Category Archives: Politics

My latest rants and insights on political events. The rigors of editing and footnotes are what prevent me from writing. So don’t expect anything polished here. My main objective here is to get my thoughts out into words.

Obamacare – a tribute

Obamacare

A Tribute to Ted Cruz’s Heroic Obstinacy

apologies to Dr. Seuss

Dem-o-dare
We’re Dems who dare
We dared to pass
Obamacare.

Those dem-o-dares
those dem-o-dares!
I do not like those dem-o-dares!
How dare they fund
Obamacare?

Would you fund
Obamacare?

I do not like it,
Dem-o-dares,
I will not fund
Obamacare.

Would you fund it
Here or there?

I would not fund it
here or there.
I would not fund it
anywhere.

I will not fund
Obamacare
I do not like it,
Dem-o-dares

Would you fund it
for a house?
Would you fund
To kill a louse?

I will not fund it
For a house
I will not fund
To kill a louse
I will not fund it
here or there.
I will not fund it
anywhere.
I will not fund Obamacare,
I will not fund it, Dem-o-dares.

Would you fund it
Fix this mess?
Would you fund it?
Do no less!

Not for a house
No kill a louse,
Not fix this mess,
I’ll do no less!
I will not fund it here or there.
I will not fund it anywhere.
I will not fund Obamacare,
I will not fund it, Dem-o-dares.

Would you? Could you?
For the poor?
Fund it! Fund it!
We want no more!

I would not,
could not,
For the poor.

You may like it
You will see.
Love it! it’s a
real small fee.

I say it’s not a real small fee.
Not for the poor! You let me be.
I will not fund it for a house
I will not fund to kill a louse,
Will not fund to fix this mess,
I will not fund ! I’ll do no less!
I will not fund it here or there.
I will not fund it anywhere.
I will not fund Obamacare!
I will not fund it, Dem-o-dares!

For jobs! For jobs!
For good jobs!
Would you, could you,
For good jobs!

Not for jobs! It’s no small fee!
Not for the poor! Sam! Let me be!
I will not fund it for a house
I will not fund to kill a louse,
Will not fund to fix this mess,
I will not fund ! I’ll do no less!
I will not fund it here or there.
I will not fund it anywhere.
I will not fund Obamacare!
I will not fund it, Dem-o-dares!

Say!  Budget cuts?
Pass it with some budget cuts!
Would you, could you, with these cuts?

I would not, could not,
With these cuts.

Would you, could you,
With some pork?

I would not, could not, for some pork.
Not for some cuts. Not for the jobs,
Not for the poor, no real small fee,
I do not like it, Sam, you see.
Not for a house. No fix this mess.
No kill a louse. I’ll do no less.
I will not fund it here or there.
I will not fund it anywhere!
I will not fund Obamacare,
I do not like it, Dem-o-dares!

You do not like
Obamacare?

I do not like it,
Dem-o-Dares!

Could you, would you,
Keep your doc!

I would not, could not.
No more doc!

Would you, could you,
It’s a rock!

I could not, would not, it’s no rock!
I will not! I want my doc!
I would not, could not, for some pork.
Not for some cuts. Not for the jobs,
Not for the poor, no real small fee,
I do not like it, Sam, you see.
Not for a house. No fix this mess.
No kill a louse. I’ll do no less.
I will not fund it here or there.
I will not fund it ANYWHERE!
I will not fund Obamacare,
I do not like it, Dem-o-dares!

You do not like it.
So you say.
Try it! Try it!
And you may.
Try it and you may I say.

Dems!
I cannot stop you,
I will will stand down.
And we’ll be through.

Say!
Obamacare isn’t bad!
My tea-party has just been had!
My filibuster was just funny!
We’re saving us a ton of money!
It’s saving a whole lot of pork!
And budget cuts. And many  jobs.
It saves the poor. It’s a small fee.
It really works for us you see!

So I will fund it for a house.
And I will fund to kill a louse.
And I will fund to fix this mess.
And I will fund! I’ll do no less!
And I will fund it here and there.
Say! I’ll fund it ANYWHERE!

I do so like
Obamacare!
Thank you!
Thank you,
Dems-who-dare!

 

Imperialism and Law

“I will make it legal” – Emperor Palpatine
That might not be the best quote, since I’m loath to compare the US Government with a Sith Lord from a children’s story, and there are far too many children’s stories to explain the situation in the Middle East. But the quote illustrates an important point: law stems from power. He who has the power makes the laws, and he who makes the laws has the power.
And that is the best way to understand the issue in Syria and how it’s developing. The basic issue is the Arab Spring, which is a pro-Western revolt in the Middle East, spreading into Syria, which falls under Russian Imperial influence.
This explains why the US has been very skittish about getting too involved in Syria – being too heavy handed could risk open confrontation with Russia. Contrast that with our $1.5 billion yearly aid to the Egyptian military.
But what Obama said, over and over again, is the US’s need to establish some kind of basic “red line” or international law by which it is compelled to act anywhere around the globe. And this is the heart of imperialism, and why it’s such a nuanced concept that it escapes most people. Too often we need something blatant behind it – oil, profit, dollars, greed – but the reality of it is as delicate as a word.
And that’s the thing. For the purposes of this article, we will assume Assad has used chemical weapons, this means Russia would also like to get on board and enforce that standard. That means Syria is becoming indefensible. And whereas Russia would feel violated if the US did an open military strike on one of its allied countries, allowing the US to maintain this international standard, or law, is more nuanced, and lets it maintain regional domain.
In this narrow sense, it’s actually a lot like Iraq. Other countries only opposed the US’s invasion of Iraq in speeches and rhetoric. When it came down to material support, they were all in there, divvying it up according to the anarchic law of imperial powers.
And the US, by upholding and struggling single-handedly for this limited international standard, no matter how basic and abridged, maintains its prestige as the world’s power.
It is with this lens that we can take Obama at his word when he says that to put that red line down, and then not to enforce it when someone crosses it, would be to gravely damage our national interests.

Numbers, dammit! I need numbers!!!

It’s an old political science lesson: when the camera pans out, it’s journalism. When it pans in, it’s propaganda.
The former is what we saw in Egypt two years ago. The latter is what we’re seeing today.
It means the demonstrations calling the overthrow of Mubarrak numbered in the millions. Meanwhile, it looks like the demonstrations calling for the restoration of Morsi are numbering only in the thousands. It seems like a lot in a country like ours where nobody demonstrates over much of anything, but it confirms my opinion in my last post that the Morsi faction is a small, well organized minority which “sees it as an all or nothing battle” (to quote a CNN correspondent).
With this in mind, struggle and death is as inevitable as it is in any revolution. At least if you want to move forward to a democratic society.
And the media continue to forget any real numbers while they fumble around blindly with their senile moralistic lens. We need numbers, goddammit! How big are these pro-Morsi demonstrations, really? What people in Egypt are saying about it? Where are the 33 million who came out in support of Morsi’s ouster?
Killing 500 people to crush a small minority aimed at strangling a fledgling democracy is really a small price to pay, especially when they say it’s an all-or-nothing battle. Consider how many are dead in Syria over that battle.
Or heck, look at how many are dead in Iraq, and how much money have we spent there? This is a doubly vexing point, considering John McCain just went on the rampage calling this a coup and saying we need to take out all our money from Egypt. Okay Mr. Finish-The-Job-10+years-In-Iraq guy. Though maybe it’s not so vexing considering the party out of power in DC always plays the anti-imperialist bullshitter card.
Please, the moralistic bullshit needs to stop. These people are journalists, not philosophers. They are not qualified to pontificate on political matters. Give us some real numbers. Tell us what’s happening on the ground. Don’t pan to shots of one person here, a few there, and scream how horrible it is. You know what’s horrible? These guys taking up airtime.

It’s the opposite of a coup

I was reading The Economist’s lament (Has the Arab Spring Failed?) about the military’s ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that this was a grave step backwards for Eqypt. Ironically, I was reading this on July 14, aka Bastille Day. Because it seems our venerated Western Democracies are so old that we’ve become a bit senile and have forgotten our own violent births.
Now I know there’s a lot of confusion about what exactly is going on, and I’m used to a population that just fumbles for gut reactions (military bad, voting good) because they’re so far away from actually being able to understand politics. But when established journalists start reporting with this lack of understanding, it’s cause for concern.
So let’s do a quick chronology of events, so we can see where we’re really at, shall we?
The ouster of Mubarrak was caused by a truly popular groundswell – a SECULAR groundswell. Of this there can be no denial. The secularists in Egypt sacrificed for that revolution and they made it. Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood was sitting on the sidelines, waiting for their moment to take advantage of it.
The details of their rise to power since then are a bit fuzzy, but it sounds like they used every shady and intimidating trick in the book to ascend to power, and once they did so, to solidify their absolute control of society. That meant pushing the secularists out.
That’s when the military stepped in. On the side of the secular revolutionists.
Now I understand this is a novel concept. When we hear the word “coup”, it conjures up connotations of Pinochet and Franco, who rose to power AGAINST a popular groundswell of leftists. But let’s continue.
The military took over, and 33 MILLION people came out in support of the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Let’s repeat that. 33 MILLION IN SUPPORT OF MORSI’S OUSTER.
IT’S THE LARGEST DEMONSTRATION IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND.
Since then, I’ve seen report after report of the military shooting demonstrators. Who are these demonstrators? Not the secularists. They’re supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, sore at their loss of power. This is to be expected, and is a necessary part of Egypt’s transition to a modern democracy we can all be proud of.
Why are we wringing our hands about this? This is why I bring up our own senility.
Democracy isn’t absolute, and it doesn’t come about by a simple ballot. Society has all sorts of anti-democratic forces lurking about – monarchists, aristocrats, slaveholders, and yes, Islamists and clerics. These people are removed only by force, not by the vote.
Remember Cromwell? Of course you don’t, it was only a 40 year Reign of Terror that history books calmly gloss over in that staid progression of Kings. I can name the American Revolution, or better yet the French Revolution, but I imagine you get my point by now.
This is what’s happening in Egypt today. We would to well to tip our hats and nod in their direction, and rally for the secularists to come to power and push for Egyptian society to move in the democratic direction it needs to go. This is the only roadmap to democracy.
UPDATE: And another thing. If we were to adopt this lens, we would see just how much positive there is going on in Egypt right now. What’s really missing in all this is some numbers, and this is where journalists should be applying their resources. How numerous are the pro-Morsi supporters? How numerous are the secularists?
I’m only gleaning this information from random wide-shots of the demonstrations, and so my vision is a bit fuzzy. But what I’m seeing is the pro-Morsi demonstrators are pretty small compared to the secularists. They’re just far better organized, since they’ve been around for many decades already. This is why they need to be repressed. They’re old weeds that are choking off the new society Egypt wants to become.

UN vote on Palestinian state

After Vote, Palestinians and Israel Search for the Next Step.
“Now that the United Nations has voted to grant the Palestinian territories status as a nonmember state, one question is whether the Palestinians will use their enhanced status for renewed negotiations in the spirit of peace and reconciliation or for confronting Israel in new ways through the United Nations system, and possibly the International Criminal Court.”
I’m going to be a jerk and bet on the latter.

Hamas’s Unpleasant Surprise

In writing this on my iPhone so this needs to be short. I’ll have time later.
But it seems like something is different this skirmish. My more skittish colleagues think this Arab Spring has strengthened Israel’s enemies but I think the opposite is true. And Hamas, still stuck in the old politics, may find its Arab neighbors unwilling to play that game anymore.
My point is that it’s important to understand the nature of the Arab revolutions in the past year. They were pro-democracy, pro-western revolutions that literally went by the same handbook as the east European revolutions of 20 years ago. And as tragic as Ambassador Stevens’s death was, it was actually a positive sign: 1) that the US is taking an active role in steering these movements 2) they welcome a US presence. Some maintain that Islamist parties have taken over, but I hold (and have corroboration) that they’re far more similar to the conservative religious parties of Europe than any radical Taliban style party.
So, to have Hamas jubilantly firing rockets at Israeli cities, this is something that goes radically against the interests of these fledgling political powers looking for new clout in the world economy. As one NPR interviewee said, yes they’ll send envoy’s to Gaza, but they doubt it will translate into any military aid.
Really, if sources are at all accurate, the only aid they’re getting is from Iran, which in he current game, is a stodgy member of the old guard.
Now this is not to say I would be surprised if it turns out differently, even drastically so. I’m just offering a ray of light in the situation. Indeed the US State Department has its work cut out for it.
But long story short, Hamas’s game of “Kill Jews, drive out American Satan” is no longer a program that makes sense I that region. They may find themselves looking around with nobody to back them anymore.

Monsanto’s evil mind-control ray

Oh, you didn’t know they had one, did you? How little you know, o ignorant sheeple.
So prop 37 failed, something this blogger hails as a victory, but that’s definitely not ending the GMO debate. The pro-37 people are already mobilizing to say that they would have won, but Monsanto and Dow poured so much money into defeating it that Californians were duped into voting against their interests.
So much so, apparently, that their million dollar mind-control machine convinced newspapers everywhere to oppose this proposition that nobody in their right mind would oppose. I could make all sorts of jokes about that but I’ll let that go as an inconvenient truth. Rather, let’s look at the numbers, shall we? I’m not gonna do any heavy analysis here (see Nate Silver post), but this infographic is mildly informative: The Money behind California Propositions.
The link itself concludes “clearly … it is not always the most funded position that wins”. If money swayed people’s minds like this, then many of the other propositions would have turned out differently as well.
The numbers alone can lead to all sorts of interpretation though, so let’s take a more qualitative approach (again, see Nate Silver) to this. Yeah we saw a lot of ads against prop 37. To be honest though, I thought that ad campaign was really crappy. To tell people that a label would cost too much money is a horrible argument. If something is proven to cause cancer, I don’t mind paying a bit for a warning label.
No, what convinced me was two things – one, I’ve been reading about GMOs for a long time now, both the amount of testing that goes into them, and the promise they have. Two though, and this is the ironic and important one, is the arguments of the pro-37 crowd. Yes, I go on the pro-37 Facebook groups and debate them. Remember that 11 year old kid’s thing I posted? About GMOs being “icky”? Yeah, that’s pretty much all their arguments. GMOs are icky, unnatural, go against God, and so they must make all sorts of horrible mutations to our genes and fragile bodies. So much so, that we’ll keep citing fraudulent studies as fact, because we’re so sure that’s what causes cancer.
And that was the final nail in the coffin of this proposition for me. Oh sure, the more intellectual people avoided those arguments, citing more “sophisticated” arguments like bad agribusiness tactics that someone else can bring up in another blog. But some great editorials addressed those concerns, and it’s not what this proposition is about.
This law was about people convinced that GMOs are causing their health problems, and the labeling is an implicit license to sue anyone they think may be causing said health problems. It’s as about ridiculous a law as requiring people to put warning signs around wifi spots because some people fear that wifi signals give them brain tumors.
So please, drop the argument that this is Monsanto’s fault. Do they have money? Sure. Do they influence politics? Sure. But to say a few million dollars can brainwash an entire state, that just puts no respect in the intelligence of others. And it also lowers other people’s respect for your intelligence.

Did you actually think we’d get what we want now?

Yeah, Maddow’s comment did feel pretty good. But did you really think re-electing Obama meant sending a mandate about all the things you and I would like to see in government?
A couple things prompted this. First, a friend posted this Borowitz Report today making fun of Boehner for already refusing to work with the president. Which, let’s face it, Boehner’s appeal to bipartisanship was about a sincere as, well, you come up with a crazy analogy.
But the other one is named Joe Donnelly.
We tend to think that the Democrats we elect are like the delegates we see on the convention floor – gay-friendly, multi-cultural, greener than the Amazon, working men and women standing up for each other. It is a nice picture but it’s not the Democratic Party that governs. Joe Donnelly may be a Blue Dog Democrat, but even then – the first thing he puts on the table is allowing the Bush Era Tax Cuts to stay. That’s telling. It may not be a smoking gun, but it gives an indication of what the Democratic Party’s core values are, and what they’re not.
They’re not the party that’s going to stop wars (In fact, my own representative, Jane Harman, may just be taking over the CIA directorship. But that’s a tangent). They’re not the party that’s going to end oil subsidies. And they’re not the party that’s going to force the rich to pay for their wars and their subsidies.
Sure, they’ll come out in support of pet issues like gay rights and GMOs and what not. That’s free votes. And heck, they can even do something slightly progressive once in a while like pass health care reform. But when it comes to the core values of our government – the maintenance and expansion of capitalism, the protection of the wealthy – they’re right in there with the politicians we call our enemies.
So, practically, what does this mean, what do I predict? I predict the Bush-era tax cuts will stay. They’ll blame the Republican congress for it, they’ll all piss and moan till they pass the same budget this year that they did last year. So will oil subsidies. Calls and clamors for the “fiscal cliff” and “the looming deficit crisis” will continue. And while Obama’s demand that the rich pay their fair share sounds powerful now, it won’t withstand the political pressure of the bourgeois press to gut Social Security and Medicare. And let’s let alone that the employment options people had as recently as six years ago aren’t coming back. These issues were drowned out by concerns about legitimate rape and global warming, but they are long-term issues that will become louder in the next election cycle.
And those are the real bread and butter issues that our government is discussing. Unfortunately, those are the issues that your more knee-jerk progressives prefer to ignore in favor of the isolated politics of “let me have my organic food and weed and let people marry whoever they want.” And that worries me – this sick kind of progressivism in this country, some call it “social liberal/economic conservative” but I call it being okay with barbarism.

Nate Silver, statistics, and the qualitative

So Nate Silver has been making the news lately, because his statistical analysis so perfectly (and humbly) predicted the election. Meanwhile, pundits everywhere did their usual entrails-reading analysis, and refused to eat the crow even after they were proven disastrously wrong.
And that’s all I’ll say about the election in this article.
But you can read an excerpt from his new book, as well as a telling NBC interview, here: Inside the mind of the man who predicted Obama’s win
The thing is, I’m not even sure my mom knows I studied econometrics in college, which was the application of statistical analysis to economic theory. So this perked up my ears on a personal level.
I didn’t pursue it because economic theory was just so much entrails at the time I was in college I felt that pursuing it any further would just dumb myself down. But Nate Silver helps to not only “make math cool” as the talking heads like to put it, he also proves that you can develop solid theories first, and then apply numerical analysis to those theories to make some pretty damn accurate predictions.
So that’s heartening to me. Maybe I still have some science career ahead of me. But that depends whether I can find a place in academia, even as a maverick. Because there are a few things that need to happen in the social sciences before statistical analysis can properly be elevated from entrails-reading to a diligent science.
And I’ll explain it with a bit of philosophy. Before you can make a quantitative analysis of anything, you first need an accepted qualitative theory. Examples: before you can accurately chart and predict the movements of the planets, you need Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Before you can split an atom, you need E=mc2. Before you can refine oil, you need laws of chemistry. These are obvious now, but they weren’t always given. Planetary movement seemed odd and random to us, back when our astronomical theory was based on heavenly circular movement. And so on.
In the field of economics and politcs it becomes doubly difficult, because we are what we’re studying – we’re no longer watching an object through a looking glass like we watch the planets. On a higher level, this means a different philosophy towards the science, but on a basic level, these sciences are so politicized that they believe their own bullshit and lies. They can’t predict their own crises? Of course not! They’re too busy selling overinflated stock to ever entertain the notion that it’s overvalued and can collapse.
But guess what? Karl Marx made some really accurate qualitative theories about boom and bust cycles, as well as how capital accumulates, and needs to accumulate. It’s so precise it predicts not only crises, but trade wars, and real wars. It’s too bad that its revolutionary implications mean that academia, which seeks to find a role within society, tends to ignore it completely, throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
There is plenty of promise in the field of statistical analysis in the social sciences. But there’s also a lot of work to be done to make it legitimate. Work which I’m not sure the universities are up to, and work that I’m not willing to do on my own, especially if it means arguing against a bunch of loudmouth dipshits.
There are good professors out there who offer a proper qualitative understanding of contemporary capitalism. This illustrated David Harvey lecture offers a great framework for analysis. The question for faculties out there is whether they make the courageous decisions to hire more professors like this, and fewer apologists, who can write enormous amounts of shiny garbage but it all amounts to wasted time and money.
To close, I wanted to quote Nate Silver’s book, where he talks about the explosion in information that the internet provides: “This exponential growth in information is sometimes seen as a cure-all, as computers were in the 1970s. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine, wrote in 2008 that the sheer volume of data would obviate the need for theory, and even the scientific method.”
This is nothing new. I came of age when Michael Crichton wrote Jurrasic Park, which popularized chaos theory and ridiculed this same notion. It’s too bad that he only offers the unknowableness of nature and a superstitious reverence for it as an alternative. Because chaos theory actually says we overcomplicate things, and that behind seeming chaos and disorder isn’t unknowability, but a very simple equation with a profoundly different philosophy. Understanding that equation at the heart of systems has enabled us to develop more effective predictors for everything from hurricanes to elections. We can only expand on that.

Rachel Maddow on the 2012 election

Rachel Maddow speaks on the 2012 election. I’m glad there are professionals to say these things because I don’t have the time to construct something so well-put myself. Let me quote my favorite part:
“Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. And he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the Congressional Research Service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not skewed to oversample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad. Nate Silver was doing math. And Climate Change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone’s guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the Moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. ANd UN election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.”
And, lest this seem too far to the left for you, let me also quote our good friend Michael Specter, who is as enthusiastic about the promise of GMOs as I am: “You have the right to your own opinions, but you don’t have the right to your own facts.” Hopefully this election is, if anything, a mandate for a facts-based discussion.