Whose oil is it, anyway?

Antonia Juhasz has written a New York Times Op/Ed piece, Whose Oil Is It, Anyway?, explaining the Iraq oil situation much better than I could. Normally I wouldn't c&p an entire article, but the NYT has an annoying habit of putting important stuff behind subscription firewalls and everybody should read this one.

TODAY more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way.

Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.

Iraq’s oil reserves — thought to be the second largest in the world — have always been high on the corporate wish list. In 1998, Kenneth Derr, then chief executive of Chevron, told a San Francisco audience, “Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to.”

A new oil law set to go before the Iraqi Parliament this month would, if passed, go a long way toward helping the oil companies achieve their goal. The Iraq hydrocarbon law would take the majority of Iraq’s oil out of the exclusive hands of the Iraqi government and open it to international oil companies for a generation or more.

In March 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group (better known as Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force), which included executives of America’s largest energy companies, recommended that the United States government support initiatives by Middle Eastern countries “to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment.” One invasion and a great deal of political engineering by the Bush administration later, this is exactly what the proposed Iraq oil law would achieve. It does so to the benefit of the companies, but to the great detriment of Iraq’s economy, democracy and sovereignty.

Since the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration has been aggressive in shepherding the oil law toward passage. It is one of the president’s benchmarks for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a fact that Mr. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Gen. William Casey, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and other administration officials are publicly emphasizing with increasing urgency.

The administration has highlighted the law’s revenue sharing plan, under which the central government would distribute oil revenues throughout the nation on a per capita basis. But the benefits of this excellent proposal are radically undercut by the law’s many other provisions — these allow much (if not most) of Iraq’s oil revenues to flow out of the country and into the pockets of international oil companies.

The law would transform Iraq’s oil industry from a nationalized model closed to American oil companies except for limited (although highly lucrative) marketing contracts, into a commercial industry, all-but-privatized, that is fully open to all international oil companies.

The Iraq National Oil Company would have exclusive control of just 17 of Iraq’s 80 known oil fields, leaving two-thirds of known — and all of its as yet undiscovered — fields open to foreign control.

The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy, partner with Iraqi companies, hire Iraqi workers or share new technologies. They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country. The vast majority of Iraq’s oil would then be left underground for at least two years rather than being used for the country’s economic development.

The international oil companies could also be offered some of the most corporate-friendly contracts in the world, including what are called production sharing agreements. These agreements are the oil industry’s preferred model, but are roundly rejected by all the top oil producing countries in the Middle East because they grant long-term contracts (20 to 35 years in the case of Iraq’s draft law) and greater control, ownership and profits to the companies than other models. In fact, they are used for only approximately 12 percent of the world’s oil.

Iraq’s neighbors Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia maintain nationalized oil systems and have outlawed foreign control over oil development. They all hire international oil companies as contractors to provide specific services as needed, for a limited duration, and without giving the foreign company any direct interest in the oil produced.

Iraqis may very well choose to use the expertise and experience of international oil companies. They are most likely to do so in a manner that best serves their own needs if they are freed from the tremendous external pressure being exercised by the Bush administration, the oil corporations — and the presence of 140,000 members of the American military.

Iraq’s five trade union federations, representing hundreds of thousands of workers, released a statement opposing the law and rejecting “the handing of control over oil to foreign companies, which would undermine the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the Iraqi people.” They ask for more time, less pressure and a chance at the democracy they have been promised.


Antonia Juhasz, an analyst with Oil Change International, a watchdog group, is the author of “The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.”

Tree blogging.

Apologies for pulling something of a bait-and-switch but this isn't really a blog post about trees.

Instead, a young woman in Darfur [El Fasher, Sudan, to be more precise] hand writes an indie newspaper and posts it on a tree, where approximately 100 people a day stop and read it, or at least peruse the headlines. All of the tools of the internet at my fingertips, and her reach is greater is mine. I love it.

For the past 10 years, Awatif Ahmed Isshag has handwritten monthly dispatches and commentary about life in El Fasher and hung them on a short, wiry tree that scatters shade along the yellow-sand lane by her house.

For the past four years, the dispatches have included items about the conflict in Darfur that appear to represent the only independent local reporting about the fighting in a region where most media hew to the official government line.

[snip]

Isshag's sister originally started the newspaper on the tree, writing articles about El Fasher but with an emphasis on women's rights. When she died in 1998, Isshag took over. She was 15.

Looks like the citizens of El Fasher have about as much trust in their MSM as I do in ours. Long live the indie media!

Update: The above link no longer works. Try this one.



Women carry water at Abushouk camp near El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state.
Photo: Reuters

Did you need another reason?

Why shouldn't we have for-profit health care? Because for-profiteers are all robber barons [or robber baron wannabes] who only care about the health of their bank accounts and stock portfolios. But, hey, don't listen to me.

Investor-owned hospitals are profit maximizers, not cost minimizers.

Eat your veggies. More of them.

It's another example of technical writers behaving badly, making the data into a pretty picture instead of presenting the actual numbers, but it illustrates the general trend I've found: nutrient values in our food have gone down as mechanization of agriculture has gone up. Never fear, I'm still looking for hard numbers for y'all.

from here

Dolls

Barnard Elementary, Washington, D. C.
This image of an integrated classroom in the previously all white Barnard Elementary School in Washington, D.C., shows how the District's Board of Education attempted to act quickly to carry out the Supreme Court decision to integrate schools in the area. However, it did take longer for the junior and senior high schools to integrate.

Nearly seventy years ago, Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark began studying the effects of racial prejudice on young children. Their research, and Professor Kenneth Clark's testimony, ultimately played a part in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end school segregation.

Since then, the Clark doll test has been used in all manner of research by a host of researchers. Among the newest and youngest of them is high school student Kiri Davis who put together this mini-documentary:

PSA: The Surge is working!

Hooray!
[peace is at hand]

Mission Accomplished!
[halliburton has been catapulted from the edge of bankruptcy...]

The NY Times won't tell it like it is, but Asia Times does.

Gratuitous Violence

[but first, some gratuitous cuteness, lifted in part from wtf is it now?!?]



My parents tell me that I started asking for a pony when I was about 4. For as long as anyone in the family, including me, can remember, my answer to the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a vet." And not just any vet, but veterinarian to the stars -- the Thoroughbreds of the Triple Crown [there's another industry you don't want to ask about]. Failing that, I'd settle for being the reincarnation of James Herriot, country vet extraordinaire.

Which is to say that I grew up finally [had a couple ponies along the way too] and went off to Ag School, where I lasted exactly one semester. The following link is a PETA video, so you already know it's going to be over the top, but I actually did see stuff like this, and learned -- in college -- how to do some of it. Got all As in it too. I was a vegetarian for years afterwards.

Anyways, this isn't the only reason I'm against factory farming, but it's one of them. You have been warned: turn down the sound on your speakers and don't click this link if there are kids in the room. Or squeamish adults.

Big Cat Rescue Videos

My apologies to all for whom the videos posted below do not work [and my apologies for that grammar].

Go to the Big Cat Rescue PodCats page, scroll down the list [on the left sidebar] to All Cats All The Time, and choose the videos from the dropdown list. The two videos I tried to embed in my post were "Bone Night" and "Pumpkin Time."

Again, I apologize for the lazy posting.

Life is short. Play with your food.

Mmmmm. Babyback ribs and pumpkin pie.
[might need to click the blue circles twice to play videos]


Online Videos by Veoh.com


Online Videos by Veoh.com

big cat rescue

Another scorecard

read the entire report at Mother Jones

Finally! A scorecard!

from this blog: a diagram of the players in Iraq.

It's the oil law, stupid.

Iraq Oil Law

found it at Discourse.net

Horse Race 2008

I like Dennis Kucinich.

I like his passion on workers' rights, though I'm a bit fuzzy on his actual plans. The rest of the issues, though, sound like Santa Claus has finally answered my letters to the North Pole.

If this isn't your cup of tea, Discourse.net, in a sidebar on the left, has a list of links to most of the [potential] candidates' web sites. Check it out.

Happy New Year!

Check out the pigs of Clark Summit Farm and chew the right thing at The Ethicurean while you're at it.

Civil disobedience -- Eat your veggies!

This I did not know [and will have to read more about], but we've been restricting the planting of fruits and vegetables while we've been encouraging and promoting -- and paying good money for -- the production [and consumption] of high-fructose corn syrup.

I've been spouting this line for years, based entirely on anecdotal evidence [mine, from reading food labels in the grocery stores], but now I know I'm not the only one.

[more homework assignments]

I haven't spent enough time yet reading through the Environmental Working Group main website or the related Mulch blog [commentary on ag policy] to decide how much I agree with them [or not], but their farm subsidy database is excellent.

Farm Bill 2007 from the USDA

Some data sets from the USDA Economic Research Service



Apologies for the homework assignments, you don't have to read them, they're here more for my convenience than for any other reason. That and I didn't feel like tackling universal health care this week after all, since I don't have any of my own.

The cost of war ...

Today through April 8, 2007, if you're in New York City, you can see James Nachtwey's photos.

headlights shmeadlights

where I get my Doonesbury fix

The insurance racket.

It pains me to say this, but it really is.

thanks, syd

Smackdown!

This post is mostly [ok, entirely] an excuse to post this picture, but I really would like to see Sparky take on Landsburg on the subject of unforced errors in women's tennis. My money is on Sparky.

Piled higher and Deeper

Marcus R Ross, PhD

Ordinarily I find Slate to be just plain annoying [read: stupidity and sensationalism masquerading as reporting] on the subject of anything scientific, but just this one time I'm glad I read their article.

So, the $13 question today is: should a YECie be granted a PhD from a reputable secular institution in the field of -gasp!- paleontology?

Yes.

If a person does the required work, and does it well, the degree should be granted. Plenty of young scientists do well in grad school, under the watchful guidance of experienced scientists, then go on to make fools of themselves once they get out in the real world. It's the responsibility of scientists and scientifically-literate citizens to keep an eagle eye on them and be ready to bash them for any slop in their scientific work.

Under no circumstances should we be applying religious tests to a person's fitness for study at a secular and publicly-funded university. In any subject.


addendum 2-15-2007: Just in case you were wondering, yes I do believe that this is an attempt to legitimize "creation research" in the eyes of the gullible.

Camouflaged as Christians

I've lived among religious fundamentalists armed with guns and ideology for so long now that I hadn't even realized they were newsworthy. I'm glad that other people are keeping an eye on them so I don't have to.

found it here

House calls.

The doctors in France make house calls.

France. The people talk funny, the food is fabulous, the climate is heavenly, the hospitals are clean, the doctors make house calls, taxes are higher, people live two years longer on average than they do here, and the country spends about half what we do, per capita, on health care.

The government [yes, your tax dollars at work] pays about 85%, the individual [or their private insurance] pays the rest. Don't know about you, but I could live with 15% co-pay.

At least now I don't have to move to Finland. I thought Finland was looking pretty good in the World Health Care Sweepstakes, till I got to France. And France is next door to Italy, geographically and in desireability of their health care system.

Details later in the week.

Write.

That's what you used to do. Put pen to paper and let the ink and the words flow. Letters to the editor. Letters to Congress. Letters to the President even, though I think this particular one might not listen.

I'd begun to think it was a lost avenue of communication here in the digital age, but I could be wrong. People are writing to their Senators and Representatives. Or at least they're thinking about it.

Just in case you hadn't noticed ...

my new favorite blog: Objective - Justice

Lt. Watada update: Mistrial.

I was just a kid, but back in the bad old days [if I remember rightly], Conscientious Objectors refused to go to war. Period. Lt. Watada has said [again, if I remember rightly] that he's willing to go to war, just not this war, the one in Iraq, the one the Army wants to send him to. So, I don't know if this qualifies him to be called a CO, but it's close enough to suit me.

Meanwhile, his court-martial has been declared a mistrial, the judge has set a tentative date for retrial, and his attorney is planning to appeal that on the grounds of double jeopardy. [details]


from Objective - Justice

A little light refreshment.

Or not. I have to admit, it sounds like there might be more to this story than we're told here. Still . . .

The all-new and improved DWI -- Driving Without Intoxication.


from Objective - Justice

This one hurts me.

I'm all for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom from police harassment, freedom from religion. As one who has lived most of forty-something years trying to avoid being saved by the bible-thumpers, I value this last one highly.

It looks like it may be another case of school officials not knowing what to do about a mostly harmless situation [i know! let's call the police!] but I think I might be on their side this time. Ouch.


from Objective - Justice

I double-dog dare you!

Back when I was a 10-year-old child, of average-to-middling mischieviosity, in the Texas school system, the worst thing they did to you was make you stay in at recess and write sentences on the board. Ask me how I know this.

Nowadays, you get arrested and sent to court.


I have questions.

• Why are we arresting children?


• Do we really need teachers who can't control 10-year-olds?


• Why aren't we training police officers to refuse to arrest children?


• Why are we prosecuting children for momentary fits of mischief?


• A school official actually set off the alarm. Why are all the adults in this case getting away with blaming a child?

from Objective - Justice

On the day that Percy L. Julian graduated ...

... at the top of his class at DePauw University, his great-grandmother bared her shoulders and, for the first time, showed him the deep scars that remained from a beating she had received as a slave during the last days of the Civil War. She then clutched his Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, “This is worth all the scars.”

Damn. I'd like to move up to that tax bracket.

From the Bushs' 2005 tax return:

gross income . . . $ 738,880
taxes paid . . . . . . . 187,768

That's an effective tax rate of about 25%, which seems fair. The rich ought to pay higher taxes than you and me. The rich ought to pay more than I do, at any rate.

From the Cheneys' 2005 tax return:

gross income . . . $ 8,824,762
taxes paid . . . . . . . . . 529,636

That's an effective tax rate of 6%.

Hunh?! My effective tax rate was almost twice that. Time to bring back those old tax brackets. I'm thinking the years 1936-1941 look good. An 80% marginal tax rate on anything over $5 million would transfer another $3-ish million from the Cheney coffers to the Federal coffers.


Bonus question: Did you notice who checked the yes-I-want-$3-of-my-money-to-go-to-the-Presidential-Election-Campaign-fund boxes?

Reason enough

I'd happily pay higher taxes for results like that.
[from yes! magazine]

Plame Game

all things Libby
from BTC News

Newsflash: Men don't like to wear condoms.

Women have to take birth control pills; men don't. Girls have to get shots for HPV; boys don't.

I'm all for women taking steps to protect themselves, but making it into a law?! And while I like the idea of Women in Government banding together to get things done, in, around, behind, or in spite of, the good-ol-boy network that all too often pervades government, I'm horrified that they seem to be pushing this.

If we're only going to force one sex to get shots, why can't it be the other one? They're the ones who are going to be infecting the women of tomorrow. Let them take the responsibility. Well, ok, maybe both sexes can get the shots.

Still, I'm opposed to making anti-cancer vaccinations required by law, no matter how benign the intent. Required vaccinations ought to be limited to those diseases that are highly communicable and that a whole crowd of people can quickly catch just by being in the same room for only a few minutes or hours with one sick person.

And requiring vaccinations against one specific cancer? How many cancers are there now, that we know of? I dunno, I think the allegations that Merck may have been lobbying a little too hard for these laws might be valid.

Fuck.

Molly Ivins died and Iso's son is in grave danger.

Is it Friday yet?

the painted cat



friday is too far away. i hereby declare today random cat blogging day.



the comment moderation thingy was a mis-mouse and i don't always check my e-mail. apologies.

Blogging for Choice is so ... last week.

That's me, a day late and a dollar short. More accurately, a week late. The 34th anniversary of Roe v Wade was January 22, 2007, and feminists were blogging specially on that day. Me, I was too busy bitching about war to notice. Sigh. Bad feminist.

This year's assignment: tell us, and your readers, why you're pro-choice. I spent some time roaming through the blogosphere, reading some of the posts, but Dr Violet Socks' contrarianism is my favorite.

Mine [I prefer to call myself pro-abortion instead of pro-choice]:

Dude. It's my body. Keep your paws and laws off.

Axis of Evil

First they came for Iraq's nuclear weapons.
Then they came for Iran's nuclear weapons.
And we call Kim Jong-Il the crazy one?

Iran is next.

January 26, 2007 | An injured man left a Baghdad hospital after receiving treatment, after a car bomb in a Shiite neighborhood killed 26 people and wounded 54. The blast occurred shortly after two rockets slammed into the heavily fortified Green Zone.
(Photo: Mahmoud Raouf Mahmoud / Reuters)




I found that photo and caption on the truthout.org front page. When I clicked on the photo, it took me to this article.

It's the Kool-Aid, Stupid.

I haven't kept up my planned pace on my letter-writing campaign. I keep taking time out to look at some of the websites of some of the Senators.

Today I found this:

“The Iraqis must pass an oil law and take other steps critical to achieving a political solution for the disputes between the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds." [emphasis mine]

at Maria Cantwell's site.

I'll admit that when I first started reading about the Iraq oil production-sharing agreement issue, I was skeptical. Sounded like conspiracy theory material to me. Even when I first posted about PSAs recently, I wondered if I wasn't sipping on some Kool-Aid that I should be avoiding.

To be fair to Senator Cantwell, she's not the only politico I've seen quoted as saying approximately the same thing. I dunno. I think maybe the translation of that statement is:

All your oil are belong to US. We'll pull our occupation forces out of your country after you pass a law making it so.

I'm going to go drink some lavender chamomile tea now, and resume e-mailing.

I'm annoyed again.

We are entitled to everybody's analysis of the SOTU speech, and the cherry-picked snippets of it they want us to have, both in writing and in video clips, but just try finding a full transcript or full video of it on the web. They're all behind walls where you have to pay, or at least register. So much for the watchdog media.


UPDATE and correction: CNN has a transcript, but I'm still peeved; the link to it was buried in one of their stories.

If it's a xeno-DESERT, can't we just exit it?

speak softly and carry a big sticker



TenaciousK takes me to task in a comment on my post below for wanting to cut and run, and for not having any real suggestions.



Taking our toys and going home: it's not just egregious, or doubly egregious, it's monstrous, horrendous, barbaric, add on all the bad adjectives you can think of. We're already complicit in the genocide that's happening/going to happen. Too late to not be.

Will it be worse if we leave or if we stay? No way to ever know. We either stay there and count the dead, or we leave and count the dead. Either way, we tell ourselves that if we'd done it the other way, it would have been worse.



Has anybody asked the people in Iraq if they want our intervention? Or anybody's intervention, for that matter?

My guess is no, nobody ever asked. Way back before you or I were ever born, but still in rather recent history, some Western powers got together and drew some lines on a map: ... and this section shall be called Iraq ... and they just shuffled together parts or wholes of various tribes, clans. peoples, whathaveyou into one "country."

Because they're all Muslims, these people all look alike to us Westerners. What does it matter which of them gets assigned to live in which country? Hunh. To paraphrase Tom Lehrer: the Shi'ites hate the Sunnis, and the Sunnis hate the Shi'ites, and everybody hates the Kurds!



Suggestions? I have some, but nobody's going to like them.


Do we take our toys and go home? I'm fine with laying down our toys on the ground, leaving them behind in the sandbox, and slinking home. I'm fine with taking whatever monies we've appropriated and not yet spent and spending it on food, water, arms, and ammunition, dropping them out of the sky onto Iraqi soil as we airlift our soldiers out of there.


Do we stay and continue to provide intervention? Okay, but how about this: we stay long enough to broker a peaceful division of "Iraq" into at least three separate states, one for the Sunnis, one for the Shi'ites, and one for the Kurds. If we truly want to spread democracy in the Middle East, this might be the way to go.

Of course, the Kurds in Armenia and Turkey and Iran may all want to split off and make a whole new Kurdistan. And Iran may want to annex the Iraqi Shi'ites --- and their oil fields --- though it's unclear whether they'd like to be Iranians or have their own state, and if they have their own state Iran may forcibly annex them anyway.


We want to "stabilize" the Middle East because we want their cheap and easy oil. If for some reason we can't get our hands on that oil, we sure as hell don't want anybody else to get it. Whatever it is we end up doing to assuage our consciences, is mostly just going to assuage our consciences.

Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

To me. I may need bailing out.

I've been agitated for too long now, and it's time to turn the tables and become an agitator myself. I'm going to start by e-mailing everybody in Congress.

I invite you to join me. Borrow my letter[s], or write your own. I've added links in the sidebar over there for writing to Congress people. If I figure out a way to make that easier, I'll fix it.

Suggestions, comments, critiques, or criticim invited, but you'll have to make them here. I've turned off comments over there. It's not like I need yet another discussion forum to keep up with, much as like all y'all.

[taking a few days off]

Real life intrudes [I hate when that happens}. Unless we invade yet another country in the next day or two, I'll be absent from the blogosphere for a bit.

Fleiauu: A legendary Tongan princess.

[thanks, tk]

Ah, a flivverous start to a touchy subject: Does Tony Snow know more about feminism than Barbara Boxer? I hate to interrupt the Goat Rope Challenge, but as an ardent feminist, I'm having trouble letting this one go by without comment. Does it look like the White House spokesman even has a clue?!

Gloria Steinem calls it:

Not to the country's most prominent feminist, Gloria Steinem, who said Snow's remark "takes your breath away."

"It had nothing to do with feminism," Steinem told The Associated Press. "It was perfectly reasonable, and it could have come from anyone a grandfather as well as a grandmother. Sen. Boxer was trying to draw a parallel" between herself and the secretary.

Senator Boxer was correct. Neither she nor Rice -- no matter how badly each of them may feel about maimed and dying soldiers and grieving families -- neither of them truly has any hostages to fortune in this war.

[interlude]

in a perfect world repair people would show up on time and no blogger would smash the thumb on one hand and burn 3 fingers on the other in the same day, but shit happens.

there's more. back later.

Defining a just society

Medicare for all

I've been less than thrilled with idea of letting the government take care of my health, but it's a system we already have in place, and spreading the risks and the buying power over all 300,000,000 of us is appealing. The government might even let the doctors decide what treatment we should get, instead of letting accountants with both eyes on the bottom line deside who gets what care.

Really, in a just society, would even a for-profit business take such bad care of its customers? I think not, so file this one under the heading of our collective self-defense, I guess.

Defining a just society

Speak softly and carry a big stick

The world is a dangerous place, with dangerous people in it. Self-defense is a necessity. Internally, this means police, courts, judges, juries, jails, prisons, and mental hospitals. Externally, this means a standing military and all its accoutrements.

A society has all kinds of people in it, and a just society would make room for all of them, including those most inclined to be of the warrior mentality. We need protection, they need a job --- voila! --- police, jailers, military.

Where we need to be very careful is in deciding exactly when to call on the services of our professional warriors, and just how often. It's a resource that most definitely needs to be under-utilized. Diplomacy, negotiation, gentle guidance, often just carefully watching and analyzing a situation; all these need to be tried first.

One would have thought that the Constitution had established some checks on our powers to wage war, but between those of us who want to be kept safe and secure from every imaginable danger all the time and those of us who want to be warriors by proxy [not to mention those who expect to profit from conflict], we've instead over-utilized this resource, and stretched it to the breaking point.

Not to mention all the people we've killed and all the havoc we've now wreaked on a few other societies, none of which were an imminent threat to us.

Then there's the war on drugs, but you get the picture.

[interlude]

time for lunch. i think i'll go to taco bell. a just society would let me stuff my arteries full of lard on occasion.

Defining a just society

Trampolines

There would be trampolines. Actual trampolines as well as metaphorical ones. A just society would make room for people to have fun. Fun. Joy. Play. Creativity. Passion. And like the cute little graphic below, whre the lemmings dive off the cliff to find a trampoline that tosses them back up onto the next cliff, a just society would have safety nets for its citizens.

Defining a just society

Food

We'd all eat real food, not attractively-packaged industrial waste. I'm all for recycling, using every possible bit of a resource, but do you really need to eat all that high-fructose corn-syrup? No, you do not. Let's turn it all into ethanol to run our cars. Fructose? Here, have an orange. Corn? Corn on the cob, roasted on the grill, beats granola bars any day of the week. Syrup? Mmmmmm, maple trees.


Food would be locally grown and consumed as much as possible.

Not shipping food long distances means that we use less fuel and emit less pollution bringing it to market. Not that I want to discourage trade. Trade is good. Apple trees, maple trees, grapes, wheat: these don't grow happily down here in the subtropics. I'll happily trade you some oranges, mangoes, papayas, and avocadoes for some apples, maple syrup, a jug of wine, and the makings of a loaf of good French bread.

Small local farms are one form of small business. Small businesses are good for the communities they serve and good for the people who run them. More on businesses in another section.


Food would be organically produced as much as possible. The regular and profligate us of pesticides and herbicides hasn't cut down on crop losses enough to justify that much use. Fertilizers have significantly increased the yield per acre for a lot of crops, but the micronutrient content [vitamins and minerals] of much of our produce is about half what it was 50 years ago. Now you need to eat twice as much food to get the same amount of nutrition. No wonder we're all so fat.


Food animals would be grown humanely. Like your bacon and eggs? With a glass of milk, maybe? Read about factory farms. Visit one. More on factory farming in another post on another day.

Defining a just society

Martin Luther King Day

In the same way that we've mostly forgotten George Washington's birthday, because we're accustomed to being our own country now, and Abraham Lincoln's birthday, because we've mostly gotten over the War of Northern Aggression, we'll have forgotten that we used to care about the color of a person's skin.

The Goat Rope Challenge: Defining a just society

Some time back, I was perusing one of my favorite blogs, Self-Absorbed Boomer, and was directed to the Goat Rope's challenge: Define a just society.

I cottoned on to the idea right away, but it has proven more difficult than I would have thought. Having put this off long enough, I now decree that my self-imposed project for this weekend, which just happens to include Martin Luther King Jr Day, is tackling that challenge. Possibly this will take me longer than a 3-day weekend, so I leave y'all with one plank from my platform:

There should be trampolines.



[tk: hello and thanks for all the lemmings]

The War On Lemmings

[thanks, tk]

With his plan to surge into The Cradle of Civilization, King George is sending hundreds of Americans to their deaths, and consigning thousands more to suffering [often grievous] injuries. Not to mention the remaining 300,000,000 million of us who are sitting here in our cozy homes, far away from it all, blogging contentedly, and who are about to get shoved off the cliff. I think it's possible we've already been shoved off the cliff, and just haven't hit the rocks yet.

Let's not send any more troops to Iraq.
Let's bring home now the ones who are already over there.
Let's stand up and fight like lemmings.









thanks for the alternative lemmings

Surge

See those little toy building blocks scattered in roughly parallel lines across the picture? They're pilings. Bridge pilings. From an interstate highway across a bay. The day after the surge. More pictures of the same devastation here.






This photo was probably taken only a few hours after the surge passed by. NOAA's tagline:
Turn Around,
Don't Drown.





The bay is about two miles wide where the bridge crosses, and the water is about 10-15 feet deep. People who know about this stuff estimate that it took a storm surge, a wall of water, 30-40 feet high to dislodge those huge concrete slabs.

Now that's a surge.

The only surge I expect to see from Bush's latest [ahem] plan [cough cough] is a surge in the number of flag-draped coffins arriving here in the US and rolling out of the bellies of big ol' jet airplanes. Not that we're going to be allowed to see those.

PSA: It's the oil, stupid.

Prostate-specific antigen. Public service announcement. Production-sharing agreement.

Did I call it?

Yes.
I did.

I think it's possible that Bush Jr really does see himself in the mold of Churchill, or Truman, or some other savior, and if he does, then he was cleverly manipulated, because I'm sure that CheneyCo are in it for the oil.


thanks be to DragonTat2 and Titan_Arum for the tip

How to Pay For Cocaine and Heroin

Not to take away from the general discussion going on over at IOZ' How to Purchase Cocaine and Heroin post, but I did get into a side discussion with TenaciousK over the costs of addiction. Were one able to save drafts of comments, I would probably have posted this over there, but c'est la Blogger vie, no can do.

Both my work and my volunteer work have brought me into contact with drug users, addicts, crack babies, and the survivng family and friends of people who died from drug overdoses. I want all those drugs to just disappear from the face of the earth, particularly meth and the like. No matter how small, the human cost is too much.

Then again [and it pains me to be in sympathy with Rush Limbaugh on anything], I'm one of the 9% and I want to be able to walk into my local drug store and casually and anonymously buy syringes and morphine sulfate the way the rest of you can bebop in there and pick up a bottle of Tylenol for your occasional headaches.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons [a future post], I now agree: drop The War On Drugs, legalize all recreational drug use.

I haven't yet figured out where I stand on the various sub-arguments about control, regulation, taxation, availability, etc [also for a later post, if ever]. For now I just want to know:

how many people are going to need treatment for drug addiction and how do we pay for it?

Opponents are fond of quoting figures like $143.4 billion as the cost of the war on drugs, but they're figuring in stuff like lost productivity, which is all well and good for making a point, but I want to figure out where in the federal coffers we have money to be turned away from fighting drugs and toward treating drug users.

Believable estimates of what the federal government is spending on the war on drugs range from about $12 billion [various sources] to about $19 billion per year. From the National Drug Control Strategy, FY 2006 Budget Summary: the budget request was approximately $12.5 billion [of which approximately 26% was to be spent on treatment].

When SWAGing stuff, I like to truncate numbers to two-ish significant figures and lean toward the worst case scenario, so $12 billion it is. And as I said to TK in the comments over at IOZ' blog, if we tax the formerly-illicit drugs like we do alcohol and tobacco, I think that might bring in another $5 billion.

In 2002, the total US population was approximately 280 million people. At about the same time, probably 7 million people, age 12 years and older, needed treatment for drug use [table 16]. That's 2.5% of the total population.

It looks like maybe one third of the same age group has tried illegal drugs at least once in their lives. If drugs become legal, affordable, and widely available, and 100% of the population tries drugs, then we can expect maybe 7.5% of the population becomes addicted and will need treatment. That seems possible or even a bit high, as the same source where I got the 7,000,000 needing drug treatment also estimates that about 18,000,000 needed treatment for alcohol problems.

So, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of $12-$17 billion to treat 22 million people. That's a paltry $545-$772 to spend on each person needing treatment. Even if only 2.5% of the population needs treatment, it only raises it to maybe a couple thousand dollars per person per year.

I don't know how much it costs to effectively treat a drug addiction, but that doesn't sound like enough money.

This is depressing. I need some drugs.




I don't agree with everything Milton Friedman says here, but but I did appreciate the homily he launches into, about 16 minutes into the video:

It's beginning to look a lot like ... Vietnam!

[you thought i was going to say christmas, didn't you?]

Demonstrations! Conscientious objectors!

Thanks to roxtar for pointing it out.

Proof that the Big Guys are listening to me!

Just in time for the 2007 North American International Auto Show in -- did you have to ask? -- Detroit, Michigan.

Last year, in response to the Slate article subtitled GM's Suicide Pact with the United Auto Workers, I both raved and ranted about the Chevy Malibu. GM appears to have listened.

The 2008 Malibu will have "stability control" and "will compete with the Camry on fuel economy." OK, so maybe they didn't listen to me very much.

Dudes! That's good, but if you truly wanted to make the Malibu tree-hugger-friendly, you'd have equipped it with a biodiesel-ready engine and -- gosh! -- maybe even made it a Prius-like hybrid.

I didn't see a single damn word any-damn-where on improving those seats.

Health? Care? [thanking you once again, sydbristow]

Being one of the 46,000,000, I was going to unleash a rant provoked by this post, but I've changed my mind. Instead, I think I'll load y'all down with a little more light reading. After all, I'm going to be wading through all this, why should I deny everyone else the chance to?

I'm still leaning towards the "Medicare for All" approach, though there's many a detractor out there. Here's some stuff on [mostly] administrative costs:

Where do health spending dollars go?

Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs
A SUMMARY OF THE 2006 ANNUAL REPORTS

National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare

Medicare's Hidden Administrative Costs

Additional Talking Points in Response to AHA's Study on Hospital Costs

Perspective: Administrative Costs of Private Health Insurance Plans

[ugh. an audit.]

The Incalculable Costs of Medicare

Medicare for All? No Thanks, Part II

Bringing single-payer healthcare to America, the stealthier way

Urban Renewal by Katrina

Bob Herbert gets it partly right in The Not Wanted Signs [thanks, syd], but he ignores the multi-faceted reality and focuses instead on the low-hanging fruit: the feel-good heartstring-tugging downtrodden-little-people tear-jerker.

[Or maybe I'm just suffering from hurricane fatigue and I'm the one who can't see the urban jungle for the hurricane-felled trees.]


The Truth: Every city, large and small, piled high like Manhattan or barely a wide spot in the road, wants the poor to go somewhere else. And don't come back.


The rest of the truth, or some of it anyway: Nobody has enough money to rebuild New Orleans, and even if they did, it's going to take longer than a day. Longer than a year, even.

Maybe Bill Gates does, but he's not offering. FEMA could have had more money, not enough to rebuild, but maybe enough to help out a little more, but with the gutting of FEMA's coffers and management during the Creationism of the Department of Homeland Insecurity that's gone. And with all that money bleeding into and out of the War on Iraq the Terrible, no other government department has anything left to spend on unimportant stuff like people.

Dress Rehearsal: Florida, 2004, the summer that one state got zowied by four hurricanes. We get hit by hurricanes a lot, so we're better prepared than most, but still ...



Some Random Lessons, had y'all been paying attention

• It took four months to get a new roof on my building, and eight months before the damaged units were habitable. This only happened because many, many non-English-speaking people, pesumably illegal aliens but no one was asking, came here and worked 14-hour days, 7 days a week. Those few hours they weren't working, they slept 5 or 10 or 15 in [often uninhabitable] houses or apartments or condos.



• I live in what is probably a lower-middle-class neighborhood. The houses are elderly, but without the historical value that comes with great age. Many were not-exactly-cheaply built, but they were the affordable housing of their day. Now they're filled with retirees on fixed incomes, who have lived in them all their adult lives. And far too many of them still have blue roofs and plywood windows.



• A lot of the houses that got destroyed in my city were ramshackle old houses in very poor neighborhoods, lived in by people who were just barely getting by, who had absolutely no money for upkeep. Most of these have been razed now, and the new "starter" homes being built cost 3-4 times the median household income for this area. None of the former inhabitants of these neighborhoods can afford to come back to them.



• Some of the older, stable, middle-class neighborhoods that were wiped out are on the water [that figures]. These newly-cleared waterfront lots got snapped up by speculators and developers who are putting up big expensive condos and trophy houses.



• Some of my better-off friends had their houses back in livable condition in about a year, but only because they paid for contractors and entire crews to come down here from places like Michigan fer-petes-sakes, paid their wages and housing.



• The building materials just aren't there. We can't grow the trees fast enough to make all those 2x4s. We can't mine the gypsum fast enough to make all that drywall. Just about six months or so after the hurricane whizzed through here, I broke the toilet paper holder in my bathroom. I couldn't even replace that. There weren't any to be had.



• It's been nearly two and a half years, but there are people here who have enough money to continue paying their mortgage and to rent or buy their trailers from FEMA, but they're still living in those trailers. These aren't mobile homes either, they're camper trailers. Some of these folks are still fighting with their insurance companies [who isn't?]. Some of them can't afford to rebuild to the new codes [and the law requires them to]. Some, I have no idea.



• A math problem for you: multiply all this by the fact that New Orleans is [was?] 6 or 7 times more populous than where I live.



• Have you forgotten Mississippi?



• And Alabama?

Factual Ignorance, Left-wing Bias or Anti-Christian Bigotry?

I link, you decide.

Tar Heel Tory's link doesn't take you directly to the story [video], but I found it via Google's cache. I make no promises as to how long my link will be good for.

Yes, in the video it does look like JJ Ramber is trying very hard to pillory Hayes for his remarks, and that her two interviewees are trying to downplay the issue. Tar Heel Tory wants us to believe that Hayes was quoted out of context, but does not provide us with a complete transcript of Hayes' remarks. Anyone out there in Conservative Blogoland want to point me to one?

THT goes on to say:

What Congressman Hayes was speaking about was the exportation of Christian values to Iraq – not Christianity itself, or the forcible conversion of Iraqi Muslims to the Christian faith.

Um, dude, peace on earth and goodwill towards all are values of a number of major and minor religions, not just Christianity. The fact that the good Congressman tossed in “Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior” suggests he's proselytizing, and proselytizing for Christianity, if you ask me. But then I'm a godless humanist living in the Bible Belt, constantly fending off other peoples' attempts to save my mortal soul, so I could be overly sensitive here.

There's a discussion down in the comments section comparing Congressman Hayes' speech at Rotary Club meeting to Congressman Ellison's speech at a conference of Muslims. Not a valid comparison, I say. Speaking about specific religious values at a gathering of, for, and about your co-religionists is fine, but Rotary International frowns on dissing the beliefs of others. Let's hope that Hayes was just an invited speaker and isn't himself a Rotarian.

[ just an aside on the death penalty ... ]

I was skimming this article and decided to vote. This is what the results looked like at the time [yes, I'm in the 21%]:

Okay, now I'm just annoyed.

First it was these guys. Then it was this guy. And these guys. To be fair, there were some others, but you get the idea.

But it's not really them [or not just them] that I find annoying. It's the realization that like colored folk and women, gays are acceptable to the public at large if they consent to remain cute, loveable, manageable, harmless pets.

I dunno. Possibly I'm over-reacting. It could just be that I can't see beyond the borders of my picturesque and picaresque home in the Redneck Riviera, where prejudices of all stripes still run amok.

Farm Subsidies, Part I

I'm still wading though this little bit of light reading from the WaPo.

Dear Santa Claus:

I've been very nice this year. I can even provide references. Please may I have a lump [or two] of coal in my stocking for Christmas?



On second thought ...

Coal mining is hazardous to people, hazardous to the environment, and not especially kind to the landscape.

Plus, we need that coal to make electricity. Oh, wait! We could get our electricity from nuclear power, and store the nuclear waste in the abandned coal mines, once we've got all the coal out. Preferably somebody else's abandoned coal mines.

And coal mining provides jobs. Jobs that can't be off-shored. A boon for the economy, no more unemployment worries! I mean, it's not like somebody in Pakistan or India could sit down with a computer monitor, gaming console, joy stick or what-have-you in hand, and operate a bunch of robots here in US coal mines. Oh, wait.



[sigh ...]

There's more. Stay tuned.

Holy cow!

Tom DeLay has a blog.

From the About section at TomDeLay.com:

The importance of the blogosphere in shaping and motivating the current conservative movement is unquestionable- not only has it served as an important tool in breaking through the liberal MSM clutter but it has helped to keep our elected officials true to principle.

This blog is meant to further the online discussion in the marketplace of ideas.

Dude! Guess what! We liberal bloggers feel the same way about our blogosphere: it's been an important tool in breaking through the illiberal MSM clutter.

I'm guessing that my ideas aren't going to be welcome in that there marketplace.


I did get a chuckle from this blurb about his latest project, G.A.I.N.:

Become an elite activist by applying to be apart [sic] of Tom DeLay's grassroots network.

Elite? Grassroots? Isn't the point of a grassroots movement that anybody can join? The unwashed, the untouchables, the rabble, the hoi polloi?

At least he's not lying about the elite part. You have to submit an application to join G.A.I.N., complete with references.



thanks, Timothy Noah and Slate

Christmas Wish List

I belong to a largish clan, well-scattered over the 50 US states, and [mostly] we all like each other. We [mostly] all like each other enough to enjoy exchanging Christmas presents.

But with dozens of cousins and such all over the West, Midwest, Alaska, Hawaii, and even that outpost of civilization, Washington DC, I was spending beaucoup bucks on presents, wrappings, boxing and shipping.

We're all more or less middle class, comfortably well off, and can usually go out and buy whatever we want. Besides, none of us needs more stuff.

So, several years ago, we all decided to take whatever money we wanted to spend on a person and donate that amount to the charity of that person's choice. Or to the charity of our own choosing, if our loved one[s] expressed no particular preference.

My wish list this year:

adopt a panther
adopt a kid
set somebody free
help somebody live their final days as well as possible



If you would like to donate to a charity, but wonder if your money will be used wisely, you can always check them out on the web:

Give.org
CharityWatch.org
CharityNavigator.org
even the government [FTC] is watching out for us

Genocide

from one side
from another side

Science and ... the MLA?!

Dude!

There's a reason why my degrees are in science, and yours are in English.

Even so, I think everyone ought to experiment, and this one does look like fun. How-some-ever, I refuse to beg anybody to do anything.

If any of you actually belong to the MLA, I'd kinda like to know if Acephalous actually does present his findings [much of the MLA site appears to be members-only].

I'll lay down.

...under power. I like that one.


If you surf through the pages and pages of taser videos in YouTube, you can find a recurring theme:

cop [tasers suspect]
suspect [falls down]
cop "Get up, or I'll taser you again!"
suspect [fails to comply]
cop [tasers suspect]

WTF?! Don't cops all have to get tasered themselves before they're allowed to use tasers on actual people? Don't they understand that of course the suspect is not going to comply with any commands to get up, or roll over, or what have you, while under power?


Probably there are situations where a taser is the best weapon. Most likely, there are a lot of good cops, none of whom abuse suspects in this fashion.

But...

There sure were an awful lot of big burly cops in that UCLA library. Surely they could have just picked up one measly student and carried him out.

Stand up!

Papieren, bitte.

Death Penalty

I'm against it.

Chilling factoid: public defenders that I know tell me that about 25% to 50% of their clients, were they offered the choice, say they'd rather be executed, instead of being sentenced to life in prison.

Another chilling thought: I've only heard this from public defenders, not from any criminal defense attorneys in private practice.

Anti Death Penalty web sites:
Death Penalty Information Center
Amnesty International: Abolish The Death Penalty

As of this writing, 1 in 8 people on death row in the US has been absolved of the crime they are condemned for:
The Innocence Project

I've been told that this documentary accurately portrays the justice system in the state of Florida:
Murder on a Sunday Morning

Pro Death Penalty web site:
Pro Death Penalty

From the US Dept of Justice:
Bureau of Justice Statistics

Benchmark: December

Forget finishing the war for Poppy. Forget showing up Poppy: this is how you fight a war, Clueless Dad! Forget bringing democracy to the Middle East. Forget saving a helpless country -- hell, an entire benighted region -- from a brutal, Hitlerian dictator.

It's the OIL, stupid.

I've cherry-picked some excerpts for your reading pleasure.
-------------------------

Iraq is sitting on a mother lode of some of the lightest, sweetest, most profitable crude oil on earth, and the rules that will determine who will control it and on what terms are about to be set.

The Iraqi government faces a December deadline, imposed by the world's wealthiest countries, to complete its final oil law. Industry analysts expect that the result will be a radical departure from the laws governing the country's oil-rich neighbors, giving foreign multinationals a much higher rate of return than with other major oil producers and locking in their control over what George Bush called Iraq's "patrimony" for decades, regardless of what kind of policies future elected governments might want to pursue.

-------------------------

Chafing at the idea that the Chinese and Russians might end up with what is arguably the world's greatest energy prize, [oil] industry leaders lobbied hard for regime change throughout the 1990s. With the election of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in 2000 -- the first time in U.S. history that two veterans of the oil industry had ever occupied the nation's top two jobs -- they would finally get the "greater access" to the region's oil wealth, which they had long lusted after.

-------------------------

But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun. Specifically, they wanted an Iraqi government that would enter into production service agreements (PSAs) for the extraction of Iraq's oil.

PSAs, developed in the 1960s, are a tool of today's kinder, gentler neocolonialism; they allow countries to retain technical ownership over energy reserves but, in actuality, lock in multinationals' control and extremely high profit margins -- up to 13 times oil companies' minimum target, according to an analysis by the British-based oil watchdog Platform (PDF)

-------------------------

PSAs often have long terms -- up to 40 years -- and contain "stabilization clauses" that protect them from future legislative changes. As Muttit points out, future governments "could be constrained in their ability to pass new laws or policies." That means, for example, that if a future elected Iraqi government "wanted to pass a human rights law, or wanted to introduce a minimum wage [and it] affected the company's profits, either the law would not apply to the company's operations or the government would have to compensate the company for any reduction in profits." It's Sovereignty Lite [emphasis mine].

-------------------------
And those are just from part one of Joshua Holland's two-part series Bush's Petro-Cartel Almost Has Iraq's Oil over at AlterNet.
[read part two here]

STFU

taking a break from ranting, raving, pseudo-pontificating

Brought to you by the war in Iraq:

Iraq Calling
Birding Babylon
Home Range

post-Election-Day decompression

I voted.

This is the first election where I was not a gung-ho yellow dog.

Oh, I've voted for the odd Republican on the odd occasion, mostly because I live in a conservative area where only Republicans have run for local offices in recent years. But in statewide and national elections, I've voted almost exclusively straight-ticket Democrat.

Yes, straight-ticket voting is the lazy citizen's way: pick a party you like the sound of, or the major candidate you like the looks of, and vote for that party in all other races.

You may deplore, and I often have, the lack of rigorous inspection of the candidates and the issues, but if about half-ish of the people vote for One Party and about half-ish of the people vote for The Opposing Party, what you get is a befuddle of several hundred people standing in the middle of the road, verbally pushing and shoving each other, and engaging in legislative tug-of-war over bridges to tiny Alaskan islands.

We're a lot safer, and the world is safer from us, if we busy ourselves with pork-barrel politics, arguing over how to divvy up this year's tax revenues for each others' states, than if we're all on the same page, marching to the beat of the same drummer, following our Fearless Leader into A Brighter Future, Bringing Democracy to The Rest of The World. That all sounds loverly, but what if that fearless leader decides that spreading Democracy means that we need to invade helpless, backward nations, listen in on everyone's phone calls without warrants, establish secret prisons, and re-define torture?

Oh, wait ....

This year I took IOZ' advice and voted for some Independents. I sort of have to agree with his assessment of the Democrats, though the rest of my votes all went to the Party of Yellow Dogs, and for now I'm still gloating over the Democrats taking both houses of Congress by narrow squeaks.

I'm taking Rumsfeld's resignation as a sign that maybe things will change for the better. The next step I'd most like to see? Impeach Cheney.

Yo! WaPo! Yoo hoo! Look over here!

I know it's just a tiny little nit-picky thingy, hardly worth worrying your busy little brains about, but Florida has TWO time zones. Our polls here in the Panhandle close at 7:00 PM Central Standard Time. That would be 8:00 PM Eastern Time, for those of you who may be historically and/or geographically challenged.

Sheesh.

Polls, polls, polls, polls

Push Polls
Just plain evil. Masquerading as polls, when in reality they're only "Vote for X" ads. That little deception is bad enough, but the scary thing is: people fall for them. Even scarier, otherwise smart people are stupid enough to believe that nobody falls for the messages in push polls.

Popularity Contests
Then there The Polls, the popularity contests, the ones everybody watches. Candidates want to know if they are popular enough to get elected. Voters want to know how everyone else is planning to vote so that they'll know how to vote too. The Media, drama queens to the bone, keep themselves center stage by recounting to us, with pretty pictures and fulsome words, every moment-by-moment change in the numbers.

Exit Polls
I'm for free speech as much as the next person, and maybe more so, but exit ought to be outlawed, as electioneering. Can anybody say Florida 2000? And if that didn't convince you of the futility of letting media moguls tell us who our next President is, how about this discussion? Pardon me, but I want the news people to go back to reporting the news, like who actually won, based on the actual number of votes.


Place Your Bets
The polls of the future? And the policy decisions of the future? OK, so people with real or fictional money backing their guesses are more likely to [collectively] guess correctly, are best guesses the best way to decide important questions? Don't ask me, I only live here.

Kidnapped, tortured, bound, and gagged

No, this isn't about some heinous crime committed by some crazy mass murderer.

Oh, wait.



Dear Dubya,

You're regarded as one who likes simple answers to complex problems. Ordinarily, I wouldn't go along with this world view, but in this case I think I can help you out.

Stop "interrogating" them. We haven't got anything useful from them anyway.

Deport them. We've still got a few tax dollars left. I don't mind your spending them on plane/boat/bus tickets for everybody to send them back to where they came from.

No more upkeep on all that prison infrastructure. No more over-priced contractors to pay. No need to to spend time and money enforcing that pesky Military Commissions Act.

And just think of all the good will and positive political capital you'd reap for displaying your much-vaunted compassion.

There. Problem solved.

Some days I wish my name were Steve.

Alas, none of my names, given or assumed, remotely qualifies.

But it would be fun to twist the tails of the creationistas just a bit. Oh, wait. Somebody just did. Figures it'd be the Irish. 'Zat you, ZB?

You may have heard of the lists of scientists that the creationists are circulating, scientists who publicly claim to doubt evolution. Project Steve is a countering list of scientists who have credentials, all named Steve [in honor of Steven J Goulding**], who support the following statement:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to "intelligent design," to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation's public schools.

So, if you are a Steve of one stripe or another, and you have a science PhD, the world is waiting to see your name on a T-shirt.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to subvert the minds of the children around me [I've given up on their elders] with my volunteer work: tutoring them in the four Rs -- Readin', Ritin', 'Rithmetic, and Reason.


Correction: Stephen Jay Gould! I meant Stephen Jay Gould! Will whoever stole my brain please return it? I'm obviously in need of one that works.

Health? Care?

The US health care system doesn't. Care about health, that is. Unless it's CEOs caring about the health of their bank accounts.

Over the course of my insured and uninsured life, I've gone from believing in the market solution, aka Competition Will Set You Free -- Buy My Insurance Plan! No, Buy MY Insurance Plan! No, Buy MINE! -- to facing up to reality.

I've whined before, many times, and no doubt will do so again, about corporate greed, corrupt politicians, and the clueless masses who enable the first two.

But not right now.

Angry Bear, my new favorite economist-blogger, has a series of seven posts on "The U.S. Healthcare System" [links are in his lefthand sidebar, under "Topics"]. I'll start you off with the first installment here: The Real Crisis.

Right now, I'm leaning towards Congressman John Conyers' The United States National Health Insurance Act, H.R. 676 [“Expanded & Improved Medicare For All”]


I've only skimmed most of the the articles, posts, and links so far, so I can't make any informed comment yet.