The Wall Street Journal’s most popular article today was an editorial by one Professor Michael J. Boskin entitled, “Get Ready for a 70% Marginal Tax Rate,” and it was a doozy. It hearkened back to bygone days at university, when we carelessly tossed haphazardly written bullshit under the professor’s door a minute after the deadline, filled with neat little tricks and techniques designed to give the appearance of substance to whatever flimsy excuse for an argument we had to present that week.

Maybe it’s because Boskin’s article reads like a sophomore homework assignment. “First, as college students learn in Econ 101, higher marginal rates cause real economic harm,” he tells us. (I guess they don’t teach history students the same thing.) Good, we’ve established an axiom. But Professor Boskin, how can we tell?

The combined marginal rate from all taxes is a vital metric, since it heavily influences incentives in the economy—workers and employers, savers and investors base decisions on after-tax returns.

So, the metric for how much higher marginal tax rates are affecting the economy is… the combined marginal rate? Leaving aside the circular logic for the moment, questions arise: how are these tax rates combined, and what is a marginal tax rate, anyway?

The current top federal rate of 35% is scheduled to rise to 39.6% in 2013 (plus one-to-two points from the phase-out of itemized deductions for singles making above $200,000 and couples earning above $250,000). The payroll tax is 12.4% for Social Security (capped at $106,000), and 2.9% for Medicare (no income cap). While the payroll tax is theoretically split between employers and employees, the employers’ share is ultimately shifted to workers in the form of lower wages.

Later, he gives us a sample question, assuming taxes will be broadly increased across the board:

It would be a huge mistake to imagine that the cumulative, cascading burden of many tax rates on the same income will leave the middle class untouched. Take a teacher in California earning $60,000. A current federal rate of 25%, a 9.5% California rate, and 15.3% payroll tax yield a combined income tax rate of 45%.

How does that work? Well, I got out a calculator (you can, too! it’s interactive!) and checked the professor’s math:

60,000×(1−(.095+(.153÷2)) = 49,710

49,710÷60,000 = 82%, or 18% tax rate before federal taxes

Federal taxes take 25% off the rest, leaving 62% of 60,000;

100-62 = a 38% effective tax rate.

How did he get to 45%, I hear you cry? Well, 60,000×(1-(.095+.153))×.75 ends up being a 43.5% effective rate, which is 45% if you round up to the nearest odd number, for some reason. But that would mean Boskin is counting the full payroll tax, half of which is paid by the employer, entirely as lost income in terms of the total tax bill. Why, by those standards, the teacher is actually making $64,590 a year (instead of $60,000 as stated). Also, our teacher takes no deductions whatsoever.

With failures in math and logic, the bigger problem lies in the fact that nowhere does Boskin say what “marginal” tax rates actually are and how they might differ from the other tax rates he yammers on about throughout the piece. Marginal taxes are those paid on the portion of income above a series of cutoffs. So, for example, California’s citizens face a haunting marginal tax rate (on wages only, not capital gains) of 44.1% including state and federal taxes; but that’s the most anyone can pay in taxes anywhere in the state (barring property, sales and other sin taxes, of course). Now I bet you’re wondering, how many people actually pay that rate? Well, here’s a look at income inequality in the United States:

The bottom 99% receive between 76-79% of the wages (which is what we’re talking about here) and the same source as the graph above says that in “9 out of 10 households — income [is] below $104,696” and that the average income for these bottom 90% is $30,374 (which includes capital gains). By smoothly transitioning from the injustice of taxing the absolute richest people in the country–a.k.a. the “marginal tax rate”–to the inflated woes of a poor beleaguered California public servant (who is making, one might point out, just about twice the average for the bottom-90% bracket) and threatening Wall Street Journal readers with a projected 70% marginal rate on wages, Boskin has all the bluster he needs to distract from the argument’s essential flaws. One that jumps out at me is the following paragraph:

Nobody—rich, middle-income or poor—can afford to have the economy so burdened. Higher tax rates are the major reason why European per-capita income, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is about 30% lower than in the United States—a permanent difference many times the temporary decline in the recent recession and anemic recovery.

Besides the intentionally misleading wording that leaves the reader to decide whether the OECD specifically blames higher tax rates in Europe for the comparative difference in per-capita income with the U.S., or whether they just operate a website that features statistics for the whole of the European Union (or maybe even all of Europe as a continent), the truth is that the rich can be so burdened. Not only can they be so burdened, but the idea that lower taxes on the extremely wealthy somehow translate into economic benefit for the rest of the economy is flat wrong. You can see exactly how flat I mean:

Source: Congressional Budget Office, Average Federal Taxes by Income Group, “Average After-Tax Household Income,” June, 2010.

You see, no matter what the after-tax income of the top marginal earners, since 1979, it hasn’t made one lick of difference in real take-home pay for the rest of us. On the other hand, the wealthiest 5% now make what the wealthiest 1% used to make way back then, and the top 1% themselves are taking in money on what, to the rest of us, looks like a vastly distorted curve.

1979, it turns out, was not only the year Reagan began to return our country to greatness by running for president, but also the year average wages basically stopped growing. Here’s the best part. Baskin acknowledges this problem, and then waves it away as if trying to swat a persistent mosquito:

Some argue the U.S. economy can easily bear higher pre-Reagan tax rates. They point to the 1930s-1950s, when top marginal rates were between 79% and 94%, or the Carter-era 1970s, when the top rate was about 70%. But those rates applied to a much smaller fraction of taxpayers and kicked in at much higher income levels relative to today.

There were also greater opportunities for sheltering income from the income tax. The lower marginal tax rates in the 1980s led to the best quarter-century of economic performance in American history. Large increases in tax rates are a recipe for economic stagnation, socioeconomic ossification, and the loss of American global competitiveness and leadership.

Back to the history books: in the 50′s and 60′s, when we were doing the exact opposite of “economic stagnation, socioeconomic ossification, and the loss of American global competitiveness and leadership,” marginal tax rates were between 94% and 70%. Not to mention the entire article is a long strawman directed at imagined increases in taxation connected to the weight of our deficit, $1 trillion of which were awarded as tax breaks to the wealthy in the last 10 years–and look how well that turned out.

So Boskin fudges the facts and the figures and the history and drips a little Milton Friedman blood on the altar of no-taxes. Who is this guy, anyway? Only last year, Boskin issued a screed on the same WSJ editorial page savaging the totalitarian impulse to destroy the truth with faulty numbers:

Politicians and scientists who don’t like what their data show lately have simply taken to changing the numbers. They believe that their end—socialism, global climate regulation, health-care legislation, repudiating debt commitments, la gloire française—justifies throwing out even minimum standards of accuracy. It appears that no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not budget, not job or cost estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO issuing such massaged numbers would land in jail.

Well, at least his motives are purely scientific–Boskin is, after all, a humble Stanford economics professor. It’s not like he’s in that rareified top echelon of earners who are actually paying the top marginal tax rate, he’s just a neoclassical economist with a real ideological fervor, right? Wrong.

Boskin happens to be a member of Exxon Mobil’s board of directors and has been for over 15 years. He also sits on the boards of Oracle, Japan’s Shinsei Bank, and European telecom giant Vodafone. He also happens to be the Friedman chair and a fellow at conservative think-tank The Hoover Institution, named after one of America’s favorite presidents (definitely in the top 100). So, this guy knows a thing or two about corporate number-crunching. And, history!

In Argentina, President Néstor Kirchner didn’t like the political and budget hits from high inflation. After a politicized personnel purge in 2002, he changed the inflation measures. Conveniently, the new numbers showed lower inflation and therefore lower interest payments on the government’s inflation-linked bonds. Investor and public confidence in the objectivity of the inflation statistics evaporated. His wife and successor Cristina Kirchner is now trying to grab the central bank’s reserves to pay for the country’s debt.

Most interestingly, Boskin was once head of the Boskin Commission, which convinced the government that… here, I’ll just let Wikipedia explain, it’s easier:

Its final report, titled “Toward A More Accurate Measure Of The Cost Of Living” and issued on December 4, 1996, concluded that the CPI [Consumer Price Index] overstated inflation by about 1.1 percentage points per year in 1996 and about 1.3 percentage points prior to 1996.

The report was important because inflation, as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is used to index the annual payment increases in Social Security and other retirement and compensation programs. This implied that the federal budget had increased by more than it should have, and that projections of future budget deficits were too large. The original report calculated that the overstatement of inflation would add $148 billion to the deficit and $691 billion to the national debt by 2006.

I guess Stanford’s Irony Department is really great.

Note: I’ve been busy and uninspired lately. Actually, I’ve been trying to pitch articles to magazines instead of working like a dog to fact-check stuff for a blog that relatively few people read. The market has wreaked its horrible toll on this blog, I’m afraid.

But don’t despair, I found this draft from a while ago about the Religious Right that I’d been meaning to fully develop at some point. Instead, I’ve just polished up some rough edges and will post a further discussion at some even later point.

Note: this is the continuation of Incredible Values.

Enjoy!

If you were to believe Pat Robertson, James Dobson, or Alan Keyes, Christians and Christianity are under attack from the evil, soulless forces of secular judges and politicians. They’re right, of course; the political power of Christians is always abutting and opposing the political and systematic proponents of secularism, one of which happens to be the U.S. Constitution. Remember, the United States is comprised of roughly three-quarters Christians and Whites respectively, so it might be instructive to think of the political kulturkampf as a parallel to the civil rights movement.

Then, as now, the rights of the minorities were being asserted against the unjust concentration of political power in the hands of the majority. Jim Crow laws were majority enacted and enforced, remember. All the same, the civil rights movements claimed new power at the expense of white power, plain and simple. White people’s monopoly on power was (and is) being diminished, but not unjustly so.

[A side note about white supremacist movements: Of course, the those most likely to suffer from this minor shift of political balance-of-power are the whites at the periphery of power, the working class whites of the type who are drawn to white power movements. These movements seek to regain that colonial advantage which would let their race's weakest to enjoy their previous advantages over other races' strongest.]

Just as the shift towards equilibrium launched by the civil rights movement threatened whites’ privileges more than their freedoms, so to has the parallel secular rights movement diminshed Christians’ political control rather than their ability to practice. The central and most instructive example is the fight over school prayer, which I have summarized previously: as long as there are tests in schools, there will be prayer in schools. But ‘school prayer’ has only one express purpose, which is to get kids who wouldn’t otherwise pray to accept Christian values.

Jesus’ take on politics was “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” but we all know Christianity has come a long way from (and since) the words of Jesus. Much like Islamism, today’s American version of Christian evangelism is a political as well as social movement. The statist aspirations of a Bin Laden and a Ralph Reed are basically similar:

“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” –Ralph Reed, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 9-Nov-1991

Consider the prominent ‘Christian’ political issues–school prayer, which is about non-Christian children; abortion, which is about non-Christian women, gay marriage, which is about non-Christian marriage. Here, I’m using ‘Christian’ as the evangelicals do, to refer to the more conservative theology that dominates the ‘Red’ states and the GOP base. These battles are about preserving a Christian monopoly in the legal arena, to which their superior numbers simply do not entitle them. Ever since the Emperor Constantine, Christianity has been gained a political aspect which, though completely extraneous to the New Testament, is nonetheless an integral part of the religion.

Having established that “values” is a terrible code-word for “Christian,” we could turn to the other politically correct code-word, “family.”

First, let’s dial it back for a moment. The world runs on convenient fictions, thing that we must believe for the sake not only of expediency, but if we didn’t, that which we call ‘the world’ would fall apart. Whether these are religious beliefs we accept on faith, trusts we have in a national currency, or narrow views of history which highlight one set of achievements and tragedies over others, we lean most heavily on these lies’ rhetorical strength when we see their truth being challenged.

Liberals have a real problem understanding why Christians want to outlaw gay marriage when the simple fact is that if you’re opposed, all you have to do is not marry someone of the same gender. Well, nobody’s going to get anywhere until they understand and empathize with the other side. Let’s take a look at, for example, one of James Dobson’s Eleven Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage (Part 1 of 5):

1. The legalization of homosexual marriage will quickly destroy the traditional family. …the introduction of legalized gay marriages will lead inexorably to polygamy and other alternatives to one man/one woman unions.

Isn’t it curious that though homosexuality predates both the Bible, marriage, and the nuclear family, Dobson links gay marriage’s destructive power to its supposed ability to bring back polygamy… like we had back in the Bible!

…After the introduction of marriage between homosexuals, however, it will be supported by nothing more substantial than the opinion of a single judge or by a black-robed panel of justices. After they have reached their dubious decisions, the family will consist of little more than someone’s interpretation of “rights.” Given that unstable legal climate, it is certain that some self-possessed judge, somewhere, will soon rule that three men or three women can marry. …Those who disagree will continue to be seen as hate-mongers and bigots. (Indeed, those charges are already being leveled against Christians who espouse biblical values!)

These Christians conveniently ignore that what they call “the traditional family” (a.k.a., the nuclear family) is an invention of the Industrial Revolution, and that what sociologists refer to as ‘the extended family’ predates even marriage. Early humans lived under arrangements much more like Dobson’s nightmare scenario of ‘group marriages.’ Agricultural societies like those of the bible were frequently polygamous and often polyandrous, and featured high rates of illegitimacy where monogamy was enforced. Extended, intergenerational households were the norm before people moved off the farms to the cities. It’s curious, isn’t it, that those we consider “Christian fundamentalists” have a vision of Christianity that’s so historically divorced from its seminal prophet and text.

The convenient fiction like the ‘traditional family’ dovetails well with the claim that gay marriage will destroy marriage itself. But if you read the critiques from the likes of Dobson (essentially that marriage will become short-lived and arbitrary more than it is already), what they’re really arguing against is the legalization of divorce. The real fear arising from gay marriage is that the Christian monopoly on yet another section of legal mores will disappear. There’s a reason the Bill of Rights is an amendment to the Constitution: the majority cannot be trusted to protect the civil rights of minorities. We realized this relatively early in the democratic experiment we call America.

In today’s evangelical movement, but most particularly in its political wing (which I refer to here as ‘Christian Patriot’) there has been an adoption of free-market capitalist rhetoric. Like the other main GOP client group, business interests, they have no intention of eating their own dog food. Much like American business leaders rail against government regulation while accepting corporate welfare and all of the legal protections and mechanisms devoted to corporate interests (including the very concept of an artificial citizen with “limited liability”), Christian Patriots rhetorically reference freedom of religion, but demand government interference in the same breath.

The Christian complaint is that they are losing their right to control legal mores. Christians, like any majority faced with a similar situation (again, a parallel to the whites of the Civil Rights era), naturally see the progress made by non-Christians not just a challenege to their position in society, but as a challenege to their fundamental democratic rights. As the majority, they feel entitled the dictate the morality of the rest of the country to a certain extent. Because you can’t come right out and say that, however, this reasoning manifests itself in two rhetorical memes:

First, that government acceptance of [insert non-Christian activity here] is the same as government promotion of non-Christian values. Secondly, they fear for their children growing up in a world of moral ambiguity where Christian and non-Christian values are presented as morally equivalent in the eyes of the government, which would lead these children to abandon Christ.

Within the evangelical community, there are two approaches to the problem of urban secularization. Loss of power is traditionally met with retrenchment–those who wish to withdraw from secular culture and society (interesting fact: Harper’s noted in a recent Index that the ratio of gated communities to mobile homes in 1:1). These are the home schoolers, the suburbanites of close-knit Christian tract developments of places like Colorado Springs (or for that matter, Elohim City). These are the people who are content to build themselves the separate nation I spoke of earlier. These people live lives of private virtue, working to fulfill their religious obligations without pushing their religion onto others.

But the political activists who wish to harness even those passive members’ political power are those who are not satisfied to live righteously themselves, but to force virtue onto others. Sometimes, (and the mayor of Spokane, Jim West, who spent 20 years distinguishing himself as the anti-gay pit bull of the state legislature is just the latest and greatest example), Christians have enough trouble living up to their own religious morality that they feel compelled to use state means to harass others who don’t share their Christian values.

These political operatives have appropriated the rhetoric of victimhood to try and rally Christians around the necessity of extending their theocratic control over the laws of this country. Freedom of religion is not enough for evangelicals; which is why they bristle at the logical extension of religious freedom–freedom from religion.

Pat Robertson:

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. It is happening all over again. It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians. Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today. More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.”

These Christian cries of martyrdom are just detestable. They ought to quit whining about the lack of restrictions on other people and worry about themselves and render unto Caesar already.

Last week, I pitched a TV show to a certain famous filmmaker and TV producer, and I have yet to hear a response. So, I figure I might as well share it with you, dear readers, because based on the horrified responses I get from other people I tell about it, it’ll never get made. Much like my pitch for the Brown Bunny remake, it looks like another one of my brilliant ideas will never see the light of network TV. Anyway, enjoy:

Dear Mr. Xxx,

I was arguing with some conservatives about our use of torture on detainees in the "War on Terror," and a brilliant idea struck me as to how to explain the situation in terms the American people understand--reality television.

Since so many are convinced that our 'stress and duress' techniques and systemic sexual humiliation couldn't be that much worse than a fraternity hazing, the only way to address their argument is to have them put their asses where their mouths are--for money!

The show would be called "A Day at the Beach in the Gulag," and in it, contestants would compete to outlast each other in a private 'detention facility' run by the show's producers. Playing the parts of detainees who are eventually released without charges (as most of them were), participants would have to last a minimum amount of days to qualify for any prize money; then the remaining contestants try to outlast each other for the largest share of the prize pool. Contestants would be treated according to the minimal dictates of Bush's policies, but no specific type of measure could be applied without two videotaped testimonials from former prisoners or officers that such measures were used. Once a contestant cries uncle, they are immediately taken to the "Geneva Convention camp" where "[p]risoners of war shall be quartered under conditions as favourable as those for the forces of the Detaining Power who are billeted in the same area." As the contest goes on, we'll be seeing as much of the Geneva Convention camp as the torture chambers. (Of course, the losing contestants have to stay detained until the winner cries uncle.)

The torture techniques the military uses now are designed to survive description by soundbite (sleep deprivation doesn't SOUND that bad), but actually watching people go through them is a different matter. (In Hollywood parlance, think 'Crossfire' meets 'Fear Factor' by way of Milgram's famous prison experiment.)

Your ideal contestant is a militant right-winger who would love to get their hands on a few thousand bucks for proving that the conditions at Camp X-Ray are no big deal. The appeal of this show is cross-factional, because conservatives will root for the contestants and liberals will root for the producers, but either way our human rights abuses will be well-detailed and widely known.

In order to get the right kind of contestant, we'd put out the call for this show as "the McCain-Hussein Challenge" and play up the opportunity for participants to soapbox about liberal whiners, etc. (perhaps a meme will be planted in the right-wing blogosphere?).

The most fun segments of the show will be the psychological torture. Think Red State POWs at the hands of Blue State troops; those who scoff at interrogators playing Christina Aguilera might feel differently when we blast NPR or hire the local Communist party to yell at them 24 hours a day, etc. The psy-ops possibilities are endless--celebrity torturers? Sexual humiliation on national TV? Bible abuse? Flag desecration? The sky's the limit, really.

It would be a great way to hold people at their word when they're being flip about torture, but it would also be riveting entertainment. Long story short, this would require a fair amount of money in consulting fees for lawyers and doctors (we'd need them on staff and on camera during the producers' televised torture strategy sessions), but otherwise the actual production costs are pretty low. I raided my living room sofa, but it looks like I may need some help.

When I mentioned this idea to a roomful of people at a party last night, one of them said to me, “you just want to torture conservatives.” Not true–I just want to torture people who approve of torture. I couldn’t think of any better way to get my point across, do you?

Some of you, and here I’m referring to those who read lefty-type blogs regularly, may have heard the “peak oil” meme, which is rapidly gaining currency.

Bascially, a man named Hubbard predicted in 1955 that the US oil production would peak in the 1970s (which it did) and that the rest of the world would follow (which it didn’t). The basic logic behind the theory isn’t hard to follow–it takes millions of times longer to produce oil than it takes to extract it, so at some point, the exhaustible supply will start being exhausted.

Anyway, while I was trolling the blogosphere for stuff to write about, I came across Eric Grumbles Before the Grave on DadaHead‘s blog, and therein a post about how peak oil is a fallacy. So I wrote a comment which turned out to be pretty long, probably because I spent so much time verifying the numbers on a spreadsheet (make of that what you will, but I’m bad at math and need a calculator to do simple artihmetic). To wit (green indicates those are Eric’s words):

First, the statement that “OPEC nations routinely understate the amount of oil in reserve in a given field” isn’t just false, but diametrically opposed to reality:

“OPEC oil production quotas are based upon the oil reserve figures provided by each member country. After this quota system was implemented in 1985, a sudden leap in world oil reserves occurred – Kuwait’s reserves jumped 41%, Saudi Arabia’s shot up 50%, a 100% jump in Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, and a 200% jump in Abu Dhabi and Dubai” –http://www.eco-action.org/dt/oilfut.html

Second, “did you know that there is another 2 trillion barrels of oil reserves in just Wyoming, Utah and Colorado? That number’s right. That is oil that is contained within shale in those states. It is more costly to extract than normal oil reserves.”

Thing is, USGS’s estimates aren’t necessarily correct (http://channel4.com/news/2004/10/week_5/26_oil.html), but more importantly, you’re misunderstanding the energy costs of oil extraction; it’s not just about the price but the amount of energy it takes to extract the oil. If a barrel of oil takes a barrel of oil’s worth of energy to produce, the fields must be abandoned. Currently, shale wastes about 40% of its energy being extracted, transported and refined. The hope is that technological refinements will lower this number, which may well be true, but the deeper you mine, the more energy it requires.

“Assuming that the oil companies can get the environmental go ahead, expect to see shale oil production beginning very soon.”

Too late–shale oil has been in production for a long time. Leaving aside the Pennsylvania “rock oil” fields where Rockefeller made his first million, Estonia is the world’s largest producer of shale, followed by Russia, Brazil, Venezuela and China. (http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Oil-shale) The problem is that not only is it monetarily expensive and energy intensive to extract, but environmentally dangerous. It combines strip-mining with tons of carcinogenic “waste rock” produced as a by-product.

Third, and most importantly, “peak oil” is about the impact rising prices will have, not that the oil wells will run dry in twenty years. Consider that Americans consume about 24.4 barrels per capita annually, compared with 4.4 barrels per capita in China (with 1.3 billion people) and about 2.1 barrels per capita in India (1.08 billion). When industrialization finally has its way with these countries (China’s oil demands are growing an estimated 12% per year right now, which would put them at about half of our per capita levels [in the next twenty years]), production will likely by outpaced by demand.

Peak oil theorists (not that I am necessarily one) are fully aware of the Athabasca and Orinoco “unconventional oil” deposits–you’re not bringing anything new to their attention. Due dilligence, Eric, due dilligence.

Here’s what I left out: it doesn’t matter if the math or even the amount of unproven reserves is wrong, the larger benefit of memes like “peak oil” is to scare us straight.

Consider the “Y2K” phenomenon. Remember when there was all this hysteria about four-digit years and two-digit years and all this horrible stuff was supposed to happen because of computer foul-ups? And then when 2000 rolled around, it looked like nothing happened and it was so anti-climactic? Well, something did happen–all that talk about impeding doom led to huge investments (and lots of employment) in making sure nothing happened–and it worked! All those lines of COBOL code got fixed,due in no small part to what I can delicately call “awareness raising,” some of it by lunatic survivalists, but much of it from sober computer scientists who figured out that this was a fixable problem if only the people in charge paid attention.

How about the ozone layer? Remember when there was all this talk of ozone depletion and aerosol cans? It prompted an international treaty called the Montreal Protocol in 1987, and lo and behold, after more than ten years of banning aerosol and other measures, the ozone layer is getting healthier and the hole is starting to shrink. I’m sure anti-environmentalists would have said that it proves there was never a problem in the first place, if the “shrinking ozone hole” story had gotten more press.

But we know that judiciously applied scare tactics do, amazingly, make a difference. So even if peak oil isn’t exactly right, we could do a hell of a lot worse than letting it scare us into cleaner energy production. Because one thing that you won’t hear from sand-oil extractors is how much worse for the environment “unconventional oil” is to produce than the “light, sweet crude” bubbling up in Saudi Arabia right now.

Read more about unconventional oil extraction here.

My new friend Dadahead seems to be under attack from right wing morons hyperventilating over his defense of pie-throwing (in this case, at ultra-conservative David Horowitz). Why, if you took your news through Right-wing News‘ filter, you’d be liable to believe that

Yes, in the world according to Dadahead, people who disagree with him don’t have a right to speak at all, not even to groups of supporters who want to hear their message. But free speech is a right reserved for human beings, is it not? And in Dadahead’s world, people who disagree with him apparently do not rise to that level.

No wonder right-wing panties are in knots–it seems jackbooted Federal thugs have confiscated their senses of humor! Let’s go over some basic points here:

1. Hitting a person with a pie is not denying that person the right to free speech. I am sick and tired of people whining about the First Amendment when they do not understand it. If the FBI had thrown a pie at someone, we’d have something to talk about. Unless the person holding the pie is an authority figure, they are legally on the same footing as those they may hit with said pie. “Free speech” is about the government or other authority restricting or punishing expression. Your fellow citizens cannot violate the First Amendment, period.

2. Wait–I’m not entirely correct on that last point. If the pie-thrower were to hold the pie in your face until you suffocated, that could certainly be construed as violating your rights. But as long as you can still speak (or, at the very, very least, type) post-pieing, your free speech rights are remarkably left intact. Unless, perhaps, the government declares getting hit with a pie to be illegal.

3. Most importantly, pie-throwing is inherently funny. If you do not get this point, you don’t deserve to live. Oops! I guess if any Freepers read that last sentence, they’ll immediately assume that I want to kill anyone who disagrees with me. Of course, if I had said, “”We should invade the pie-throwers’ countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity” and got into drag on Fox News, they’d think me a perfectly rational, if somewhat overly passionate person.

“But, D. J.,” I hear you cry, “you don’t know what getting hit by a pie is like! You couldn’t possibly imagine the horrible trauma experienced by those brave, innocent jackasses who get hit with pies by liberal pranksters every few months!”

Actually, I think I’ve got a pretty fair handle on the the whole pie-throwing thing–because I was pied and lived to tell about it. It’s hard to believe (because I’m still expressing myself freely, I know), but I myself was hit with a whipped-cream pie while I was running for student government president at McGill University. Even more shockingly, I was the one who arranged to be hit with the pie in the first place.

Yes, when I was the editor of the humour magazine there, I ran at the head of the Red Herring Institutionalized Revolutionary Party/Liberation Front ticket. I had my roommate construct a whipped-cream pie, and then got one of my opponents (in fact, he was another joke candidate who had been inspired to run against me by my very own writings critical of the student government) to throw a pie at me at the end of my speech.

Right-wingers must be recoiling in horror. How could someone voluntarily submit to such a cruel and unusual punishment? How could someone allow themselves to have their very rights to free expression insidiously stripped from them by means of that most liberal of whipped creams, Redi-Whip?

Because it’s funny, you dolts. And relatively harmless, even if the elections committee made me clean up the mess after the debates myself. You know what? I laughed the whole time I was scrubbing those dirty windows.

Many people have noted that conservatives have been trying to paint themselves as victims, even though they control the government, most Fortune 500 companies and much of the media. Sorry, kids, I don’t buy it.

And as for rightwingnews.com’s further comment that

That’s the sort of “nuanced” opinion that most people probably associate with the sort of thugs who walk around with shaved heads and swastikas on their arms, darkly muttering about “subhumans.” What was that Dadahead said early on in his rant, “They will call us Nazis…?” Well, if the jackboot fits…

Let me say this: if the Nazis were pie-throwers, my grandfather wouldn’t have lost his entire family in the Holocaust and had to spend five years hiding from the SS in the forest. My grandmother wouldn’t have watched German soldiers kill her neighbors in front of her very eyes or had to smuggle her parents and siblings into a Soviet prison colony just to get away from the Third Reich. And I wouldn’t be crying as I just typed that.

Calling people Nazis because they aren’t outraged about a pie being thrown is so insulting I want to do much worse things to such idiots than throw a pie at them, and that’s no fucking joke.

Yesterday, the New York Times Op-Ed page published an unusually long (and very good) retrospective of Einstein's work. It commemmorated the hundredth anniversary of his banner year in physics publishing; not only was this the year of "E=mc<small>²</small>", but of the declaration that though light appears to be a wave, it is actually composed of particles (i.e., photons). The article is a little vague about how, but the remarkable thing about this discovery is that it led to the formulation of quantum physics, a field which Einstein vigorously campaigned against, even though his work was the foundation of it.

Those of you who have known me for over a year have already, in all likelihood, received my lecture about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, but for the rest of you, here's a condensed version:

The significance of light's particular nature (no pun intended) was revealed when Heisenberg was working with the atom in the 1920s. He discovered that in trying to pinpoint the location of an electron, you could either find its velocity or its position, but not both. And why was this? Because in order to "see" the electron, we need to bounce a photon off of it; and the impact of that photon necessarily changes the course of that electron.

Usually, when I tell people about the Uncertainty Principle, it has nothing to do with physics; the everyday lesson of the principle is that <i>observation necessarily changes the observed phenomenon</i>. (Example: at university, on of my roommates' boyfriend was constantly pestering her with hypothetical questions about their future together and so forth. I explained to him that merely asking the question forms a response and an opinion that might be totally different had he not asked the question.)

But today, I want to talk about the larger questions of quantum physics. Einstein was offended at the implications of the theory: "God does not play dice with the universe," he said famously. From the article:
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If, as quantum mechanics asserted, the best you can ever do is predict probabilities, Einstein countered that he'd "rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist."

This emphasis, however, partly obscures a larger point. It wasn't the mere reliance on probabilistic predictions that so troubled Einstein. Unlike many of his colleagues, Einstein believed that a fundamental physical theory was much more than the sum total of its predictions – it was a mathematical reflection of an underlying reality. And the reality entailed by quantum mechanics was a reality Einstein couldn't accept.
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Indeed, quantum physics rewrote everything we knew about reality. But the most significant advance of quantum theory for the larger world, in my view, is that it replaces the age-old question of "<b>why</b> things happen the way they do" with "<b>how</b> did things happened the way they did." In the multiverse of quantum physics, you actually split reality in two (or more) parallel universes merely by flipping a coin. I'm not capable of explaining the whole of quantum theory here, so you'll have to consult your local library with questions about how exactly the whole thing works.

Getting back to the article: Einstein was so troubled by quantum physics that he spent a large part of his life seeking a Grand Unified Theory to oppose the probablitistic uncertainties of quanta. But it was too late; the quantum cat was already out of the bag.* Even an intellect as great as Einstein's refused to accept provable facts which would have blown his whole way of thinking apart.

I've been thinking about all this in view of a recent article article on the Revealer about teens' perceptions of god, and the phenomenon they call "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." You should really read the whole article, but here's a relevant excerpt:
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The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that "powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States." Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism

Given recent events in the Middle East, many people are wondering if perhaps Bush and the neoconservatives aren’t right about our military ventures and the Bush foreign policy. Specifically, people are looking at:

1. The successful elections in Iraq,
2. the developments in Lebanon,
3. municipal elections in Saudi Arabia,
4. and the Mubarak’s promise of reform in Egypt.

I won’t say it’s inconceivable that these events are part of some modern-day domino theory at work, but I will say that we need to look a little closer at the Middle East’s past and present before we declare Bush the greatest president ever, as many seem to be in a rush to do.

Let’s look at the elections in Iraq. First of all, I’d like to say that I have been gravely remiss in not tipping you readers off about my old schoolmate Spencer Ackerman’s blog for the New Republic, “Iraq’d,” which delves much, much deeper into Iraq than I ever do, with far greater frequency. Do yourselves a favor and bookmark it.

As usual, the situation on the ground in Iraq is far more complex and chaotic than the administration’s public pronouncements make it seem. What we’ve had is about two years of “Mission Accomplished” photo ops in various guises. The famous Bush distaste for statebuilding has a good reason: democracy cannot be installed at gunpoint, and the administration knows this, even as they beam out a message that their bold actions are reaping rewards.

Consider the recent parliamentary elections in Iraq. Now, in order to have a working democracy, you need (at the very least) two things: an educated middle class, and institutions people respect–otherwise known as a legitimate government. Iraq actually has an educated middle class, so at least there’s a possibility of democracy taking root. It’s a good thing we destroyed all the institutions in Iraq, because otherwise, it wouldn’t be a challenge.

Pro-war liberals, such as the editorial staff of the New Republic, who then famously asked “Were We Wrong?” more than a year after they had declared their strong support, often compare our invasion and occupation of Iraq to that of Japan and Germany after World War II. Indeed, we invaded, destroyed, rebuilt, and fostered democracies in both countries. So, what are the key differences in our approach to those occupations and our approach to this one? Two words–”Marshall Plan.”

We poured massive amounts of money and logistical aid to the vanquished, so as to avoid the mistakes of WWI. Not to mention that we still have active bases in both countries to this day (the Japanese are getting tired of our soldiers raping civilians, but hey, what are they going to do about it?). Bush and company, on the other hand, have figured out a better resource management scheme; they had openly suggested that Iraq’s oil revenues would fund the invasion, and as soon as they got to the oil fields, they were seized and the interim government was forced to accept legislation allowing American robber barons to extract and keep Iraq’s most important natural resource: oil money. We’ve been handing out huge contracts to private American firms like Halliburton, who seem to have lost much of it. Same thing with our hand-picked puppet government, who apparently have kept 9 billion dollars from the funds we gave them for which no one will account. It’s the Reverse Marshall plan.

Are we setting up another Weimar Republic?

Getting back to the Iraqi elections: it seems to me that the true measure of any Iraqi government’s legitimacy (for the citizens, anyway) is their efficacy in getting U.S. troops to leave, which is probably impossible. While we’re pillaging what is rightfully Iraq’s, the country will be doomed to perpetual poverty. Why, Iraq (which sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves), actually has to import oil today. Still hopeful about Iraq’s chances for a lasting democracy?

Let us turn now to Lebanon. Hopeful Americans have linked the resignation of the pro-Syrian government there to our foreign policy. Again, if we look more closely, the casual linkage we can’t help but think about (Bush said something about democracy, Lebanese protestors win a victory, they must be connected somehow) falls apart.

Did our invasion of Iraq cause the Syrian government to assassinate Lebanon’s popular former Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri? Did it retroactively create the Lebanese protest movement, which started in 2001? Will Assad’s government really withdraw its troops from Lebanon, or merely move them closer to the border, as they have actually proposed? Remember, folks, the Syrian government is Ba’ath, too. (Fun trivia fact: Saddam’s Iraqi Ba’ath party was the civilian wing, whereas the Syrian government comprises the military wing of the party.)

I do sincerely hope for the success of the Cedar Revolution, even if Bush takes credit for it. The White House (and it doesn’t matter who’s in it) will always claim responsibility for things going right, and seldom for things going wrong, regardless of their culpability in either case.

Our next stop on the pseudo-democratic tour is Saudi Arabia, where they have allowed municipal elections for the first time (of course, only men can vote). I actually think that this is a relatively promising development, because the franchise is being slowly expanded in a way that might actually build institutions on a local level.

It’s interesting that Saudi Arabia actually seems to echo the Bush vision (or perhaps, version) of America: a central ruling family (whose power was built on oil wealth and political connections stemming from that wealth) cares little for regional government; the tendency is toward a feudal distribution of royal funds to religious charities and what are essentially government subcontractors. (Government services are provided as “charities” literally by the grace of the monarchy). It’s easy to see why they allowed municipal elections–they don’t really give a shit about administering the country on a local level. Like any kingdom, the state is designed to protect the royal posessions, not to provide government for the people.

Back to the elections themselves: let us compare the Saudi elections with those in Iran. Iran, although it’s part of the “Axis-of-Evil,” has regular elections where women vote. Of course, it’s a one party system with theocratic checks (but no balances) which disqualify it from being a true democracy. Iran’s bicameral government has secular and clerical branches; but the clerics can disqualify candidates in the next election for any reason (which they have done several times). It’s a one-party system with orthodoxy written into the national constitution. By the way, Japan also has a one-party system, which was their way of transitioning from despotism. Building democracies takes a long, long time; much longer than the patience of most Americans. We’ll see what happens with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s promise to have multi-party elections (either he wants to retire or the reforms are just for show).

You might call it ironic, but Axis-of-Evil Iran’s is the most likely path to democracy in the Middle East. It’s not quite a democracy, but it has been declared compatible with orthodox Islam. Someday, reformers will take over the clerical branch of Iran’s government, and they’ll be able to have a real democracy.

Here’s what’s really interesting: as we’re supposedly raising the flag of “democracy” abroad, our own country is becoming less and less democratic. Are we trying to meet the Arab dictators halfway? As they supposedly become more democratic, we become less so. Our civil liberties, the integrity of our press, the standards for truth in government–all are under attack as part of a truly integrated domestic and foreign policy. The Bush message to the Muslim world is that you can be a “democracy” without bothering too much about the nitty gritty of serving your citizens or respecting human rights. Just like us.

Speaking of religion and debunking mythology, I came across this article on “the Global Consciousness Project”, who claim the following:

1. To have a “black box” which generates a random string of ones and zeroes;
2. That “[a]gain and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, ‘forcing it’ to produce unequal numbers of ‘heads’ or ‘tails’.”
3. That these boxes, operating around the world, act as sort of psychic seismographs, allegedly detecting ‘disturbances in the force’ (for lack of a more obviously dismissive term on my part). The project claims to have registered many recent traumatic events, namely Princess Di’s funeral, 9/11 and the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Pretty amazing, no? No. Some of the more helpful trollers over at Slashdot found a November 2002 Skeptic Report article on the GCP. After closer inspection (read the whole article to get the full explanation), the ‘scientists’ behind this hoax aren’t holding their findings to the strictest experimental standards:

Another serious problem with the September 11 result was that during the days before the attacks, there were several instances of the eggs picking up data that showed the same fluctuation as on September 11th. When I asked Radin what had happened on those days, the answer was: “I don’t know.”

I then asked him – and I’ll admit that I was a bit flabbergasted – why on earth he hadn’t gone back to see if similar “global events” had happened there since he got the same fluctuations. He answered that it would be “shoe-horning” – fitting the data to the result.

Checking your hypothesis against seemingly contradictory data is “shoe-horning”?

Basically, the GCP guys check their data after they read the newspaper, and then find a random fluctuation near the time of the event they want to retroactively “predict.” (Don’t take my word for it, just look at their site, with all the data publicly available.) It’s the kind of wishful thinking that has a long Western tradition, starting with the Enlightenment. Ever since the Church put the smackdown on Galileo for stating the obvious (as Magellan said later, “I have seen the shadow of the earth upon the moon, and I have more confidence in the shadow than I have in the church”), reasonable religious folks have been trying to bridge the gap between science and religion.

It’s a valiant effort, though wholly misguided (more about this in a minute). The problem with efforts like this one is that they’re usually based on faulty science. The Global Consciousness people are basically rehashing the Bible Code method of producing revelations: given a sufficiently large amount of data, you can find any number of arbitrary patterns to support your hypothesis. The same prophetic math that supposedly foretold major world events in the Bible can be replicated with any similar-length book, like War and Peace, or the Quran. Seek and ye shall find.

Not that the Project is necessarily religious in nature, but their obvious focus on proving the existence of an actual “global consciousness” shows that they’re trying to reconcile a vague spiritual idea with science. And how does one do that? Find some data, make a foregone conclusion, and hope people don’t look too closely.

A similar technique is writ large as “intelligent design,” and is making the rounds of America’s schoolrooms instead of evolutionary science. And what exactly is “intelligent design,” I hear you cry? Since Bible-thumping won’t work as well today in court (or the school-board meeting) as it did for William Jennings Bryan 80 years ago, creationists need to coat their creation myths with the patina of scientific validity. Some make more effort than others–to quote another article on Skeptic Report:

For example, the public school edition of Henry Morris´ textbook, Scientific Creationism, published by Creation-Life Publishers, states: “It is precisely because Biblical revelation is absolutely authoritative and perspicuous that the scientific facts, rightly interpreted, will give the same testimony as that of Scripture. There is not the slightest possibility that the facts of science can contradict the Bible.”

It’s strange that they make such an adamant and unmistakable assertion, especially since the Biblical account of creation actually contradicts itself

.

Here’s a fun party trick that will either make you a few bucks or punched in the face: ask someone whether Genesis says man was created before the animals. No matter what they say, bet them that the Bible says the exact opposite.

How does it work? Before going to the party, tear out the first two chapters of Genesis and produce them after you’ve confirmed the bet with your bookie. The Bible actually starts off with two competing and irreconcilable accounts of creation. I mean, if the Bible can’t even get its shit together, how are we supposed to believe its pseudo-scientific apologists?

I recall looking this up in junior high school, after one of my classmates insisted that science basically agreed with Genesis’s account of creation, if you assume that ‘a day’ is not a fixed length of time. It sounds almost reasonable, but I’d have a real problem saying trees were created before the sun, no matter how long the interval between the third and fourth days. People have a powerful desire to believe that religion and science can play nice, which is how we get things like the Global Consciousness Project.

The Bible’s creation stories aren’t the real problem with intelligent design. In fact, there are two major problems here, issues of much broader scope than the Darwin debate. As I’ve been intimating throughout this article, what we have here is just deficient science. We have assertions instead of testable hypotheses, pronouncements with a side of cooked data. Would that creationism were the only place this is happening, but the truth is that what we’re seeing here science going “post-modern.”

Operatives and culture warriors like Karl Rove understands that the way to combat the scientific establishment is to hire scientists to come to your own counterfactual conclusions. The tobacco industry pioneered this approach, which the White House has been using in the fight against global warming regulations. In a world where the media’s idea of ‘fairness’ is to present a point-counterpoint on any issue, it doesn’t matter if 99 scientists say ‘X’ and 1 says ‘Y’, because they’ll both get the same amount of airtime on FOX News. Even before the paid-punditry scandal came to light, it was obvious that when Bush decides he needs to pay ‘the truth’ some lip-service, he relies on the market to provide him with at least one professional willing to buck ‘conventional wisdom.’

I say “post-modern” because the right-wing media has really taken the rejection of the notion of objectivity and run with it. News isn’t composed of facts anymore, it’s just someone’s opinion. It looks like they’ve extended this line of reasoning to the point where they see ‘scientists’ as fancy pundits. Global warming is a myth–just ask this guy we found. He’s a doctor or something.

Let’s return to intelligent design for a moment, because there’s an interesting facet of the theory which explains how the whole apparatus works. The crux of the intelligent design argument is what they call “irreducible complexity,” which ID advocate and author Michael Behe sums up as follows:

“By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced gradually by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, since any precursor to an irreducibly complex system is by definition nonfunctional.”

I will let others with stronger backgrounds in biology sort out the details of how complex systems evolve. The larger issue is, irreducible complexity isn’t just wrong; it runs counter to the very idea of science.

Irreducible complexity isn’t just ignorant of the science it claims to base itself upon (of the many usable examples, I could use mitochondrial DNA as evidence that evolution created the ‘irreducibly complex’ cell), but that the whole theory is based on a distinct lack of curiosity.

If Intelligent Design advocates aren’t intelligent enough to delve into the biology of something, they declare it irreducibly complex and that science cannot possibly hope to understand it. ID isn’t breaking any new ground here–this is how religion has always functioned; to present explanations for things we cannot understand. Our ancestors could understand the workings of the world up to a point, and beyond that point lay supernatural forces. It’s like the old maps of the Atlantic Ocean–we’ve explored up until here, and beyond that “thar be monsters.” (“What do you mean, there’s no monster? It’s right here on the map!”)

The remarkable thing about Intelligent Design is that it’s actually a campaign to push the borders of our understanding backwards. Evolutionary biologists, stop looking at the evolutionary development of organs! If we’ve told you once, we’ve told you a thousand times, they’re irreducibly complex. Stop reducing their complexity, it’s making us look bad.

One of the reasons I don’t like watching the President on television (other than the inevitable shards on the ground and stains on the wall behind the TV set) is that I despise the theatrical aspect of politics. Emotional appeals of the type we saw last night are great at obscuring the issues at hand. This is why, although I did catch some of the State of the Union on TV, I prefer to read it off the White House’s web site. I’m going to ignore the Social Security part of the speech for now; I’m sure you’re sick of me talking about it. Not that it isn’t rife for satire or deconstruction, mind you.

Let’s skip straight to national security:

In the three and a half years since September the 11th, 2001, we have taken unprecedented actions to protect Americans. We’ve created a new department of government to defend our homeland, focused the FBI on preventing terrorism, begun to reform our intelligence agencies, broken up terror cells across the country, expanded research on defenses against biological and chemical attack, improved border security, and trained more than a half-million first responders.

The biggest reform our intelligence services went through was their new focus on providing information to serve a foregone conclusion, instead of the previous focus on being ignored by the president with warnings about actual terrorists. And as for the FBI and the Justice Department in general, Bush supporters count about 25 terrorism convictions (most of whom plead guilty, saving the department a trial) while the rest of us count more than 5000 detainees. To paraphrase Meatloaf, one out of two hundred ain’t bad.

Police and firefighters, air marshals, researchers, and so many others are working every day to make our homeland safer, and we thank them all. (Applause.)

Sure, we can thank them, but damned if we’ll give them the budget they need to adequately protect us at home. But thanks anyway.

Our nation, working with allies and friends, has also confronted the enemy abroad, with measures that are determined, successful, and continuing.

Yes, one way to “confront the enemy” abroad is to create more enemies, and then wait for them to snipe at our soldiers. This effort, as the president noted, has been very successful. As a sidebar, have you noticed the biblical undertones yet? I don’t think Bush is talking about terrorists when he says “the enemy;” I think he’s actually talking about Satan. Much like the “War on Terror,” the battle of good and evil will continue until the end of the world.

The al Qaeda terror network that attacked our country still has leaders — but many of its top commanders have been removed.

That’s great news… unless they’ve been replaced. Then it’s only so-so news. Wait–can we make the bodies do something funny or embarrassing? That might make us feel better, right?

There are still regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction — but no longer without attention and without consequence.

The message is now clear: as for those regimes which are not actually seeking weapons of mass destruction, their actions will neither escape attention nor have any consequence. Those regimes who already have weapons of mass destruction will continue to be left off the hook. Especially if they invade another country on the pretext of non-proliferation. (You know, it’s funny, I always thought the idea of disarmament was to stop wars from happening.)

In the long-term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder.

The conditions do not include the United States occupying foreign countries for obvious reasons. It actually refers to foreign oil companies taking control of the Iraqi oil fields, because as we all know, something about getting Muslims and petroleum together makes the U.S. nervous. I bet you thought it had something to do with profits–it’s really just a security-related precaution.

Another sidebar–does it seem strange to you to hear a man who has amassed the world’s largest national debt talking about stewardship of the future? No? Let’s press on…

If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America and other free nations for decades.

Later in the speech, Bush backs a Constitutional amendment to prevent any President from taking his own speechwriters’ advice. But then, I’m skipping around too much.

Our enemies know this, and that is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the “evil principle” of democracy. And we’ve declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. (Applause.) The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else.

There’s a lot of freedom floating around in America. Take, for example, freedom from irony, or perhaps, freedom from shame. Seriously, take them somewhere.

That is one of the main differences between us and our enemies.

To be fair, it only moved into the Top Twenty because one of our old chart-toppers, the fact that we are a signatory to the Geneva convention, mysteriously dropped from our countdown sometime in 2002.

They seek to impose and expand an empire of oppression, in which a tiny group of brutal, self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life. Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens, and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace.

The empire we seek to impose and expand, on the other hand, has a McDonald’s in it. Doesn’t that sound fun?

A temporary reprieve from my lame jokes, courtesy of Tom Lehrer, who sang in 1964′s Send the Marines:

Might makes right
And ’til they see the light
They’ve got to be respected, all their rights protected
‘Til somebody we like can be elected! Member of the Corps
All hate the thought of war
They’d rather kill ‘em off by peaceful means!
Stop calling it aggression
Oooh, we hate that expression!

Later in the speech, the president elaborated on the War in Iraq:

Our generational commitment to the advance of freedom, especially in the Middle East, is now being tested and honored in Iraq. That country is a vital front in the war on terror, which is why the terrorists have chosen to make a stand there.

It seems like George Bush has become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim. The terrorists showed up after we invaded, which makes the reason we have a front on terror there the fact that they’ve chosen to make a stand, not the other way around.

Our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorists in Iraq, so we do not have to face them here at home. (Applause.) And the victory of freedom in Iraq will strengthen a new ally in the war on terror, inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran, bring more hope and progress to a troubled region, and thereby lift a terrible threat from the lives of our children and grandchildren.

If only anybody who knows anything about the history of Iraq and Afghanistan could agree with you. (I’ll just link to some of the things I’ve written about this here and here).

We will succeed in Iraq because Iraqis are determined to fight for their own freedom, and to write their own history. As Prime Minister Allawi said in his speech to Congress last September, “Ordinary Iraqis are anxious to shoulder all the security burdens of our country as quickly as possible.”

Those ungrateful bastards are just complaining because the occupying troops can’t tell insurgents from “ordinary Iraqis.”

In previous posts, I talked about some of the reasons I fear the second-term Bush presidency. But prognostication is a tricky business. When I first left the States in '98, I had definitely not forseen that we would have had a major (and preventable) terrorist strike on my hometown, much less three ensuing, simultaneous wars. Not to mention record job losses. And the whole American Idol phenomenon.

But I digress. Considering what happened last time, the possibilities are limitless for the second Bush term. I don't necessarily mean that I'm worried Bush might start World War III or anything. I say this only because people like ex-CIA director James Woolsey have designated Bush's "War on Terror" as World War IV (counting the Cold War as World War III). I'm worried about Bush starting World War V. Of course, World War IV will still be going on (Rumsfeld will ridicule 'linear thinkers' who protest that we shouldn't get ourselves into a four-front war instead of the nice, maneagable two front land wars in Asia we have now).

So, in a nutshell, the country is in danger of going to shit and I have a strange feeling I might not want to stick around for that. Look, I'm not under the impression that Bush is going to do anything he wouldn't have otherwise done without the majority of the popular vote or anything, but there's a 55-45 split in the Senate. That's a lot of filibustering that needs to be done to stop Bush's legislative or appointment agendas. Bush is a lame duck. If you think he didn't give a shit what you thought before, he sure as shit doesn't now. And frankly, I don't want to be a part of it.

Who knows what's next. Maybe they'll send a couple anti-globalization protesters to Guantanamo, just to see what happens. Or make Phyllis Schlafly the Secretary of Education. Or name more buildings after Reagan. I mean, they could do anything! And who can stop them, honestly?

It's not that I think all the Democrats in America ought to raise stakes and move to Canada. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to do that. People have jobs, families, or student loans and all that. But some of us can just get up and go.

I was talking to a colleague a day before the election, about how I was worried about Bush winning (this was principally based, I can tell you now, on the fact that Bush's approval rating remained the same before and after the debates). I talked about a self-preservation instinct which was telling me to leave my home as my ancestors had left theirs. It occurs to me that I'm about the same age my great-grandfather was when he came to America. He just up and left, well before the World Wars would tear Europe apart. I like to think this refined fight-or-flight instinct is what keeps us alive. The survivors are the ones who live on to tell the unlikely stories of how they somehow knew it was time to get out of there. My friends, if there is a single lesson of import to be learned from history, it is <i>discretion over valor</i>.

Let me be clear here–I don't think that there's one country that's better than all the other countries. Each country has good points and bad points, good and bad culture, good and bad customs. I truly and honestly believe that people around the world are more similar than dissimilar. But each society shapes our worldview and our values. All societies work better for some of their members than for others. Those whose values conform are rewarded while dissenters are punished.

Getting back to my conversation with my colleague. She has faith in American values, she said. I do, too, I said, but which values are those, exactly?

I mean, I know about my America, my list of American values. Part of what I like about America is that it's the most diverse country in the world. Well, I say that because I live in Brooklyn. I'm not sure I would've said the same thing if I was from Wyoming. America is a sprawling scrap-pile, a self-contradictory melting pot. It's the world's biggest variety store and we have everything you're looking for on sale… whatever you need, it's somewhere around here (wait at the counter, we'll send the stockboy to go find it). America is catholic in the lower-case sense of the word; all-encompassing, all-accepting. Jazz is just as uniquely American as the Country/Western. We had Father Coughlin and Lenny Bruce. William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. The Osmonds and the Mansons. Nobody owns America, which is what's great about it.

There's something else I learned when I left the States. Wherever I go, I'm an American. I may not be the same kind of American as many of my fellow citizens, but I'm an American nonetheless. I believe in free speech and small-r-republicanism and all citizens being equal before the law. We all have our top ten list of American values, but we compose those lists ourselves.

So it's not that I don't think there's a place for me in America anymore. It's more about the compromises we make to live here, which is a philosphical and political decision. Let's be clear: participation in a system is tacit approval of that system. I have to live with the laws here even if I don't agree with them.

So if I was to leave this country, it wouldn't be because I think some other country is inherently better. It wouldn't be because I'd rather go be a part of another system. If I left, I would be forever resigning myself to remaining outside those systems, an eternal outsider of principled non-participation.

Why would anyone choose such an existence? Because they are unconvinced of the efficacy of their participation in the system, that's why. So after all this deliberation about whether or not I should leave, it boils down to a single question:

Do I think that I could positively affect things in this country if I stay? Because if not, it's time to go.

I was talking with a friend about patriotism today. I maintained that there are different kinds of patriotism; there’s the jingoistic kind and the civic kind. The most succinct way I can state the difference is that civic patriots support their government by voting and paying (all) their taxes, while jingoistic patriots support the American flag industry in mainland China.

“That’s just jingoism,” countered my friend. “Patriotism is love for one’s country.” The truth is that patriotism has several definitions, positive and negative. Are patriots part of a national team, or a patriarchy? Do they love their country because they don’t know anything else, or because there is something genuinely good about it? And as James might say, what, exactly, is the use of patriotism? Much like a country, patriotism has good and bad uses. Patriotism can foster civic participation, or it can start wars.

You don’t need to be a patriot to be a civic participant. But you do need to be some kind of patriot (nationalist, jingoist, pick your term) to value your country’s citizens’ lives over another country’s.

I was thinking about this because I caught a Republican Congressman on TV defending the Iraq war on the grounds that we had gotten rid of a brutal dictator who had murdered 400,000 of his own people.

Four hundred thousand is a horrible, horrible number. But if we want to talk about numbers, we can start with our embargo of Iraq, which killed more than one million Iraqi children. I recall when former Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked about these starvation deaths, she said it was worth it. Even when the UN tried to remedy the situation with its Oil-For-Food program, that effort turned out to be as corrupt as the contracts we’re awarding to Halliburton for the reconstruction.

It’s very difficult to buy what “patriots” say when they talk about numbers of dead, because we know those numbers are totally irrelevant to them. The truth is that, by jingo, American lives are worth infintely more to Americans than any other lives. Look, for example, at our invasion of Afghanistan–we killed slightly more civilians there in 2001 than were killed in the World Trade Center attacks, but somehow we don’t hear so much about the Operation Anaconda widows. And if we are to accept that Bush was justified in invading Afghanistan based on the number of civilian deaths, would we be able to say that Afghanistan would be equally justified in invading the U. S. on the same grounds?

The truth is that we will throw any number of foreigners under the bus to maintain our image as an impervious superpower. We will kill two brown people for every white person they kill, right? I wrote about this last year; vengeance is powerful and it doesn’t distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

It is only patriotism that can enable you to value one stranger’s life over anothers based on their nationality. Are all men really created equal? We talk so much about how we’re a democracy–the flip side is that it enables us to kill as many non-citizens as we want. They can’t vote, what are they going to do? We can go it alone if we want, because this is the greatest country on earth, etc.

The title, by the way, is from a nineteenth century song intended to rouse nationalist fervor against an under-equipped enemy; it’s where we got the term “jingoism.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

When I hear a meme twice in one day, I feel compelled to address it. Today, that meme is the "you break it, you bought it" with regard to Iraq.

The idea is that because we are to blame for creating the mess in Iraq, we bear the responsibility for fixing it, which means we need to set up shop there and stay for the long haul, the way we did in Germany and Japan (oh, wait–we're still there, aren't we).

While this kind of thinking might work in a store or in interpersonal relationships, countries operate under a unique set of rules. If all you have to do to "own" a country is break it, you might as well just go around breaking a whole bunch of countries and claim ownership by such right. Hell, we should be taking crowbars to our neighbors' cars in joyous celebration of our newfound acquisitory powers!

Countries are not for sale. They ought to be owned by their citizens. And standing in the way of that right to self-determination is not helping us out around the world, whether it's the War on Terror or diplomatic efforts with anyone else. In order to "help" the Iraqis, we need to control their territory. But this is the Iraqi war of independence–they cannot accept a puppet U.S. government any more than Saddam's regime. The interim government lacks leigitimacy, and legitimacy is the only thing a government truly subsists on.

The U.S., on the other hand, is helping the situation out by having destroyed all state institutions and then setting up 12 permanent bases within Iraq. (Don't forget we've irradiated large parts of Iraq and refuse to admit it or clean it up.)

It's wrong, both morally and practically, to pretend that we can install democracy at gunpoint. Democracy doesn't work that way, and more importantly, we have the chance (and we're taking it!) to <i>poison the well forever</i>. We're trying to create a new U.S.-friendly government while we kill civilians and continue to run the world's largest terrorist training camp. These things are not helping the medicine go down.

The question is really, how do we win Iraq? How do Iraqis win Iraq? Are these two victories mutually exclusive? Unfortunately, I think they are.

For the past few years, we’ve been hearing a lot about so-called “dirty bombs,’ that is, regular explosives combined with radioactive material. The idea of the dirty bomb is so appealing to guerrillas and terrorists because it maximizes destructive payoff with little added complexity–all you have to do is cover the bomb with anything radioactive and voila–you have a low-grade nuclear weapon.

Fox News is a good place to hear about dirty bombs. One of the functions of television news (and particularly FNC) is to feed the fear which leads to authoritarian governments and because dirty bombs are so easy to make, they’re a convenient bogey-man to keep the American populace in line. (Next time you hear the name Jose Padilla, consider that he was arrested after allegedly discussing the possibility of making a dirty bomb with some friends, and now he’s been labelled an “enemy combatant” without any civil rights.)

Strange, though, that mainstream news outlets have pretty consistently ignored the biggest dirty bomb story of them all, which is at least ten years old. Folks, I’m talking about depleted uranium. What’s depleted uranium, you ask?

Why, DU is that substance which coats all of our M-1 Abrams tanks, our armor-piercing shells, and many of our other munitions. It’s 1.7 times denser than lead, and radioactive. As a by-product of nuclear fission, depleted uranium differs from enriched uranium by having around 1% “depleted” Uranium-235 and 234 as well as some plutonium particles (both enriched and depleted uranium are 99% Uranium-238).

The military uses DU for several excellent reasons:

• It’s virtually impenetrable by traditional munitions; it’s denser (read: stronger) than steel. Ill-equipped armies like Iraq’s have virtually no chance of defeating an Abrams coated in DU. But if they started using all-tungsten missiles…
• It’s cheap–often offered to defense contractors for free as a by-product of the nuclear energy industry.
• It explodes on contact (creating fine radioactive dust), ripping its target apart.

Anti-DU activists focus on the last point when speaking of the ill-effects of DU on civilians; uranium is “aerosolized” when it impacts and burns, creating “poison dust” which can be inhaled up to 45 kilometres away. Of course, Uranium-238 has a half-life of about four-and-a-half billion years.

We’ve been using depleted uranium since before the first Gulf War. Like I said, it covers every M-1 tank and our armor-piercing shells. Now for those of you who’ve been following the parallel radiation-effects-on-humans story coverage in Marvel comics, it turns out that exposure to DU may grant you some of the following superpowers:

• Chronic illness due to a weakened immune system.
• Cancers.
• Tumors.
• Headahces and dizziness.
• Chronic fatigue syndrome.
• Neurological disorders.
• Vision problems.
• Skin problems.
• Muscle and joint pain.
• Infant mortality.
• Infertility.
• Birth defects.
• Having people’s “skin literally melted away from their bones.”
• “Another child lies in its mother’s arms. It’s impossible to tell if the child’s smiling or crying. Its mouth, which is a huge, purple, scarred, messy hole, is so disfigured it doesn’t change from its permanent position: wide open.“
• Salting the earth so that nothing will ever grow from for a couple billion years.

Truly A Weapon of Mass Destruction

For all the talk of Saddam’s formidable arsenal, he never deployed dirty bombs, missiles, or tanks in the conflict. Only “the Coalition” did–the UK and other US allies use depleted uranium as well. And why shouldn’t they? It’s the dirt cheap and stronger than steel. It makes your army almost invincible against armor-piercing technology, which in turn, is the guerrilla’s best friend.

One of my major reasons for opposing the War on Iraq was the inevitability of contaminating Iraqi cities with this nuclear waste. It’s not bad enough that there’s still plenty of DU lying around from the first Gulf War; this time we needed to hit far more targets inside the country, primarily in densely populated areas. Even after the political violence dies down (if it ever will), Iraqis will still be living in the most irradiated and densely inhabited territory on earth. And more hotspots are being discovered every day.

The other part of the DU issue has nothing to do with civilians or irradiating countries we’re supposedly “liberating.” Remember Gulf War Syndrome? When soldiers returned from Operation Desert Storm complaining of symptoms which seem an awful lot like they resulted from radiation exposure as detailed above? Well, it couldn’t have possibly been a result of the exposure to DU, because the U.S. military vehemently denies there is any health risk associated with depleted uranium. But every study done on the subject shows serious health problems associated with DU, particularly in Gulf War vets. There’s a lot of really specific medical information available about this, but let me give you a small taste from an article by Leuren Moret, whom there is an outside chance you recall as the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab whistleblower:

Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems. In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans’ families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.

Now it has come to light that today’s GIs are experiencing radiation poisoning at a much greater rate, probably because they’re sticking around the scene of the war crime to patrol, exposing themselves to their own radioactive fallout. The above article mentions that soldiers deployed in Iraq have already started to develop malignancies. And of course, there are radiation hotspots all over Iraq today, including the former Presidential Palace, where the occupation forces had set up headquarters.

But really, why would the Pentagon admit that it was poisoning its own soldiers? The lawsuits alone could bankrupt America’s war machine. Not to mention the fact that if the government admitted how dangerous DU really is, we would have to clean it up in all the places we dropped it in Iraq, Kuwait, and Yugoslavia.

This is a major environmental disaster. We have dropped literally tons of this shit on Iraq and Afghanistan and we refuse to clean it up. We’re burning down the villages to save them, as always.

Links about DU:

Uranium Medical Research Center
Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets
IAC’s Depleted Uranium Education Project
Soldier’s new mission is exposing risk of depleted uranium

I was watching Bill Maher's "Real Time" just now and they were talking about racial profiling with D. L. Hughley (who was awesome and very funny and right), Emmanuel Rahm, and evil conservative Michelle Malkin. She and Maher agreed on the necessity of racial profiling. They started talking about the CBS interview of Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, who was asked,

<br><blockquote><small>
If you saw three young Arab men sitting, kneeling, praying before they boarded a flight, no reason to stop and ask them any question?
</small></blockquote>
<br>
Mineta said no, and then Malkin and Maher excoriated him for it, along with some of the audience.

Right, because as an Al-Qaeda terrorist, the thing you want to do <b>just</b> before you get on the plane, is start kneeling and praying with two of your friends in the waiting area.

–
Update here.

Dear readers, I implore you to purchase the latest issue of Heeb Magazine (Issue #7), which is on the newsstands now. Below is the original draft of the piece I did about esteemed (I think perhaps a bit too esteemed) actor Norman Fell. It's not exactly the version which ended up in the magazine, but I think you'll enjoy it nonetheless.

<big>AMERICA, FELL IN LOVE</big>
<br>Hollywood's real-life Zelig finally gets his due.

If it's true that there are no small actors, only small roles, then Norman Fell is the champion bit-part player in Hollywood. Born Norman Feld in Philadelphia, Fell
made a name for himself as a perenial bit part player in over a hundred and fifty films and television series. Not that it was a big name, but a name nonetheless.

Yes, wherever there was a non-descript cameo to be cast, Hollywood often turned to Fell, because a) brother can pass for Anglo Saxon, and b) you could count on good old Norman to never steal a scene. It's as if the studio execs got together and said, "he studied with Stella Adler, he ought to be able to pull off a twelve line part. But any more is pushing it!"

Of course, Fell will forever be known as George Roper, the nosy and undersexed landlord on Three's Company. His one shot at a starring role was the ill-fated spin-off, The Ropers, which lasted one-and-a-half seasons. Why one-and-a-half? It seems Fell had made an agreement with the studio that if The Ropers ran less than a season, he would still have an option to return to Three's Company. Those wily studio execs had screwed him yet again.

Doing the research for this article involved many trips to the video store. The first time I did this, I requested three movies: <i>Transylvania 6-5000</i>, <i>C.H.U.D. II – Bud the Chud</i>, and <i>The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats</i>. The clerk looked at me like I was some kind of pervert, so I said, "I'm doing a piece on Norman Fell for a magazine."<br>
"Who's he?" aksed the clerk. <br>
"You know, he was Mr. Roper on Three's Company. He's in all of these movies…" <br>
"Oh yeah! He's in everything! He's like the most famous guy who's not famous!" <br>
It doesn't get any more succinct than that.

I present to you the most comprehensive analysis of Norman Fell's extensive ouevre to date, and by "extensive ouevre" I mean "the only Fell movies they had at my video store."

<b>Ocean's Eleven</b>: Fell probably has the most on-screen minutes in this Rat Pack flick out of all his movies. Not because he's a particularly important character (OK, he's one of the Eleven), but because the movie is about fourteen-and-a-half hours long. Fell has the least amount of lines of any of the title characters; while almost every other character has some sort of on-screen backstory, Fell is just… well, around. It seems like they threw in his character because Ocean's Ten didn't sound as good as Ocean's Eleven. Basically, what I'm saying is that Norman Fell makes the entire premise of the film possible.

<b>Inherit the Wind</b>: Fell plays the radio technician for WGN. Never has a six-line cameo been imbued with such monumental symbolic significance. Fell's are the hands who whisk the microphone away from the blustering Brady as it becomes clear the crowd has lost their interest (and faith) in him. Then Gene Kelly makes a crack about loudspeakers. Norman Fell, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.

<b>Bullitt</b>: Fell's role in Bullitt as one of many cops is about as pointless as the movie as a whole. This could just as easily mean his performance is about equal with the balance of the film.

<b>It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World</b>: As much as I love this movie, the truth is that the best gag occurs in the first ten minutes. Immediately following this climax, Fell's character (one of the detectives who chases Smiler Grogan off the road) appears, playing the straight man to Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, and Sid Caesar, delivering a crucial twenty-line exposition. Who else but Norman Fell would get stuck playing the only serious role in a movie in which every other actor is a bigshot comedian?

<b>Catch-22</b>: Fell plays Major Major's secretary, Sgt. Towser–the only character who is neither mad with power nor mad from the abuse of power. Sgt. Towser unquestioningly follows orders, no matter how absurd. Apparently, the man prepared for this role by being an actor in the Hollywood studio system for a decade or so. Also, Fell actually was a tail gunner in the air force during WWII, but it was in the Pacific, which was a completely different theater.

<b>The Graduate</b>: The first of Fell's great series of roles as 'the landlord.' Why is it that Fell's best roles are playing nosy landlords? Usually the man has basically nothing to work with in terms of lines (and, to be frank, he doesn't do much with nothing). But his portrayal of Benjamin Braddock's paranoid landlord is really Fell's finest hour on film, and it's only fifteen lines.

* Sorry, that is not Norman Fell doing an uncredited cameo in the original Thomas Crown Affair. If you read this footnote, you likely checked the Internet Movie Database and thought I forgot to include it, didn't you. It is merely an actor who bears a passing resemblance.

<b>Acting By Numbers With Norman Fell</b>:

Fell had a simple philosophy as an actor–pick the three emotions you convey best, and use them as the pallette for all of your future roles. In his case, these are either a)
exasperation, b) curiosity, or c) unamused annoyance. For example:

<b>Exasperated + curious = Policeman</b> (e.g., <i>Detective </i> in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, <i>Captain Baker</i> in Bullitt)

<b>Exasperated + unamused = Army Sergeant</b> (e.g., Sergeants <i>Coleman, Dell, Towser, Wadley, Wilentz, or Winkler</i>)

<b>Curious + unamused = Landlord</b> (<i>Mr. Roper</i> in Three's Company, <i>Mr. McCleery</i> in The Graduate)
Ever wonder why Fell shines as the landlord? You try playing curious and unamused at the same time… not so easy, is it? That's why he has a Golden Globe nomination and you don't.