observe the passing scene

Questioning

This needs no gloss:

Every time I see one of those insipid yellow-ribbon magnets now, I think of Charlie Anderson, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “I just want to ask those people,� says Anderson, referring to those who display the yellow-ribbon magnets, “when is the last time you wrote one of those soldiers? How many of them do you actually know? How many have really asked us, what did you do there? I wanna tell them, we don’t need your fucking ribbons. We need help and jobs.�

clip
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

Too Many Dead

Iraqi women mourning their deadThe first Lancet study on the number of dead in the Iraq war came out just about two years ago; the authors pioneered a very difficult technique, which relied on direct interviews of Iraqi households, asking about family members who have recently died and how they died. Death reports were documented by official death certificates. At that time, the study estimated that 100,000 Iraqis have died in that war, most of them as the result of actions by coalition forces. Our son Alex reported on that study for This American Life, the public radio show at which he is a producer; he did an excellent job of explaining, clearly and persuasively, the relatively difficult statistical methods that the researchers used.

Last week, the authors of the Lancet study released their follow-up study, which used the same techniques and a larger sample of Iraqi households. Their results, which have been widely reported, indicate that the total Iraqi death toll from the war comes to well over half a million.

The Lancet study has been widely criticized, of course, by apologists for the war. The IBC, the Iraq Body Count organization, is by no means an apologist for the war, but they have become the de facto independent source for body count statistics. Their numbers are compiled from official pronouncements and published news stories; while they are considerably higher than the ridiculously low, and constantly changing, numbers that the administration drops when it pleases them, the IBC numbers are still an order of magnitude smaller than the numbers in the Lancet study. IBC is not pleased with that study, and they’ve issued a press release challenging it. But, on careful reading, the IBC’s criticisms seem to boil down to “I can’t believe it; it can’t be that high!” Lenin, on the blog Lenin’s Tomb, has done a point-by-point analysis of the IBC press release, and summarizes his findings:

The whole thing [i.e. the IBC refutation of the Lancet study] is an enormous and misleading exercise in circularity, a massive raise of the eyebrow, a titanic exercise in obfuscation. They cannot touch the study for methodology, they cannot find anything in it that is badly done: not a single cluster wrongly placed, not a single false extrapolation, not a particle of evidence of any fraudulence or fecklessness. They hazily refer to possible bias, but on the basis of nothing more solid than that this would explain away the uncomfortable implications that they draw. As Daniel Davies points out, the chances of the Lancet authors obtaining the sample they did, if the facts were much closer to what the IBC records, are so low that it would have to be fraud. The IBC cannot and do not make this accusation….

To IBC’s credit, their press release concludes with the telling point that we should not need to know that 655,000 died, that even IBC’s own lower estimates are enough to provide “all the necessary evidence to deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels.”

Update: Deltoid reports that the Senate has just passed a Congo relief bill that uses, in support of the need for such an effort, a mortality study that was also published in the Lancet and that uses the same cluster analysis technique as the Iraqi death toll study.

observe the passing scene
vote Democratic

Comments (0)

Permalink

Kill your TV

After going for the past 30 years or so without any television whatever, except what we occasionally saw at a friend’s house, we recently took a major plunge and wound up with a big wall-mounted LCD monitor, HD digital cable, and a Mac Mini to play DVDs. We’ve lived for a few months now with that setup, and this story, from “The Frontal Cortex” science blog, does not surprise me.

After looking at the data, social scientists at The Johnson School at Cornell University noticed a striking correlation between exposure to television at an early age and rates of autism in three separate states. They concluded that their "findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism"

Television is dreadful. There’s no other word for it. The shows are almost uniformly dreadful; the endless sequences of commercials coming at you like machine gun fire are dreadful; the sameness of thinking, of style, of narrative structure, amidst all that apparent diversity (200 channels!) is dreadful. The whole business of watching television induces slack jaw and slack mind. And now it seems likely that television has induced a plague upon our civilization in the form of a lifetime behavioral disorder that currently affects 1 in 166 children. Is there any way to stop it, short of the collapse of our technological infrastructure?

observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

What, Me Worry?

Newsweek October 2, 2006 Issue
European Cover
Asian Cover
Latin American Cover
US Cover
Europe Asia Latin America United States

It turns out that Annie Leibowitz is tired and nursing a cold; she’s just back from shooting Angelina. Newsweek explains: “‘I talked with Angelina before the shoot,’ says Leibovitz, who’s famous for her preparation. ‘She felt like she was coming back from having the baby and she felt very sexy and ready to go.’” Jolie’s a pilot, and flew her own plane in to the shoot location, which was an abandoned oilfield in the desert. And next day Brad flew down in his plane. It was all just thrilling, and nobody got dirty. And nobody was killed. And no nations were lost, that anybody noticed in these parts.

dread the rising dark
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

Jim Nails it Again

This post covers a lot of ground - why gas prices have dropped, the reality of Chevron’s newly announced deep-water oil reserves, what the bursting of the housing bubble will look like, what’s driving jihad - and Kunstler ties it all together neatly. His vision is dark and he offers no solutions, but the clarity of his analysis is, for some reason, bracing and even uplifting.

Five years after 9/11/2001, the "progressives" want to wish away Jihad and the "conservatives" want to wish away the need to change daily life in America. Real political leadership, if it emerges at all, will have to come from some place off the normal political scale.

observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

The Sovereign Nation of New York City

LondonThese cities are bigger than many industrialised nations. And they are growing at a dizzying rate, sucking in workers from rural areas.

Economically, many of the world’s great cities are already divorced from their nation-states, with their main streams of investment come from other great cities.

Shanghai has so much power and autonomy it has been described as effectively a city-state, within China only in geography. And on Thursday London Mayor Ken Livingstone was handed a raft of new powers over planning, housing and the environment.

He joked: "Having been to Singapore and seen how successful it was I think anything short of a fully independent city state is a lost opportunity, with its own foreign and defence policies thrown in."

There was a great series of sci-fi novels back in the ’50’s by James Blish collectively titled “Cities in Flight”. The premise was that as Earth’s infrastructure collapsed, the big cities, aided by an anti-gravity technology called “spin-dizzies”, took to space, where they mined asteroids and traded with other space cities. I don’t remember the details of any of the stories, but remember reading them with delight at their inventiveness and detail of plot and character. Beneath Blish’s sci-fi conceit was the recognition that the major cities of Earth, even at that time, had more in common with one another than they had with the population of whatever countryside they happened to have grown up in.

clip
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

Listen up, and listen good!

Pope Benedict XVI toured Auschwitz, and was upset by his visit.
Joseph Ratzinger, 1940"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
What a cowardly, evasive, self-serving, pius pious piece of shit. And what he said, too. And today, while genocide is going on in Darfur and throughout Africa, while AIDS is on its way to kill one third of the population of that sad continent, while a thoroughly ruinous, unjust, and unjustified war is being prosecuted in Iraq, while the land of the free is contemplating a final solution to the brown-skinned people who clean our toilets and serve our tacos, while the earth itself is being raped by greedy, short-sighted SOBs and hurtling toward an environmental crisis that will make the holocaust look puny in terms of numbers killed and populations extinguished, while the Pope’s own Holy Land is torn apart by suicide bombers on one hand and self-serving nativist hawks on the other, what are the Pope’s hundreds of thousands of priests thundering about in their hundreds of thousands of pulpits? Gay marriage, the right of a state to force women to carry a foetus to term, the morality of fucking with condoms and the assorted immoralities propagated by all those brown people, or turbaned people, or atheists. It makes me sick.

And to answer Ratzo’s question, perhaps God’s silence is always and only apparent in retrospect. Or it may be that God was screaming His head off then, and is screaming His head off now, and nobody’s listening. Or maybe, just maybe, the persistent delusion of the faithful that God speaks to them and their mad longing to hear His voice is deafening them to the worldwide cries of human misery.

observe the passing scene
reject the one true God

Comments (0)

Permalink

Progress

Jim Kunstler’s grim vision of where we’re going is founded in a surprisingly upbeat idealism. I say that with sincere admiration: I don’t think that idealism is fuzzy-minded or a sign of weakness; in fact, Kunstler’s fearless confrontation of a probably disastrous future proves that. But his admiration for, and profound understanding of, progressivism is bracing. He understands clearly what the ideal of progress was based on, and the question he asks is a keen one:

The notion of Progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.

Progressivism also may have been fatally tied to the accompanying reality of robust industrial economic growth, which itself was tied to abundant new energy resources, mainly oil. The belief that more of everything would become available raised the moral issue of allocating it fairly. Since we now face declining energy resources, and perhaps long-range economic contraction, we would appear to also now face the awful task of allocating less of everything — which may be as impossible in practice as it sounds.

So the question now might be: what kind of economic justice is possible?

When things fall apart, as Kunstler believes (and argues for most persuasively), people will be in difficult straits, and will be in no mood for what passes for liberalism these days - “a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.” And the feds aren’t going to be able to provide material help; they’ve exhausted their credit, and when the housing bubble pops, there will be nothing left - no welfare, no safety net, no chance of a federal bailout. So, how can we, in a desperate nation, maintain the progressive ideal of justice? The answer that Kunstler gives is almost hopeful, given the prevailing tone of his posts.

The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods. That is why suburbia will turn out to be such a fiasco — because the public realm, and everything in it, was impoverished, turned into a universal automobile slum, while the private realm of the house and the car was exalted. The private goods of suburbia will now have to be
liquidated and we will be left with little more than parking lots and freeways too expensive to use.

A true Progressivism of the years ahead has to begin by concerning itself with a redefinition of what our public goods really are — and in practical, not abstract terms. That’s why I harp on the project of restoring the railroad system. Not only will it benefit all classes of Americans in terms of sheer getting around, but it would put tens of thousands of people to work at something with real value. It would also begin the process of healing public space ravaged by cars for almost a hundred years.

A true Progressivism would concern itself with the comprehensive reform of all land use laws, policies, codes, and tax incentives that promote more new car-dependent suburban development. A new Progressivism would put dwindling public monies into the re-activation of our harbors and shipping infrastructure. We’re going to need it. It would direct remaining agricultural subsidies into explictly organic, local farming enterprises, not to the Archer Daniel Midland corporation. It would revive the legal practice of restricting monopolies in business. It has to lead us in the direction of making other arrangements for how we live.

I think all that’s true even if Kunstler is wrong, or mostly wrong, about the magnitude of the coming crash, as I hope he is. Whatever happens, what we are witnessing now is exposing, clearly and painfully, the failure of anti-progressive conservatism. And Kunstler’s recipe for the kind of progressive thought that we need to put in its place sounds tasty to me.

clip
dread the rising dark
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

Breaking news from the Catholic Churchâ„¢

This one is purely funny.

For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII.

A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict’s speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for €15,000 (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus “legal expenses� of €3,500.

They’ve got a pretty good batch of lobbyists. Maybe they could funnel some of the royalty payments they collect to buying a few Republicans, and get them to stretch copyright protection, retroactively, to a couple of millenia. Then they could really rake it in.

clip
observe the passing scene

Comments (0)

Permalink

God 1, Sharon 0

Morbidly obese SharonGod picks easy targets. First, New Orleans—a city built below sea level and protected by poorly designed and badly maintained levees. Now, Ariel Sharon—morbidly obese, hypertensive, over-stressed. God got him with what Josh Marshall called “punitive cardiology”. Here’s Pat:

"He was dividing God’s land, and I would say, ‘Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,’" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club."

"God says, ‘This land belongs to me, and you’d better leave it alone,’" he said.

I don’t believe that God smote Sharon, as much as he might have deserved smiting. As far as I can tell, the only thing that God does to people is make them arrogant and stupid. But He seems to do that to just about everyone He touches.

clip
observe the passing scene
reject the one true God

Comments (3)

Permalink