The archives of my thousands of posts since 2005 that used to be at my old site have been copied over here, so that they are now available at both places.
Because of the size and other complications, the work was tedious and time consuming and I want to acknowledge my deep gratitude to Jason Thibeault over at lousy canuck for carrying out this huge task so efficiently and cheerfully.
To commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I am linking to a post I wrote on this occasion in 2008 that tried to expose readers to the fact that towards the end of his life, King was actively campaigning against a wide range of injustices, not just racial ones.
People sometimes forget that he was widely read in politics, economics, history, and philosophy and used all of them in his writings, especially the later ones, to forcefully make the case for justice.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has been on a tear recently. His recent op-ed in the Washington Post lists ten reasons why the US should no longer consider itself the land of the free.
While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of “free,” but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit.
These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens — precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.
Just go down the list to see how the bogus ‘war on terror’ waged by both Bush/Cheney and Obama has been used to steadily strip away all the protections that used to be considered sacrosanct. It is both shocking and depressing.
A regular reader of my former blog, who describes himself as a fence-sitting agnostic, commented in response to one of my posts at my previous site:
One objection I do have against this blog is the sense of superiority it conveys and the derision with which it refers to the religious. Atheism somehow seems to bring out the not so nice qualities of its adherents. A great pity. In my experience, being an agnostic among Atheists is more daunting than being one among the religious.
Actually it should not be at all surprising that he finds that that the company of the religious to be more congenial than that of atheists. This is because for some time, the more sophisticated religious people have been feeling the heat that the new atheists have been putting on them. Our relentless demands for evidence to substantiate their belief in a god have put them in a quandary because there is no evidence, other than the evidence from ignorance that there are some major things (the origin of life and the universe for example) that science has not yet fully explained. It has resulted in them resorting to the position that god is not an empirical entity and so evidence is not relevant to the question of his/her/its existence. If you look at the arguments of theologians, much of it now consists of finding reasons for why there is no evidence of god although, oddly enough, they seem to have no difficulty ascribing a whole range of properties to something for which they have no evidence. [Read more…]
Glenn Greenwald uses the recent murder of an Iranian scientist to meticulously document how the word terrorism has been drained of any objective meaning and has become a propaganda term to be used only to describe acts that are taken against the interests of the US and Israel. If the US and Israel commit such acts, or are even suspected of doing so, then the loaded word is scrupulously avoided and euphemisms substituted, such as the more clinical ‘targeted assassination’.
[Read more…]
Much has been written about what the US Supreme Court unleashed with its CITIZENS UNITED v. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION ruling that allowed much more money to invade the electoral process in new ways. One of the obvious new features are the so-called Super PACs that are free to pour money into ads as long as they work independently of the candidates.
While many have noted that this leaves the door wide open for abuses, Stephen Colbert is the one who has best exposed this potential, by creating his own Super PAC. Last week’s segment beautifully described how the required separation between the candidate and the Super PAC can be easily made a sham.
The Colbert Report
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Note that Colbert’s personal lawyer and advisor during all this is Trevor Potter, who served as a commissioner and chair of the Federal Election Commission during the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, that is supposed to monitor elections and that the election laws are followed. So you can be pretty sure that what Colbert is doing, as ridiculous as it looks, is likely legal.
Here is the ad that the Super PAC that Jon Stewart now runs is airing in South Carolina.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Colbert Super PAC Ad – Attack In B Minor For Strings | ||||
| www.colbertnation.com | ||||
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Colbert then went on ABC’s This Week to defend himself against charges that he is attacking Mitt Romney.
Suppose someone presents you with some data in the form of numbers in tables. These numbers may have been used as evidence to support some contention. Can you judge whether those numbers are authentic without actually repeating the entire study?
There have been cases in the past where people have reviewed other people’s data and found suspicious numeric patterns that would have been unlikely to occur naturally. One of the famous cases is that involving Cyril Burt’s studies of twins that purportedly showed that genetics played a far greater role in a person’s development than had been previously thought. In 1974, soon after Burt’s death in 1971, Leon Kamin analyzed Burt’s data and found that they were likely not correct because the statistical correlations he reported stayed stable up to the third decimal place, despite being obtained from different sample sizes. The odds of that happening naturally are extremely low. (Not in Our Genes by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (1984) p. 103.) [Read more…]
Matt Taibbi’s articles in Rolling Stone and his blog are essential reading for those wanting to know about the financial shenanigans that have rocked the country, and the excesses of Wall Street executives.
In a blog post with the above title, he provides yet another example of both aspects.
The Daily Show examines his record.
Margin Call (2011) is a first-rate film.
It deals with what ensues in a large unnamed investment bank when a junior analyst discovers late one evening in 2008 that the value of the bank’s holdings of mortgage-backed securities has wandered dangerously outside the range of mathematical models of the values that it should have, and that the size of the potential losses is so huge that it could bankrupt the entire institution.
The film tracks events over the next twenty-four hours as this information goes up the chain of command all the way to the chief executive, triggering a series of meetings at higher and higher levels that run through the night and into the dawn, as everyone tries to figure out what to do before the news of this disaster becomes widely known in the financial industry and destroys the company.
In the process, it reveals the thinking and mode of operation of the various players in investment banks, from the junior to the highest levels, the role of money, how people’s allegiance and silence is bought, and how some people are ruthlessly sacrificed so that others may profit, all done calmly and urbanely.
This world is unknown to me since I have never worked in such institutions but I have to say that from what I have read on the financial crises and kinds of people involved, the story and characters seem utterly plausible.
The film keeps you intensely interested even though there is little physical action or even any shouting. It is all talk, low-key and understated, but it shows how a film can deal with serious issues and still be engrossing. What it takes is that it be well-written, well-directed, and well-acted.
Here’s the trailer.