Notes to myself for the forthcoming year...

1.  Try to get more people to read the DEEPEST SEA, by Charles Barnitz.  Ask them to write a 500 word essay explaining why they liked it.  This is guaranteed to persuade. 

2.  Try to understand that the old white men in Congress who are Republicans are indeed human.  After all, you are an old white man yourself.  But it's so hard...

3.  You should try to read more fantasy, mysteries, science fiction and thrillers.  Because, you know, you didn't this year.  
 
4.  Scale back the level of your horticultural ambitions to goals that are sustainable and achievable.  (You knew that mango plantation under glass was not going to fly, didn't you?)  Mebbe a coupla tomato plants.
 
5.  Read more political blogs so that you can develop the cunning of Karl Rove but remain within the realm of fact and reason.  On second thought, this may be like squaring the circle or untying the Gordian knot.  Mebbe next incarnation. 
 
6.  Understand that many do not realize that Austin is the Center of the Significant Cosmos & that the idea of bat-watching is lost to their appreciation, let alone the actuality. 
 
7.  Work on your novel in the most desultory and lackadaisical fashion possible.  Maybe even try a little procrastination.  (I don't believe in putting pressure on myself).
 
8.  Go the YMCA gym at least three times a week.  That way you wil be ideally positioned to do exercise if you should feel like it.  (No pressure, see?)
 
9.  There may be a Notes to myself for the fortcoming year II--but, hey, no pressure.
 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

What James Vega Says

Democrats – Don't be misled. The media is going to call Obama's new Afghan strategy a "betrayal" of the Democratic base – but it's not. It's actually a decisive rejection of the Republican/Neo-Conservative strategy of the "Long War"
This item by James Vega was originally published on November 17, 2009.
Print Version
When Obama presents his new strategy for Afghanistan in the next few days it is inevitable that many in the press will describe it as a profound betrayal of the Democratic "base". Obama will face fierce criticism from many progressive and anti-war Democrats who will consider his decision to significantly increase the number of troops as representing a complete capitulation to the military and Republican neoconservatives.
This reaction is understandable, but it is actually profoundly wrong. At the same time that Obama's plan will authorize additional troops, his new strategy already represents a powerful repudiation of the fundamental Bush/neoconservative strategy and a historic reassertion of civilian control over the military after 9/11.

For many Democrats – those who do not carefully follow the cloistered and jargon-filled "inside the beltway" debates over counter-terrorism and military strategy -- this assertion will seem utterly and patently absurd -- how can a decision that significantly increases troop levels in Afghanistan possibly also represent a challenge to a militaristic strategy?
In order to understand why this apparent paradox actually makes sense it is necessary to view the specific issue of Afghanistan in two larger contexts --- the overall strategic debate about how to conduct the long-term "war on terror" and the proper relationship between the President and the military. The fundamental conflict that has been going on between, on the one hand, the Obama administration and the Republican/neoconservatives and the military on the other has actually been over these two larger strategic questions and not over the precise number of troops to send to Afghanistan. The size of the proposed troop increase in Afghanistan is only a single sub-issue within a much larger debate over what American military strategy and policy should be for the next ten, twenty and even fifty years.
On one side is the perspective that is variously called the Global War on Terror, World War IV or simply The Long War". It is widely shared among Republicans and neoconservatives and is supported by a major sector of the military establishment.
This view was codified in the period immediately after 9/11. Its central premise is that military operations aimed at hunting down individual terrorists and dismantling specific terrorist organizations are totally inadequate – indeed almost worthless -- in dealing with the threat of global terrorism. It is only by fundamentally transforming the societies of the Muslim world – by introducing U.S. style political institutions and orienting their societies and economies toward the west and the global economy – that the roots of Islamic terrorism can be undermined.
This was the underlying basis on which the Bush administration decided to invade Iraq rather than maintain the focus on Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. In the "Long War" perspective, if "regime change" and cultural transformation could be engineered in Iraq -- and after that Iran -- then more peripheral Muslim countries like Afghanistan would almost effortlessly fall into line.
In the initial plan for Iraq it was assumed that once Saddam Hussein was overthrown the people of Iraq would very quickly embrace western institutions and values with only minimal, top-level, direction from the occupation authorities. During the period from 2002-2004, in fact, the coalition authorities efforts were focused on building a massive network of military bases that were planned as a permanent hub for the projection of U.S. air and land forces over the entire region – and particularly as the launching pad for operations aimed at Iran.
By 2005, as Iraq continued to sink into chaos, it became clear that this "laissez-faire" military approach was not working and that a much more direct "hands-on" strategy was needed. The doctrine of "counterinsurgency" – an approach that had been employed by the British in India, China, Iraq, Afghanistan and Malaya, by the French in Algeria and by the U.S. in Vietnam and Central America -- was brought up to date in the "US Army-Marines Counterinsurgency Field Manual" and applied in the urban areas of Iraq.
As outlined in the Field Manual, a counterinsurgency strategy has two basic elements:
1. Heavy concentrations of troops must establish clear control over particular neighborhoods or areas.
In largely urban Iraq this involved building high concrete walls and barriers to separate ethnic neighborhoods and the establishment of elaborate systems of checkpoints, identity cards and frequent searches of vehicles and individuals. More recently in Afghanistan – in the small farming community of Nawa, for example -- it has involved constant foot patrols though the streets by U.S. troops – two patrols a day – by every single one of the 36 squads in the 1,100 man battalion.
2. U.S. forces must take major overall responsibility for managing the local economy and physical infrastructure of a particular area.
The Counterinsurgency Field Manual specifically lists four major objectives U.S. forces must try to provide (1) Security from intimidation, coercion, violence and crime; (2) Provision of basic economic needs, (3) Provision of essential services such as water, electricity, sanitation and medical care; (4) Sustainment of key social and cultural institutions.

Just within the category of "essential services", the detailed list of the objectives needed for success is startling –
• criminals detained
• timely response to property fires
• water treatments plants functioning
• electrical plants open
• power lines intact
• all schools open, staffed, supplied
• roadways and bridges open
• hospitals and clinics open and staffed
• trash collected regularly
• sewage system operating
There are similarly detailed lists for security, governance and economic development.
Progressive Democratic critics of counterinsurgency doctrine have noted that for all practical purposes this two-pronged strategy is identical to that which was followed by British colonial forces in the period of the British Empire – and leading counterinsurgency advocates do not seriously disagree. In his book "The Accidental Guerrilla" , David Kilcullen, one of the major strategists behind current counterinsurgency thinking, describes the approach as a "temporary" form of colonialism and John Nagl – one of the three authors of the Counterinsurgency Field Manual -- wryly notes that the doctrine can reasonably be criticized as "neocolonialism dressed up in PowerPoint".
But in one key respect modern counterinsurgency significantly differs from its colonial predecessors. In Britain during the period of the empire there was broad social consensus on the need to maintain large and permanent garrisons of British troops around the world and a willingness by the large majority of the British population to accept the massive expense and continuing flow of casualties that this entailed.
In America there is no such consensus and – although in seminars and conferences counterinsurgency theorists openly discuss the need for Americans to accept massive troop deployments and huge military expenditures for many decades to come -- they and the largely Republican politicians who support this view do not try to openly and honestly convince the American people to support this long-range perspective. Rather, they tend to follow a more circumspect strategy. They define the overall mission of a counterinsurgency strategy in very broad and general terms --"shield the population from violence and coercion", "create a vibrant economy, political participation and restored hope" -- and then engage in a prolonged, essentially perpetual series of lobbying campaigns to gradually increase the number of troops as each partial troop infusion proves inadequate to achieve these near-utopian goals.
In the case of Afghanistan, by the time Obama was elected the leading counterinsurgency strategists were already quite clear in stating that a genuinely successful campaign to pacify the country would require at least 300,000 troops and would need to last for a period of 10 to 15 years.
The initial troop request given to Obama in March 2009, however, was only for 17,000 additional troops and lacked any clear acknowledgement that this number would be totally inadequate in the long run. On the other hand, the statement of the mission these troops were tasked with carrying out was breathtakingly ambitious – "Our counterinsurgency strategy must integrate population security with building effective local governance and economic development. We will establish the security needed to provide space and time for stabilization and reconstruction activities."
In truth, there was not a single counterinsurgency expert in America who genuinely believed that this mission could actually be carried out with the number of additional troops requested. However, as David Kilcullen told David Ignatius at the time "we should use the extra 17,000 troops to stabilize the situation but delay the big decision about escalation until after Afghanistan's presidential election in August."
Circumstances in Afghanistan, however, changed for the worse. Even as the newly appointed commander Stanley McChrystal was preparing his own "commander's assessment" of the situation – one that would argue that an additional 40,000 troops were needed immediately – and substantially more within 18 months -- a series of military setbacks occurred in June and July and then in August the presidential elections were blatantly stolen, casting serious doubt on the possibility of stabilizing the country.
In response, Obama did something that the "Long-War" advocates had not anticipated. He announced a very public and very detailed top-to-bottom review of the entire strategy – gathering both his civilian and military advisors and consulting with a range of outside experts. His statements clearly suggested that this review would question every aspect of the strategy and might even significantly limit or redefine the mission itself.
Since the "Long War" advocates were accustomed to being able to define the mission of military operations and to choose the strategy within their closed community without any outside interference, this represented a profound threat.
Their response was to leak General McChrystal's memo, essentially making his request for 40,000 troops and the open-ended mission he defined an official and public statement of the "Long War" position with which Obama would be forced to either agree or disagree. The Republican and neoconservative supporters of the "Long War" strategy then began a two- pronged campaign aimed at forcing Obama to accept the memo's conclusions without change.
• First, they argued that (as John McCain dramatically but inaccurately put it) "our entire military command supports this approach". The implication was that, as a civilian, President Obama did not have the necessary expertise nor was it his proper role to second-guess the military experts. This was true not only in regard to specific tactics or operations, but in regard to the overall strategy and even the basic mission the military had defined for itself. In a wide range of editorials, commentaries and speeches Obama's refusal to immediately sign-off on McChrystal's strategy was treated as showing a disturbing and even sinister lack of deference and respect for the military.
• Second, the "Long War" advocates argued that there was simply not time for any careful review of our strategy and mission. A review was "wasting time", "dithering", "demoralizing the troops" "encouraging our enemies" and so on. The transparently partisan nature of these claims was evident to everyone who remembered that George W. Bush's strategic review – the review that led to the "surge" -- took over six months to complete, during which time not a single one of the same group of writers and politicians ever raised any similar objections.
The "Long War" advocates hoped that the chorus of attacks would essentially intimidate Obama into quickly endorsing the McChrystal assessment. But Obama refused to be stampeded. Instead, he responded in three ways
• First, he firmly insisted that it was not only his right but his "sacred constitutional duty" as commander in chief to review the strategies proposed by the military and particularly to evaluate and approve the mission that American troops were being asked to perform. To do this properly required evaluating if the proposed mission was realistic -- which in turn required seriously examining everything from the likelihood of successfully training a new Afghan army to deciding how many cities and areas U.S. troops should try to protect.
• Second, Obama essentially "called the bluff" of the critics who predicted disaster if he did not cut short his review and immediately endorse the military proposal. He refused to cut short the process or apologize for taking the time to perform the task that was his responsibility.
• Third, Obama insisted on hearing from a wide range of experts including individuals outside his cabinet and who were opposed to the current strategy. He made it clear that he saw his obligation as being willing to listen openly to all points of view and not limiting his information to "yes-men" as the Bush administration had so dramatically done in formulating its strategy after 9/11.
In fact, Obama's strategic review has already established four important precedents that will be of profound value for all future Democratic administrations.

1. The mission that is given to American troops is ultimately the responsibility of the President as Commander in Chief. It is not a strictly military decision that a President should be expected to automatically rubber-stamp.
2. The president has every right to review and evaluate the feasibility of missions proposed by the military – in as much scope and detail as he considers necessary -- before approving them.
3. Strategic reviews should be managed to include a wide range of opinions and not just those of any one specific perspective.
4. Other than in cases of genuine and immediate crisis, claims that military plans must be approved without delay are groundless and can be ignored.
This represents a near-catastrophic blow to the basic Republican and neoconservative strategy for subtly dragging America into a decades-long "Long War". In effect, they tried to stampede Obama into giving his generals the right not only to determine the tactics and strategy for Afghanistan but also to define the mission in any way they pleased -- and he flatly said "no". This is a major change in the relationship between a Democratic president and the military. The argument that a Democratic president is an incompetent civilian who is obliged to give the military a blank check to define its own mission is categorically rejected.
Based on current reports, Obama's final decision will approve a significant increase in the number of troops – the exact number depending on the number of major cities to be covered and the degree of protection to be provided for the major road highways. For the many critics who believe that sending large numbers of additional U.S. troops may actually be counter-productive, this is a clear disappointment.
But it is also already clear that Obama's strategy will do several other important things. It will establish specific criteria for success and failure. It will define the mission in a concrete and specific way that can be openly debated and revised. It will include an explicit "exit strategy" rather than an open-ended commitment.
Obama's specific plan for Afghanistan may turn out to be right or wrong – there are entirely reasonable and cogent arguments that a smaller military "footprint" could actually enhance our ability to achieve our ultimate objectives more than a larger one. But, in any case, the method Obama has used to reach his decision is one that has profoundly undermined the basic foundations of the strategy neoconservatives have been following to embroil America in a perpetual "Long War" --- an endless series of open-ended, military campaigns that drag on for decades, constantly requiring more and more troops to achieve hopelessly vague and unquantifiable objectives of fundamental social and cultural transformation across the Muslim world.
In fact, years from now, Obama's strategic review this fall may be seen by historians as the moment when America first began to "step on the breaks" to slow the "Long War" and Progressive and anti-war Democrats should keep this clearly in mind as they express their understandable disappointment and frustration. The basic underlying struggle that has gone on this fall has not really been over the exact number of troops to send to Afghanistan but rather between the advocates of the open-ended "long war" and those who favor a carefully defined and limited mission. In this crucial and fundamental debate Obama has clearly and forcefully embraced the second alternative.
Posted by Ed Kilgore on November 30, 2009 09:00 AM
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Health Care Reform Debate...

Although I've tried to ignore it, information about the health care reform debate keeps coming out & I am depressed and angry. 

Why the Democrats won't try reconciliation and/or eliminate the filibuster for something this important really bedevils me. 

The health care system is being held hostage by Joe Lieberman and four or five other so-called "centrists" whom he is enabling--and their reasons for doing so are delusional and they are also in bad faith. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

This means the universe is swarming with critters!

1 December 2009

"A meteorite designated ALH84001 became famous in 1996, when a group of scientists led by David McKay, Everett Gibson and Kathie Thomas-Keprta of NASA's Johnson Space Center announced that it contained evidence of past life on Mars. That claim has since been widely debated, and non-biological accounts of the same evidence have emerged.
 
 Now the NASA team has used new tools to model the principal non-biological scenarios; they find them untenable. "We conclude that the vast majority of the nanocrystal magnetites present in the carbonate disks [example, right] could not have formed by any of the currently proposed thermal decomposition scenarios." Therefore they believe, Ancient life remains the most plausible explanation for the materials and structures found in the Mars meteorite."

 
Dontcha see!  If there was life on Mars several billion years ago, in an environment that likely was far less hospitable to life than the earth was subsequently, it means either that 1) life will emerge wherever there's an adequate environment or 2) life is a ubiquitous feature of the cosmos and is being seeded throughout interstellar space to every liveable niche in the cosmos
 
Cain't wait for the announcement of the hyperspace warp drive..
 
R.
 
P.S. I read recently that scientists have theorized that an ideal environment for what they conceive of as the orgin of life would be a planet with a lot more mass than the earth and in a zone around its star that would make it quite a bit warmer. 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Bill White for Governor? (of Texas)

I know little about White except that he was elected mayor of Houston twice with incredible 80%+ support.  He also has an impressive pate that is not obscured by excessive hair.  It would be a refreshing contrast to Gov. Goodhair. 

In a time of great fiscal stress, White also managed the budget in Houston with such proficiency that few or no major cuts in services occurred. 

I'm thinking he may be the most viable candidate for major office that the Democrats have had in a while. 

He had planned to run for the Senate, but now he is deliberating about running for Governor. 

I will now channel George Bush (the little one):  My gut tells me that White has a better shot at Governor than he does at Senator 'cuz Gov. Goodhair is so unloved in quite a few quarters.  But Senator would be a more important post for him to hold.  The Governor's power in Texas is more a matter of bully pulpit than it is vested executive authority.  But then 80%+ margins suggest a certain amount of charisma--either that or an incredible degree of rationality amongst the citizens of Houston.  Anything is possible, I guess (I lived in Houston as a youth & while I was not too conscious of local politics, I recall them as being as opaque and chaotic as any anywhere). 

But the idea of even a moderate centrist & technocratic Senator from Texas who is also a Democrat is pretty exciting.  His opponent, Cornyn, is not well loved in many circles either, but Cornyn has a solid core of supporters behind him and he is also politically more savy than many of those who hold to his extreme views...

I dunno.  I welcome comments as long as they don't hurt my feelings. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Northern pastoral

In order to maintain my literary pretensions, I resolved a couple of years ago to read the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, cobbled together in the early 19th century (I think) by a fellow named Lonnrot (sp?).  At the time, the only translation I could handily find that was affordable was  a contemporary one, written in contemporary English.  I had seen excerpts online from a late 19th century translation by one John Martin Crawford that I liked a lot better,  but at the time there were no affordable editions of that one available, at least that I could find. 

Well, I read the first 70-100 pages and then let the project lapse.  But these days I'm reading the stream of mysteries coming out of Scandanavia and Iceland and I can't seem to get enough of them.  And even though I didn't like the translation of the Kalevala that I had much, the evocations of nature from what I have read there often haunt my consciousness in the morning, especially if the weather is cool or rainy. 

A friend of mine sent me a review by Christopher Hitchens of Stieg Larsson's trilogy.  Hitchens remarks in passing that he has heard of bookstores that now devote whole sections to Scandanavian mysteries.  I wish there was a book store in Austin that had one. 

Northrup Frye asserts somewhere that the Western is a fictional analog to the poetic genre known as "pastoral."  I can see that.  I am led to wonder also if part of the appeal of the Scandanavian mysteries is the quiet but constant presence of the northern landscape in the background.  The winters, I imagine, make it hard to ignore. 

In any case, I have found a cheap edition of John Martin Crawford's translation of the Kalevala.  Maybe now I can finish it and really impress people at parties. 

R.

P.S. The Kalevala was an inspiration for Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha," according to people who know this sort of thing.
 
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Headed for home plate?

 

Everybody (except for about 30% of population)  is sweating bullets about the prospects of real health care reform (as well they should be, with the Democrats' talent for "f*cking up a wet dream") and yet, the frail Reid has whispered the magic word "reconciliation" to the Conservadems & they seem to be melting into the shadows...

 

What I would like to think is that this is like the campaign, where we kept wishing Obama would "get tough" or do this, or do that, and yet he made it come off & rather brilliantly at that.  I think it is also true now, as it was then, that he and all the Good Guys have a mighty assist from the rank ineptitude of their opponents...So health care reform may yet happen.  If it does, though, I really think the Good Guy Democrats and Obama should get their act together better.  One cannot rely on the ineptitude of the opposition lasting forever...

 

(I just violated one of my core principles in the caption:  never use sports metaphors except from horse racing--a guilty pleasure I allow myself.  I guess I'll get over it).

 

R.

 

 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Make It Stop...

The rain of chickensh*t from the Far Right seems relentless--even after the Reign of Chickensh*t (i.e. the Bush Administration) is over.  Even uber-conservative Grover Norquist doesn't agree with this attitude--(& it's a very odd feeling to find yourself in agreement with Grover Norquist).  

I myself worry about stepping out into the yard and being bitten by a copperhead.  Or attacked by a rabid pit bull.  It could happen. 

Rep. Shadegg Suggests Mayor Bloomberg's Daughter Will Be "Kidnapped" By A Terrorist

by Matt Finkelstein

Despite the fear-mongering of many conservatives, the Obama administration's decision to prosecute five alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City has the backing of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  "It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site where so many New Yorkers were murdered," Bloomberg said last week, noting that the city has "hosted terrorism trials before."

However, a far-right congressman from the other side of the country doesn't appreciate Bloomberg's confidence in New Yorkers.  Speaking on the House floor last night, Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) went after Bloomberg personally, suggesting that the mayor's daughter could be "kidnapped at school by a terrorist" because of the trial:

SHADEGG: I saw the Mayor of New York said today, "We're tough. We can do it."Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist? How are you going to feel when it's some clerk -- some innocent clerk of the court -- whose daughter or son is kidnapped?  Or the jailer's little brother or little sister? This is political correctness run amok.    
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Rhetorical question on last night's health care vote...

Why does everything have to be so effing hard? 

Just once it would be nice to see the Forces of Light triumph without a struggle unto the 11th hour. 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Roots of terrorism

Or one of them any way.   The awfulness of the shootings at Fort Hood are self-evident and I don't have much to say about them in their particularity.  The shooter had Arabic & Islamic origins and I'm sure that's going to be fodder for all kinds of ignorant, boorish & hateful bullshit politics.  Not that I have any great sympathy for the man.  In fact, I partially hope that he dies, not only because it would be emotionally satisying, but also to spare the country a lot of back-and-forth rhetoric that a long, probably complex trial would occasion. On the other hand it would be an opportunity for a vindication of the criminal justice system as a means of dealing with terrorist incidents. 
 

But I submit the following impressions:  what lies at the root of terrorism in some corners of the Islamic world is not something confined to the Islamic world and has little to do with Islam, per se.  It has more to do with the tribal codes in place in the Arabic world before Islam and which colored much interpetation of Islam thereafter.   It is a thing which pre-dates Islam anywhere and which could be found everywhere and  is still with us nowadays just about anywhere, but I would especially indicate the American South, American gun culture,  various street gangs of varying ethnicity. East Asia (insofar as it remains traditional) and among the professional military throughout the world.    What is this awful thing, this mother of blood feuds? 

I think it is a thing variously called "honor" and "face."  It's a matter of taking slights and insults to heart and feeling that one is diminished until one is avenged by the taking of appropriate retaliatory action up to and including violent retribution.  I would note that "appropriate" does not refer to how much objective harm is done, but rather how grievous the insult is felt to be.   Obsession with honor also overrides a concern for self-preservation. 
 
It is bad enough with indivduals when they become mass killers a la Columbine,   but when when a preoccupation with honor becomes collective, through vehicles of nationalism or chauvinisms of race, religion, or culture, it's all the worse. 
 
I believe that what a sense of honor is ultimately is a corruption of a sense of justice. 
 
R.
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

A riff on Scott Corey's Afghanistan policy idea...

This is cold.  But given the damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don't situation the U.S. finds itself in Afghanistan, perhaps the U.S. policy should be, as Scott Corey suggested in yesterday's guest article in Juan Cole's blog, "Informed Comment," to stay for a fixed period (two years) to give the Afghanistan government time to get its act together, but if it can't, too bad.  That should give the government considerable incentive. 

I would add that the U.S. and its allies should also engage as much of the population as can be fairly well protected in development projects that provide as much quick and long term benefit as possible.  That way, if Afghanistan falls to the Taliban or other retrogressive forces, there could a kind of automatic destabilization of the oppressive regime as people remember "the good old days" when the West was there...

Maybe that's the plan.

I hope it is not too cyncial to interpret Obama's visit to the fallen soldiers as some kind of harbinger of a change of policy of some kind.  I hope it's for the better, whatever that may mean.

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

A Rare Occurrence

A convergence of Reason, Fact & Justice in the political arena will come about if a worthwhile form of the public option is signed into law in the health care reform effort. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Greetings from the bat-watching

epicenter of the Universe, Austin, Texas on this beautiful raindark morning...just trying to live up to that part of my blog's mission statement which invokes whimsical self-indulgence...& trying to cope with an unjustified sense of well-being (nope, no drugs involved in the usual sense---but the coffee was very good this morning...)
 
James Carse wrote a clever little book called something like GAMES FINITE AND INFINITE...
 
I don't much like the "game" metaphor because I feel it trivializes life, but I'm willing to overlook it in this case because I thought Carse made some interesting observations...A finite game is one with fixed rules, where there are clear winners and losers and there's a definite end to the particular game being played.  An infinite game has no fixed rules, there is no necessary end to the game, and there can be any number of winners without there necessarily being any losers.  Of course, sports games are the paradigm for the finite games and cultural activities, like art, music and literature are exemplars of infinite games.
 
Giles Deleuze, my favorite French philosopher (whom my friend J.H. would dislike) has some notions congruent to the foregoing.   In literature, for example, there are authors who write stuff so great that it transcends literature and becomes a quality that subsists as a kind of atmosphere that exercises influence down through the ages--Kafka and Proust are the citations that I recall...(He also mentions Nietszche, whom I detest, but there's no denying his influence...)  
 
 I also like the clever way Deleuze defines individuality--he compares it to a cloud--you can point out a particular cloud, but it has no fixed boundary or essence...but I digress
 
Me, I would be happy if I ever finished the 50,000 word incoherent potboiler I've been putzing around with for the past five years...
 
Below is a prologue I wrote for something-or-other.  Everybody have a good day. 
 
(The celtic new year is nigh.  I'm going to stay indoors and be nice to people out of sheer perversity)
 
I am not a bona fide ghost
In any sense well-known to most.
I've never bedded in a berm
Or been provender for a worm
To put it baldly, completely shorn,
I've never taken human form.
I live between all space-time worlds
Inter-quantum foam, x-dimension curls--
Your middling astrophysicists
Do exceed their proper business
Proclaiming finitude of space
As clerics do, limiting grace--
The　 thing about where I reside--
Pure Translation can abide.
If civilized ants of another star
Resonate with who you are,
Perhaps I'm why you feel faint needs,
To tunnel deep and carry seeds.
Besides Translator, from sphere to sphere,
I have more roles where I appear;
I am invoked by countless names,
To inspire arts, crafts, peculiar games,
Of a scope beyond grasp of earthly mind
(Assuming they even have the　 time).
I'm also a library in myself,
Tag me a capacious kind of elf,
Who marks all said and done
On behalf the Good:　 Who is the　 One,
Who persuades us all to come exist,
To shun Old Chaos and persist,
To exult as creatures somewhat free,
Then takes us up in Unity--
Each entity is an existence test,
Although all pass--some are best.
Now the　 Good One's writ only runs so far,
The　 Cosmos isn't a largish bar,
Where a Bouncer of Infinite Size
Rather resembles one of the　 guys.
Omnipotence is a Greek-ish thought
The　 Godly have too quickly bought.
The Good One's Power to make amends
Is Infinite and never ends,
But can't undo the　 Bad once done
And suffers along with everyone.
As I am angel, spirit, essence, jinn,
More than these, yet more again,
The　 Greater has asked me to recount
The　 Big Picture only I can mount,
In terms almost everyone knows,
Something of how world history flows.
In part a homily is my intent,
But I won't ask that you repent.　
Around slightest quark,
also what's biggest of all,
(Whatever it is, it is not small),
There's a complex, harmonic array,
A halo of potentials, who await their "say,"
(A potential is real but is not actual,
Until an Act of Is makes it factual)
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Profoundest intuitions of the Old Testament

may confirm the essential validity of process philosophy & theology.  In the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead et alia in the process tradition, God and the Universe have always existed in some form or other.  God shapes the actual entities of the universe through a mode analogous to persuasion...

The article below deals with a new translation of the Old Testament that suggests that God did not create the world but made it habitable...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6274502/God-is-not-the-Creator-claims-academic.html
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Talk about your tin ear II

In fact, I believe the ABA's decision for a Roaring 20's theme for their party is worthy of my first award, a

DS award for the American Bankers Association.

R.

Talk about a tin ear,

politically speaking--the theme of the festivities at the American Bankers Association confab was "The Roaring 20's"

Sometimes our ruling class is too nekkid to believe.  Maybe that's why so few have noticed--up until now at least.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/25/bank-protests_n_333155.html

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

On sh*t and politicos

The poem below provides some authority for the ranking system I'm going to use for an occasional feature on my blog modeled after Olbermann's Worst Person in the World awards--I'm not going to use it all the time, only when I feel like it.  And if I get around to it.  Any way, there's:

HorseSh*t--usually petty stuff (HS Award)
Dogsh*t--pretty yucky--(DS Award)
Catsh*t--beyond yucky & possibly bearing the political or social equivalent of toxoplasmosis--CS Award

Now, I don't mean to demean these humble substances by applying them to the assorted repulsive creatures & incidents that I run across.  I realize their inevitability & necessity in the real world, but I am bowing to common parlance to get a point across.

I quote A.R. Ammons below to prove my benign intentions toward this aspect of the natural world:

Shit List; Or, Omnium-gatherum Of Diversity Into Unity by A. R. Ammons
You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are:
gosling shit (which J. Williams said something
was as green as), fish shit (the generality), trout

shit, rainbow trout shit (for the nice), mullet shit,
sand dab shit, casual sloth shit, elephant shit
(awesome as process or payload), wildebeest shit,

horse shit (a favorite), caterpillar shit (so many dark
kinds, neatly pelleted as mint seed), baby rhinoceros
shit, splashy jaybird shit, mockingbird shit

(dive-bombed with the aim of song), robin shit that
oozes white down lawnchairs or down roots under roosts,
chicken shit and chicken mite shit, pelican shit, gannet

shit (wholesome guano), fly shit (periodic), cockatoo
shit, dog shit (past catalog or assimilation),
cricket shit, elk (high plains) shit, and

tiny scribbled little shrew shit, whale shit (what
a sight, deep assumption), mandril shit (blazing
blast off), weasel shit (wiles' waste), gazelle shit,

magpie shit (total protein), tiger shit (too acid
to contemplate), moral eel and manta ray shit, eerie
shark shit, earthworm shit (a soilure), crab shit,

wolf shit upon the germicidal ice, snake shit, giraffe
shit that accelerates, secretary bird shit, turtle
shit suspension invites, remora shit slightly in

advance of the shark shit, hornet shit (difficult to
assess), camel shit that slaps the ghastly dry
siliceous, frog shit, beetle shit, bat shit (the

marmoreal), contemptible cat shit, penguin shit,
hermit crab shit, prairie hen shit, cougar shit, eagle
shit (high totem stuff), buffalo shit (hardly less

lofty), otter shit, beaver shit (from the animal of
alluvial dreams)—a vast ordure is a broken down
cloaca—macaw shit, alligator shit (that floats the Nile

along), louse shit, macaque, koala, and coati shit,
antelope shit, chuck-will's-widow shit, alpaca shit
(very high stuff), gooney bird shit, chigger shit, bull

shit (the classic), caribou shit, rasbora, python, and
razorbill shit, scorpion shit, man shit, laswing
fly larva shit, chipmunk shit, other-worldly wallaby

shit, gopher shit (or broke), platypus shit, aardvark
shit, spider shit, kangaroo and peccary shit, guanaco
shit, dolphin shit, aphid shit, baboon shit (that leopards

induce), albatross shit, red-headed woodpecker (nine
inches long) shit, tern shit, hedgehog shit, panda shit,
seahorse shit, and the shit of the wasteful gallinule.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

On the possibility of epic poetry in our time

Well, a grandoise subject requires a grandoise subject line...I seem to recall that literary critics have something of a consensus that an epic poetry consumable by the masses is nowadays impossible...Epics whether folk-like in origin, like Homer's, or artificial, like VIrgil's, all tend to be about the encapusulation and expression of a tribe, a people or a nation's origin--there's not too many great ones and most are not read by the masses, whether artificial or folkish in origin.  But maybe the bar for a reasonable popularity for the epic has been set too high.

I would surmise that at any given time, Homer's audience, whether consuming aurally or ocularly, was never more than a few thousand at the most--and the total number of Greeks in Homer's era and for several centuries thereafter was at the very most in the low millions.  If memory serves, Athens at its height never had more than 300,000 souls. Or maybe it was 100,000.  (I dwell on Homer because his work seems to be the gold standard for what constitutes a great epic poem)

These days, the overwhelming majority of nations & peoples have already been founded for a while and most have already got their national literary touchstone in place & mostly unread by most, except them as likes Litrachoor, as Michael Caine puts in EDUCATING RITA. 
 
But there's this notion in anthropology and sociology called something like "imaginary community" or "imagined community"--it's similar to the thing that makes people who are at most 1/16th (or maybe no nth at all) Irish wear green on St. Patrick's Day.  And I submit there's something a little imaginary about nationalism and ethnicity in the first place.  It's all largely in the head.  Doesn't mean it doesn't have real effects in the real world.  But the notion of "imaginary community"  also opens up limitless possibiilty for the assemblage of a "community."   And some have argued that the creation of one of those primordial epics is what creates a people or community in the first place...(I apologize for using that "some have said..." trope--it's the kind of crappy thing that Fox News does, but I feel somewhat free to use it because here I'm freely admitting I lack any depth of knowledge about which I speak...I'm spinning stuff off the top
of my head). 
 
Given what I've said so far, I think it is very interesting that so many works of modern fantasy are truly epic in scope.  People like Terry Goodkind & Terry Brooks (to name only two of many) regularly churn out these doorstopper tomes and people buy them in pretty damn good quantity...That's not the same thing as a poem you say, well, no if you define poem in terms of rhyme and meter, but a good many of the aforementioned fantasy books use a certain elevated language, formulaic tropes and set speeches...And apart from the book-buyers, there's the moviegoers.   Watching the Rings trilogy in the theater, I had to shuck myself of the modern impatience with the set speeches and high style carried over into the screen version (I confess:  I have only actually read one, maybe two of the Ring books & I can't even remember which...) but I got over it, & was eventually entralled.  Maybe it was the special effects you say.  Well, possibly so, but any
original auditor of Homeric recitation did not need the assistance of special effects to block out mundane images of an urban environment in order to make the scenes come alive.  This hypothetical auditor could easily conjure up an immediate perception of what a "wine-dark" sea was without the intervention of Hollywood. 
 
Anyway, with the advent of the internet, I like to think that there is a number of incipient world-wide communities out thee awaiting their epos to bind them all together.  What language or languages will the bard(s) use.  Dunno.  A question for another day. 
 
R.
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Feel free to suffer this...

> Initial Meditation on the B
>
> "Being is not bad"--St Thomas Aquinas
>
> "Be-ing is not bad"--postmodern gloss on Aquinas
>
> "B-ing is not bad"--as old Dada used to say
>
> I can play the first scale on my quena
> (No, not the B)
> And daydream about the altiplano,
> Llama herds, balsa rafts on blue Titicaca,
> Flute-maddened dances in bright woolens,
> Breathing hard up that high...
>
> I don't even have a horsehead fiddle
> Yet the Eternal Blue Sky of the Mongols
> Is ever uppermost in my mind,
> (Well, it has to be somewhere)
>
> But, damn, isn't to live on Avenue B
> In Austin, Texas
> To someone, somewhere, some way, somewhen
> Really rather exotic-purple-macaw-Shangri-la and all that?
   (And a word of praise for the paradox of hypens-they join even as they
> divide)
> And be at least as odd there as the missed ontologies with which I tease
> myself here
   On Avenue B as I think of Genghis Khan standing in front of his ger
   on the faraway steppes, on some hillock analog to my Avenue B,
   Watching the sun rise in the east. 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The ears have it...

Houston Mayor Bill White is the Democratic Senate hopeful for 2012, running against Kay Bailey Hutchinson or Gov. (Goodhair) Perry. 

He's probably going to have to punt on some issues I would rather he wouldn't, but he seems an eminently supportable Democrat, especially for Texas.

Another plus:  he has large, noble ears, comparable in awesomeness to my own. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

It's so hard for me to live in the present...

Alan Grayson 2016. 

(Just hope he don't got a bimbo problem)

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

It's hard not to gloat...

as we watch the Republicans struggle with their lunatic fringe, being forced to kowtow to them one minute, and back away from them the next. 

But I sincerely hope the moderate Republicans get their act together well enough to remain a credible threat to the Democrats,  The idea of a viable proto-fascist party gaining traction as an electoral threat is too nasty to contemplate. 

Trouble is, people like Lincoln Chaffee are no longer in office.  Specter has little credibility with Republicans now that he is a Democrat & he's getting up in years.  Sen. Lindsay Graham (Huckleberry), well, it's stretching it to call him a moderate, although he has a moderate style--and I wonder if he is smart enough.  It's unfair, but even though I'm from Texas, I have to struggle with the prejudice I have regarding the intellect of anybody who speaks with such a cornpone accent--but right now, he seems like their best bet.  (He's said some crazy shit to placate the Right as he preps for a run for 2012 or 2016--at least I hope that's what he's doing--that is, mere posturing).

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Digby has the ultimate rejoinder

to that JP in Louisiana who refused to marry the interracial couple:

"Bardwell and the couple didn't immediately return calls from CNN Thursday. However, Bardwell told the Hammond's Daily Star that he was concerned for the children who may be born of the relationship and that, in his experience, most interracial marriages don't last.
"I'm not a racist," Bardwell told the newspaper. "I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children."

Right. Their poor kids could grow up to be president someday.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

"Just Let People Alone"

In the health care reform debate, Alan Grayson, Congressman from Florida (of all places), has become a lefty hero for many people, including myself, for speaking  truth to the Powers incarnate in that Know-Nothing contingent in the House (and elsewhere) commonly known as the Republican Party--& doing so with an admirable brevity & snarkiness. 
 
In his blog below, he asks the tough questions about U.S. Afghanistan policy and quotes Congressman David Obey: "Equally important, he said, "Do we really have the tools to overcome language, culture, history and a 90 percent illiteracy rate to sufficiently transform such a country?"
 
Grayson's argument for pulling out of Afghanistan is compelling, but I simply cannot agree.  If we do not have to tools we need, we should acquire them.  Let me qualify that immediately.  By "we" I don't simply mean the U.S. but as many nations as can be convinced to join together in the project, preferably under the auspices of the UN.  And "sufficiently transform" does not and should not mean trying to re-make the country into a Sweden or Norway. 
 
Minimally, the goal should be the eradication of the barbaric practices inflicted on women and some form of the rule of law, even if Sharia-based, but minus the draconian punishments meted out by the Taliban and still practiced to a large degree under the Karzai government. 
 
The Soviets actually planted the seeds of modernism during their occupation and I think that is a major reason there is a small but real women's rights movement there. 
 
I think of the project in Afghanistan not so much as nation-building, but as the repression of barbarianism.  Otherwise, let Afghanistan evolve as best it can.
 
It might mean dealing with the people of Afghanistan on a tribe-by-tribe, region-by-region basis, rather than mediating through a central government.  So be it.  (Though Juan Cole has remarks somewhere about how misleading the characterization of Afghanistan as "tribal" can be). 

 
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2009/10/alan-grayson-explains-best-policy-for.html
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Obama the Anti-Christ....

See, it's obvious.  Those socialist Swedes on the Nobel Prize Committee are political commandos for the New World Order that the Anti-Christ Obama is seeking to bring about. 

And it's no accident that Obama is black--like the Devil Himself. 

(Mark my words--you will find something like this argument making the rounds on the Internet and the right wing radio shock jocks--I wouldn't be too surprised to see it show up in somewhat more civil form on Fox News...)

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Olbermann as Murrow/Cronkite

He would like to be, I think.  He is a person of good will.  I think he may be hampered in part by the constraints of the current news format that demands that the news be "infotainment," and his demeanor is also molded by those constraints. 

But I caught in passing that he plans to devote an entire news hour to one of his "special comments" in support of health care reform--& I wouldn't be surprised if he comes out strongly for a single payer plan. 

I know that news anchors have editorialized before, but I am wondering if this is some kind of first. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Effing crraziness...

Senator Huckleberry distances himself from Glenn Beck but avows the same kind of craziness.  

Saber-rattling & threatening a pre-emptive strike against Iran--I can think of few things better calculated to solidify support of the Iranian regime by the people--or better calculated to provoke Iran to go all out with their own pre-emptive strike against Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq.  What's to lose for them? 

http://rawstory.com/2009/10/attack-iran-before-israel/

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Two thoughts on Tuesday...

The idea that Obama is some kind of socialist makes real leftists snicker into their frosted mini-wheats--but I think the Right has stumbled into an inchoate self-fulfilling prescience about health care reform if does turn out to contain a viable public option.   The word "socialist" has been flung around as a epithet with such lack of discrimination that it's losing its sting.  Moreover, if the public option proves to be popular and viable, identifying new reforms as "socialist"--even if they actually are--may prove to be an inadvertent argument in their favor. 

If U.S. forces in Afghanistan could hogtie Osama bin Laden and bring him back to New York, then Obama could probably withdraw unilaterally from Afghanistan without much domestic political cost, save for the usual caterwauling from the neocans.  I'm not saying that should be the goal in Afghanistan. My point is that people in the U.S.  think about foreign policy--and government policy in general--in terms of celebrity and personality to such an extent that Obama could do that whether or not withdrawing from Afghanistan is a wise policy. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

The political is the personal(ity)

I have often complained about the role that features like "personality" and "sincerity" play in U.S. politics at the expense of sound policy & program. 

I wish we could elect colorless policy wonks as needed, but there doesn't seem to be any way around this fact of life as it pertains to American political discourse. 

Now even people who agree with him on the issues are complaining about Michael Moore's new movie, CAPITALISM, A LOVE STORY, on the grounds that it is also full of Michael Moore's self-promotion. 

I haven't seen it yet, but just off the top of my head, so what? 

It  seems to me that in the U.S. nobody can affect the national discourse without a robust egotism.  Case in point, the continuing influence of the batsh*t crazy right wing, despite their dwindling numbers.  Their leadership consists of personality and little else (Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, PALIN, the list goes on and on...)

I trust Michael Moore, egotist or not.  He's sincere and I like his fashion sense.

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Juan Cole makes a case against involvement in Afghanistan

Juan Cole makes the case against further military involvement in Afghanistan. As far as I can tell, nobody knows more about the ethnic, political and sectarian divides in Central Asia and the Mideast than he does. I still question the analogy with Vietnam. It seems to me that the Taliban do not have the same kind of sophistication, nor the same kind of unitary grip on the Pashtun population that the Communist Party did with respect to the North Vietnamese.

Granted Afghanistan's government is weak, corrupt & oppressive, & there is general hostility toward Western involvement, it seems unthinkable that a Taliban-style state should be allowed to re-emerge in Afghanistan.     I hope the Obama Administration can come up with a hearts-and-mind strategy that works in tandem with the military side. If not, maybe the West should cut its losses & get out. But the human cost of that also seems unacceptable.  My reactionary friend (he knows who he is) thinks that Pakistan is key to what happens in Afghanistan.  The West should do whatever it can to help Pakistan consolidate itself as a modern, secular nation-state & that will go far toward depriving the Taliban forces of external support.   I agree & think that should be part of whatever hearts-and-minds stuff the Obama Administration can come up with. 

 

Afghanistan has even less chance than Iraq of becoming like Sweden any time in the near future.  Perhaps the most we can hope for is an Iran-style pseudo-democracic oligarchic state, autocratic in character, tempered somewhat by corruption and inefficiency, but possessing vestiges of a secular rule of law.   

 

But I have to think about a couple of Juan Cole's observations before I try and rebut them.  Not sure I can.

 

 

Blog: Informed Comment
Post: Is Afghanistan Vietnam or Iraq? Arguing with Obama and Rubin
Link: http://www.juancole.com/2009/09/is-afghanistan-vietnam-or-iraq-arguing.html

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High noon for the public health care option--A call to action.

Only greed and stupidity stand in the way...

(Robert Reich is the former Secretary of Labor and an economist)

Robert Reich's Blog
The Public Option's Last Stand, and the Public's
August 17, 2009, 11:09AM

I would have preferred a single payer system like Medicare, but became convinced earlier this year that a public, Medicare-like optional plan was just about as much as was politically possible. Now the White House is stepping back even from the public option, with the President saying it's "not the entirety of health care reform," the White House spokesman saying the President could be "satisfied" without it, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element."

Without a public, Medicare-like option, health care reform is a bandaid for a system in critical condition. There's no way to push private insurers to become more efficient and provide better value to Americans without being forced to compete with a public option. And there's no way to get overall health-care costs down without a public option that has the authority and scale to negotiate lower costs with pharmaceutical companies, doctors, hospitals, and other providers -- thereby opening the way for private insurers to do the same.

It's been clear from the start that the private insurers and other parts of the medical-industrial complex have hated the idea of the public option, for precisely these reasons. A public option would cut deeply into their current profits. That's why they've been willing to spend a fortune on lobbyists, threaten and intimidate legislators and ordinary Americans, and even rattle Obama's cage to the point where the Administration is about to give up on it.

The White House wonders why there hasn't been more support for universal health care coming from progressives, grass-roots Democrats, and Independents. I'll tell you why. It's because the White House has never made an explicit commitment to a public option.

Senator Kent Conrad's ersatz public option -- his regional "cooperatives" -- won't have the scale or authority to do what a public option would do. That's why some Republicans say they could buy it. What's Conrad's response? "The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," he tells "FOX News Sunday." Conrad is wrong. If Obama tells Senate Democrats he will not sign a healthcare reform bill without a public option, there will be enough votes in the United States Senate for a public option.

I urge you to make it absolutely clear to everyone you know, everyone who cares about universal health care and what it will mean to our country, that the bill must contain a real public option. Tell that to your representatives in Congress. Tell that to the White House. If you are receiving piles of emails from the Obama email system asking you to click in favor of health care, do not do so unless or until you know it has a clear public option. Do not send money unless or until the White House makes clear its support for a public option.

This isn't just Obama's test. It's our test.

Killer squid was a good beginning

for the month of August, but it seems to have died away.  God, what I wouldn't give for a humongous UFO flap to take the media's attention off the laughable yet ominous town hall "protests"...

Or if the Mars Rover could find clear evidence of alien artifacts on the Red Planet.  (In that case, perhaps somebody could start up an engaging conspiracy theory about how NASA got Hollywood to fake the Martian probes and all the photographs...)

Oh.  An inspiration.

Lefties should start showing up at the townhall meeting loudly demanding that the government release all the information about the treaty that the U.S. Government has made with the Grays (you know, the little gray aliens with the huge insectoid eyes...). 

At the very least, it would be interesting to see how many of the "birthers" and the "deathers" would chime in...

R.

P.S. Let me reassure you.  There are no little grey aliens.  Actually, the aliens resemble blonde Swedes & are dressed in shining white robes. 

P.P.S. Or maybe George Soros could rent a fleet of unmarked black helicopters to hover in the vicinity of the town hall meetings...

P.P.P.S. Oh, well, I guess the possibilities are manifold.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Odd blog traffic...

Nobody visits my blog--since anybody who might be inclined to read it already gets the postings in the form of the rants and ravings I send out via e-mail (I can cc the material to the blog without any of the addressees information showing up on the blog post)

But just for the heck of it I checked the traffic stats and for some unknown reason there were 12 visits in late July by party or parties unknown--from Brazil. 

Naturally, my first reaction is free-floating paranoia.  But probably somebody idly curious en passant. 

R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Glass half-full observation on health care reform...

Leading Senators & Obama himself have made noises during the past day or two suggesting that they are waffling on the public option in health care & there are some (appropriately) alarmist headlines in Huffington Post & Raw Story. 

I'm okay with the alarmism in the headlines--everybody needs to stay vigilant--but I suspect that the backtracking on the public option is more apparent than real.  I think that perhaps the White House and its allies are trying to ratchet down the some of the violence-prone stupidity coming from the tea bagger types by allowing the public option to go discreetly unmentioned--for the time being. 

Come September, although victory is far from assured. I'm pretty sure the public option  will be on the table.   

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Out in the sticks...

Lead story in the Sunday Austin-American Statesman today:  TENSION AT THE TACO TRUCK.  It's a riveting story about the escalating conflict between licensed and unlicensed taco vendors. 

I know a Sunday in August is apt to be a slow news day, but, really, this makes a body feel provincial. 

How can I jeer at New Yorkers for being parochial, or Oregonians for being rustic if my hometown paper can't come with anything more significant?

(Even Kokomo, Ind. has the occasional UFO sighting...)

R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Fw: Notes toward a grand synthesis...(1)

July 31, 2009 3:52:03 PM
Subject: Notes toward a grand synthesis...(1)

Come.  Suffer my wisdom (1).  (Don't worry--there may not be a (2)--And ignore this if you don't have a taste for this sort of thing...
 
After reading a bunch of books in desultory fashion, I have cobbled together some working ideas for a worldview that I would like to be true--& I would like some of them to be more true than others.  Unfortunately, I lack the time, energy, and capacity for systematic scholarship to do them justice--but then, I prefer mercy to justice. 

Rene Girard:  Like many French intellectuals he gets aholt of a bone of idea, sometimes even a good one, but then won't let go for dear life, ever, sometimes reducing that bone to powder.   His idea that the social bonding that enabled the initial formation of society was the result of a scapegoating mechanism seems to me to have a certain intuitive truth.  But he goes on to argue that it accounts for everything--myth, religion, language, law, gambling, transactional economy...  Why not say that absent the inhibitory mechanisms to dampen intra-species aggression and violence, that the scapegoating mechanism provided an initial breathing space for more or less rational social institutions to take root so that thereafter the necessity for scapegoating was vitiated.  In fact, one of the functions of those primordial social institutions (that would later become a legal system), was/is to hold the scapegoating mechanism in
check--granted not always successfully.  
 
There is also in Girard and most (but not all) Girardians, an unseemly anxiety about "victimizing the victimizers" that tends to push their thought into what I think are conservative and even reactionary political realms...I admit it's a lot more fun sometimes to think about punishing Evildoers than it is Doing Good & I would dearly love to see George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the dock at The Hague, but the point of that would not be to make them suffer, but to administer sanctions that would clearly communicate that what they did was Wrong...
 
Bruce Chilton subsumes the category of sacrifice (and the sacrificial victim) as a side effect, as it were, to a a broader psychosocial (if that's the word) mechanism than that of scapegoating; to wit, a primordial  desire of human beings to be in harmony to the universe as expressed most fittingly through the most basic of creaturely functions--that of eating--taking part of the universe into oneself and having the universe become part of oneself & also by implication establishing oneself as part of the universe.  To put it more concretely,  human beings have an impulse to get closer to the gods by having meals with them & those meals thereby become sacred.  Some of the edibles are set aside for the gods ("first fruits," for example) & this practice is the ancestor/exemplar of the idea of sacrifice--& sacrifice thus easily segues into place as part of Girard's "scapegoating mechanism." 
 
One Good Thing about Girard, though, is that his analysis and exposure of the scapegoating mechanism undercuts, refutes and destroys the doctrine of the Blood Atonement.  That Jesus died for our sins has always been a completely unintelligible notion to me ever since I began thinking about it at the age of 13 or so. 
 
Girard's position (and mine), broadly speaking, is that the death of Jesus at the hands of a violent system that runs on death and the threat of death, may have been inevitable, but it was not NECESSARY in the sense that God required it in order to legally discharge human beings from the consequences of sin. 
 
I would gloss this question further by saying that Jesus is the fullest expression of that aspect of God that which is most intellible to human beings qua humans.  As such, Jesus is Perfectly Human--although not a Perfect Human--Jesus would not be human if he were perfect in the sense usually meant by theologians. The difference between Jesus and other human beings is, metaphorically speaking, quantitative rather than qualitative--Jesus possesses such an abundance of the humanness that God would prefer that it becomes a quantitative difference large enough, as Marx would say, to become qualitative.  Jesus did not occur in a historical vacuum either.  He happened because of a long process of tutelage between God and the people of Israel.  Other peoples may have been candidates but it so happened that the Jews, as it were, got there first. 
 
(Other peoples gave rise to prophets and seers who brought to light other aspects of the deity and the cosmos and answered other questions human beings put to the cosmos and the deity(ies).  As John Cobb and Wilfred Cantwell Smith have indicated, different religions are different answers to different questions:   The Buddhist and Hindu question is something like, What is the  nature of existence?
The Abrahamic religions are more focused on the question that runs something like, What is the nature and destiny of my personal individual historicity in the context of my society?)
 
(What could follow at this point is my ideas about the meaning of the Incarnation & its salvific effects (if any).  That is the discussion in which I want to argue that the Incarnation is in some non-trivial sense true and imporant and at the same time repudiate supercessionism, i.e. the idea that only Christianity is true and is the only path to salvation. Before I can do that, though,  I think I have to run on a bit about the nature of God and the origin and significance of evil...which I will probably do...)
 
R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

My take on Senator Baucus & his role in the current health care debate...

Chaucer said it best (from a different context): "Wold that I hadde his coillons enshyrned in a hogge's turd" (approximate quote)

R.

 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

You can't teach an old dog (not) to live in glass houses--(Yahoo provided the subject line --I inserted the "not")

(As I was preparing this screed about the shenanigans of Gov Sanford, I accidentally hit the Yahoo button that generates those subject lines that sometimes rather strain at humor...damn near perfect subject line this time...)

Even though he cried in public & everything, I feel, I feel a remarkable lack of compasson.  Mark Sanfod was part of the Newt's Lynch Clinton Mob back in the day so there's a certain justice in seeing him hung by his own, well, you know, whatever...

Had he been successful in refusing South Carolina's stimulus money, I have little doubt that the cost would have been some shortened lives, not to mention a incalculable but significantly larger amount of unnecessary suffering. 

And this was one of their leading presidential prospects...

Right now, according to one poll, Sarah Palin is the single most popular Republican presidential contender.   If there are any realists left in the Republican Party, though, I doubt if she can win a primary.  Mitt Romney, anyone?  His personal life is squeaky clean by most accounts.  I bet he drinks root beer on the sly though.

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Yahoo!

A Yahoo defeated.  Maybe there's hope for Texas after all.  (If nothing else, the lege didn't want the state to have to deal with the lawsuits...)

Governor corrected, Creationist Don McLeroy rejected:
In a rare rejection of an appointment by the Texas governor, the Senate Thursday ousted Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education, with his supporters claiming the Bryan dentist was the victim of his strong religious beliefs. McLeroy is a devout Christian who believes in creationism and the notion that the Earth is about 6,000 years old. He has steadfastly argued that Texas students should be taught the weaknesses of evolution. 
 
 
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

They don't deserve an apology...

Sotomayor's opponents that is, for the out-of-context comment 8 years ago that a Latina could render a better judgment than a white male...In context, her remark shouldn't be exceptionable to any sane, unbiased person. 

I don' understand why she and apparently the White House should dignify the vicious attacks on her by apologizing for ANYTHING. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

For me this calls to mind a certain principle: Puh-leez don't throw me in that briar patch!

Tomorrow: RNC Could Rename Democrats As "Democrat Socialist Party"
By Eric Kleefeld - May 19, 2009, 5:01PM
The Republican National Committee could potentially take a very bold, politically momentous move tomorrow. I am speaking, of course, about the upcoming vote on a resolution to declare that the Democratic Party should be renamed the "Democrat Socialist Party."
 
 
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Already polls show that as many as 47% of the public are either undecided or actually prefer socialism to capitalism.  The more the Republicans try this tack, the more the sting is going to be taken out of the word and the sooner it can become a viable option...
 
R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Thank God for Tennessee!

At last--a state legislature even more retrogressive than our own (meaning Texas): 

Tennessee state senator calls guns in bars a 'dreamy scenario'

Share on Facebook By David Edwards and Stephen Webster

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Of course, a good portion of white Texas is ancestored out of Tennessee (and me, too). 

R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Some news continues to be good...

Senator Jeff Sessions, Rethug from Alabama, sez he is open to a gay or pro-choice Supreme Court nominee.  Senator John Thune, Rethug from one of the Dakotas, sez that's a "bridge too far."  Sessions, of course, is a lying sack of sh*t.  If he isn't in this case, it's because he's realized it's ultimately more important to pander to the money boys of the Rethug party than it is to the social conservatives, i.e., he might support a gay, pro-choice nominee to the Supreme Court provided he or she is a follower of Ayn Rand and wants to put the country on the gold standard.   But I am enjoying the spectacle of these conflicting Rethug pronouncements.   You would think that some political consultant would have told them not to gear up to opposing Obama's choice of Supreme Court nominee until he had named one.  It only solidifies their image as the Party of No.   If S.L.A. Marshall is right that discipline is something that arises out of
morale, then the Rethugs have a gaping wound in their esprit de corps.

In other news,  Specter has reportedly flipped again on  EFCA.  I am lacking in trust though it would be the smartest thing for him to do politically & Specter always seems to do the smartest thing for himself politically--after huffing and puffing a lot about doing the Right and Principled Thing..
 
Pelosi is going to continue to push for both the Health Plan & cap & trade despite pressure from the Blue Dogs    I would really like something more Draconian than "cap & trade" but I reckon that's just my Inner Stalinist talking--not that Stalin ever gave a flip about the environment. 
 
R.
 

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

I like it where they are...more thoughts on Afghanistan

The better angels of my nature lead me to believe that even the Good Guys need to be constantly looking over their shoulder or else they will become Worse Guys, or worse yet, Bad Guys.  On that basis, I hope that some day the Republicans get it together well enough to become a party of sufficient appeal to the electorate to credibly threaten the Democrats.  That's the better angel.  (My Inner Trotsky, yea, my Inner Stalin is constantly whispering...a different prospect)

But right now, despite their huge majority, the Democrats have enough DINOs in their ranks to credibly threaten a Good Guy agenda--an agenda that would be even better if it weren't for the DINOs, so right now the Democrats don't need the threat of a revitalized Republican Party to keep them in line. 

I hope the Republicans stay stuck in their self-induced political purgatory at least through Obama's second term.   Health care reform (minimally with a public option),  a decent energy & environmental policy, EFCA, the beginnings of an effective strategy to help secure a (relatively) civilized rule of law in Afghanistan & Pakistan, education reforms (sans vouchers),  financial regulation, withdrawal from Iraq, accountability for the Bush torture regime, an end of the drive toward privatization of government services...that's all I want.  Oh.  And a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  That would be nice too.   And, actually, all of those are doable & politically feasible in terms of the what the public wants, DINOs notwithstanding.  (DINO--Democrats-in-name-only)

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I did not realize that even after the Soviets left, the Communist government in Afghanistan hung on for another three years.    Despite the brutal civil war that ensued, I suspect the Communist did manage to plant the seeds of modernism in Afghanistan, or else you wouldn't have the several organizations for women's rights that exist in Afghanistan. 

I have an overbelief, ungrounded in actual research, that the liberation of women is the key to success in bringing a minimum of social justice to Afghanistan and similar societies.   More later--if I can find out what I'm talking about. 

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

More Info Age fun...

 
 
An invention that could change the internet for ever
Revolutionary new web software could put giants such as Google in the shade when it comes out later this month. Andrew Johnson reports
Sunday, 3 May 2009
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The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: "What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly... I think this could be big."
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly", according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.
"I've wanted to make the knowledge we've accumulated in our civilisation computable," he said last week. "I was not sure it was possible. I'm a little surprised it worked out so well."
Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project.
"It will understand what you are talking about," he said. "We are just at the beginning. I think we've got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library."
The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.
He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.
Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term "50 Cent" caused "absolute horror" in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.
"We have a certain amount of popular culture information," Dr Wolfram said. "In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who's related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts."
He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia's popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.
With Google now one of the world's top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.
Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. "We're working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense," he said. "Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies."
What the experts say
"For those of us tired of hundreds of pages of results that do not really have a lot to do with what we are trying to find out, Wolfram Alpha may be what we have been waiting for."
Michael W Jones, Tech.blorge.com
"If it is not gobbled up by one of the industry superpowers, his company may well grow to become one of them in a small number of years, with most of us setting our default browser to be Wolfram Alpha."
Doug Lenat, Semanticuniverse.com
"It's like plugging into an electric brain."
Matt Marshall, Venturebeat.com
"This is like a Holy Grail... the ability to look inside data sources that can't easily be crawled and provide answers from them."
Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of searchengineland.com
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Partisan snark is such fun...

Get a load of this headline from Josh Marshall:

New Brand Kinda Like The Old Brand
Mitt Romney: "We are the party of the revolutionaries, they [Democrats] are the party of the monarchists." 
 
 
 
This remark typies the absurdity and irrelevance into which the Republicans have fallen. 
 
It's sapping my motivation to post.   It seems pointless now to do anything except try and offer well thought out critiques and defenses of  positions on real world issues.   But it's harder than pointing out Republican outrages.
 
 I'm still bogged down trying to figure out what I think should be happening in Afghanistan. 
 
Originally, I was thinking in terms of framing the issue in terms of just war theory--but justified (or not) police action would be more descriptive.  Or should be descriptive.  Unmanned drone bombs and the use of bunker buster bombs I think are counterproductive, but their use suggests conventional warfare, which the intervention in Afghanistan ultimately isn't.  It's more like Northern Ireland although parallels can't be clearly drawn.
 
As Richard N. used to say, let me be perfectly clear. The emotional impetus for my support of the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan is the Taliban's war against girls and women.    I should like to see the Taliban utterly destroyed as a political and social force.  It doesn't mean I think they should all be killed to the last man but I certainly think judicious force and violence against them is justified.  (For the purposes of this argument, I make no distinction between Al Queda and the Taliban). 
 
Leaving aside the use of unmanned drones & anti-personnel weapons like the bunker buster bombs, I think any criticism I have of what Obama is proposing to do is that it may not be enough, for both the military and nation-building aspects of the intervention, and that's even given the limited goal of trying to secure a stable government there with something like a rule of law that is not an outrage to civilized society. 
 
I would wish the same on the House of Saud and a dozen other places, but generally you have to pick your battles with those that have picked you. 
 
On a somehwat related note,  I saw with considerable surprise that Juan Cole refers to those who want the U.S. to leave Iraq immediately as "withdrawal fundamentalists." 
 
R.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Miss California & Afghanistan

Increasingly, anything associated with the Right, leaving aside all that is sinister, seems to consist of surrealistic schlock:  See comments of Michael Steele, Michelle Bachmann, James DeMint, the tears of Glenn Beck,  teabagging,..the list goes on and on.   But Miss California is special.    It's not just her views that are odious.  She is such a perfect parody of conventional standards of beauty & female demeanor, she is actually repulsive in her person. 

I have written an already lengthy screed on Afghanistan.  I'm not posting it until I can figure out what the hell it is I'm saying. 

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

I feel the earth move under my feet...

Arlen Specter has joined the Democrats!  True, it IS Arlen Specter.  Whom I trust about as far as I can throw a bull-sized rat by its tail.  He's been a blowhard on both sides of several major issues, but almost always came down on the side of the Bush Rethugs. 

He reversed himself on EFCA (card check) out of fear of the primary challenge from Pat Toomey, wingnut extraordinaire.  Now he won't have labor's support as he goes for the Democratic nomination.  I guess he could dog whistle covert support by suggesting that while he would vote against EFCA, he would vote not to filibuster it.  Out of deference for the wishes of the majority. Or something. 

Anyway, if Franken gets seated in June, the Dems will have their magic 60--except, of course, it's not all it's cracked up to be.  But it might prove to be handy, now and then.  I wish Reid wuz a little more--make that a lot more--like the character Curly in the movie City Slickers.  (That was my father's nickname also & there was a subtle temperamental resemblance there...)

R.

http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Too obviously true?

I just had a rant about right wingers assuming too quickly that some of their positions are self-evident. 

I just learned that the Obama Administration is insisting on keeping the Bush Administration's proposed missile shield in Poland--to protect Europe against Iran. 

That's just effing stupid.  And obviously so.

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

"Democrats can't prosecute unless they've taken leave of their senses..."

Chris Hayes of the NATION suggested that Ross Douthat is an intelligent, principled conservative.  After I read Daily Kos's blurb in "Abbreviated Pundit Roundup" I went and raed Douthat's full NYT column.  It was a back-handed defense of Dick Cheney.  Douthat imagined a scenario in which Cheney rather than Mccain was the Republican nominee.  Douthat proposed that Cheney's landslide defeat would have been good for the Republicans the way Goldwater's was in 1964...And he would have put the torture debate on the table in a useful way, the way he sorta of has now.  Douthat evidently thinks, from the quote cited in the subject line, that there is no question that torture is necessary and that nobody should be prosecuted.   Up until then Douthat was pretty incisive and interesting.  I think that's a clear exemplar of the chief defect in right wing thinkery--there's always a point at which conservative thinkers arrive, even if they are making a
serious effort, where they assume that some assertion or proposition of theirs is so obviously true that it needs no further explanation or defense. 

For all the talk about Republicans' need to re-think, there is nothing there to re-think.  Outside of the stance of their quasi-fascist remnant, there is only one place for them to go:  become a right wing social democratic party--which might be a useful countervailing power against excessive impulsiveness on the Left.  In any case, if the Republicans become truly marginalized (as they seem to be trying their damnest to do), I see the Democrats splitting into two parties--left wing and right wing social democrats. 

R.
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Just War and Afghanistan

I was thinking about writing a screed defending U.S. (and others') involvement in Afghanistan.  It would be easier, though, to write a rebuttal to somebody attacking said involvement. 

But I think the manner in which Obama proposes to be involved in Afghanistan is defensible on just war grounds.  (Although I initially supported Bush's military actions in Afghanistan, I came to believe that Bush's signature incompetence would nullify ANY argument for ANY military action by his administration...one of the criteria for a just war is that it must have some realistic chance of succeeding and its effects, however horrible, must be calculated to be less horrible than abstaining from military action...That, in a nutshell, is my argument about Afghanistan.  I recognize that judgment is highly contentious.  I would like people to test my understanding of the situation.

R.

 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/

Torture Commission

I don't particularly care about a Torture Commission, per se.  What I want is prosecutorial investigation.  But the langauge used by Reid and the Obama Administration in opposing the idea of a Torture Commission is irritating in that it strongly suggests we should just let bygones be bygones.  We don't do that for some crazy asshole who holds up a convenience store.  Why should we do it for likely war criminals? 

 

My sympathies are almost always slanted toward the defense--most of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are signficantly dysfunctional in one way or another.  But these people, these primae facie war criminals,  are highly intelligent, highly functional types who actually have more capacity to recognize culpability than your average dope dealer or convenience store heister. 

But the important thing is not so much the severity of the sanctions as it is the certainty. 
 
R.  
 
http://gg9-tto.blogspot.com/