serious. Surely you know that.
Humor for sure and music too. In the interest of improving USA-Brit relationships, here’s an accompaniment with anonymous lyrics —
If you give me your Magna Carta
I can give you my First Amendment
And you can be my long last pal
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rN7R6r0T48
“Last” was a F-slip for “lost.”
Or maybe
—Lord Darlington, Lady Windermere’s Fan by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde! He knew that reality lives between the lines, in the white space around the sounds, in the blankness between one bad dream and the next.
In the margin between hearing a joke and drawing breath for a laugh, that is where you will find the “really serious”. Pay attention!
W00t
What’s your problem with another White House dog?
I don’t think it’s about the dog. I think it’s about the fawning press coverage of a non event.
But that’s just my opinion.
Good press. Roll over. Play dead.
Ha! when I saw the second dog I thought the White House
must be desperate for feel-good news. It will take more than one dog IMO — if they turned the place into a pet shelter that would be a start…
Fetch! Heel!
http://news.yahoo.com/first-puppy-sign-troubles-come-124010936.html
“Is the new First Puppy a Sign of Troubles to Come?”
“What’s the connection between Sunny, the new First Puppy at the White House, and storm clouds on the horizon in Washington? Recent tongue-in-cheek political science research shows there might actually be one.”
As an avid “dog lover,” I certainly have no problem with “Sunny.”
But, I suspect that the “Yahoo” piece is spot on about “brewing political trouble.”
It would be difficult for me to believe that after the “roll out” of the ACA and the Health Exchanges this Fall–the midterm elections will likely result in a “bloodbath” for the Dem Party.
Just heard that the Dem Party shill, Ed Schultz, is being brought back to MSNBC, five nights a week. Apparently, he is taking one of Hardball’s (Matthews’) time slots.
If that doesn’t indicate “panic,” I don’t know what does, LOL!
Yves, this past Friday:
Woof.
Woof, woof, woof. Summertime, the livin’ ain’t easy, I’m getting hoarse.
“… England, the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong, which are all approximately libertarian societies …”
CANADA? Is he SERIOUS?
The only one I might agree with would be Hong Kong, and even thats a stretch.
How the USA, the land of the largest MIC on earth, is a ‘libertarian society’ is also beyond me, but its at least more reasonable than saying CANADA (or England for that matter!) is one.
I compliment you on your effective use of capitalised letters :)
an oldie but goodie, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axLRUszuu9I
Surging libertarianism or anarchism seems to be a growing narrative. Maju said something similar yesterday:
I just don’t see it. What I see is a reaction to the wielding of authority which is perceived to be increasingly corrupt and draconian.
I see absolutely no evidence of a transition to a less hierarchical, less centralized, and less disciplined social and economic order. On the contrary, our world is much more hierarchical, centralized and disciplined now than it was in 1968. And I say that as a gay man. So while the LGBT boat may have risen realitve to others, the tide of individual freedom has gone out, with the net result being that my boat has sunk.
And given the people Rand Paul is teamed up with — Charles Koch, the Cato Institute, etc. — I’m highly suspicious of the sincerity of his libertarian credentials.
I suppose time will tell, but I have to wonder if it’s possible to be a good apple in a bushel of rotten ones. For what Koch and the Cato Institute are up to is trying to float neoliberalism under the banner of libertariansim. Libertarianism believes in a weak state, a small state. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, believes in a strong state, a massive state, but one which is in the exclusive service of a small handful of oligarchs.
I take it you probably mean the US-UK deep-state neoliberalism. That’s one pole. Then, there’s the Chinese pole of power. Then, the Russian pole of power. Sterling Seagrave said that on earth, the powers that be, as individuals/families, ultimately, “It’s all like scrambled eggs!” (secret alliances, with some treachery, etc.)
I don’t think neoliberalism is a good word to describe China. Neoliberalism is first and foremost a doctrine of deindustrialization. So that leaves China out.
Here in Latin America they have coined the word “conservative developmentalism” to describe what went on in Mexico 1940-1980 and what has been going on in places like Germany and China for the past decade or two. It’s an industrialization strategy, but based on increasing exports rather than spuring internal demand. Brazil has walked a path somewhere between conservative developmentalism and progressive developmentalism, which is an industrialization strategy that relies on spurring internal demand. And of course conservatism and progressivism both explicitly advocate a strong state.
Could you elaborate on that a bit more? It seems right but it isn’t what comes to mind when I think of (the little I know of) neoliberalism, which is why I’d like to know more.
Latin America was the first place where neoliberalism was imposed. That’s why Greg Grandin calls it “empire’s workshop.”
Latin America, therefore, offers the longest-running case studies of what neoliberalism is all about.
Here, for example, is what happened in Argentina:
Here’s another account:
The first paper I cited elaborates on the role of deindustrialization as part of the imposition of neoliberalism:
Hmm. Can you show that industrialization decreased globally? I’m not so sure it has. Since the neo-liberal thought collective is trans-national (as are, presumably its funders) we would expect its effects to be transnational. After all, the US over the last generation has been transformed into a site for resource extraction. But Buffets BNSF carries coal to China, and from China, shipping containers full of (industrially produced) Chinese goods.
Trade between different countries has its pros and cons, as we all know. I’d say neoliberalism tends to ignore the cons of so-called free-trade (NAFTA and all that jazz). When it comes to the Chinese “deep-state”, beyond the Politburo or whatever, I mean the higher “echelons/masters”, the political-economic policy agenda is pretty obscure, at least from where I sit …
Thank you for your kind response, Sr. Mexico! (As a long-time lurker and very occasional commenter, I just want to add that I appreciate and enjoy your comments immensely!)
People can vote for Rand if they want, Dems *deserve* to lose, so make me care. But to believe again that voting for high level people will change things … really? (though I’d have a little more hope for his father)
Libertarianism is *one* seemingly logical response to the police state. That what we almost certainly will get is the same old policy of empire that they plan to *market* as libertarianism is a near certainty. Remember when Obama was marketed as progressivism and leftism? They plan to do the same thing from the right. Is the libertarian right capable of learning from the left’s Obama experience? They really need to take notes!
So the people can keep voting against empire, and war and the police state, from both sides, AND they’ll keep getting it anyway, because the people’s positions don’t matter (like the Chomsky article). But certain policies that go under libertarianism will actually be used to make the situation worse even if only speaking in terms of power abuses? Yes, I know that. Concentrated wealth becomes concentrated power.
Anarchism is actually an even more logical response to the police state (and has the virtue of opposing other forms of concentrated power) but they’re at such a tangent to anything having to do with the actual political system that …. However I do see plenty of small scale anarchism.
A few years ago the UK police decided that another innocent Brazilian was a terrorist, pursued him down to the s̶u̶b̶w̶a̶y̶ tube and shot him dead. I think the Brazilians do remember this, while the rest of the world has forgotten, so this most recent “terror” nonsense will not impress them about the trustworthiness of UK police or the UK government.
It’s General Woundwart! Hide!
Oh, and anyone interested in chess, the FIDE World Cup 2013 enters into the (I think) semifinal round today. America does not endorse chess. Thus, Americans don’t know much about it and most of our “American” grandmasters are actually imported from other countries, but it’s a great game to follow these days and GM Nakamura for the US has made it through so far, who plays an exciting tactical style.
All games are on chessbomb.com with real time computer analysis, and you can get livestream coverage from livestream.com, starting at 9:00 a.m. EDT (NOW), with IM Lawrence Trent and former women’s world champion Susan Polgar covering the games:
http://new.livestream.com/cisha/wcc2013?query=chess&cat=event
Some interesting matchups!
Thanks for the link. It seems like chess and football (soccer) are two games that people the world over have in common. Both of them have helped me meet and befriend people in foreign lands. Telling then, that neither enjoy much popularity in the US…
You are quite welcome!
I’ve made lots of international friends through chess too. To an extent I see chess as a microcosm of our cultural experience. People tend to like what they’re shown. It’s been a source of simultaneous amusement and revulsion to see the way chess books in my local Barnes & Noble went from being a whole enormous section to just 8 books last I checked, while poker – which gets ESPN coverage – has an enormous section now when it used to be small. If a US team should ever win the world cup in futbol/soccer, watch for an immediate futbol/soccer boom, but don’t expect it to last unless maybe the TV and other media decide to push it hard. We’re like that. Bike boom after Lance, chess boom after Fischer, etc, but it’s not on TV, so…they die. The US actually has a rich history of monster players in chess too (Morphy, Pillsbury, Marshall, Fine, Fischer, Nakamura, etc).
But I’ve got the internet, and for the time being I get to watch these excellent players of the post-Kasparov/post-super computer era, and they’re fantastic. People thought computers would be the end of chess, but they’ve only made some of the playing styles of humans even more knife edge/tactical or more ingeniously positional/strategic. I’m fascinated by chess and chess players, from both an asthetic point of view and from the joy of watching brilliant people at work on what amounts to an abstract argument. It’s one of those pursuits like music and math where genuine child prodigies emerge due to its abstract nature rather than its specific reliance on knowledge or experience, and these people all have unbelievable memories and first rate calculating devices in their heads. Some of the players are great too. I’m glad Peter Svidler has advanced so far in this (4th round, not anywhere close to semifinals as I wrote above). He’s a very urbane and funny guy whose interest in English is so strong that he speaks it better than many native speakers I know, so it’s nice to see him give interviews.
I’ve only ever watched game analysis videos on-line (until today) so this is a novelty for me. My favorite player is Tal, a dead Russian, but Morphy and Fisher are right up there. But I love the Russians, for some reason…I was super excited to see Kramnik playing.
Tal was incredible – just a fearless attacker and author of some of the prettiest checkmates and most daring chess tightrope walks I’ve ever seen. His autobiography, Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, is a desert island book for me; I’ve read it a dozen times or so. He was also very funny and a real humane character. From what I’ve read he didn’t have a single personal enemy in the chess world. Everyone loved him. He’s naturally a huge favorite of mine too.
I gravitate towards the most friendly personalities, the artists, the bon vivants, and the underdogs, so Keres, Tal, Mieses, Bronstein, Svidler, and Spassky are right up there, and I root for the women whenever I can. (Women’s World Championship match is next month by the way, from Sep 10 to 27, between Yifan Hao and Anna Ushenina – it will also be broadcast on livestream with all games on chessbomb, and then we get the world championship itself between Carlsen and Anand in November!)
Keep an eye on chessbomb.com. It has ongoing board coverage of all games in pretty much every significant tourney the world over at any given time, and then you can find live video coverage with human commentary usually on livestream, often with some big names doing commentary (Trent was pared with Nigel Short for the candidates match to determine Anand’s challenger, for example, and Short is a very entertaining fellow.)
Youtube has some nice commentary. I like Kingscrusher’s videos (Prolific! Usually does a vid a day), Sean Godley’s (he’s in the middle of presenting Nimzovich’s My System in its entirety), and Chess Explained does some nice ones too.
Oh, and obviously this current World Cup tourney is still ongoing, so that link I posted above will be kicking off again tomorrow morning, the next day, the day after that, etc…
A little something to keep all the insanity in perspective…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L40A1jMuyo
@ “Fed advises US banks to lift capital targets”
The Fed operates under the assumption that all Americans are terminally stupid.
Bank capital is so easily gamed that it is a meaningless yardstick of anything but the Fed’s and its bankster owners’ ability to dissemble and deceive.
@ “Capital Flowing Back to Advanced Economies as Asia Markets Slump”
It looks like the wheels are finally coming off the shale gas ponzi scheme.
good point
Big Brother:
Aside from the sheer horror engendered by thesse events
I can’t help recognizing what a comedy show all this is.
We have “the authorities” looking most un-authoritative
as well as many of them becoming completely unhinged.
We hardly even need Jon Stewart for this one as the
officialdom is already doing such a great job of making
total asses of themselves. Now, if only they could
manage to buckle down and do an equally great job (or
merely competent job) on some of the things we actually
hired them for…
+50
My message to Big Brother would be:
Look, Bro: dark sunglasses, black helicopters, bearcats, bayonets, insignia, medals, the rack, the guillotine, psy-ops on black project CIA (top secret) radio propaganda mind-facking, eye of Horus and I could go on; we’ve seen it all before; now, I need honest answers that actually mean something and say something, and that sould be at least 64 kilobytes of information. I promise, I’ll be patient. V/R, znc
College students say no to costly textbooks
College students heading to campus this fall will probably pay more for new textbooks, but recent studies suggest that the era of costly course materials could be coming to an end.
College students and some of their professors are pushing back against ever-escalating textbook prices that have jumped 82% in the past decade.
Growing numbers of faculty are publishing or adopting free or lower-cost course materials online.
Students also are getting savvier: 34% this spring reported downloading course content from an unauthorized website, up from 20% in 2010, says a survey released last month by the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association whose members include publishers, retailers, librarians, and other professionals engaged in print and electronic media. Also, 31% said they photocopied or scanned chapters from other students’ books, up from 21% in 2010. The study (from spring 2013) is based on ongoing surveys involving about 6,000 book buyers a month.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/20/students-say-no-to-costly-textbooks/2664741/
i could publish my own notes on net but i stopped doing that…students tend to become too lazy and uninterested in lectures….once they know ready made- in depth notes are available on net,why will they attend classes?i ask them to read textbooks instead..list of textbooks is always given in syllabus–they can make their own notes,photocopy relavant parts of textbook,scan the book etc..not very difficult thing to do…if they want to learn,let them work for it..it sounds like callous attitude to some of over concerned parents but spoon feeding knowledge doesn’t work
the cost of textbooks are out of sight…most of it is rehashed and repackaged…I would love to see actual costs and what the split is between school and publisher.
It costs a lot to change the order of the end-of-chapter questions and some of the “true” answers to “false” and vice versa.
Real,
It’s been a few decades since I sat in a classroom and I don’t know anything about your lectures but my experience was that I got MUCH MORE out of a lecture when I wasn’t focused on trying to scribble notes.
My all time worst memory was in a graduate econometrics class: the prof had an 8 foot long table in the front of the room. At the beginning of the “class”, he would lay HIS notes out in front of him (around 20 pages). The “class” consisted of him copying the notes to a blackboard and the students furiously copied what he wrote.
When he filled the blackboard, he’d wait 30 seconds and erase it all. Then repeat the process.
I asked him if he’d make the notes available so that we could actually pay attention to what he was saying rather than trying to take “dictation”. He looked at me like I had just asked him to bite the head off of a live chicken.
Dropped the class and demanded (and received) a full refund.
The Wittgenstein article should be called, “Using Wittgenstein as an Intellectual Cop Out”
If the author took Wittgenstein seriously, he would find that his own religious views and public religious rituals are comprised of the same “alien nonsense” as as the empty language of spirituality and “inner life” that he has, in my opinion, correctly dismissed.
But one can’t read Wittgenstein and take away from it the idea that we should be okay with “I don’t knows,” as the author says. What we should hopefully get from Wittgenstein is that if the answer to a question is, “I don’t know,” and might likely always be, “I don’t know,” for everyone who is asked it, then we should examine whether the question itself makes sense, or if it is one that can be answered in the first place.
I hesitate to proclaim what a “real” Wittgenstinian should believe, but I would think that in religious matters something like ignosticism would prevail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism) rather than unquestioning adherence to ritual.
In other words, rather than simply saying, “It’s okay that I don’t have the answers to certain religious questions,” it’s more helpful to ask, “Do these questions make sense? Can they be formulated in a way that makes sense or that is even answerable?”
If someone asked me if I believed in God, the first thing I would ask them is, “What do you mean by God, specifically?”
“If someone asked me if I believed in God, the first thing I would ask them is, “What do you mean by God, specifically?”
An invisible dude in a toga with a grey beard and staff who follow you around and kicks your butt when you fukk up big time. And if you keep fukking up despite the instruction it’s the barbeque pit for ya. I’d say God exists but nobody sees him and so they get confused.
Holy Howling Rabbit, craazyman. You almost got that right.
Man came from Africa and God made Man in His image – so that means God is a black dude, or maybe even a black dudess! The reason you can’t see Him is He/She only goes out at night.
But He/She sure kicks butt – especially if you’re trying to get rich all the time. Betcha that rabbit up above was leveraged to the hilt on mortgage bonds. ouch!
http://legacy-cdn.smosh.com/smosh-pit/012011/troll-quote-bieb.jpg
sometimes I can’t tell if it’s God or the Boogeyman. I wonder if Wittgenstein had that problem! Probably not since lunatics don’t believe in boogeymen.
God could very well be a black dude, like Morgan Freeman, but we’ll never know since he’s invisible.
For more Deep Thoughts about God and man, send $50 to;
Mystery Circus
PO Box 8
Magonia 7777777
https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod
The Tweet of God
Excerpts:
Money can’t buy happiness. But love can’t buy a Ferrari, either.
Why is everyone I talk to crazy?
Millions of people simultaneously believe both that Barack Obama is Muslim and that I had a son born of a virgin. Humanity, you’re the best!
I deeply regret some of you.
The next generation has been the worst generation in the minds of the present generation for 500 generations.
Many people pass their days in a series of near-life experiences.
My favorite is: “Bless you for sneezing? Why don’t I just make you Pope for burping while I’m at it?”
Q: Who is God, really?
1) He who dreams, and by dreaming, creates the universe.
2) Eric Clapton.
3) Silly question, mortal.
4) God is our mighty fortress, our copilot, our guide, judge, father, and alibi. God followed us to the Pacific, the Rhine, the bathroom, the Pole, the moon. And wherever He sent us, wherever He followed us, God was there waiting for us. God is a Voice speaking to us in the night, a convergence of events leading to a sales opportunity, an invisible means of support. He is the last word of a dialogue in a movie about an old man, a kid, and a dog, the author of the Gideon Bible, and the hope of the future with the unknown up his sleeve. He is yesterday’s justification, today’s improved radial tire, tomorrow’s game show host when the fix is in. He comes in all colors, black, brown, yellow, and red. And He’s white all over. He knows when you’ve been sleeping, He knows when you’re awake. He lifted the Bambino’s homer into the second tier, and sometimes He lets John Wayne miss, just to keep you on your toes. God likes hamburgers, weekends, insects, Catholics, Protestants and the occasional Jew, hard work, good neighbors, and Bold Enforcer in the fourth at Belmont. He is Omnipresent, Eternal, Omniscient, and an honorary citizen of these United States, whatever the country of His birth. But after you’ve succumbed to cancer, or been crushed by a car, or expired by a sucking chest wound or heart failure, when you’ve killed yourself, or been killed, or just died, He can make everything right with those two little words: “Hello, sailor.”
If you enjoy learning about religions just for the fun of it, or are in search of a new way of real meaning, there’s an article about the ancient ritual of Hieros Gamos: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hi%C3%A9rogamie
I just say no.
This American Life has a segment on the current episode about a charity that provides direct cash transfers to Kenyan villagers. It’s a rather different take on poverty alleviation than we usually see. I’d be interested to hear what folks think:
http://www.givedirectly.org/howitworks.html
And so why not here? I’ll set up the helipad in the yard personally?
Greater purchasing power overseas. I built a school in Nepal for the same price I would pay for a used car here. If you want to maximize social utility (assuming one accepts that concept), then the thing to do is to transfer funds from folks with low marginal utility of income to people with high marginal utility of income. Give Directly does allow this to happen very, well, directly. 92% of donations make it into beneficiaries pockets, which is far better than plenty of other NGOs who can spend 30-50% on overhead.
Also, I don’t know that we have cell-phone banking here like they do in Kenya. That little piece of tech is what’s making this possible. But yeah, I don’t see why we can’t set up an NGO to give money to poor Americans too…voluntary wealth redistribution is a good thing, no matter where it’s going on, imho.
Sounds like a plan!
I’d love the “oomph!” my small donation would have in a poor country without it enriching rich “do-gooders” here.
But I won’t commit to any continual donation.
Diptherio,
Many thanks for sharing this with us.
Truly an ascending NC highlight of today.
I believe that the Give Directly founder, Paul Niehaus, originally got the idea from the UK charity Oxfam and their Cash for Coffins project in Vietnam. Both are nice examples of how to successfully cut out the middlemen.
However, I have several Qs/concerns about the GiveDirectly approach: 1) who owns the phones and who has their hand on the money in the grass-roofed mud huts? 2) do these villages which are chosen by Give Directly, also offer access to healthy food, education with decent ROI, appropriate healthcare etc. which can be purchased with a portion of the money donated? 3) how do we as donors get updates on what has been accomplished in terms of real improvements in the lives of these people?
In any case, I look forward to hearing the results of the Give Directly research related to the independent randomized control trial later this year.
I also think it would be an excellent idea if Americans were to replicate this in their own backyard ie. going direct to the poorest families here in local communities across the US.
I listened to that segment. Interesting that Heifer Int. wouldn’t give their stats to him. I have changed my giving ways. I give directly or very locally. I’m all in for helping here at home. I’m in.
If you’re a U.S. resident, and you haven’t yet signed a White House petition to prevent Larry Summers from being nominated to head the Fed, please do so here. Please ask your friends to sign, because there aren’t enough signatures yet.
The petition stinks to high heaven of Deristocrat party veal pen trappings. Asking 85 to 99 percent people to pretend we could possibly be represented with the Fed structure as it is, even if Summers isn’t appointed is supreme troll behavior. I for one am delighted you don’t have enough signatures.
The system is broken.
Troll? I learned about this petition from the Links section of NC a few days ago. Yes, the system is broken, but we should try to fix it. Keeping Summers away from any influential position is one small way to improve the system.
The thing is, whoever is picked, it almost doesnt matter who, because they would do the SAME THING.
Amen.
The idea that people who would appoint a Fed chairperson would give a shit about citizens’ views is absurd. The whole concept of a Fed is anti-democratic.
On the other hand, it might be fun to see a petition endorsed by millions who thought Summers was a shit.
I’d have had a more positive response to the petition if the proffered alternative weren’t a sitting member of the Fed board. How about a position demanding the nomination of…oh, let’s say Bill Black, maybe?
Peter Kropotkin’s chances are just about as good, and he’s an anarchist who’s been dead for around nearly a century.
I found out about this galah, and he just might wear Big Boots: https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod
I thought about suggesting Bakunin but Black has more experience with bank regulation. Plus, he’s still alive.
Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I’m more than a little tired of choosing from a very limited menu selected by the other side. If I’m going to sign a pointless petition I’m at least going to sign one that asks for something I might actually want, instead of lending my name to what amounts to an affirmation of the status quo, shuffling Fed chairs on the Titanic.
No no. The veal pen petition would be at Kos, so they can collect from some client for the clickthroughs. And they would never use ALL CAPS !!!!!
FYI: Google has changed their ranking of this site. Used to be I could type only “naked capital” and NC popped out on top with a full spread of results. Now NC is not even on the first page.
Furthermore, so when I searched for the full “naked capitalism,” the first link that comes up is a sub-level page. Not the main portal.
In duckduckgo, “safe search”, the default setting, ignores the word “naked” in the query and this site appears nowhere in the results. Once the setting is changed the NC home page appears at the top of the results page. Might be a similar issue in Google, which I’m trying to minimize my use of.
Wikipedia has a decent page on Naked Capitalism. It says roughly that NC was ranked in the top 10 finance blogs in 2010 by technorati. I wanted to know what technorati is. There’s a link on their homepage with the text “Contact Us”. When clicked, the link turn to a 404 error (no-such-page): http://technoratimedia.com/contact-technorati/
NC comes right up for me in Google. Perhaps Teh Google is optimizing for each of us individually? (Wish I could turn that off…)
yeah, teh google is “optimizing” for each of us based on everything we ever searched for, or looked at, or wrote in an email, or read in an email. i’m so optimized that i’ve been minimized
Btw, is there any info of what the level of the water table is at the Fukushima plant vs the depth of the foundation?
Ice walls shouldn’t work if the level of the water able is higher as it would simply go underneath it or am I missing something? Is it that you have a flow of water in a permeable top level soil layer above an impremeable on (in which case I can see how it could work).
Of course if the standard water table is lower than the foundations they need to drain then no worries.
Begin at the highest points – with multiple spent fuel pools which are several stories above ground. We know at least one of them (reactor 4 spent fuel pool) is exposed atop a crumbling building. When, not if that building crumbles all other nuclear bombs, testing, waste, meltdowns in history combined will seem miniscule. We also don’t know where three melting 100 ton cores are at all and that numerous highly toxic storage/waste pools are all over the area at ground level and leaking.
Ice sounds like a yakusa kabuki contract.
agree – who do they think they’re fooling?
The final link in the list “Violence, suffering and denial” is a useful reminder of the moral vacuity and, and yes violence, involved in the acceptance of planned mass unemployment as a policy instrument and the dehumanizing social assumptions it is constructed upon.
To date, TEPCO engineers have only been able to freeze the ground at Fukushima a meter or so deep. That just trapped groundwater, causing it to rise and create a swamp, which made Reactor Building Four sink about two feet on one side.
Freezing a mile long ring around the reactor site to 65 feet deep should work as described, since groundwater does not run that deep, but some risk still remains of the ring capturing runoff water from the cooling of the melted cores and leaking fuel rod pools. It will require lots of pump power and finding tanks or other places to store pumped water. And it will take years to complete.
Regrettably, it’s all a sideshow that does not address the most dangerous situation this world has ever faced — the many hundreds of stored fuel rods barely kept under water in the several leaking pools perched four stories up in the various shattered buildings.
The fuel rods are no longer vertical, no longer in neatly spaced and ordered rows. They are as jumbled as uncooked spaghetti tossed on the kitchen floor. The massive gantry cranes once used to lift the used fuel rods out in water-filled containers are shattered or have fallen into the pools, on top of the fuel rods.
Any fuel rod removed and exposed to air will burst into flames from lack of cooling water, burn off its cladding, bend and melt and fall in flames to the ground. So removal in a water-filled container is the only way to remove the rods.
But nobody has any idea how to approach the jumble of fuel rods, much less remove even one of them.
It should be the top priority of every government on the planet to push TEPCO and their 40-year decommissioning plans aside and figure out how to eliminate the gigantic risk all those teetering pools of fuel rods pose to human life on earth.
When they fall down and melt, there will be lots of plutonium released, and it will not go away for millions of years. There is no one unaffected by this clear and present danger.
Why are we happily letting this happen?
Just a comment on Ellen Brown’s piece on Spitzer, referencing Lynn Parramore and Yves last week. I wish all those feminists against Spitzer’s use of hookers would show as much outrage for Wall Street’s use of hookers. And I’m wondering, if Spitzer does become comptroller, can he make use of the FIRREA law that Judge Rakoff ruled valid in the B of A case? Or will Spitzer just invoke state protections for the pension funds? Can he go for damages, etc?
Just curious. I thought it was strange that the CIA released two documents simultaneously. One admitting that Area 51 exists. Big yawn. And the other admitting the US overthrew Mossadeq in 1953. Area 51 was a red herring, right? The purpose of the release about Mossadeq was not discussed. Strange. I betcha it was a stragegic diplomatic move meant to ease the political tension between Iran which is surrounded by adversaries now. An out. An alternative to deploying missiles. The US confesses ergo the British confess; Russia is somewhat vindicated and Iran is placated. It is a piece of info that was as strange as that story about that Saudi “prince” who recently defected to Iran saying Saudi Arabia was not truly Islamic.
I read this in my morning meanderings:
http://www.eurasianet.org/node/67397
“Rouhani May Go To Bishkek, But Unlikely To Focus On SCO”
Basically it claims that Iran is steering itself away from its alliance with Russia and China, and looking towards a future aligned with The West.
This makes no sense to me, but it seems there are other opinions out there.
Susan TO,
Where did you see the story about the US-UK coup against Mossadeq being released by CIA? Would love to see it.
The story about how the US and the UK overthrew a democratically elected (secular) president of Iran because he did not wish to entrust Iran’s oil to foreign companies would be one of the top 3 I would teach in a US high school history class.
Nobody, but almost nobody, has any idea who Mossadeq was and what we did to destroy him and a budding democracy in the Middle East. I don’t suppose the truth about that “incident” would have square so well with decades of US policy (and monetary gifts) based on the claim that Israel is the civilized world last barrier against an invasion of the Infidel Hordes.
I know. Surprised me too. First I heard it on late night (early morning BBC) Sunday night; then on Chris Hayes (I think, probably not Rachael because I go on to Aljazeera at her hour) yesterday. Right there in plain sight.
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/18/cia-iran_n_3777507.html
CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran’s Coup – By Malcolm Byrne | Foreign Policy
Etiquette requires that after any transgression, before a pardon may be granted, there must first be an admission – and a request.
woke up this morning to this email in the inbox from the Global Footprint Network:
“August 20, 2013, 12:01 AM Geneva, Switzerland
August 20 is Earth Overshoot Day, the approximate date humanity’s annual demand on nature exceeds what Earth can renew in a year. In just 7 months and 20 days, we have demanded a level of ecological resources and services — from food and raw materials to sequestering carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions — equivalent to what Earth can regenerate for all of 2013. Humanity has exhausted nature’s budget for the year.
“For the rest of the year, we are operating in overshoot. We will maintain our ecological deficit by depleting stocks of fish, trees and other resources, and accumulating waste such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As our level of consumption, or “spending,” grows, the interest we are paying on this mounting ecological debt — shrinking forests, biodiversity loss, fisheries collapse, food shortages, degraded land productivity and the build-up of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and oceans — not only burdens the environment but also undermines our economies. Climate change — a result of greenhouse gases being emitted faster than they can be absorbed by forests and oceans — is the most widespread impact of ecological overspending….”
don’t know how they can be so sure of the date, but nevertheless.
If you take into account fossil fuel consumption, “Earth Overshoot Minute” would be around 2 minutes past midnight on January 1st.
What the world consumes in a year, Nature cannot rebuild in a million years.
Re: warrantless cell phone searches.
Useless article. Distinction between cloud-stored data vs. phone-stored data? Encrypted phone, or password locked?
the critters build big brother, piece by piece, every time they replace an intelligent thought, with peer pressure, and then bemoarn…sing me a river…
Russian Officials Now Prohibited From Having Foreign Bank Accounts
MOSCOW, August 19 (RIA Novosti) – Senior Russian officials, including lawmakers, judges and the heads of state corporations, as well as their spouses and underage children, are no longer allowed to keep their money in foreign bank accounts or financial instruments abroad as of Monday.
The legislation, initiated by the Kremlin to “nationalize the elite” and deter corruption, originally envisioned a ban on owning any assets abroad, but the bill was softened in parliament to allow ownership of foreign real estate.
The law came into force in early May, but officials were given three months to get rid of the respective assets or resign. The only penalty for incompliance is relinquishing one’s post.
Several senators in the upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, have quit rather than give up foreign assets, Speaker Valentina Matviyenko said Monday. The press service for the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, said the same day that no deputies there had resigned over the ban.
Earlier reports said that nine of 166 senators – including Nikolai Olshansky, who featured on Forbes magazine’s list of the richest Russians – and some 15 of 450 Duma deputies reported getting rid of foreign assets.
http://en.ria.ru/politics/20130819/182850233/Russian-Officials-Now-Prohibited-From-Having-Foreign-Bank-Accounts.html
The Snowden affair is shaping up as another signature event. The actions and reactions to the disclosures strip away the facades and public faces and allow us to see behind the curtain and into the character of those involved. It gives us graphic illustrations of who is who and what is what. The lame propaganda and lies emanating out of the President, the White House, the Congress, the Washington Establishment in other words, along with the media, punditocracy, and veal pen blogosphere, ditto for the UK, all this is putting names to the commitment the elites have to subvert basic human rights and functions of government and the law.
There’s more than a whiff of desperation in the Stazi’s tactics lately, chasing Snowden: bullying Russia, forcing down the plane of a Sovereign, abducting a journalist’s family member, closing a score of embassies, and maybe unrelated, the coup and massacre in Egypt. It reeks of desperation, actually.
I’m eagerly awaiting Greenwald’s and Poitras’ coming revelations. For now, it’s good to see Obama squirm a little, at least until his impeachment and prosecution for war crimes.
Re: the SWAT drill
It’s really too bad the bus driver wasn’t armed. It would have served them right.
It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Every bit of it and every participant was staged.
Note the very sparse passengers and placement.
They would not risk that someone would attack the guy if they saw an opportunity.
All the after the fact passenger commentary was pure preparred propaganda.
http://www.newser.com/story/172872/alleged-shooter-in-custody-at-ga-elementary-school.html
Shots were fired today at a Georgia elementary school, reports WSB-TV. Reports indicate that no one was injured in the incident, and the suspected shooter is now in custody. One person at the school called WSB-TV to say that the gunman demanded she call the local TV station; gunfire could be heard in the background during that call. A number of sources described the suspect as a 20-something white man dressed in black and carrying an AK-47.
TV footage showed students fleeing the McNair Learning Academy in DeKalb County, while others later evacuated the building in an orderly fashion. Parents have since been told to pick up their children at a nearby Walmart, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
(shooter in custody & being interviewed…police did not exchange gunfire)
Arthur Silber has some harsh truths to convey about Brad Manning and reality:
If You Love Martyrs So Much Then You Be One
“In brief: statements obtained through torture are not to be credited in any manner at all.”
I caanot believe we’re still having this conversation. Of COURSE the point of torture is not to obtain reliable information; as the author states most clearly, one simply needs to be an honest human being with at least some limited capacity for empathic understanding to be able to see that.
“When a person is subjected to unendurable, excruciating pain, especially when he is repeatedly told that the pain will go on and on and on unless he talks, he is very likely to talk eventually.”
And to say the precise thing he has been told will make the torture stop. An apology, a confession, a denunciation of some targeted third party.
How is it that this is not obvious, both from an attempt to imagine the experience of torture and from an understanding of the actual history of how its been used in the world? I truly do not understand.
Actually, that’s a viscacha, a relative of the chinchilla.
EBU stops its support to the Hellenic Public Broadcaster: Another victory of the neoliberal dictatorship
http://failedevolution.blogspot.gr/2013/08/ebu-stops-its-support-to-hellenic.html
—
Lambert Strether said:
That’s exactly what I was thinking. But not only the McKibben post resonates, but also today’s post “China Prepares to Bail Itself Out.”
Both posts deal with power: who has it, whether they should have it, and, if they have it, how and under what circumstances they should use it.
Neoconservatism, as John J. Mearshiemer has noted, is the marriage of military power with idealism:
“The Romantic belief that the world can be reshaped by an act of will” is the ideal that informs neoconservatism, writes John Gray in Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern. “American/style ‘democratic capitalism’ is destined to spread everywhere,” he explains, and as “it does, a universal civilization will come into being, and history will come to an end.”
Realism, on the other hand, is the marriage of state power (military, economic, financial, police, etc.) with realism.
For pacifists, whose opposition to the of use of military power is absolute, both neoconservatism and realism would of course be unacceptable.
Reinhold Niebuhr had been a pacifist, but experienced a change of heart and resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940. It “was Niebuhr more than any other Christian thinker-activist who was able to turn the American Protestant ‘establishment’ away from its considerable indifference to the moral-political threat of Nazism – often couched in terms of pacifism – by arguing that the Nazis and their ideology had to be actively opposed, even if that meant going to war against Hitler and his minions.” (David Novak, “Idolatry and injustice: A Jewish appreciation of Reinhold Niebuhr”)
Niebuhr had publicly expressed alarm over the Nazi threat as early as 1931:
Niebuhr came to believe that Nazi Germany posed an existential threat to the United States, and to civilization, which required a military response.
In his Gifford Lectures, delivered in Scotland on the eve of World War II in 1939, he inveighed against Nazism with a warning that is just as fitting for today’s neoconservatives as it was for the Nazis then.
“In the life of every political group,” he says, “whether nation or empire … obedience is prompted by the fear of power on the one hand and by reverence for majesty on the other. The temptation to idolatry is implicit in the state’s majesty.” He then speaks of “the claim of moral autonomy by which the self-deification of the social group is made explicit by its presentation of itself as the source and end of existence.” And most succinctly he states, “The nation pretends to be God.”
The rise of Nazism jolted Niebuhr back to the reality of transcendent evil, and he steadfastly endorsed World War II, even while criticizing the Allied bombing of German cities and questioning the atomic attacks on Japan. Later, he supported Western resistance to Soviet communism, though he opposed the Vietnam War almost from its start.
Niebuhr’s anti-communist liberalism was in sync with Hubert Humphrey’s until the Vietnam War, which Niebuhr opposed as “fantastic.” Niebuhr’s described his friend’s adherence to President Johnson’s war policy as “very sad.” (Mark Tooley, “Niebuhr and Obama”)
Niehbur, along with almost all realists in the United States except for Henry Kissinger, opposed the Vietnam War.
Equally, almost all realists in the United States — except for Henry Kissinger — opposed the war against Iraq.
Max Blumenthal equates Niebuhr’s realism with Bush’s, Obama’s and Brooks’ neoconservatism. This is an empirical claim, one which is demonstrably and patently false.
I have it upon an erudite Catholic authority that “grace is a gift of God”. That dogma/doctrine might or might not square with Niebuhr’s “paradox of grace”. Hopefully, this can be solved in less than forty thousand years.
WWII was essentially caused by the money system. How about a system that drives people into unjust debt for “absolute evil?” One based on usury for stolen purchasing power? That specifically oppresses the poor since they are the least so-called creditworthy? That recurrently wrecks the economy into dangerous desperation?
Did Niebuhr ever speak about banking? Serious question.
EBU stops its support to the Hellenic Public Broadcaster: Another victory of the neoliberal dictatorship
failedevolution blogspot
God help us all:
Summers, Yellen allies wage behind-the-scenes effort to win Federal Reserve nod
God help us all:
Summers, Yellen allies wage behind-the-scenes effort to win Federal Reserve nod
Sorry about the double post, fat fingered the submit button.
speaking of fat fingers…here’s the one that killed my fruit loops birdy
http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/corn
Hang Seng -304
Nikkei -106
usd fighting 80.90
10y bouncing off 2.810
Be always lavish of your caresses, and sparing in your corrections. Cavendish
:-/
Only two things myself expects in a day… wood in the morning and flaccidness at night… mental of course.
Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door
I know that I’m a prisoner
To all my Father held so dear
I know that I’m a hostage
To all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years
Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got
You say you just don’t see it
He says it’s perfect sense
You just can’t get agreement
In this present tense
We all talk a different language
Talking in defence
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It’s too late when we die
To admit we don’t see eye to eye
So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It’s the bitterness that lasts
So Don’t yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different day
And if you don’t give up, and don’t give in
You may just be OK.
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It’s too late when we die
To admit we don’t see eye to eye
I wasn’t there that morning
When my Father passed away
I didn’t get to tell him
All the things I had to say
I think I caught his spirit
Later that same year
I’m sure I heard his echo
In my baby’s new born tears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years
Say it loud, say it clear
You can listen as well as you hear
It’s too late when we die
To admit we don’t see eye to eye
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGDA0Hecw1k
skippy… whom said discovery was a bitch… oh yeah… that which can not be challenged.
thanks for that memory skippy…reading it is heat seekin
here, let me throw some wood on that fire…
Let me watch by the fire and remember my days
And it may be a trick of the firelight
But the flickering pages that trouble my sight
Is a book I’m afraid to write
It’s the book of my days, it’s the book of my life
And it’s cut like a fruit on the blade of a knife
And it’s all there to see as the section reveals
There’s some sorrow in every life
If it reads like a puzzle, a wandering maze
Then I won’t understand ’til the end of my days
I’m still forced to remember,
Remember the words of my life
There are promises broken and promises kept
Angry words that were spoken, when I should have wept
There’s a chapter of secrets, and words to confess
If I lose everything that I possess
There’s a chapter on loss and a ghost who won’t die
There’s a chapter on love where the ink’s never dry
There are sentences served in a prison I built out of lies.
Though the pages are numbered
I can’t see where they lead
For the end is a mystery no-one can read
In the book of my life
There’s a chapter on fathers a chapter on sons
There are pages of conflicts that nobody won
And the battles you lost and your bitter defeat,
There’s a page where we fail to meet
There are tales of good fortune that couldn’t be planned
There’s a chapter on god that I don’t understand
There’s a promise of Heaven and Hell but I’m damned if I see
Though the pages are numbered
I can’t see where they lead
For the end is a mystery no-one can read
In the book of my life
Now the daylight’s returning
And if one sentence is true
All these pages are burning
And all that’s left is you
Though the pages are numbered
I can’t see where they lead
For the end is a mystery no-one can read
In the book of my life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBfFolxAitk
That hole Eastern philosophy meets Capitalism thingy via the Beatles resulted in a lot of Knighthoods… ewwwww~~~
http://www.phasechange.com/index.php/en/about/biopcm-biopcmat-thermastix
Biopcm
A little musical treat for the insomniac readers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE6aCm41aPU&list=RD02ldLO4LwNLHY
Orchestra Baobab Live, Hutru horas
Thanks for that. You can put them in my elevator anytime! I’ve often wondered about the splendorous creativity of West African sculpture and music. It oddly takes me back to Ancient Egypt.
http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/music.htm
My take on Niebuhr is that he understood that the life of the individual and the life of the individual in a community led to moral complexity. Here are 3 quotes from his 1932 Moral Man and Immoral Society:
Niebuhr nails the bellicosity and warmongering of the ruling classes. They embrace Niebuhr because of his later defense of the concept of a just war. For them, any war they contemplate is “just” and so they can use the intellectual prestige of Niebuhr’s name to justify it.
Here Niebuhr observes that appeals to patriotism of ordinary citizens trump reasoned pacificism and their actual interests where they have not been completely ground down. It is important to note this is how the ruling classes sucker us in to their wars.
In this last quote, Niebuhr evokes the complexity of moral action at the social level, that it can lead to violence, even violence against innocents. But isn’t it precisely this acceptance of violence, intended or no, to some “good” social end which undergirds the idea of just war?
Now to be fair to Niebuhr, Nazism was an existential threat and one can see, especially with regard to this last quote, how Niebuhr could see violence justified in response to it: a just war. But this sets him on a slippery slope because his own belief in moral complexity means there are not just two polar opposites, a just and an unjust war. So how will he or we know the next war we are being sold is truly just? How unjust can a war be and still be just? Because of course, every war our ruling classes sell us they will tell us is just, and they will come up with good or not so good, plausible or not so plausible arguments to that effect. And this is complicated further because although the later Niebuhr may have been aware of it, he was not fully immune to the siren song of our ruling classes or their appeals to his patriotism and, being human, his ego.
A fair assessment in style and substance in my view.
@ Hugh
That’s a wonderful summary.
Who knows, maybe the concept of just law is all smoke and mirrors.
But it does seem to me that it is an improvement over the Roman “war of conquest” law it replaced, which held that conquest itself was sufficient justification for war, and that conquest and occupation constituted sufficent title to legitimize the full domination and incorporation of defeated territories and peoples.
At least just war became something we consider and debate, even though like you say the concept is easily gamed.