The exact number of crazy people in the population

When opinion polls are conducted and the results released, I always wonder at what level of support we should begin to take minority viewpoints seriously. I had arrived at a rough rule of thumb that, depending on the issue being polled (politics, religion, science, etc.), you could always find anywhere between 10-20% of the population willing to subscribe to whatever truly nutty option is offered to them, whether it is because they are truly believe in it or are answering at random or are just having fun at the pollsters’ expense. (Whenever polls survey young people about their beliefs and activities, I suspect that the last factor rises considerably.)

Back in 2005, Kung Fu Monkey was able to put a more precise figure on the nutty segment, at least when it comes to people’s preferences for political candidates: 27%.

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —

Tyrone: 27%.

John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Makes sense to me. So when you find people like Sarah Palin polling in the mid-twenties as people’s choice for president, bear that in mind.

Why the US mainstream media cannot be trusted

Gareth Porter uses the latest WikiLeaks release to illustrate how the New York Times and the Washington Post lie to their readers by omission, carefully editing their stories to reflect the views of the government.

A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.

The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish “at the request of the Obama administration”. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly-distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website.

NPR is only marginally less obsequious to US government interests. As Paul Craig Roberts writes,

On November 29, National Public Radio emphasized that the cables showed that Iran was isolated even in the Muslim world, making it easier for the Israelis and Americans to attack. The leaked cables reveal that the president of Egypt, an American puppet, hates Iran, and the Saudi Arabian government has been long urging the US government to attack Iran. In other words, Iran is so dangerous to the world that even its co-religionists want Iran wiped off the face of the earth.

NPR presented several nonobjective “Iranian experts” who denigrated Iran and its leadership and declared that the US government, by resisting its Middle Eastern allies’ calls for bombing Iran, was the moderate in the picture. The fact that President George W. Bush declared Iran to be a member of “the axis of evil” and threatened repeatedly to attack Iran, and that President Obama has continued the threats–Adm. Michael Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has just reiterated that the US hasn’t taken the attack option off the table–are not regarded by American “Iran experts” as indications of anything other than American moderation.

Somehow it did not come across in the NPR newscast that it is not Iran but Israel that routinely slaughters civilians in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, and that it is not Iran but the US and its NATO mercenaries who slaughter civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yeman, and Pakistan.

Iran has not invaded any of its neighbors, but the Americans are invading countries half way around the globe.

Notice that the items in the cables that have received the most publicity is how some Arab leaders want Iran to be bombed. The media spotlight this because this continues the demonizing of Iran, which is a key policy objective of the US and Israel and helps prepare the groundwork for a potential attack on Iran. They also act as if the views of these leaders are also the views of the people in those nations. Noam Chomsky, appearing on Democracy Now!, gives the unreported other side of the story:

[T]he main significance of the cables that have been released so far is what they tell us about Western leadership. So, Hillary Clinton and Binyamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. And the results are rather striking. They show that Arab opinion does—holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that the region will be—it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. Eighty percent, 77 percent say that the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. Ten percent say that Iran is the major threat.

Surely the question of why the dictators of these Arab countries want the US to attack Iran in the face of wide opposition of their own people should be of some interest? But that is a discussion that you will rarely hear. But Roberts gives a possible explanation:

The “Iranian experts” treated the Saudi and Egyptian rulers’ hatred of Iran as a vindication of the US and Israeli governments’ demonization of Iran. Not a single “Iranian expert” was capable of pointing out that the tyrants who rule Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear Iran because the Iranian government represents the interests of Muslims, and the Saudi and Egyptian governments represent the interests of the Americans.

Think what it must feel like to be a tyrant suppressing the aspirations of your own people in order to serve the hegemony of a foreign country, while a nearby Muslim government strives to protect its people’s independence from foreign hegemony.

Undoubtedly, the tyrants become very anxious. What if their oppressed subjects get ideas? Little wonder the Saudis and Egyptian rulers want the Americans to eliminate the independent-minded country that is a bad example for Egyptian and Saudi subjects.

Pause for a moment and reflect. The government of Iran is by no means an admirable one. It has many, many serious defects. But the US and Israel would be very pleased if it were replaced by dictators like those in Saudi Arabia, a proud US ally, but a country whose rulers are far worse than Iran’s in almost every respect.

This is why anyone who really seeks to be informed has to find sources beyond the ones that are not mainstream ones. In a future post, I will try and provide a list of the sources I use that some readers might find helpful.

When ‘Judeo-Christian’ really means just ‘Christian’

There is a move to dump the present speaker of the Texas house of representatives because he is a Jew, with some saying “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.”

But of course they resent any suggestion that they are bigoted towards Jews. As one of them said, “My favorite person that’s ever been on this earth is a Jew… How can they possibly think that [I am a bigot] if Jesus Christ is a Jew, and he’s my favorite person that’s ever been on this earth?”

Who can argue with logic like that?

Christians are so cute when they are self-unaware

At the opening of a recent conference in Cancun, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change invoked the Mayan goddess Ixchel as “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”

This caused considerable snickering among our Christian commentariat at these strange and obviously false gods.

I think it is time to show again a cartoon that I suspect is going to get a lot of use.

David Stockman, progressive?

It’s a sign of how insane the current state of politics has become when David Stockman, the budget director for Ronald Reagan (who was considered a right wing extremist in those days), is advocating policies to curb the debt that would be considered far too progressive by even Obama and the Democrats .

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'David Stockman
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Democracy Now! on the Wikileaks release

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists is one of those people who tries to be a ‘responsible’ transparency advocate which requires him to criticize WikiLeaks. Democracy Now!, a wonderful news source, has Glenn Greenwald debate him. Well worth watching, right up to the end where host Amy Goodman reads memos from the government warning employees not to even read the cables released by WikiLeaks, even on their home computers!

Why I support WikiLeaks

The latest WikiLeaks release, like the previous ones, have resulted in people taking two contradictory positions. On the one hand there are those who seek to minimize the importance of the release by focusing on the titillating bits of gossip conveyed by diplomatic cable and suggesting, in an oh-so-weary insider tone, that this is the normal business of governments. Such people say that the leaks reveal nothing of value. Glenn Greenwald points out that this is not true (He gives links to all the claims he makes):

In this latest WikiLeaks release — probably the least informative of them all, at least so far — we learned a great deal as well. Juan Cole today details the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East. Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA’s kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent. The head of the Bank of England got caught interfering in British politics to induce harsher austerity measures in violation of his duty to remain apolitical and removed from the political process, a scandal resulting in calls for his resignation. British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures. Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know: it’s just “law,” nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).

Then we have the other extreme, those who are actually calling for the murder of Julian Assange because of the supposedly serious damage he has done to the US, an odd charge if the release contains nothing of value. I find it chilling that we have reached the stage when it is considered perfectly acceptable for so called ‘respectable’ people to publicly call for the extra-judicial killing of those who have not been found guilty of any crime whatsoever. This kind of speech (“Kill Julian Assange! Hang Bradley Manning! Nuke North Korea! Bomb Iran!”) used to be the preserve of the recognizably lunatic fringe of society, the ravings of drunks and racists and bigots or the just plan stupid. But not anymore. People say these things on TV and in the newspapers and are treated as if they are serious commentators.

Greenwald also takes on those who try to straddle the issue, wanting to preserve their vaguely independent bona fides while still seeking to be seen as ‘respectable’ by the political and media establishment. These people pick on missteps by WikiLeaks to tut-tut about how they should have done it better.

One could respond that it’s good that we know these specific things, but not other things WikiLeaks has released. That’s all well and good; as I’ve said several times, there are reasonable concerns about some specific disclosures here. But in the real world, this ideal, perfectly calibrated subversion of the secrecy regime doesn’t exist. WikiLeaks is it. We have occasional investigative probes of isolated government secrets coming from establishment media outlets (the illegal NSA program, the CIA black sites, the Pentagon propaganda program), along with transparency groups such as the ACLU, CCR, EPIC and EFF valiantly battling through protracted litigation to uncover secrets. But nothing comes close to the blows WikiLeaks has struck in undermining that regime.

The real-world alternative to the current iteration of WikiLeaks is not The Perfect Wikileaks that makes perfect judgments about what should and should not be disclosed, but rather, the ongoing, essentially unchallenged hegemony of the permanent National Security State, for which secrecy is the first article of faith and prime weapon. (My emphasis)

Greenwald highlights the steady perversion of democracy that has happened right before our eyes.

Because we’re supposed to have an open government – a democracy – everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That’s not just some lofty, abstract theory; it’s central to having anything resembling “consent of the governed.”

But we have completely abandoned that principle; we’ve reversed it. Now, everything the Government does is presumptively secret; only the most ceremonial and empty gestures are made public. That abuse of secrecy powers is vast, deliberate, pervasive, dangerous and destructive. That’s the abuse that WikiLeaks is devoted to destroying, and which its harshest critics – whether intended or not – are helping to preserve.

In this interview with NPR, Der Spiegel reporter Gregor Peter Schmitz, who has been one of those studying the recent WikiLeaks documents for months, says that upcoming reports will reveal a lot of important things and they are not just gossip meant to embarrass the US, as many have been quick to claim. He says, “If you read the whole coverage that is coming out over the next weeks or so, you will realize that this is about important global developments; it’s giving you an insight into, well, basically how the world is perceived and run from an American’s perspective, and I think that is something that the public has a right to know, yeah.”

As time goes by and independent analysts (i.e., people not concerned about being in the good graces of the government) have more opportunities to study the cables, other revelations will surely follow and I will highlight them as they emerge.

The legendary investigative journalist I. F. Stone said, “Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” WikiLeaks is striking a blow for openness and transparency, the very essence of democracy.

The critics of WikiLeaks seem to have forgotten what they are entitled to by being members of a democracy, and do not see that WikiLeaks is returning to them something precious that they have mindlessly given away. All those who value those things should support it.