The obsession with gas prices

I have always been a little puzzled by the obsession in the US with the price of gas. From as long as I can remember, the price of gas has been reported regularly in the news, even when the prices were not fluctuating. NPR news reports on the national average of gas prices on a regular basis. Michele Bachmann has even vowed that she will bring gas prices down to $2 if she is elected president though she does not say how. (Plunge the country into a deep recession? Invade all the oil producing countries?)

Why, among all the commodities, is the price of gas singled out for special mention and monitoring?

I understand that the price of gas influences the price of other things and so is perhaps a proxy for inflation but surely the cost of living index would be a better gauge? I also understand that this is a car culture. When my mother used to write letters (remember those?) to me from Sri Lanka, she would always quote the price of bread and coconuts as indicators of the cost of living. Maybe because it was because she did not own a car and besides, gas prices in Sri Lanka were controlled by the state.

Perhaps gas is focused on here because it is perhaps the only thing that we buy regularly in isolation. When it comes to other staples like bread or milk, which would serve equally well as rough indicators of the cost of living, they are usually bought in conjunction with other groceries and so their price variations do not stand out. Also, gas stations are everywhere and they post their prices in huge signs so you cannot avoid being aware of them.

If you were ask me the price of bread or milk, I probably could not tell you even though I buy them every week. This is because I have no choice but to buy these staples and can afford to, so there seems to be no point in agonizing over their prices. But I do know the price of gas, even though the same conditions apply.

Dead pope’s blood to reduce crime?

Catholic theologians tend to be a pretty sophisticated bunch. How can they possibly reconcile themselves to their church when the Vatican does things like this?

A vial containing the late pope John Paul II’s blood will soon be winging its way to Mexico in a bid to help bring down crimes rates in the largely Catholic country, Vatican Radio reported Wednesday.
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Several vials of blood were taken from Pope John Paul II during the last days of his life in 2005. They have since taken on the aura of holy relics, with Catholic faithful invited to venerate them.

That’s not all. The Vatican is also going to display vials of his blood for people to venerate.

There’s something truly creepy about the Catholic church’s obsession with the actual flesh and blood of dead people.

Mythic hero films

When I was a teenager in Sri Lanka, there seemed to be a never-ending supply of adventure films involving bare-chested muscular heroes (usually played by body builder Steve Reeves) portraying mythic characters fighting evildoers and monsters. The films had titles like Goliath and the Barbarians, Ursus, Hercules, Hercules Unchained, and Hercules and the Three Bears (ok, I made the last one up). These films were made in Italy and the actors’ lines were badly dubbed into English. The films were low-budget and cheesy, and although they and made for some campy fun, one quickly grew tired of them.

By the time Arnold Schwarzenegger came along, I had no desire whatsoever to revisit that genre and in fact have not seen a single film of his. I will not see the current remake of Conan the Barbarian either, but I found Stephen Whitty’s review to be hilarious.

When the US government takes advantage of Sharia law

Sharia law is a system of justice based on Islam as defined in that religion’s sacred texts. Like any system of justice based on religion, it is intolerant, cruel, obsessed with sex, and incompatible with our modern understanding of what makes for a humane society. For example, “Within Sharia law, there are a group of “Haram” offenses which carry severe punishments. These include pre-marital sexual intercourse, sex by divorced persons, post-marital sex, adultery, false accusation of unlawful intercourse, drinking alcohol, theft, and highway robbery. Haram sexual offenses can carry a sentence of stoning to death or severe flogging.”

There has been some hysteria in the US about the creeping threat of Sharia law being imposed in the US, and the claims that Barack Obama may be a secret Muslim are part of this paranoia. Twelve states have even proposed legislation to ban it, although the First Amendment would make these superfluous since it would rule out any laws that seek to advance the interests of any one religion.

But despite this anti-Sharia feeling, what people may not be aware of is that Sharia law is what the US used to enable CIA agent Ray Davis to escape trial and punishment for murder in Pakistan.

You may recall the case in which Davis was captured after gunning down two men in a crowded city. The US demanded that he be released immediately while the Pakistan government said that he had no alternative but to go through the legal process. The US government and the media kept the public in the dark about the facts of the case.

Then to everyone’s surprise, Davis was suddenly released and quickly spirited out of the country. How did that happen? Because the US took advantage of Sharia law in which a person accused of a murder can be released if the family members of the victim pardon him in exchange for ‘blood money’, which is what happened in the Davis case. The Pakistani government has confirmed this.

Shaukat Qadir, a retired senior Pakistani military officer, explains the deal that was struck.

It appears, therefore, that the deal struck between the military leadership included a shut down of CIA’s HUMINT operations in Pakistan, retaining only ELINT, Davis would ‘sing’, within limits, of course, and only then could Blood Money be negotiated for his release. And the US would be bled in that final deal also so as to ensure the safety and the future of the immediate families of both Davis’s victims.

At the height of the debate on the question of Raymond Davis’ immunity from trial for murder, this writer emphasized that Pakistan could not release him without a trial. A trial took duly place and, in accordance with prevalent law in Pakistan, the next of kin of the deceased young men, pardoned Davis in return for ‘Blood Money’. However outlandish this law might seem to those peoples whose countries have their based on Anglo-Saxon principles, such is the law in Pakistan and so there was nothing underhand in what transpired.

Alexander Cockburn says that reports have emerged that “a price tag of about $1.5 million per family was been paid, with US citizenship for a dozen or more members of each family, with job guarantees for those of age and education opportunities guaranteed for children – more than they could ever dream of and sufficiently tempting for them to pardon Davis. Money in sufficient quantity rarely loses its persuasive powers.”

So there you have it. Sharia law was used by the US government to enable Ray Davis to escape punishment for his crime. But don’t expect the wingnuts to make a fuss about it.

France taxes the rich

What is looked upon with horror in some circles in the US is viewed as perfectly reasonable in France.

The French government is to impose an extra tax of 3% on annual income above 500,000 euros (£440,000; $721,000).

It is part of a package of measures to try to cut the country’s deficit by 12bn euros over two years.

The tax increase came after some of France’s wealthiest people had called on the government to tackle its deficit by raising taxes on the rich.

See, that wasn’t so hard was it?

The logic of science-15: Truth by logical contradiction

(For other posts in this series, see here.)

Theologians often try to claim that they can arrive at eternal truths about god by using pure logic. In some sense, they are forced to make this claim because they have no evidence on their side but it is worthwhile to examine if it is possible to arrive at any truth purely logically. If so, we can see if that method can be co-opted to science, thus bypassing the need for evidence.

In mathematics, there is one way to prove that something is true using just logic alone and this is the method known as reductio ad absurdum or reduction to absurdity. The way it works is like this. Suppose you think that some proposition is true and want to prove it. You start by assuming that the negation of that proposition is true, and then show that this leads to a logical contradiction or a result that is manifestly false. This would convincingly prove that the starting assumption (the negation of the proposition under consideration) was false and hence that the original proposition was true.
[Read more…]

The Bush-Obama presidency

David Bromwich, a professor of literature at Yale, argues that there is a remarkable continuity between the Bush and Obama presidencies. He repeats the warning that I have made earlier, that Obama and the Democrats are in fact more dangerous to the fortunes of the not-wealthy than the Republicans were.

In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” — a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition. A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.

Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.
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A certain mystery surrounds Obama’s perpetuation of Bush’s economic policies, in the absence of the reactionary class loyalty that accompanied them, and his expansion of Bush’s war policies in the absence of the crude idea of the enemy and the spirited love of war that drove Bush. But the puzzle has grown tiresome, and the effects of the continuity matter more than its sources.

Bush we knew the meaning of, and the need for resistance was clear. Obama makes resistance harder. During a deep crisis, such a nominal leader, by his contradictory words and conduct and the force of his example (or rather the lack of force in his example), becomes a subtle disaster for all whose hopes once rested with him.

Bromwich looks in detail at which advisors the president likes to keep and which ones he is quick to jettison and sees a pattern that points to Obama’s willing complicity in the looting by the oligarchy.

Meanwhile Glenn Greenwald argues that the increasing surveillance powers that the US and UK governments have developed to spy on and monitor their own citizens is because they are afraid of the growing anger among their populations at the fact that most people are being marginalized while a very few are doing well. The governments will need this information to crack down on possible mass protests in the future.

This year, the Obama administration began demanding greater power to obtain Internet records without a court order. Meanwhile, the Chairwoman of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, is sponsoring a truly pernicious bill that would force Internet providers “to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year.” And a whole slew of sleazy, revolving-door functionaries from the public/private consortium that is the National Security State — epitomized by former Bush DNI and current Booz Allen executive Adm. Michael McConnell — are exploiting fear-mongering hysteria over cyber-attacks to justify incredibly dangerous (and profitable) Internet controls. As The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest and William Arkin reported in their “Top Secret America” series last year: “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.” That is a sprawling, out-of-control Surveillance State.

One must add to all of these developments the growing attempts to stifle meaningful dissent of any kind — especially civil disobedience — through intimidation and excessive punishment. The cruel and degrading treatment of Bradley Manning, the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks, the unprecedentedly harsh war on whistleblowers: these are all grounded in the recognition that the technology itself cannot be stopped, but making horrific examples out of those who effectively oppose powerful factions can chill others from doing so.

There is already a lot of anger in the US. This is often taking inchoate forms and directed at the wrong targets out of ignorance (the Tea Party is a good example of this) but the ruling class cannot depend on that happy state of affairs continuing forever.

Greedy geezer

Harvey Golub, former CEO of American Express, takes to the opinion pages of the August 22, 2011 issue of the Wall Street Journal to whine about how unfair the current tax system is to rich people like him and that it would be an outrage if his taxes are raised. But he has solutions to the budget deficit! He feels that eliminating the departments of education and energy is better than him paying more taxes.

There is one statement that is flat-out incredible, where he says: “Of my current income this year, I expect to pay 80%-90% in federal income taxes, state income taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes, and federal and state estate taxes.”

80-90% of his current income goes in taxes? To the calculators, Batman!

I have no idea what Golub’s income is this year is but let’s say it is one million dollars. Let’s be most generous in our calculations in his favor and assume that it is all from salary and that he is a single person and claims no deductions at all.

First off, federal and state estate taxes are not based on income at all, so it is deceitful for him to include that in the list of taxes that are set off against income. Furthermore, aren’t those taxes a one-time thing imposed at death? Does he die at the end of every year, pay the tax, and come back to life the following year? If so, he should really write about that, rather than this bilge.

As for the rest, he would pay federal income tax $327,643, social security tax $11,106 (assuming that he generously pays the employer’s contribution as well), Medicare $29,000 (again picking up the employer’s tab), and state income tax (if he lived in Ohio) $56,464, for a grand total of $424,213, or 42% of his income.

In reality, people like him claim a lot of deductions, have tax shelters, and get a lot of their income from investments that are taxed at a lower rate. I would be surprised if he pays even half that amount.