What we have lost in the so-called ‘war on terror’

Radley Balko compiles a list of all the things that we have lost in the Glorious War on Terror. He said that he compiled this list simply off the top of his head without doing a lot of research but it seems pretty complete to me. Here is his complete listy:

  • We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
  • We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
  • In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
  • We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
  • The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
  • The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
  • Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
  • The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
  • The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
  • Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
  • American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
  • Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
  • The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.

If the government had issued all these new policies suddenly, there would have been a revolt (at least I like to think there would have been). But all these things were introduced gradually and by both parties, after the public had been softened up by a continuous drumbeat of fear-mongering. It is only when the full list is compiled that we see how far we have sunk.

This is the danger of creeping authoritarianism.

Myths about the Golden Ratio

Take a straight line. How should one divide the length into two parts such that the ratio of the length of the whole line to the longer segment is equal to the ratio of the longer segment to the shorter one? A little algebra gives you the result that longer segment should be 0.618 times the length of the whole line and thus the ratio of the full line to the longer segment is 1.618 (=1/0.618).

The number 1.618 is known as the ‘Golden Ratio’ and folklore ascribes deep significance to it and claims a ubiquity for it that far exceeds the reality.

Mathematician Keith Devlin tries to set the record straight.

Paying for people’s services

There is a 78-year old Austrian billionaire named Richard Lugner who likes to have women celebrities as his dates at a fancy ball that is held every year in Austria. He reportedly pays them as much as $150,000 for the pleasure of their company and in the past has squired such well-known names like Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton, Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, and Andie MacDowell. Apparently there are complicated financial negotiations that have to be gone through by representatives of both parties before the deals are finalized and contracts signed. It all seems a bit much for a few hours of socializing.
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Michael Lewis on The Colbert Report

Michael Lewis appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show recently to discuss the financial crisis. I realize that this is a comedy show and that the humor is provided by Colbert using his guests as foils, but on occasion Colbert gets carried away and talks far too much. This was one of those episodes where he kept on interrupting Lewis and became really annoying. Lewis as a guest was interesting and amusing in his own right and Colbert was a nuisance and a distraction.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Michael Lewis
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The collapse of the Irish economy

Those following business news will have read that many European countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Italy) are facing financial crises and are looking for help from external sources. The causes of their predicament are drearily familiar: a banking sector that lent money recklessly on the basis of endless growth in real estate prices and now that that market collapsed, the big banks are demanding that governments must bail them out or that the entire financial system will collapse. It is exactly the kind of extortion that happens in the US. This is why the terms ‘banksters’, which was coined as an amalgam of bankers and gangsters during the time of the Great Depression, is so apropos in describing them.

Currently all eyes are on Greece but in an article for Vanity Fair titled When Irish Eyes Are Crying, Michael Lewis describes the spectacular rise, and even more spectacular fall, of the Irish economy. “What has occurred in Ireland since then is without precedent in economic history. By the start of the new millennium, the Irish poverty rate was under 6 percent and by 2006 Ireland was one of the richest countries in the world.” And yet, within a few years, it had completely tanked.

An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.
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In late 2006, the unemployment rate stood at a bit more than 4 percent; now it’s 14 percent and climbing toward rates not experienced since the mid-1980s. Just a few years ago, Ireland was able to borrow money more cheaply than Germany; now, if it can borrow at all, it will be charged interest rates nearly 6 percent higher than Germany, another echo of a distant past. The Irish budget deficit—which three years ago was a surplus—is now 32 percent of its G.D.P., the highest by far in the history of the Eurozone. One credit-analysis firm has judged Ireland the third-most-likely country to default. Not quite as risky for the global investor as Venezuela, but riskier than Iraq. Distinctly Third World, in any case.

Ireland managed to collapse its banking sector without all the new fangled gimmickry of Wall Street with its derivatives and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs). They lost money the old-fashioned way, with a classic bubble where they kept buying and selling each other real estate at escalating prices using easily available mortgages on the assumption that prices would continue to rise.

But unlike in the US where a homeowner is only liable for the value of the mortgage and thus can walk away from their home if its market value drops below the mortgage amount (a state known as being ‘underwater’ or ‘upside down’), leaving the bank to get what it can from the foreclosed property, in Ireland you are forced to pay back to the bank what you owe. This means that the average person faces unavoidable large and inescapable debts.

Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest in the world. There’s no such thing as a non-recourse home mortgage in Ireland. The guy who pays too much for his house is not allowed to simply hand the keys to the bank and walk away. He’s on the hook, personally, for whatever he borrowed. Across Ireland, people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.

There is one major difference in what happened in Ireland and in the US. As Lewis says, “In America the banks went down, but the big shots in them still got rich; in Ireland the big shots went down with the banks.”

But despite that one slightly positive aspect, the Irish banks are still draining the economy. In March, the Irish government said that they need another 24 billion euros to ‘save’ the banks, whose ratings have been reduced to junk status and the total cost of the bailouts keeps continually rising.

Currently Greece is in the headlines because of fears that it will default on its debts. I do not think this will happen because the banksters will demand that money be loaned to the Greek government so that it can then give it to the banks. Since these banks have global reach, they can exert pressure on the French and German governments to lend the Greek government the money. Of course, those governments will tell their people that this ‘aid’ is in order to save the European Union when it is really driven by the banksters’ extortion.

Progressives and elections

Veteran political observer Sam Smith tries to provides some guidance as we enter the fairy tale period known as the presidential election season where desperate people pin their hopes on some leader to take us out of the mess we are in, not realizing that the game is rigged and that wars, assaults on civil liberties, and giveaways to the rich will continue whoever wins.

There has been over the past few decades a steady deterioration of the political difference between national Democratic and Republican politics, most notably with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Today it is hard to define that difference given the strong bipartisan support for several illegal wars, the unconstitutional Patriot Act, and a bottomless desire to bail out Wall Street, and a stunning indifference to the financial problems of everyone else.
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It’s more sensible to regard the two major parties as Mafia mobs fighting for control of a region known as the United States.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a difference between them. But it’s about survival, however, not politics. The Demos tend to do less damage to our lives than the Repubs. Both mobs may beat the shit out your father, but the Demos are less likely to harm your children or your grandmother.
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If America is to be saved, it will because of movements outside the mainstream political game. It’s always been like that and will continue to be so.

So enjoy the fairy tale that is bubbling up around us. Vote for the bastards who will be do us the least harm. But if you want to be part of the story – and you are whether you desire it or not – then that only thing that will really matter is what you do outside the voting booth.

Classifying the Republican candidates

There are so many people running for the Republican nomination that it is hard to keep track of them all, so I decided to make it easier by classifying them according to what I thought their intentions are. The asterisk is for those who are being coy and have not yet declared that they intend to run.

  1. Those who are serious about the 2012 election: Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee*
  2. Those who are using this as a dry run for 2016: Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry*
  3. Those who are using this to gain visibility and promote ideas: Ron Paul, Gary Johnson
  4. Those who are using the election to promote/enrich themselves: Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin*
  5. Those who think that god wants them to be president or have otherwise lost touch with reality: Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Herman Cain, Rudy Giuliani*

Some people may belong in more than one category. Palin, for example, could easily be put in 1, 2 and 5 as well but I limited myself to just one. Feel free to argue with my sorting. I may have also overlooked someone, the field is so crowded.

But where is my favorite candidate Alan Keyes? No major election is complete without the man who set the standard for the crazification factor. Run, Alan, run! God is calling you to save the nation!

More religious cruelty and stupidity

Blog reader FuDaYi sent me this news item about a Jewish rabbinical court that sentenced to death by stoning a dog that wandered into premises because they thought it was the reincarnation of a secular lawyer who had antagonized the court 20 years earlier and had been cursed by the judges to have his spirit passed to a dog when he died, which happened a few years ago. Fortunately the dog escaped.

What is it about religion that destroys people’s minds?