Obama Speaks English Again

There's a lot of pressure on candidates to avoid risk, to talk tough, to elide and not say what they mean. Barack Obama was roundly press-crucified for saying that he wouldn't nuke Iran, naive as that notion may be. He retreated into cautious inanities for a couple of months, and his poll numbers dropped. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton, in effect, voted for legislation that gives the current Occupiers the go-ahead to attack Iran in connection to prestidigitations into Iraq. This gave Obama an opening to definitively call BS on Her Clintonessa. His passion and intellect pulse for real, and he's still one of us. Hillary has passed far beyond us, on into the frozen lands of fairy maidens.

While there would be a foreign policy pragmatism gain if Hillary gets elected, there won't be any substantive change in the Empire's stance with regards to the Mid-East, or war footing, or energy policy. Better to give money to Obama, Chris Dodd, or Ron Paul. They want to change the equation in a fundamental way and stop the Dracula Strategy. Hillary's on board the Status Quo like a jump-suited Pro-Ho in a purple pimp-mobile. An improvement on sheer idiocy, sure, but she's been anointed with unholy oils and is up for a crude awakening. Obama's lighting her up again, which is Real Good. Read his statements in bold below and please tell me if they don't make sense:

DES MOINES, Iowa - Democrat Barack Obama has stepped up criticism of front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton, sending Iowans a mailing noting that he opposed a measure that critics warn could lead to war with Iran and was supported by Clinton.

"Barack Obama opposed another Bush foreign policy fiasco," said the mailing, being sent to thousands of homes on Tuesday.

At issue is a measure in the Senate which declared Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which Obama called "conventional" while campaigning in New Hampshire.

"What I've insisted is, we have to completely rethink foreign policy and diplomacy. ... We have to talk not just to our friends but also to our enemies. That includes Iran. That includes Syria," Obama said at a house party in Merrimack, N.H.

Clinton voted in favor of the Senate measure. She defended her vote over the weekend, saying she did so only after language which could be interpreted as an authorization of the use of force was removed.

Clinton sent a mailing to Iowa activists explaining her vote. It included comments from retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin siding with Clinton's vote.

Obama countered with his own mailing on Tuesday.

"Why is this amendment so dangerous?" Obama's mailing said. "Because George Bush and Dick Cheney could use this language to justify keeping our troops in Iraq as long as they can point to a threat from Iran, and because they could use this language to justify an attack on Iran as part of the ongoing war in Iraq."

Responding to the mailing, Clinton spokesman Mark Daley said: "If Senator Obama really thinks this is an issue of war and peace, it's odd that he didn't speak out against the measure before it passed or show up to vote against it. That's not the kind of strength and leadership Iowans are looking for."

The dispute goes to a fundamental disagreement between Obama and Clinton.

Obama routinely criticizes Clinton for voting in favor of authorizing the use of force in Iraq, a move he opposed even though he had yet to be elected to the Senate. He says that shows he has "judgment we can trust," while Clinton's judgment is flawed despite her experience in Washington.

Clinton has said only she would not have voted to authorize the use of force if she knew at the time what she now knows. She blames flawed intelligence.

In New Hampshire, Obama said the debate is representative of the campaign's larger differences.

"We have very good candidates on the Democratic side," he said. "The question, though, is whether you are going to nominate a candidate who is not just tinkering around the edges or can bring about real change."

Iran Facts Update: Earth Moves Under Thy Feet

Update: Talks in Rome held, and successful too, According to Solana.
In this picture, he is shaking hands with the resigned negotiator, Dr. Larijani. Iranians showed a united front, and willingness to negotiate peaceful solution.

I am beginning to romanticize the cleverness of the Iranian government, wondering with a satisfied grin: was the resignation a part of the choreography?
=================================

More than 180 Iranian MPs have signed a letter praising former chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, who has resigned from his post.

The deputy speaker of Iran's parliament has said that Mr Larijani resigned because he could no longer work with Mr. Ahmadinejad, confirming suspicions that they had fallen out on policy, and possibly personality as well.

This means Ahmadinejad's in trouble!

This indicates that if Ahmadinejad deviates from the expressed wishes of the supreme leadership and the parliament, he will be in constitutional trouble! That, Larijani attended the Rome talks as representative of the supreme leader is already alluding to to exposed rift between Iran's ruling factions. However, it seems that the so called "islamo-fascist-dictatorship" in Iran is acting more responsibly and more democratically than that of the US of A!

Mr Velayati, the former war-time foreign minister- now senior foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has expressed objection to Ahmadinejad accepting Larijani's resignation: "In the very important and sensitive situation where the nuclear issue is at the moment it would be better if this [resignation] did not happen, or at least it was prevented".

According to Velayati (read the voice of supreme leader on foreign matters) pragmatists believe in negotiating with the international community and talk of following the path of Japan.

It would be becoming worrisome however, if Ahmadinejad takes a radical stance against the supreme leader. He has been showing Komeini-ist megalomaniac symptoms, and he has been capitalizing on the capitalist corruption of those who are opposing him at this moment. Khomeini's radicalism has done great harm to Iran. I doubt this rookie is afraid to fall in the same Neo-Con trap that his spiritual leader fell, 30 years ago!

(Editor's Opinion: Ahmadinejad seems to be losing control of his "Base." Like in the US, the clerics in Iran hold the minority position, but the most concentrated power. Except in Iran, they will act functionally, meet, and deal. Khameini is the dealer, and by comparison to our crazies, he's taking a "first do no harm" approach. Larijani resigned in order to free himself from A-jad, and he's still very much in the negotiating driver's seat as evidenced in Rome. Iran's end game? It wants nuclear power so it can generate electricity and doesn't have to burn or export so much oil. It's reserves are wildly overstated, and its oil fields are in collapse. The objective is NOT to nuke Israel, screeching harpies notwithstanding. The contract for providing nuclear power generation is now at play between Russia, the US, and France. Thanks to Naj at Iran Facts for the high-quality local insight.)

The Return Of Containment & Hope

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander must make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature."

--Clausewitz--

(Update: I posted this back in May, and am re-posting it for its topicality to positive developments on the Iranian front, and to positive statements by Democratic candidates with regards to foreign policy, Obama and even Hillary among them. Will append Hillary's foreign policy platform later.)

Clausewitz translation: fight stupid wars, and pretty soon you'll leave broken monuments. Von Clausewitz would've chortled schnapps out of his nose at the Bush Doctrine. Attacking and occupying Iraq grossly conflated a minor but thorny enemy into an empire-ending emetic. It was a full-court embarkation onto a fool's parade of twisted alien natures and wars which can't be won. It's time to cut the losses and reach back to strategies which proved successful.

George F. Kennan was a time-and-motion foreign policy genius (the anti-Bismarck), and he was the promulgator of "Containment." In context, Containment was a long-term, non-violent way of defeating an inimical, hostile form of government, a way of lowering confrontational temperatures down into a non-military zone. Kennan would know about that. He was SecDef under Truman from 1947-48, a time when many in the U.S., England, and Germany, including George S. Patton and a chorus of ex-Nazis believed there was no good alternative but to invade and defeat Stalinist Russia. The lower the temperature, the more it favored us.

Kennan convinced Truman and the planners around him, with a series of well-reasoned articles, to buy enough time for flawed, inferior, murderous, centrally planned communist systems to fall. He knew we didn't need to attack them directly because they would consume and probably reform themselves. Kennan was probably the biggest anti-communist of all time, and I became his disciple in the early 80's because his doctrine of strong-point containment had the courage to express and exercise a simple confidence in democracy. He believed we would win out, and thus didn't need to attack Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, or other places. Kennan believed it would be better to out-invest Russia and China than to out-kill them. He made sense to me then, and he makes sense to me now. None of those wars needed to happen to defeat communism, and he encouraged not a single one of them. All the crucial battles between democracy and communism were about making people healthier and happier than the other guy did. Sometimes that was hard for both sides to understand.

Ian Shapiro, a Yale Professor and biographer of George F. Kennan, was on the local NPR show the other morning. He was talking lots of sense that morning, so I called in and slid past the producer with an inane, innocent question, something like "I'd like to invite Dr. Shapiro to speculate about when Containment will make a comeback." But when the producer patched me in, I asked Shapiro on the air with extravagant politeness: "How long until this goddamned %@%^*-t ends?"

"Soon, my friend," he said. "Very soon."

Hidden Histories & The Bombing Of Benazhir Bhutto

[Caught in sensual music all neglect the monuments of unaging intellect. At night old friends and such as me ate sushi in a Boomtown restaurant. At one point we discussed the assassination attempt on Benazhir Bhutto.]

What a terrible thing, hundreds of people blown apart. How big that bomb must've been.

Terrible for us, too.

Really? How so?

It's so because as you know we caused atomic bombs to be given to ul-Haq, the general who killed Bhutto's father in '79. Who went to Berkeley, by the way.

Tsha! Berkeley. Hotbed for hippie socialists.

First, we didn't trust India and still don't. The Bomb was quid pro quo for setting the biggest CIA station ever up in Islamabad. The Saudi Foreign Legion loaded donkeys with weapons, the donkeys climbed with Stinger missiles through the Wazir passes. Russian boys same age as me back then were riding around in trucks so they could get ambushed. The missiles messed up the helicopters, shot down some generals. The soldiers and half Russia got messed up on smack. With the Bomb, the CIA and Foggy Bottom raised alarms and tried to stop it but they got trumped and stifled by the same guys who run this Tom Clancy shit right now.

C'mon, you're talking crazy we would never have done no such thing. Give the bomb away to a bunch of Islamic fascists? No way.

Weren't you just foretelling how thin the world's thread is hanging and how the stock market's life should be feared? Whatever. Believe what they tell you Sunday morning. Pakistan has the nukes, it's got the people who'll use them. The means to deliver them. Probably the same people who tried to off Bhutto's daughter. Musharraf is so desperate to keep the lid on that he's bringing her in to form a coalition. The whole thing depends on a few people staying alive. Kinda like the country formerly known as Yugoslavia, but with nukes.

Stop it, you're cheering us up. Maybe you should go on Meet the Press! Talking like you're some kind of expert.

Yeah right. Monuments to our magnificence. They press the meat so flat we can receive wisdom like pizzas. Sing, baby, sing. Well maybe the truth can't compete with the Kabuki. But when the spin is spun and forgotten the truth stays in the ground like veins of gold. They stay put, can't get rid of 'em. They're right there waiting on forensics like CSI. Even after a thousand years someone like Ed Gibbon comes along, digs 'em up and sings out to Byzantium. He was way into the Roman Empire because he was thinking so hard about his own.

So you're saying Pakistan's going to go up?

Yep. Not saying they'll nuke somebody for sure, but maybe. If it happens, it'll escalate. And all this Iran shit is just a scarecrow. They want to bomb the only stable thing on the whole damned yellow brick road. Crazy mother#&*%ers. That axis of evil they kept pushing, it's stuck smack dab into Pakistan. Strapped onto us like a suicide bomb. Hey, I hear they're making a movie about Afghanistan called Charlie Wilson's War. Tom Hanks is in it. He's doing fantastic stuff now.

Yeah. I loved Band of Brothers. Let's drink to that. To Bands of Brothers, and to America!

[Clink. Clink. Clink.]

Prozac The Clown & William Bennett Do Las Vegas

[Prat-falling off the Segway he was slumped onto, Prozac makes his entrance to the Family Research Council Conference's day care facility. A crowd of impeccably-scrubbed kids lose their composure, whooping with schadenfreude-steeped joy .]

Hiya, boys and girls! I'm here because Bill the Bennett, one of the greatest clowns in the whole white world, my esteemed colleague and drinking bu...very close friend, is upstairs talking to your parents right now. So he sent Prozac! Prozac'll tell ya right now, kiddies, he can't hold a candle to the Bennett when it comes to dosing out a case of the clown crazies. But what he can do is...this! [Prozac turns, then runs full-speed into the wall, nearly knocking himself unconscious, reeling and collapsing on the floor. The children squeal with ear-splitting hysterical ecstasy.]

Toot-toot! Sheesh, those walls sure can sneak up on you! And that's just what Bill the Bennett would tell you if he were here. In fact, it's what he's saying to your mommies and daddies in the Big Room upstairs right now:

"Battlefield surrender comes from cultural surrender. Cultural surrender comes from befuddlement."

Let Prozac explain what that means. See, Bill the Bennett is a very smart clown, and he's also very brave. With his own two eyes, Prozac has seen Bill stay up all night at Caesar's Palace playing high-stakes Black Jack. What he means is, the wall that snuck up and hurt Prozac is just like the Liberal Media. That's right. Liberals are losing a war against Bad People, who want to come here and hurt your mommies and daddies. Bad People want to come here and hurt you, too. How bad are they? Well, for one thing, they would burn down all the McDonald's and Burger Kings everywhere. So you could never have another milkshake ever again! That's how bad! [Prozac makes his sad face, the children get totally quiet and little creased frowns of worry build upon their brows.]

Hey, c'mon you great little Americans, don't you worry. Not even for a minute. We're going to kick Bad People Booty. Toot-toot! And here's a little hint from your buddy Prozac, to make you look smart to your parents. So smart they'll buy you a milkshake and all the fries you want. So: when you're going home with them in your SUV, tell them that the Nazis only surrendered because their Liberal Media confused everybody with defeatism. And Japan's "Left Wing" [Prozac flaps left arm, holds nose] got "befuddled" by Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What's defeatism? Very good question from the little girl in the yellow dress. Well, it's spelled d-e-a-f...whatever, defeatism means you love to lose. And only sick people, like Liberals, do that! And befuddled means, ah, messed up. Tell your parents the next time you see someone from the Liberal Media, you're going to kick them in the bee-hind, and that you need to eat a Big Mac right away, so you can grow up big and strong and dish out lots of Collateral Damage.

Ok, you got it? Liberal Media! Defeatism! Milk Shake and Big Mac. Aww, you're such good boys and girls, and Prozac loves you all. But he knows Bill the Bennett must be feeling a mite parched right about now, so he's gotta go help out before it's an emergency. [Prozac precariously mounts his Segway.] Now, do you remember the Prozac Motto? That's right: Take Your Ritalin, Be a Good Citizen!

Feist: Mushaboom

There's a way to slide between conventions, to honor the angry young pogo-punk inside and yet insinuate yourself into folk, pulling the sweetness of pop along with you and distilling the last sweet drops of Rilke's fruits and vines into music. Linda Feist proves it. It's possible that Sid Vicious could've metamorphosed from screeching "God Save the Queen, She's not a Human Been" to writing Windham Hill music, but it didn't happen. Feist is better, like a mescal worm into a purple butterfly. I know damn well she gave it her all, tried like so much hell that she ripped out her vocal cords. Yet now you can listen to her effortless songs, roll them up and throw them away without a second thought. Then the spell she wove takes hold, the wind changes direction and blows them back at you, her words and music shellacked in lilac sticky-stuff and buttercups that won't let go. Which is ok by me, and I promise, it'll be ok by you, too. Somewhere along the way, this woman swallowed magic beans, and grew.

Lyrics:

Helping the kids out of their coats
But wait the babies haven't been born oh
Unpacking the bags and setting up
And planting lilacs and buttercups oh

But in the meantime we've got it hard
Second floor living without a yard
It may be years until the day
My dreams will match up with my pay

Old dirt road,
(mushaboom, mushaboom)
knee deep snow
(mushaboom, mushaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow
(mushaboom, mushaboom)
o-o-o-o-old

I got a man to stick it out
And make a home from a rented house oh
And we'll collect the moments one by one
I guess that's how the future's done oh

How many acres, how much light
Tucked in the woods and out of sight
Talk to the neighbours and tip my cap
On a little road barely on the map

Old dirt road,
mushaboom, mushaboom)
knee deep snow
mushaboom, mushaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow,
mushaboom, mushaboom)
o-o-o-o-old
(mushaboom, mushaboom)
Old dirt road rambling rose
(mushaboom, mushaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow
(mushaboom, mushaboom)

Psyche's News Roundup

TPMmuckraker | Verizon illegal spying for Bush

The Raw Story | Verizon provided data to Feds 720 times without court order or determining its legality

Think Progress CBS, Logan: We're doing badly in Iraq. (and hiding dead soldiers so everyone thinks it's hunky-dory)

The Real Iraq We Knew - washingtonpost.com (more "phony soldiers")

Think Progress Right Wing Gleefully Smears Two Yr-Old SCHIP Recipient Bethany Wilkerson (swift-boating the children)

I am an American Soldier in Iraq, Right Now

'Failure Risks Devastating Consequences' - The New York Review of Books

Media Matters - Limbaugh says he told journalist writing story on him: "We're going to find out where your kids go to school"

naked capitalism: Further Developments on the SIV Rescue Front

Cancer Monthly InFocus Blog Archive: Vitamin C and Cancer

Clinton on Iran: All options must remain on table | Politics | Reuters (nuke 'em, Hillary)

Glenn Greenwald - Salon Telecom Amnesty would forever foreclose investigation of vital issues (really the point, right?)

Gore Derangement Syndrome - New York Times By Paul Krugman (Americans prefer stupid)

Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV' - Independent Online Edition > Americas

The Raw Story | Wisconsin GOP chair faces charges in enticement of teenage boy (add him to the list of Repervlicans)

Ezra Klein: There Is So Much For Us Of Little Faith: Lee Siegel (leap of faith and falls on face)
American lawbreaking: How laws die: - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine (and democracies)

YouTube - Buried 60 minutes interview (Paul O'Neill: Bush planned Iraq before 9/11))

National Post Attack on Gore a Last Gasp from Some Sore Losers | DeSmogBlog

Booman Tribune - Halperin Creates The Page (more Drudges)
Talking Points Memo | Kurtz: The Kid Had It Comin' (why Kurtz has no soul)

Romney loses NV straw poll - msnbc.com (MSNBC's way of saying Ron Paul won)

Media Matters - CBSNews.com article contains language nearly identical to WorldNetDaily article, including falsehood (conveyor belt of bullshit)

YaHooka Forums - - First Lucid Dream - Frightening (takes acid in dream)

Is there life on a moon of Saturn? | Science | The Observer

Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass -- New York Magazine

MediaStorm: Kingsley's Crossing by Olivier Jobard

Banks Admit Depth Of Mortgage Crisis

There are still articles being published with titles like, "Will the SubPrime Crisis Lead to a Recession?" Well, the banks are so sure that it will they've decided to pool a $100 billion firewall for emergency liquidity. This is the banking equivalent of a deer-in-the-headlights, stare-into-the-abyss, House-of-Seven-Gables look.

Wall Street investment banks, being the perps in this equation, knew exactly how bad they were raping the market, and what was coming. So they bundled up mortgages into CDOs (Certified Debt Obligations) layering multiple types of loans, or "tranches" into them, just like a movie drug dealer puts a couple layers of the good product on top and the stamped-on toxic crap underneath. Then they got bond-rating agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poors to put AA ratings on them and proceeded to sell them to regular European and Asian banks. Otherwise known as "the victims."

Actually, taxpayers and holders of dollars are the victims. For a double-whammy, The Fed has chosen to hyperinflate the dollar in order to keep the stock market chugging along. They'll call the inflation "stimulus." I'm not an expert on banking, but a woman I know said something prophetic once: "Under everything is the land." Somehow it seems doubtful that $100 Billion is going to be enough for the "Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit," and that governments will be called in with the bail-out buckets.

Via: Wall Street Journal:

In a far-reaching response to the global credit crisis, Citigroup Inc. and other big banks are discussing a plan to pool together and financially back as much as $100 billion in shaky mortgage securities and other investments.

The banks met three weeks ago in Washington at the Treasury Department, which convened the talks and is playing a central advisory role, people familiar with the situation said. The meeting was hosted by Treasury's undersecretary for domestic finance, Robert Steel, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. official and the top domestic finance adviser to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The Federal Reserve has been kept informed but has left the active role to the Treasury.

The new fund is designed to stave off what Citigroup and others see as a threat to the financial markets world-wide: the danger that dozens of huge bank-affiliated funds will be forced to unload billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and other assets, driving down their prices in a fire sale. That could force big write-offs by banks, brokerages and hedge funds that own similar investments and would have to mark them down to the new, lower market prices.

The ultimate fear: If banks need to write down more assets or are forced to take assets onto their books, that could set off a broader credit crunch and hurt the economy. It could make it tough for homeowners and businesses to get loans. Efforts so far by central banks to alleviate the credit crunch that has been roiling markets since the summer haven't fully calmed investors, leading to the extraordinary move to bring together the banks.

In recent weeks, investors have grown concerned about the size of bank-affiliated funds that have invested huge sums in securities tied to shaky U.S. subprime mortgages and other assets. Citigroup, the world's biggest bank by market value, has drawn special scrutiny because it is the largest player in this market.

Citigroup has nearly $100 billion in seven affiliated structured investment vehicles, or SIVs. Globally, SIVs had $400 billion in assets as of Aug. 28, according to Moody's.

Such vehicles are formally independent of the banks that create them. They issue their own short-term debt, usually at relatively low interest rates reflecting their high credit rating. The vehicles use the money to buy higher-yielding longer-term assets such as securities tied to mortgages or receivables from midsize businesses seeking to raise cash.

Many SIVs had trouble rolling over their short-term debt in August because of concerns about the quality of their assets. That contributed to the broader seizing up of credit markets.

The Financial Services Authority, the United Kingdom's markets regulator, has suggested that U.K. banks consider participating in the plan, a person familiar with the situation said. HSBC Holdings PLC, the largest U.K. bank, has an affiliate SIV called Cullinan Finance Ltd. with $35 billion in senior debt. An HSBC representative wasn't immediately available to comment.

If the banks agree, the plan could be announced as early as Monday, people familiar with the matter said. Citigroup announces third-quarter earnings Monday. The tentative name for the fund is Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, or M-LEC.

TSA Proposes Three-Day Notice For Air Travel

Insanity. It's what's for dinner. In hell. If implemented, the TSA proposal means all airline passengers will have to undergo security checks to get permission to travel. Boarding passes will be denied at whims, and it seems domestic travel is included. If so, this is how the Thing Which Can't Be Named will clamp down. Travel to the US is already down by 10% since 2001. Boy, I can really see this reversing the trend! Via the Register:

Under new rules proposed by the Transport Security Administration (TSA) (pdf), all airline passengers would need advance permission before flying into, through, or over the United States regardless of citizenship or the airline's national origin.

Currently, the Advanced Passenger Information System, operated by the Customs and Border Patrol, requires airlines to forward a list of passenger information no later than 15 minutes before flights from the US take off (international flights bound for the US have until 15 minutes after take-off). Planes are diverted if a passenger on board is on the no-fly list.

The new rules mean this information must be submitted 72 hours before departure. Only those given clearance will get a boarding pass. The TSA estimates that 90 to 93 per cent of all travel reservations are final by then.

The proposed rules require the following information for each passenger: full name, sex, date of birth, and redress number (assigned to passengers who use the Travel Redress Inquiry Program because they have been mistakenly placed on the no-fly list), and known traveller number (once there is a programme in place for registering known travellers whose backgrounds have been checked). Non-travellers entering secure areas, such as parents escorting children, will also need clearance.

The TSA held a public hearing in Washington DC on 20 September, which heard comments from both privacy advocates and airline industry representatives from Qantas, the Regional Airline Association, IATA, and the American Society of Travel Agents. The privacy advocates came from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Identity Project. All were negative.

The proposals should be withdrawn entirely, argued Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad and the leading expert on travel data privacy. "Obscured by the euphemistic language of 'screening' is the fact that travellers would be required to get permission before they can travel."

Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly, the central claim in John Gilmore's case against the US government over the requirement to show photo ID for domestic travel.

In addition, the TSA is required to study the impact of the proposals on small economic entities (such as sole traders). Finally, the TSA provides no way for individuals to tell whether their government-issued ID is actually required by law, opening the way for rampant identity theft.

ACLU's Barry Steinhardt quoted press reports of 500,000 to 750,000 people on the watch list (of which the no-fly list is a subset). "If there are that many terrorists in the US, we'd all be dead."

TSA representative Kip Hawley noted that the list has been carefully investigated and halved over the last year. "Half of grossly bloated is still bloated," Steinhardt replied.

The airline industry representatives' objections were largely logistical. They argued that the 60-day timeframe the TSA proposes to allow for implementation from the publication date of the final rules is much too short. They want a year to revamp many IT systems, especially, as the Qantas representative said, as no one will start until they're sure there will be no further changes.

In addition, many were concerned about the impact on new, convenient and cash-saving technologies, such as checking in at home, or storing a boarding pass in a PDA.

One additional point, also raised by Hasbrouck: the data the TSA requires will be collected by the airlines who presumably will keep it for their own purposes – a "government-coerced informational windfall", he called it.

The third parties who actually do much of the airline industry's data processing, the Global Distribution Systems and Computer Reservations Systems, were missing from the hearing.

Psyche's News Roundup

Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm (Bush started illegal spying on day one)

Even worse than we imagined: AT&T contract for NSA to surveill all internet traffic, foreign and domestic, started before 9/11 | Corrente

Glenn Greenwald - Salon - The Beltway Establishment's contempt for the rule of law (retroactive telecom immunity)

Surveillance Update - washingtonpost.com (Fred Hiatt -- let them break the law)

Comcast Caught Filtering Political E-Mails - BSAlert.com

Voting Machines Giving Florida New Headache - New York Times

Spies, Lies and FISA - New York Times

The .Good Germans Among Us - New York Times

The Raw Story | Bill Maher: Show me a man wearing an American flag pin, I'll show you an asshole

Joe Conason: Wesley Clark's memoir and the neocon strategy for a wider Mideast war Salon.com ("Seven countries in five years" - that worked out really well, didn't it?)

The Raw Story | Author Naomi Klein: America is succumbing to fascism (too late)

Think Progress White House Embraces Right-Wing Blog That Called For Destroying Graeme Frost

Matthew Yglesias (October 14, 2007) - The Epistemology of Kausfiles (hackology) )

The man who knew too much | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

How Corporations See Blogs

"They destroy brands and wreck lives! Is there any way to fight back?"

Nice to see that the knights who fight for the Divine Right of Capital are offended by blogs. ("It's all just so unfair!") China just shut off all RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds going into it, and now sits behind a great Information Wall. That probably won't happen here, but likely there will be regulations, and punishments, making it difficult to denigrate "brands."

Smart corporations reach out to blogs, and even have begun to hire bloggers and podcasters. Microsoft's XBox group recently hired Nelson Rodriguez, who ran "Achievement Junkie," one of the most popular podcasts about XBox games. It also hired Rob Greenlee of WebTalk Radio to head up its ZuneCast project, a destination, directory, and discovery tool for tens of thousands of podcasts.

A Kiss Before Bombing

These pictures are from the Unapologetic Mexican. He says, "Here are images, I wanted to lay them out. As glimpses. Isolated glimpses into another country, one that mostly exists for us in scary soundbytes and media-approved shots of hangings and flame and the dark dark chador and the obscuring burqa. We pump the hot gas of our fear and media worship into those shadowy shapes, because after all, all of us here in the USA are experts at marketing and advertising and image. We take joy in our trade. This is our most intensive area of training.

We are mid-commercial right now. Halfway through the award-winning "Bomb Iran" messaging blitz. I give you a few outtakes that might not make it into the glossy front page spread.

The tricky part about laying out images in a sequence is that, depending on the order, a story wants to connect the previously separate moment. The Glimpse becomes a Thought, and then a Tale. But I did not want to force some clunky narrative...which my hands seemed to want to do no matter how I moved around the pictures. So I ended up initially grouping them by color to solve my problem. That gave me a basic blueprint that I could follow without fear of setting up something too contrived. Let the colors lead the way, let the pigment and the paint and the hue have its say."


A woman looking into Khomeini's tomb.


Meadows as green, flowers as wild.


The mosque in Naqse-Jahan Square in Isfahan.


A Kurdish-Persian wedding.


In Najar, Iran. Kurdistan. People descended from the Medes.


Bolhassan, Iran. The cluster of homes that do not seem ruled by a grid, but rather naturally occurring as groups of people settled near one another. This village of people was chemically bombed by Saddam Hussein with munitions provided by the US in the Iraq-Iran war in 1987 and 1988.


A cooling tower on a museum roof in Kashan, Iran.


Naqse-Jahan Square, Esfahan, Iran.


The Azadi Tower, or "The Freedom Tower."


Bam, Iran. The same year this was taken, an earthquake destroyed the city, taking 40,000 lives.


September 8 is International Literature Day in Iran.


Shirley Temple Day.


A major highway in Tehran. They noticed, and titled it "Inconvenient Evidence."


More Iranian schoolchildren. Probably in California.


Children play outside Ali Qapu Palace, in Esfahan.


Women poking fun at something.


A woman protests against the US-led bombing of Afghanistan.


Sheep graze their way to freedom.


The Grand Bazaar.


Women in Arsanjan mash pomegranates.


God Bless Humanity.

Al Gore Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

They can take issue with the presentation. They can shoot a few holes in the science. They can chalk it up as sheer anomaly, but for some reason, the ice is retreating about 100,000 years ahead of earth's regularly programmed schedule, and the obliquity of the ecliptic and the gyroscopic precession of the earth are a mite touchy about where all that ice-weight shifts to when it melts.

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have made people aware that Something's Up, and are deservedly sharing this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The picture above is of Mt. Everest. Without snow.

Musical Hezbollah - Radiohead's 'House Of Cards'

Revolutions often take a long time to really get rolling, and sometimes longer to prevail. More often, they get squashed and leave nothing more than a greasy spot behind on concrete. Like Jim Morrison boiled it down in his song Five to One, "they've got the guns, but we got the numbers." True. But those guns are always a real big problem.

Back in the early '90s, a music industry veteran and I were jawing about how computer technology was sure to doom the recording labels. All you had to do was park songs by every band from every where on servers, sell them for 25 cents a piece, let people download them, and give the band 2/3rds of the money. Simple. You'd kill the industry's inequities, its control over artists. No doubt it's fortunate that we didn't run off and start up a company based on that idea, as we would've (at minimum) spent a lot of time dodging dive-bombing lawyers and corporate cruise missiles. As the industry in question has convincingly demonstrated, amongst other things by suing senior citizens whose grandkids downloaded a movie while visiting the house on Thanksgiving, or slamming college kids into jail for peer-to-peer file-shares over their school's computers, it just doesn't. Want. To be. Killed.

The labels also refuse to change their business model, which tells me how much of a killing the people who run record labels must've grown accustomed to, must still be making. (If bands have a smash hit with their first album, they don't make any money.) Apparently by preference, they're bleeding like wounded Godzillas in black-and-white movies, tottering around smoking landscapes, breathing fire and lashing out with huge tails to crush people under buildings and toy cars, roaring the inarticulate rages of terrible lizards. For 15 years, with news of the RIAA going after thousands of defenseless music lovers and quite literally ruining their lives, I've been yelling, "Die, you dumb-ass dinosaurs, die!" And finally...it's happening.

The popular Brit band Radiohead announced this month that they're leaving their label, as in, they're not going to have one. They just put up their new album, In Rainbows, on inrainbows.com. Here's how it works: you go there, download it in MP3 format, and pay them what you feel like they deserve. Seems like they trust their fans more than they do their business managers. Hmm. Managers can still dismiss the move as crazy, because Radiohead, being a band, is a bunch of pie-eyed anarchists, who even published the virulently anti-American political album Hail to the Thief in 2004. In Rainbows sold 1.2 million copies on the first day of its release, and that might be a little worrisome, but they're thinking it's sure to slow down, and anyway, pay-as-you-wish (PAYW) is a laughable, unpredictable business model. Not serious.

Then Nine Inch Nails announced on Monday it was going with the PAYW model. Then Oasis. Then Jamiroquai. And yesterday, Madonna left her label to take a $120 million contract with a concert promoter, Live Nation, for a three-record deal. Live Nation has never distributed a record before. There are those who say this isn't the death knell of the record labels, that bands still need to be fronted lots of money for equipment, tours, and promotion, and that labels do add a lot of value. These are all status quo positions, and ignore that music is entering a Web 3.0 phase, wherein tools + users + audiences + promotion are all relationships under the direct control of the artists, and they're all web-mediated.

If it's not the death knell of record labels, then they're going to have to immediately remove their heads from their gluteal cleavage and wrap them around a multiverse which looks increasingly chaotic. For music, top-notch production costs a fraction of what it used to, a band's MySpace page adds a lot of promotional value for zero cost, and there's now room for many different price and distribution models. A Rolling Stone writer can get an interview by sending an email. The likely common denominator is that bands will have to build audiences by playing in front of people, feeding performances back onto the web, and relying on word of mouth. How frightening!

By the way, In Rainbows is going to be Album of the Year. And one of my favorite bands, stuck down in the skinny part of statistical distribution's Long Tail, the appropriately titled Slender Means, is playing at the Tractor Tavern tomorrow night in Ballard.

Psyche's News Roundup

Rove Linked to Alabama Case - TIME (the reason why Karl quit?)

Glenn Greenwald: Salon - Joe Klein's defense of warrantless eavesdropping, telecom amnesty

Think Progress: CNN Pins Blame On Democrats For Right-Wing Smear Of 12-Year Old Boy

Sadly, No!: Stalkin' Malkin is losing it (outer wingnuttia)

Think Progress EXCLUSIVE: E-mail Reveals McConnell Staffer Propagated Smear Campaign

LRB | Jim Holt: It's the Oil (and always was)

Media Matters - Coulter says that "we" Christians "just want Jews to be perfected"

The American Army Manuals of Torture [Voltaire's Candide still pertinent]

Clinton Cites Lessons of Partisanship - washingtonpost.com (keeping torture options open)

International Peace Operations Association (lobbying group for military contractors-sheesh!)

FT.com / World / US & Canada - US foreclosures double in September

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII - washingtonpost.com

RIAA Hits a Sour Note With Its File-Sharing Witch Hunt

And The Walls Came Tumbling Down: Madonna Dumps Record Industry

The most powerful microscope in the world

P2P researchers: use a blocklist or you will be tracked... 100% of the time

BBC NEWS | Magazine | A beautiful mind

Mind the Gap

Disconnected

Zoey & Me over at Cat in the Bag has a nose for nice graphics, and mixes them, along with odes to feline fealty and adventure, in with a keen and spare eye for timely political analysis. Today they have a nice surrealistic work up by Charnine, a painting of trees which have clouds for leaves. One of my favorite artists was the surrealist Rene Magritte, whose conveyances seemed to presage developments in scientific theories regarding paradoxically quantum aspects of time and object position. Charnine has quite a few fun paintings in the same vein.

The idea of an English phone booth on the moon is impractical, yet compelling. If you've ever been in an English phone booth, you know they were designed to withstand repeated impacts with light vehicles, lorries, meteorites, and all manner of abuse and come off with nothing more than a scuff or two and repair of a few glass panes.

The Battle Of Bletchley Park, Science & Free Speech

WWII was won largely because German U-Boat captains were often bored. To amuse themselves in the lonely North Atlantic, they signaled to each other wirelessly and thought their signals secure.

For that reason on a squally spring day a friend named Nieves Khoury, the only Canaria resident I've had the pleasure to know, rode with me sportingly up out of London to where the fates of nations had turned. They turned, of all things, on practical applications of information theory. I wanted to see the belly of Bletchley Park, the military import of which was clear from my childhood things. The park lies about the same longitude west of London as Castle Windsor's polo field but an hour further north, off the M1 towards Buckinghamshire. Remote, yet just enough. They deciphered the Enigma code there and many others with the aid of the world's first programmable computers.

At the time I was in the delightfully disreputable field of artificial intelligence so visiting made professional sense, and for ironic measure I brought along a disowned, reprobate-turned-con-man who was the son of one Intel's founders. He faked an enthusiasm to see where Alan Turing's inference machines were first made in 1940. Their electrically actuated gears were housed in lockers which took up much of a room, then finally they used valves, or vacuum tubes, which took up even more. Which led to transistors and then to the comparatively tiny silicon chips which made Gary's disappointed father, but Gary not yet and probably never Gary, filthy rich.

To Nieves the notion of heavily armed ships and warplanes milling around at dreadful expense to kill millions of foreign homicidal maniacs was dated and inappropriate. As anachronistic as slave-holding. She and her friend Lola, who came with us, were from islands off Spain long accustomed to aggressive, pasty-skinned tourists. So they graciously kept their thoughts to themselves. We drove into the Park to see wind-blown grounds and ill-kept buildings, where a compound of decaying huts had once housed the weary boffins who fought the Battle of Bletchley. I got out of the car to walk up and look in the windows, to contemplate why the US and England prevailed. I considered patent law, competition, Jacquard looms, systems of government, economies, luck and leaders. What the scientists ate. Why did our system win? Perhaps because we had New Science, more freedom, enough openings to throw down old gods and repeat Titanomachia.

They called me back into the BMW, telling me there was nothing to see, the girls scolding me for staying out in the sideways rain. For staring oddly and too long at a reverie of dilapidated, boring buildings.

Where art and free speech flourish, so does science. When they are turned away their empty seats are always reserved for pretty falsehoods, failure's bridesmaids. Alan Turing was a very special boffin who loved truth and adored beauty, who believed the exceptions in regular patterns are so information-rich you can divine all relevant data from them; in essence, contradictions point to the most meaningful rules of life itself. He meditated on morphology. What would become known as Chaos Theory. With this intuited precept, to focus first on data's diseases and compare them to the whole, he broke open the most complex and secure codes yet devised. As with so many contradictions, he was himself the precept's social embodiment. In 1954 he was hounded to the point of suicide, having been convicted of a "crime." Homosexuality. He died of cyanide poisoning, a half-eaten apple by his side in imitation of the heroine in his favorite story. Snow White. Turing's death is why the first personal computer maker later chose a bitten apple as its logo.

Amongst acclaimed scholars (Those Who Should Know Better) it's a commonplace that the American plan to inexorably smother its hapless enemies under mountains of industrial goods was chiefly responsible for victory. As if triumph was a fait accompli, the materials merely having to be put at disposal of generals and their armies, and voila, determinism. (Stupidity.) While it was nice to luxuriate in weapons and supplies, the intelligence gleaned via math was fundamental, had far more strategic effect and was morale-crackingly lethal. Materiel had to traverse a hostile world in fragile berths. Armed with oracular knowledge of enemy movements and intents, a plodding fool such as Bernard Montgomery couldn't manage to completely negate such advantages. Even with foreknowledge of his enemy's strategy, the only reason he was able to keep Rommel away from Arabia's oil fields was because the latter's supplies were inconveniently situated at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Right where the oracles of Bletchley had put them. Montgomery became a Field Marshal, Germany tried to make oil out of turnips. Such are the impacts free speech and art impart to science, and long are the reaches of the gods which rulers worship.

In early 1942, the German Navy added a fourth rotor to their earlier Enigma coding machine, vastly increasing its mathematical complexity and regaining secrecy. In February of that year, a million tons of vital supplies bound for England and Russia were sunk in the Atlantic. Imagine, say, a million cars being sunk in a month. Then the next month 1.2 million. Then 1.5 million. Then 2 million. Who can keep that up for long? With the code unbroken, America's industrial output was on a conveyor belt to The Deep. From the Allied perspective, the war looked lost. In the eyes of most, democracy and communism were beaten by the efficiencies of fascism. Millions in Russia and many in England were starving, and weapons were short in the field. Convoy ships were sunk within sight of Miami Beach, the Naval Academy at Anapolis, in the Long Island sound, off Portland and the Carolinas. 35% of US Merchant Marine shipping losses and over 50% of its casualties during the entire conflict occurred in 1942. The pressure on the hut-dwellers in Bletchley was intense and Turing's team slept not in beds, but at desks.

On December 13th, 1942, Enigma was re-broken through toil, good guesswork and computer programming. The German Navy's commands to its U-Boat fleets began to serve as writing on the wall once more. Shipping losses from U-Boats decreased dramatically, and the submariners were baited, blasted, and bagged like sharks. Had U-Boat communication protocols been more strict, it would have taken longer to break the code; but the sheer volume of data allowed Turing and his machines to spot contradictions in patterns, to form hypotheses about what caused them, and to test those wild-ass guesses far less laboriously than was possible heretofore. His sexual orientations were overlooked long enough for that.

Stretching off to near infinity, white punch cards flurried and spinning tape rolls curled into flames. They translated information and pegged them into grids on big maps with little symbols hung upon them for sharp relief. In a bombsight's reticule, at a periscope's vortex, the fragile holds of far-off symbols gravid with troops and war-fuels were soon to be split, rent hopeless with spray and steam. Athena has on rare occasion allowed to be our goddess and from her wisdom we soon derived secret range and azimuth. Before we betrayed her it was she who ministered unfair advantages and quotidian death down upon the acolytes of Aries.

Whether above or on or under the sea they must've had last thoughts such as these: "Impossible! Noooooh! How could they ever have known...that we were here?"

Of Mercenaries And Black Waters

A good rule of thumb in military history is to bet against a belligerent which hires mercenaries. For bad ideas, it generally ranks up there with press-ganging peasants into service and sending them into battle armored with straw, carrying scythes and pruning hooks. Commingling the former with the latter is more than a rule of thumb, the results as predictable as throwing a match into a keg of gunpowder which is lying under an outhouse near a propeller. Unless, of course, one adversary is determined to outbid the other in terms of simple stupidity. There is an undeniable element of luck in battle, as those who lived through them attest. The famous Hans Holbein engraving, attached above, conveys the image of confusion without the blood.

There are exceptions to these rules, of course. In the article below, for example, economic warlock Paul Krugman needlessly takes Machiavelli far out of context, even falsely construes his meaning, in order to denigrate the US security services firm, and the regrettable haven of our bad fortunes, Blackwater USA.

In truth, Machiavelli did not say mercenaries are worthless. He said they're unreliable, and also wrote a great deal about their relative utility and employment, praising in particular the dreaded Swiss pikemen who were renowned for their competence and ruthlessness. In the Hundred Years' War, if you didn't have your Swiss piker contingent, or a larger one than your opponent, the starting odds were considered as stacked against you. They were impervious to cavalry charge and pretty much everything else but another heavily armed pike box, such as another formation of Swiss mercenaries. They wouldn't fight each other, however. Their supremacy in Europe only began to dim with the increasing effectiveness of firearms circa 1500, but they remained on the battlefields there until the early 1800s. Even today, their last contingent guards the Vatican.

More commonly, mercenaries, the Swiss included, have always been known for their abominable behavior off the battlefield. They are known for freebooting, looting, murder, pillage, rape, protection rackets, and the indiscriminate application of senseless violence. Nearly four hundred years after the fact, bad memories of mercenaries remain compressed into an expression of disgust in German: Schwedentrunk, or "Swede's mead." In the Thirty Years' War, in which 20%-40% of Germany's entire population died, Swedish troops swarmed down throughout the land to ostensibly persecute Catholics. Their rear, or "black" guards devised an expedient to aid in finding hidden food, treasure, and women: they would take manure and liquify it with urine, fill a funnel with it, and force a servant or farmer's jaw open. The practice was recorded in the baroque satirical memoir of that war, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus (English title: Simplicissimus):

They lay the bound servant on the ground, stuck a wooden wedge into his mouth, and poured into his belly a bucket full of foul manure water, which they called a Swedish Drink.

The quibble with Krugman is past history. Blackwater USA, founded by evangelical crusader Erik Prince in the here and now, is the private muscle of the Bush Administration. Prince has donated $168,000 to the Republican National Committee. Iraq's population has been preyed upon by its lawless mercenaries and 20% of its population is already dead, maimed, tortured, robbed, raped or displaced. Blackwater had a lot of help with that, but they did play a prominently annointed part. To think that Blackwater's mercenary role departs from the norms of history is utterly naive, which most of my fellow citizens still choose to be, as is thinking that the American Legacy retains its former status. Which we all prefer to do. Here's the article (via Cat in the Bag):

by Paul Krugman
NY Times

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.

And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.

As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”

And, yes, the so-called private security contractors are mercenaries. They’re heavily armed. They carry out military missions, but they’re private employees who don’t answer to military discipline. On the other hand, they don’t seem to be accountable to Iraqi or U.S. law, either. And they behave accordingly.

We may never know what really happened in a crowded Baghdad square two weeks ago. Employees of Blackwater USA claim that they were attacked by gunmen. Iraqi police and witnesses say that the contractors began firing randomly at a car that didn’t get out of their way.

Yeah. We know pretty well what happened. And what else is happening. Krugman goes on in language suitable for polite society at the NY Times.

Psyche's News Roundup

Annals of National Security: Seymour M. Hersh: Shifting Targets: The New Yorker

Crooks and Liars Sy Hersh on Iran: New Propaganda push to attack their Revolutionary Guard

I hate all Iranians, US aide tells MPs | the Daily Mail (look at her)

David Bromwich: Hillary Clinton Votes for War Again - Politics on The Huffington Post

9/11 Is Over - NYT: Flathead Friedman changes tune "9/11 dumb, Iraq is lost."

Left of Boom (washingtonpost.com) (All Around My IEDs)

McClatchy | 09/30/2007 | The religious right's political power ebbs (until Armageddon!)

McCain: Prefer Christian President (America is a Christian Nation - the Constitution says so)

Creationism out of the classroom! | Science | Guardian Unlimited

Low-Paid, Liberal, Nonprofit Yuppies Unite - Doron Taussig

Pew Research Center: Young White Evangelicals:Less Republican, Still Conservative

Scholars give us antiquity, the colorized version. The Harvard University Gazette

.99999...=1 | MetaFilter (and another think/thing coming)

Linda! Linda! Lin-daaa! | MetaFilter