Quotes

I just picked up "Free the Market: When Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive" by Gary L Reback. It starts with this quote by George Will (from this column):

It will remind everyone -- some conservatives, painfully -- that a mature capitalist economy is a government project. A properly functioning free market system does not spring spontaneously from society's soil as dandelions spring from suburban lawns. Rather, it is a complex creation of laws and mores...

Bingo.

As I continue to plow through the magazines I set aside during my sports shooting season, I wanted to note the 2009 October issue of The Atantic. It focused mostly on media issues, but also featured one of the best discussions of U.S. Torture Policy in Andrew Sullivan's letter to former-President Bush that offers perhaps the only real solution for moving forward on this important issue.

I was struck by a quote from Mark Bowden (an author I almost always enjoy reading, regardless of subject matter) in his "The Story Behind the Story" that really gets to the heart of why Fox News bothers me so much:

Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful because it does not seek power. It seeks truth.

Fox News has blazed a path of subverting what journalism should be. They weren't the first - but they have blown away the competition. And it bothers me to the extent that other networks copy that approach in an attempt to gain viewers rather than educate viewers.

I was pleasantly surprised by Robert D. Kaplan's "Why I Love Al Jazeera," (which was about Al Jazeera English, not the arabic sister-channel). AJE is basically a BBC-style program if Howard Zinn ran it - it focuses intently on the perspective of the powerless.

And Kaplan also zinged Fox News - noting:

I have spent the past two years reporting from the Indian Ocean region, dealing predominantly with Muslims and indigenous nongovernmental organizations; watching Al Jazeera is the vicarious equivalent of engaging in the kinds of conversations I have been having. One of the multitude of problems I have with Fox News is that even its most analytically brilliant commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, seem to be scoring points and talking to their own ideological kind rather than engaging in dialogue with others. Watching Fox, you have to wonder whether many of its commentators have ever had a conversation with a real live Muslim abroad.

History from the Daily Beast:

Conservatives delude themselves that the Bush tax cuts worked and that the best medicine for America’s economic woes is more tax cuts; at a minimum, any tax increase would be economic poison. They forget that Ronald Reagan worked hard to pass one of the largest tax increases in American history in September 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, even though the nation was still in a recession that didn’t end until November of that year. Indeed, one could easily argue that the enactment of that legislation was a critical prerequisite to recovery because it led to a decline in interest rates. The same could be said of Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which many conservatives predicted would cause a recession but led to one of the biggest economic booms in history.

For the most part, the world's religions are strongest in those areas where people are poor, uneducated, without hope for a decent future, and influenced by the vision of the wonderful afterlife thta all the orthodoxies give promise to.

from an article called "Perhaps, My Swan Song" David Koven in Social Anarchism issue 39 in 2006.

Nonetheless, I think it wise to be familiar with religion - or at least catch phrases. One of the things I respect about daddYman is that though he is strongly opposed to Christianity as practiced in America, he also knows the Bible. This fascinating clip from NPR's On the Media suggests many of the folks at the NY Times don't know the Bible. Pretty hilarious, really.

I have yet to fully read the Bible, but I have read large parts of it and I find it quite handy in talking to people and understanding their thought process. Such knowledge is important in these United States - where so many claim to be inspired by an internally contradictory book from which they can find passages to justify damn near anything.

I have been shepherding a disastrous web site migration at work - moving from a large static HTML site to a content management system. We're a year late, over budget, and sick of the whole damn thing.

Over the weekend, our contractors put a patch up that was supposed to resolve a problem but it seems to have only made things worse. As I was explaining it to my boss, I said

In web development, it is always darkest before dawn and it always gets darker than you could possibly imagine

This has probably been said before, but it was an original thought to me (I think).

From the Dhammapada - Sayings of the Buddha

Anger is like a charioteer careering wildly.
He who curbs his anger is the true charioteer.
Others merely hold the reins.

It has been too long since I put up some quotes.

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman - From lecture "What is and What Should be the Role of Scientific Culture in Modern Society", given at the Galileo Symposium in Italy, 1964 - Source.

I think this really applies to how we have to live in this post-fact society.

I love reading The New Republic -- until I reach the last page. Leon Wieseltier is frequently featured as their "Washington Diarist" and I generally find him to be

1. Wrong
2. Dumb
3. Arrogant
4. Incomprehensible

Not always all 4, but always at least one. Occasionally I agree. Today was interesting - the November 5, 2008 issue has his "The Ballot Blues."

But before I go into that, I should note that I don't place a lot of blame on him when I find him incomprehensible. I blame myself for not having the energy to sort out writing when the author is intentionally trying to be hard to read - which is his mission in some pieces from what I can tell.

I believe good writers make themselves easy to understand, but some brilliant writers are well worth reading even when they make themselves hard to understand. It seems like an art - but I have never found anything Leon made hard to understand worth reading. I'm sure others have.

But I found a brilliant quote in this piece

I like capitalism, but not religiously, and I feel the same way about diplomacy. I do not trust bankers to understand American values and poets to understand American interests.

True to Leon form, after writing something brilliant, he has to balance it with something moronic. He says McCain was "splendidly right about the surge, which is not a small thing; and the grudging way Obama treats the reversal in Iraq, when he treats it at all, is disgraceful."

Leon should be smart enough to realize that the surge has not brought victory in Iraq. In exchange for fewer lost lives each month, we continue to spend billions for little gain for any American (and possibly humanitarian) interest. The "success" of the surge came largely from paying our enemies not to attack us - which is to say about 10x worse than "appeasement."

So many Americans want to kill the insurgents who dared attack our liberation-bringing troops. Listening to people call into radio shows whenever Guantanamo is brought up is instructive - it doesn't matter if someone materially supported attacks on our troops or not - if they are down there, they should be executed. These same Americans love that the insurgents we didn't catch are now drawing a paycheck from the same imperial army they once attacked.

So if we caught you, we should kill you. But if you were sneaky enough, we pay you.

But let's be clear - I support paying the insurgents. We should have done it long ago. It is well worth saving American lives who never should have been in Iraq anyway - and if committed to Iraq, should have been better supported by their military and civilian commanders. But let's not pretend the surge brought about the decline of violence from unacceptable to acceptable levels. It is largely the result of intelligent policies created before the surge that should have been embraced years ago if not for the fact that the Bush Administration cared more about keeping Rumsfeld in power than putting America's needs first.

And such as it is, the surge set a number of political goals and practically none have been met. But we can ignore that because Americans are not dying - and being grievously wounded - in large enough numbers to merit media coverage when we can talk about a campaign that will never end.

Should we be attacked in the first 10 months of an Obama administration - in an attack planned from Afghanistan and/or Pakistan, we will undoubtedly find many blaming Obama despite the fact it was Bush who refused to honor his pledge to hunt down bin Laden. But this is the nature of politics - never let facts get in the way of your predisposed notions.

From the March 28 Diane Rehm show on WAMU (second hour).

Caller: I am actually have Sunni and half Shi'ite. And I think that the recent events in Basra are a great example of how this Western narrative of Sunnis and Shi'ites fighting for ages is wrong. What happened in Iraq is a political and economic war between Sunnis and Shi'ites who are nationalists against other Sunnis and Shi'ites who are separatists and want to secede. I wish we can hear more from the Iraqi narrative instead of repeating over and over one narrative.

...

Panelist: People always fight for economic purposes, for political power but they always couch it with religious or ideological garb. This is what is happening in Iraq.

This captures a major thought I have long failed to spit out in a succinct manner. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are demagogues, not Christians. If they found a way to harness atheists with slick-talk and gain even more power, you can believe they would do it in a second.

When I was in the Middle East, whether in Israel, Palestine, or other areas, I never got the sense of a true religious dimension to the conflict aside from the obvious ways their leaders used that shared identity to motivate action. What the religion teaches is of secondary importance, what is important is that people have a shared identity. Once the shared identity is cemented, no one asks questions because to do so would threaten their identity.

The war in Iraq is not between Sunnis and Shi'as - or even between the U.S. and terrorists or the U.S. and Iraqis. The war is between competing groups of people who harness a Sunni or Shi'a identity to achieve some gain. If they were all Sunni's, they would still be fighting but using some other distinct piece of a shared identity to motivate action.

This is why I find so much of religion and who believes in God to be non-interesting. Because if there was no such thing as religion, we would still have people like Pat Robertson occupying the same position and push small-minded agendas to divide us based on inconsequential details like who we like to sleep with. Religion is not the problem nearly as much as a human tendency to seek out like-minded people to create a shared identity.

Once the shared identity is created, some folks inevitably find ways of profiting from exploiting it. Those who think differently are ostracized.

The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retro-active immunity. No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he's willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.

In what appears to be a growing tit-for-tat hat tip, thanks to Moldy Blue Cheese Curds for that Kennedy quote.

I wrote to our Senator Coleman asking him to respect the Constitution and refuse to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies who gave the government access to our private conservations (thank you Qwest for refusing to violate the law and telling the Bush Administration to piss off until it was in compliance with the law).

The Honorable Senator, who must have momentarily forgotten his oath to uphold said Constitution, replied that more or less, if the President asks someone to break the law and tells them they are not breaking the law, they should not be punished for breaking the law. Seems like kind of a bad precedent.

But hey, this is a time of war and the King should be free to act. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right? The right to privacy is only something we should expect when, I dunno, buying weapons I guess.

Which brings me to - what the hell is up with people gunning down lots of people lately? Damn, reading the national news is like watching a damn western lately.