QOTD: Talk About Arrogance . . .

(((John McCain, conservative? Tom DeLay, when did he get out of prison? Climate change is a political position.)))

Watching Tom DeLay talk to Chris Matthews, right now, about McCain's address to CPAC, and DeLay says,

It is arrogant to presume that man can effect [did he say affect? lol. benefit of the doubt.--jf] climate change.

This came out of DeLay's observation that McCain today did not apply conservative principles to, among other things, the issue of climate change. So Matthews couldn't resist asking, "[w]hat is the conservative position on climate change?" To which DeLay responded, "Man is not responsible for climate change," going on to say that "no science suggests" that man [sic] causes climate change, which he later adjusted to say science hasn't "proven" it.

But this is just the point. The arrogance is presuming that one can have a political position on climate change. It's like saying, the conservative position is that gravity does not exist, or that the earth is flat, or the round earth sits unmoving at the center of the universe. The mere fact that you've got some industry and ideological hacks out there obfuscating the truth about climate change, much like they do with evolution, does not make acknowledging reality arrogant. Elevating your ideological biases above sound science might be the definition of arrogance.

Being a whacko postmodernist, I'm the last person to say that science is ever free of ideology or that it is ever "pure." But there's reasonable and there's stupid. Tom DeLay is either stupid or the apotheosis of cynicism.

The upside is that he's made John McCain sound almost bearable: supports the ICC, believes we need to do something about global warming (as DeLay put it, introduce staggering regulation using global warming as an excuse), wants to shut down gun shows, etc.

And if I heard him right, he said at the end of this interview that McCain might be worse than Obama or Clinton in office. I need to check the transcript when it's out.

What a fruitcake, that guy. Jesus. And here's Chris Matthews giving him airtime. Might as well talk to Ralph Reed.

It's not Torture if You're not at Guantanamo

(((Those destroyed CIA videotapes of waterboarding; how they're not covered by the judge's order not to destroy evidence because the victims--yeah, I said it--weren't at Guantanamo Bay)))

According to CNN:

The Bush administration argued Friday that the CIA's destruction of videotapes that showed the interrogations of two al Qaeda suspects did not violate a court order because the suspects were not at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [ . . . ]

Joseph Hunt, an administration attorney, said the men in the videos were held at secret locations and did not fall under the category of those who were "now at" Guantanamo in Cuba.

"It is inconceivable that the destruction of the tapes could have violated the order," Hunt told the judge.

Okay, it's the judge's bad. They like to blame everything on those activist judges, don't they?

And yet . . . it is also a clear demonstration of bad faith on the part of the administration to even make this argument, never mind to have destroyed the evidence in the first place. Could it be any clearer that they will do precisely everything they think they can get away with?

Quote of the Day: Joe Knows Witches

(((Nigeria; African Evangelical churches and practices; hunting child-witches; witch hunting and "deliverances" no more "essentially" Christian than sharia tribal honor practices "essentially" Muslim)))

Pastor Joe Ita of Liberty Gospel Church in Eket, Nigeria sez:

We know how they operate. A witch will put a spell on its mother's bra and the mother will get breast cancer. But we cannot attribute all things to witches, they work on inclinations too, so they don't create HIV, but if you are promiscuous then the witch will give you HIV. [ . . . ] We are the only ones who really know the secrets of witches.

Yeah, it kind of sounds funny, if you haven't been reading the horrifying descriptions of child mutilation and murder. Rich churchmen like Joe make tons of money charging parents for the "deliverance" of their children from witch-spirits. Of course, it turns out it's not enough to kill the children:

Parents don't come here with the intention of abandoning their children, but when a child is a witch then you have to say "what is that there? Not your child." The parents come to us when they see manifestations. But the secret is that, even if you abandon your child, the curse is still upon you, even if you kill your child the curse stays. So you have to come here to be delivered afterwards as well.

My point about sharia has always been that there is nothing "essentially" Muslim about it. It's not the Qur'an, and in fact early Islam was precisely all about overcoming certain aspects of tribal bullshit, like, for example, the abandonment and murder of female infants. Not that Muhammad was modern, just that murdering a woman for being raped is not some integral part of Qur'anic or even Muslim logic, without which the whole thing would fall apart or be unrecognizable. This witch hunting strikes me in a similar way:

Although old tribal beliefs in witch doctors are not so deeply buried in people's memories, and although there had been indigenous Christians in Nigeria since the 19th century, it is American and Scottish Pentecostal and evangelical missionaries of the past 50 years who have shaped these fanatical beliefs. Evil spirits, satanic possessions and miracles can be found aplenty in the Bible, references to killing witches turn up in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Galatians, and literal interpretation of scriptures is a popular crowd-pleaser.

Even if you think the "tribe/s" question is/are American and/or Scottish evangelicals and pentecostals, the point remains the same. Further, in Africa, there are not the same mitigating political, social, and cultural factors that at least prevent freaks who think their children are witches from burying them alive. Most of the time, anyway.

tags technorati : religion, nigeria, witches, africa

Legacy of Stupidity

From the Economist's review of Legacy of Ashes:

The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner's view the CIA was lamentable at both—and most presidents must take a share of the blame.

The CIA failed to warn the White House of the first Soviet atom bomb (1949), the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950), anti-Soviet risings in East Germany (1953) and Hungary (1956), the dispatch of Soviet missiles to Cuba (1962), the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. It overplayed Soviet military capacities in the 1950s, then underplayed them before overplaying them again in the 1970s.

The record of covert action is little better. In Japan, France and Italy the CIA sought to protect democracy by buying elections. It sponsored coups in Guatemala, Iran, Syria and Iraq, where a Baath Party leader boasted in 1963, “We came to power on an American train.” When an invasion of Cuba masterminded by the agency failed, it plotted to kill Fidel Castro. In ascending order of bloodshed, it took a hand in military coups in South Vietnam, Chile and Indonesia.

One reckons many another tale of woe figures into Weiner's assessment, but this is a really nice synopsis of key debacles. We might throw the SOA in there for good measure.

Was such skulduggery worth it? Did the extra security for the United States outweigh the immediate human cost, the frequently perverse geopolitical consequences and the moral damage to American ideals? Doubters repeatedly warned presidents that on balance the CIA's foreign buccaneering did more harm than good. Mr Weiner has dug out devastating official assessments of covert operations from the 60 years he covers suggesting that many were not worth it. The sceptics were not peaceniks or bleeding hearts but hard-headed advisers at high levels of government.

We're not talking just operational ineptitude. We're talking about seriously stupid decision-making. Stupid and, in many cases, evil.

What we really need is a good intelligence organization. Why is that so hard?

tags technorati : CIA Legacy of Ashes

Doublespeak in Action

I think George Orwell himself wrote Bush's encomium to the new law that lets the NSA eavesdrop, without obtaining a warrant, on any communication involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States."

"When our intelligence professionals have the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies, America is safer," Bush said. "And when these same legal tools also protect the civil liberties of Americans, then we can have the confidence to know that we can preserve our freedoms while making America safer."

"Civil liberties" here apparently does not include the Fourth Amendment, or the First, as far as I can tell. But it gets better. Bush is threatening to further protect and extend our freedoms:

The new law updates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and it will expire in six months unless Congress renews it. Bush wants deeper, permanent changes. "We must remember that our work is not done," Bush prodded. "This bill is a temporary, narrowly focused statute to deal with the most immediate shortcomings in the law.

The "clash of civilizations" is turning into the squabble among totalitarian family members.

tags technorati : FISA, Surveillance, Wiretapping, Politics, Civil Liberties

Fear is Freedom

So much to blog, so little time. An op-ed in today's NYT describes the growing structural, economic entrenchment of the War on Terror state of emergency.

Back [in the 1980s, on the Montana-Alberta border], if we had seen a man on horseback riding along the border, standing in his stirrups to look around, we would have assumed that he was a rancher looking for straying livestock. Today, we’d have to consider the possibility that he was an operative for Operation Noble Mustang, in which wild horses from Bureau of Land Management holdings in the West are trained by prison inmates for use by border patrolmen on the lookout for smugglers and terrorists trying to enter the United States from Canada. [ . . . ]

It’s a new, strange story. In a part of the country that was built on the most extravagant homesteaders’ and oil-drillers’ hopes for the future, economic health in this new century rides largely on the continued threat of threat itself.

And now the House has gone and legislated Bush's freedom to eavesdrop on any foreign communication routed through the US, no warrant required. You're welcome, Ameria: kiss your fucking Fourth Amendment goodbye. No need to thank us.

When people see the US as the biggest threat to democracy in the world, they can prove their case by pointing to the contracting rights of US citizens. We do the "terrorists'" work for them. Well done, George. Well done, Democrat representatives. Well done, modern-day yellow dog Dems, and nu skool "we hate big government jackboots" Republicans. Well done, Americans who are too busy being afraid of or hating al-Qa'ida to pay any attention to what their own government is doing to them.

tags technorati : Freedom, Constitution, Politics, Surveillance, War on Terror

 

Well, He Is an Arrogant, Lying, SOB

I don't know if the count about "threatening aggression against Iran" and so "undermining the national security of the United States" has much substance or much point, but otherwise i mainly wish I believe this could actually go somewhere.

tags technorati : impeach cheney

Freedom Fries Are Soooooooo 9/11

New York Post [Page Six] - June 28, 2007:

Quiche Next

Rudy Giuliani was as down on the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of France as any red-blooded American - until Nicolas Sarkozy was described as the Gallic version of "America's mayor" and elected First Frog. At an appearance at a temple in Maryland this week, Giuliani said, "I wasn't drinking French wine for a while. Then, the New York Post had an article that the 'French Rudy' was elected. I'm
drinking French wine again."

tags technorati : Giuliani, French Wine, French, Sarkozy, Freedom Fries

Viva Vivoleum

Sez "Shepard Wolff:"

"We've got to get ready. After all, fossil fuel development like that of my company [Exxon] is increasing the chances of catastrophic climate change, which could lead to massive calamities, causing migration and conflicts that would likely disable the pipelines and oil wells. Without oil we could no longer produce or transport food, and most of humanity would starve. That would be a tragedy, but at least all those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us."

"We're not talking about killing anyone," added the "NPC rep." "We're talking about using them after nature has done the hard work. After all, 150,000 people already die from climate-change related effects every year. That's only going to go up - maybe way, way up. Will it all go to waste? That would be cruel."

And, as Exxon's Kenneth Cohen points out, with respect to Exxon's concerns about climate change, "We're very much not a denier, very much at the table with our sleeves rolled up."

tags technorati : science environment Yes Men Exxon global warming vivoleum

"I am your father!"

Pope Palpatine XVI (thanks, Dave) scares some little children . . . and I'm sure their skin color has nothing to do with anything.

"Join me! Together, we can bring order to the galaxy!"