Happy Birthday, Charles

America's Darwin problem is only one component of America's science problem. As Kenneth Miller notes:

Significant numbers of Americans have come to regard the scientific enterprise as a special interest group that rejects mainstream American values and is not worthy of the public trust. Governor Rick Perry of Texas spoke to this view when he claimed that "There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data" to their own benefit. Why? Perry was clear about this. It's personal greed. Scientists cheat "so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects."

Unfortunately, Governor Perry is right, just not in the way his remarks imply. Scientific data is indeed being manipulated, but it is almost always done in the service of some financial interest. Andrew Wakefield, for instance, the widely discredited originator of the vaccine-autism canard, had his own treatment racket in mind when he concocted the bogus link between autism and the MMR vaccine. And pain researcher Scott Reuben faked dozens of studies to keep research grants from Pfizer rolling in. FDA "fast-tracking," agri-pharma profits and Americans' piss-poor science education have combined to create a perfect storm of scientific mistrust, which is what is at the heart of our rejection of Darwinism. If we hope to catch up with the rest of the developed world, let alone surpass it, we must take the profit motive out of science.

And when data falsification isn't the culprit, peer bullying is. A PR firm called The Bivings Group formed an army of sock puppets to impugn the reputation of a UC Berkely researcher named Ignacio Chapella who had published a paper showing that GM corn had cross-pollinated with conventional corn.

And when PBS programs FRONTLINE and NOVA teamed up to address the issue of GMOs in a program titled "Harvest of Fear," they were forced to post the following caution regarding their online opinion tally:

In late May 2004, thanks in part to the vigilance of several outside readers who phoned in, we discovered that some person or persons had tampered with this feature's tally. Specifically, on May 16-17, 1,540,016 "Yes" votes and 33,641 "No" votes were cast via just four IP addresses. (Prior to May 16, a total of roughly 124,000 votes of any kind had been cast since the feature launched in April 2001.)

Deeming the credibility of the tally to have been compromised, we made this page unavailable for several days while we decided how best to address this problem. In the end, we threw out these suspicious votes and recalculated the remaining response numbers and percentages. Then we did a more thorough scouring of votes from before May 2004.

It appears that a lesser degree of multiple voting has been going on for some time, so we have decided to temporarily remove the final vote and tallying options from this feature until we can put a more secure system in place. The feature itself remains unchanged, and we encourage you to challenge your stance on GM foods by reading it. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we appreciate your readership.—The Editors

The upshot is that Americans' rejection of Darwinism and distrust of climate data and of science in general is the result of decades of educational dumbing down and the intentional scientific misconduct of researchers starving for grant money, which, increasingly, comes from corporations and not government subsidies.

And GMO defenders like David Tribe and Pamela Ronald, among others, have cleverly manipulated this phenomenon in order to portray suspicion of corporate greed as scientific ignorance, so that if you question Monsanto's or Syngenta's motives regarding the promotion of genetically modified crops, or if you make note of the many instances of pharmaceutical research fraud, you are lumped in with global warming and evolution deniers.

I kind of feel the same way towards the agri-petro-pharma-chemical complex as I do towards President Obama. On the one hand, I am forced to defend the president against imbeciles who think he's a Kenyan Marxist with a fake birth certificate, but on the other hand, I'm forced to point out to his legion of defenders that he's a neoliberal stooge of the corporate feudal state. Similarly, I find myself reluctantly defending the agri-petro-pharma-chemical complex against attacks from the likes of Jenny McCarthy who think vaccines cause autism or Sean Hannity, who thinks global warming is a hoax, but on the other hand, I feel compelled to expose Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Golden Rice as the scams that they are.

Somehow, we've got to find a way to restore integrity to the scientific community, and at the same time, we must remove the barriers of intimidation that prevent public schools from imparting scientific knowledge. Until we accomplish these two goals, we will slip further and further into a new Dark Age.

UPDATE: As the Guardian reports, the ignorati have launched a fresh assault on science: 

In a disturbing trend, anti-evolution campaigners are combining with climate change deniers to undermine public education.

       [...]

The Heartland Institute – which has received funding in the past from oil companies and is a leading source of climate science skepticism – also lobbies strongly for school vouchers and other forms of "school transformation" that are broadly aimed at undermining the current public school system. The Discovery Institute – a leading voice for intelligent design – has indicated its support of exactly the same "school reform" initiatives.
If you can't shut down the science, the new science-deniers appear to be saying, you should shut down the schools. It would be a shame if they succeeded in replacing the teaching of science with indoctrination. It would be worse if they were to close the public school house doors altogether.

Well, we're fucked.

Some Things Never Change (Redux)

I posted this six years ago (god, have I been blogging that long?) and it seems apropos yet again in light of our Libya misadventure:

Charles Bukowski is a writer known mainly for his short stories and novels about hookers, gambling, heavy drinking and weird, abusive relationships. Later in his writing career, he also took up poetry. Here is one of my favorites.
In addition to his fiction and poetry, Charles Bukowski is the author of one of the best political essays ever written. It was originally published in a volume entitled, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. That volume has since been split in two and published under the titles The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and Tales of Ordinary Madness, both published by City Lights. The essay below appears in the former. I hope City Lights won’t be too pissed that I reprinted it here. Pardon the lack of capital letters; that’s the way he wrote it.
POLITICS IS LIKE TRYING TO SCREW A CAT IN THE ASS
"Dear Mr. Bukowski: Why don't you ever write about politics or world affairs?"
M.K.
"Dear M.K.: What for? Like, what's new? --- everybody knows the bacon is burning."

our raving takes place quite quietly while we are staring down at the hairs of a rug --- wondering what the shit went wrong when they blew up the trolley full of jellybeans with the poster of Popeye the Sailor stuck on the side.
that's all that matters: the good dream gone, and when that's gone it's all gone. the rest is horseshit games for the Generals and money-makers, speaking of which --- I see where another U.S. bomber full of H-bombs fell out of the sky again --- THIS time into the sea while SUPPOSEDLY protecting my life. the State Dept. says the H-bombs were "unarmed," whatever that means. then we continue to read where one of the H-bombs (lost) had split open and was spreading radioactive shit everywhere while supposedly protecting me WHILE I hadn't even asked for protection. the difference between a Democracy and a Dictatorship is that in a Dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
getting back to the H-bomb dropout --- a little while back the same thing happened off the coast of SPAIN. (we are everywhere, protecting me.) again the bombs get lost --- careless little toys. it took them 3 months --- if I remember properly --- to find and lift that last bomb out of there. It may have been 3 weeks but to the people in that coast town it must have seemed 3 years. that last bomb --- the god damned thing had gotten itself wedged on the edge of a sandhill far down in the sea. and everytime they tried to hook the thing, so tenderly, it would shake loose and roll a little further down the hill. meanwhile, all the poor people in that coast town were tossing in their beds at night wondering if they'd be blown to hell, courtesy of the Stars and Stripes. of course, the U.S. State Dept. issued a statement saying the H-bomb had no detonation fuse, but meanwhile the rich had left for other parts and the American sailors and townspeople looked very nervous. (after all, if the things couldn't blow up what were they flying them around for? might as well carry 2-ton salamis. fuse means "spark" or "trigger," and "spark" can come from anywhere, and "trigger" means "jolt" or any similar action that will set off the firing mechanism. NOW the terminology is "unarmed," which sounds safer but is the same thing.) anyhow, they hooked at the bomb but as the saying goes, the thing seemed to have a mind of its own. then a few undersea storms came about and our lovely little bomb rolled further and further down its hill.
the sea is very deep, much deeper than our leadership.
finally, special equipment was designed just to haul bomb-ass and the thing was pulled from the sea. Palomares. yes, that's where it happened: Palomares. and you know what they did next? the American Navy had a BAND CONCERT in the town park in celebration of finding the bomb - if the thing wasn't dangerous they were really cutting loose. yes, and the sailors played the music and everyone came together in one big sexual and spiritual release. whatever happened to the bomb they pulled out of the sea, I don't know, nobody (except the few) knows, and the band played on while 1,000 tons of radio- active Spanish topsoil was shipped to Aiken, S.C. in sealed containers. I'll be the rent is cheap in Aiken, S.C.
so now our bombs are swimming and sinking, chilled and "un-armed" about Iceland.
so what do you do when you've got the people's minds on something not so good? easy, you get their minds on something else. they can only think about one thing at a time. like, all right, headline of Jan. 23, 1968: B-52 CRASHES OFF GREENLAND WITH H-BOMBS; DANES IRKED. Danes irked? oh, mother!
anyhow, suddenly, Jan. 24, headline: NORTH KOREANS SEIZE U.S. NAVY SHIP.
oh boy, patriotism is back! why, those dirty bastards! I thought THAT war was over! ah ha, I see --- the REDS! Korean puppets!
it says under the A.P. wirephoto, something like this --- the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo --- formerly an army cargo ship, now converted into one of the Navy's secret spy ships equipped with electric monitoring gear and oceanographic equipment was forced into Wonsan Harbor off the coast of North Korea. those dirty Red bastards, always fucking around!
but I DID notice that the lost H-bomb story got shoved into a small space: "Radiation Detected at B-52 Crash Site; Split Bomb hinted."
we are told that the president was awakened between 2 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. and told of the capture of the Pueblo. I presume he went back to sleep.
the U.S. says the Pueblo was in international waters; the Koreans say the ship was in territorial waters. one country is lying, one is not. then one wonders, what good is a spy ship in international waters? it's like wearing a raincoat on a sunny day. the closer you can get on in, the better your instruments pick up.
headline: Jan. 26, 1968: U.S. CALLS UP 14,700 AIR RESERVISTS. the lost H-bombs off Iceland have completely disappeared from print as if it had never happened.
meanwhile:
Sen. John C. Stennis (D.-Miss.) said Mr. Johnson's decision (the call-up of Air Reserves) was "necessary and justified" and added, "I hope he will not hesitate to mobilize ground reserve components as well."
Senate minority leader, Richard B. Russell (D.-Ga.): "In the last analysis, this country must get the return of that ship and the men that were seized. After all, great wars have started from much less serious incidents than this."
House Speaker John W. McCormack (D.-Mass.): "The American people have to wake up to the realization that communism is still bent on world domination. there is too much apathy about it."
I think that if Adolph Hitler were around now he would pretty much enjoy the present scene. what's there to say about politics and world affairs? the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban crisis, spy planes, spy ships, Vietnam, Korea, lost H-bombs, riots in American cities, starvation in India, purge in Red China? are there good guys and bad guys? some that always lie, some that never lie? are there good governments and bad governments? no, there are only bad governments and worse governments. will there be a flash of light and heat that rips us apart one night while we are screwing or crapping or reading the comic strips or pasting blue-chip stamps into a book? instant death is nothing new, nor is mass instant death new. But we've improved the product; we've had these centuries of knowledge and culture and discovery to work with; the libraries are fat and crawling and overcrowded with books; great paintings sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars; medical science is transplanting the human heart; you can't tell a madman from a sane one upon the streets, and suddenly we find our lives, again, in the hands of the idiots. the bombs may never drop; the bombs might drop. eeney, meeney, miney, mo-
now if you'll forgive me, dear readers, I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time. if these contain death, then, to me, it seems far less offensive to be responsible for your own death than the other kind which is brought to you fringed with phrases of Freedom and Democracy and Humanity and/or any of all that Bullshit.
first post, 12:30. first drink, now. and the whores will always be around. Clara, Penny, Alice, Jo- eeny, meeney, miney, mo.

TEPCO, Toshiba, Stone & Webster, and You

TEPCO, the utility company that operates the exploding Japanese nuclear reactors, has an 18 percent stake in the two new reactors President Obama has proposed for the South Texas Project. And as Greg Palast reports, both TEPCO and their US construction partner, Stone & Webster (now a division of The Shaw Group) have a history of falsifying safety reports. Not only that, but the reason The Shaw Group was able to acquire Stone & Webster so cheaply was due to a failed $147 million Indonesian kickback scheme that sank the company. And Toshiba has acquired the Westinghouse brand primarily for the purpose of promoting nuclear energy in the US, despite its now apparent incompetence in Japan. So, as usual, our nuclear power future is pock-marked with corruption and incompetence.

But wait! There's more!

In the latest shocking reversal from his campaign positions, President Obama is defending nuclear power's safety record in the wake of Japan's calamity. He has already asked Congress for $9 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear energy, and he is expected to seek an additional $56 billion in his inevitable second term.

So it appears the looming corporate feudal state will be augmented with dangerous, expensive nukes just for shits and giggles.

Hypocrites to the Left of Me, Republicrats to the Right

This is awesome. Three years ago, Indiana Republicans enacted draconian voter identification legislation, and now, the Republican state elections chief has been indicted for voter fraud. Priceless.

In case you're wondering how draconian Indiana's voter ID law really is, check this out:

Retired Nuns Barred from Voting in Indiana

Wednesday 7 May 2008
At least 10 retired nuns in South Bend, Indiana, were barred from voting in today's Indiana Democratic primary election because they lacked photo IDs required under a state law that the supreme court upheld last week.


What's more, the voter fraud these laws are supposedly attempting to combat is virtually non-existent, unless, of course, you count Republicans.

The true purpose of these voter ID laws -- which, by the way, are being enacted in around seven states -- is to disenfranchise elderly and poor voters, who traditionally vote Democratic.

Meanwhile, the outgoing (nominally Democratic) Chicago mayor and brother of incoming Obama chief of staff dutifully recites GOP talking points.

Andrew Breitbart's Racist Lizard Brain

From Digby:

"Breitbart had edited the video, of course, and he refuses to release the whole thing, naturally. But that didn't matter in this case any more than it mattered in the ACORN case. It's nothing but a play to America's racist lizard brain."

UPDATE: Monkey Muck sums up my feelings succinctly:

President Obama is a weak kneed, lily livered, scaredy cat. He's the cowardly lion who got taken in by a bunch of right wing nitwits. He tossed a decent and good public servant under the bus to avoid being made fun of by the crying Mormon and the man behind the Acorn non scandal.

And you know I'm right when one of his biggest supporters calls him out for being such a wuss.

I've said it before and unfortunately, I'll have to say it again, GROW A PAIR and stop being afraid of your own fucking shadow Obama. Stop starting from a compromised position and you won't have to give in as much. Stop being such a timid version of Jimmy Carter and start being a lion like FDR.

Spitzer Gets It

Ten Days That Changed Capitalism

From The Wall Street Journal:

Officials Improvised To Rescue Markets; Will It Be Enough?

March 27, 2008; Page A1
David Wessel
The past 10 days will be remembered as the time the U.S. government discarded a half-century of rules to save American financial capitalism from collapse.
On the Richter scale of government activism, the government's recent actions don't (yet) register at FDR levels. They are shrouded in technicalities and buried in a pile of new acronyms.
But something big just happened. It happened without an explicit vote by Congress. And, though the Treasury hasn't cut any checks for housing or Wall Street rescues, billions of dollars of taxpayer money were put at risk. A Republican administration, not eager to be viewed as the second coming of the Hoover administration, showed it no longer believes the market can sort out the mess.

"The Government of Last Resort is working with the Lender of Last Resort to shore up the housing and credit markets to avoid Great Depression II," economist Ed Yardeni wrote to clients.

First, over St. Patrick's Day weekend, the Fed (aka the Lender of Last Resort) and the Treasury forced the sale of Bear Stearns, the fifth-largest U.S. investment bank, to J.P. Morgan Chase at a price so low that a shareholder rebellion prompted J.P. Morgan to raise the price. To induce J.P. Morgan to do the deal, the Fed agreed to take losses or gains, if any, on up to $29 billion of securities in Bear Stearns's portfolio. The outcome will influence the sum the Fed turns over to the Treasury, so this is taxpayer money; that's why the Fed sought Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's OK.
Then the Fed lent directly to Wall Street securities firms for the first time. Until now, the Fed has lent directly only to Main Street banks, those that take deposits from ordinary folks. That's because banks were viewed as playing a unique economic role and, supposedly, were more closely regulated than other types of lenders. In the first three days of this new era, securities firms borrowed an average of $31.3 billion a day from the Fed. That's not small change, and it's why Mr. Paulson, after the fact, is endorsing changes to give the Fed more access to these firms' books.
Increased Leverage
In the days that followed, the Republican Treasury secretary leaned on two shareholder-owned, though government-chartered, companies -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- to raise capital that their boards didn't want to raise. In exchange, their government regulator allowed them to increase their leverage so they can buy about $200 billion more in mortgage-backed securities.
So Fannie and Freddie will get bigger, a welcome development when mortgage markets are in trouble. Already, they have regained lost market share. They accounted for 76% of new mortgages in the fourth quarter of last year, up from 46% in the second quarter, Mr. Paulson said Wednesday. But everyone knows that if Fannie or Freddie stumble, taxpayers will get stuck with the tab.
And then, the federal regulator of the low-profile Federal Home Loan Banks, which are even less well capitalized than Fannie and Freddie, said they could buy twice as many Fannie and Freddie-blessed mortgage-backed securities as previously permitted -- more than $100 billion worth.
Was this necessary? It's messy, uncomfortable and undoubtedly flawed in many details. Like firefighters rushing to a five-alarm fire, policy makers are making mistakes that will be apparent only in retrospect.
Too Great to IgnoreBut, regardless of how we got here, the clear and present danger that the virus in the housing, mortgage and credit markets is infecting the overall economy is too great to ignore. The Great Depression was worsened because the initial government reaction was wrong-headed. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spent an academic career learning how to avoid repeating those mistakes.
Is it working? It is helping. One key measure is the gap between interest rates on mortgages and safe Treasury securities. A wide gap means high mortgage rates, which hurt an already sickly housing market. A lot of recent activity, including Wednesday's previously planned auction in which the Fed is trading Treasurys for mortgage-backed securities, is aimed at increasing demand for those securities to drive down mortgage rates.
The gap remains enormous by historical standards, but has narrowed. On March 6, according to FTN Financial, 30-year fixed-rate mortgages were trading at 2.92 percentage points above the relevant Treasury rates; Wednesday the gap was down to 2.22. Normal is about 1.5 percentage points. Money markets are still under stress, as banks and others hoard cash and super-safe short-term Treasurys.
Is it enough? Probably not. Although it's hard to know, the downward tug on the overall economy from falling house prices persists. The next step, if one proves necessary, is almost sure to require the explicit use of taxpayer money.
Cushion the Blow
The case for doing more is twofold. One is to cushion the blow to families and communities, even if some are culpable. The other is to disrupt a dangerous downward spiral in which falling prices of houses and mortgage-backed securities lead lenders to pull back, hurting the economy and dragging asset prices down further, and so on.
In ordinary times, a capitalist economy lets prices -- such as those of homes, mortgage-backed securities and stocks -- fall to the point where the big-bucks crowd rushes in, hoping to make a killing. But if the big money remains on the sidelines, unpersuaded that a bottom is near, the wait for bargain hunters to take the plunge could be very long and very painful.So the next step, no matter how it is dressed up, is likely to involve the government's moving in ways that put a floor under prices, hoping that will limit the downside risks enough so more Americans are willing to buy homes and deeper-pocketed investors are willing, in effect, to lend them the money to do so.

Susan Jacoby with Bill Moyers

Watch the clip here.

BILL MOYERS: It's not only the reality of our finances we are running from. In her new book published just this week, one of America's most prolific and provocative free thinkers says we are in a headlong flight from reason. The book is the age of American unreason- and it couldn't be more timely. Here's an excerpt:
"It remains to be seen, as the current presidential campaign unfolds, whether Americans are willing to consider what the flight from reason has cost us as a people and whether any candidate has the will or the courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue affecting everything from scientific research to decisions about war and peace."
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON offers an unsparing description of what Susan Jacoby calls "an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge".
Susan Jacoby is the program director of the Center for Inquiry in New York. Her last book FREETHINKERS: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN SECULARISM was acclaimed as one of the notable books of 2004. Welcome back.
SUSAN JACOBY: Oh, it's wonderful to be back.
BILL MOYERS: How is this flight from reason, as you describe it, affecting-- playing out in our current political race?
SUSAN JACOBY: In an age of unreason you tend to get focus on very small personal facts as opposed to big issues. But even more than that, lack of knowledge and unreason affects the way candidates speak about everything.
I mean, for example, obviously the healthcare situation in this country is very important. All of the candidates say it is. But if people don't know, for example, how is healthcare handled in other countries? How many people, for instance, do have the right to choose their own doctors in this country? In other words, without a base of knowledge of how things are you can't really have a reasonable talk about how things ought to be. In other words, you can say, "Oh, we don't want a program which will prevent people from choosing their own doctors." Well, are we able to choose our own doctors? I'm not. I have to choose within a managed care network.
BILL MOYERS: You have a powerful section in here on what's happened to our political language. How, for example, politicians so often talk these days not about people but ab-
SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.
BILL MOYERS: --folks-
SUSAN JACOBY: Folks.
BILL MOYERS: --about the folks. What's wrong that?
SUSAN JACOBY: What's wrong with it is folks used to be a colloquialism. It was the kind of thing that you'd talk about mostly in rural areas, mostly in the south and the Midwest. People talked about folks. It was not considered suitable for public speech. If you used it in the classroom your teacher would, you know, would get after you, because it wasn't considered appropriate language.
But think about this though. Think about our political language in the past and today. Just think about The Gettysburg Address. We highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this government, of the folks, by the folks, and for the folks, shall not perish from the earth. This is patronizing. It's talking down to people. I read all of FDR's fireside chats where he-- I could not find a single reference to folks. You know why? Because the addressing people as folks is talking down to them. It's not dignifying them. When you call people citizens you're calling them to rise-- calling on them to rise above the lowest common denominator. You really need to think about what's being said when people are called folks. It's encouraging you not to do too much. And, you know, when I--
BILL MOYERS: Not to expect anything special.
SUSAN JACOBY: Not to expect anything special. And people are terribly scared of saying, "We really need to expect more."
BILL MOYERS: You mentioned Franklin Roosevelt. You have a wonderful comparison in here.
SUSAN JACOBY: I want him back.
BILL MOYERS: You talk about how during World War Two when he would have a radio fireside chat he would ask the American people listening out there to get a map of the world and spread it out in front of them so that as he talked about the battles that were going on they would be with him in terms of the place, the geography, the strategy of what was going on. Can you imagine a president doing that today?
SUSAN JACOBY: No. No, I can't. I mean, Doris Kearns Goodwin, you know, talks about this extensively in her book, NO ORDINARY TIME. Maps sold out. You couldn't buy a map before Roosevelt's fireside chat in the February after Pearl Harbor because millions of Americans went out and bought maps. And they sat there by the radio and followed what he was talking about.
But I think, you know, one of the big mistakes today-- that's made today is it-- we're-- you talk about our political culture as if it were something separate, something different from our general culture. What I say in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON is, no, that's wrong. Our political culture is a reflection of our general culture. It is-- it is as much shaped by our general culture as it shapes our general culture. Now to return to FDR, which I'm really glad you asked about, it's been forgotten now in the mythology of World War II that even when the Nazis invaded Poland and attacked England, overwhelming majority of Americans were opposed to American involvement in--
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SUSAN JACOBY: --the war. The reason they came around is not just Pearl Harbor. Franklin D. Roosevelt spent several years trying to educate a resistant public about the stake that America had in the future of Europe. The renewal of the draft in 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, in the summer of 1941, passed by one vote. Imagine what would have happened if the Army had been disbanded, if FDR had not made all those educational efforts, where we would have been six months later when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The role of the president-- everybody talks about who's equipped to be Commander in Chief, a word I hate, which presidents didn't used to use, from day one--
BILL MOYERS: And why do you hate it?
SUSAN JACOBY: Because the President's only the Commander in Chief of the Armed Force. He's not the commander in chief of us. And it's a word that presidents didn't use except in a strictly military sense in the past. What's far more important than being commander in chief is being educator in chief. And Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln would not have succeeded as commanders in chief if they hadn't first succeeded as teachers in chief.
To be non-partisan about it, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush are two of the biggest failures as teachers in chief of any presidents we've ever had. Bush at foreign policy obviously. It's great to bring people along with you when everybody's in favor of the war as they were in 2003 'cause there was this desire to strike back at somebody, anyone, for 9/11. So Bush just said, "Oh, yeah. Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11." And people believed it. But--
BILL MOYERS: And Clinton? What about Clinton?
SUSAN JACOBY: Everything in my view that's being written about the failure of the Clinton healthcare program in relation to Hillary Clinton's candidacy is wrong. Yes, it's true. It's that failure is usually attributed to their failure to bring the insurance industry groups to the table, all of the interest groups in advance.
No. The reason that healthcare reform was dead on arrival was that the American people hadn't been educated and prepared for any kind of change. Bill Clinton just announced his plan which had been developed kind of secretly, without much public participation. The health insurance industry jumped in with its Harry and Louise commercials. Now I'll bet everybody who is listening to this tonight remembers Harry and Louise. And nobody remembers a detail of the Clinton plan, the healthcare plan. It is the job of the president to get his message out before Harry and Louise. Bill Clinton didn't do that.
BILL MOYERS: You helped me to see something else about the importance of language. You write about the difference it makes to talk about troop and troops instead of soldier and soldiers.
SUSAN JACOBY: Very Orwellian. That's very Orwellian. Troops used to be a term reserved only as a collective noun. Like would say, "Allied troops have landed at Normandy." Troops meant a massive military operation. We never talked about a soldier who was killed in action as a troop. We don't lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Troop. We lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Now I think that kind of euphemistic language-- it's very important when you talk about troops it in a way takes the individuality away.
BILL MOYERS: It becomes an abstraction.
SUSAN JACOBY: It becomes an abstraction, right. Not a person, an individual soldier who is dying. And by the way, I offer a theory in this book about how this substitution happens. And it's not very Machiavellian at all. It's part of, again, part of how dumb our culture has become. I think some PR person, somehow decided that soldier could mean only a man. And they were looking for a noun that sounded more neutral. It's utterly stupid, of course. A soldier can be a man or a woman. But my guess is that some dopey PR person suggested this. And somebody in the army said, "Great." And the newspapers just went along.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But now it's used commonly.
SUSAN JACOBY: Now it's used commonly.
BILL MOYERS: So what has happened that prompted this book?
SUSAN JACOBY: In a way it was an outgrowth of FREETHINKERS, a History of American Secularism. After FREETHINKERS was published I really welcomed the opportunity to go out and speak across the country. You know, to educate people about a secular tradition which has been kind of lost and downgraded and denigrated. And I soon found, very quickly, my audiences consisted almost entirely of people who already agreed with me. And conservatives report exactly the same experience.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
SUSAN JACOBY: Now, this was not always the case in our country. In the 19th century Robert Ingersoll, whom we've talked, who is known as the great agnostic, had audiences full of people who didn't agree with him. But they wanted to hear what he had to say. And they wanted to see whether the devil really has horns. And now what we have is a situation in which people go to hear people they already agree with. What's going on is not so much education as reinforcement of the opinions you already have.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, why is it we're so unwilling to give, as you say, a hearing to contradictory viewpoints? Or to imagine that we might learn something from someone who disagrees with us?
SUSAN JACOBY: Well, I think part of it is part of a larger thing that is making our culture dumber. We have, really, over the past 40 years, gotten shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans. One of the most important studies I've found, and I've put in this chapter, they call it Infantainment-- on this book. It's by the Kaiser Family Foundation. And they've found that children under six spend two hours a day watching television and video on average. But only 39 minutes a day being read to by their parents.
Well, you don't need a scientific study to know that if you're not read to by your parents, if most of your entertainment when you're in those very formative years is looking at a screen, you value what you do. And I don't see how people can learn to concentrate and read if they watch television when they're very young as opposed to having their parents read to them. The fact is when you're watching television, whether it's an infant or you or I, or staring glazedly at a video screen, you're not doing something else.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you, Susan, that half of American adults believe in ghosts? Now I take these from your book. One-third believe in astrology. Three quarters believe in angels. And four-fifths believe in miracles.
SUSAN JACOBY: I think even more important than the fact that large numbers of Americans believe in ghosts or angels, that is part of some religious beliefs. Is the flip side is of this is that over half of Americans don't believe in evolution. And these things go together. Because what they do is they place science on a par almost with folk beliefs.
And I think-- if I may inveigh against myself, ourselves, I think the American media in particular has a lot to do with it. Because one of the things that really has gotten dumber about our culture the media constantly talks about truth as if it-- if it were always equidistant from two points. In other words, sometimes the truth is one-sided.
I mentioned this in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks there was a huge cover story in TIME Magazine in 2002 about the rapture and end of the world scenarios. There wasn't a singular secular person quoted in it. They discussed the rapture scenario from the book of Revelation as though it was a perfectly reasonable thing for people to believe. On the one hand, these people don't believe it. On the other it's exactly like saying-- you know, "Two plus-- two plus two, so-and-so says, 'two plus two equals five.' But, of course, mathematicians say that it really equals four." The mathematicians are right. The people who say that two plus two equals five are wrong. The media blurs that constantly.
BILL MOYERS: You call that a kind of dumb objectivity.
SUSAN JACOBY: Yes. Dumb objectivity. Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: What does it say to you that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism based on the book of Genesis to be taught in our public schools along with evolution? What does that say to you?
SUSAN JACOBY: Well, it's that evolution is just a theory, it's just another opinion. Just as some people believe that the account of the six days of creation in Genesis is literally true, some people believe we're descended form lower animals. In other words, it places belief on the same level as science subject to proof. I should say, however, that it may also mean that a lot of Americans aren't exactly sure what creationism means. Because, in fact, the most recent Gallop poll shows that only 30 percent of Americans believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. In other words, many-- most Americans believe the Bible is divinely inspired. But you can believe the Bible is divinely inspired and still believe in evolution.
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SUSAN JACOBY: But you can't believe that the Bible is literally true and still believe in evolution. There's a wonderful book on religious literacy by Stephen Prothero -- you know, which sites a poll that half of Americans can't name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. Well, if you can't-- but this is part of the total dumbing down of our culture. The-- one of those books apparently that the 50 percent of Americans aren't reading is also the Bible or they would know that Genesis was the first book of the Bible. It's sort of like, you know, "I don't know what Genesis is, but I believe it."
BILL MOYERS: Doesn't this say-- also say something beyond religious belief about the level of science education in our public schools?
SUSAN JACOBY: I think it says everything about the level of education in our schools. When you have, look, one out of every five Americans still believes that the sun revolves around the earth. But you shouldn't have to be an intellectual or a college graduate to know that the sun doesn't revolve around the earth. There's been a huge failure of education.
I do agree with many cultural conservatives about this. I think that schools over the last 40 years-- instead of adding things that-- just adding things, for example. African-American history, women's history, these are all great additions, and necessary. But what they've done in addition to adding things is they really have placed less emphasis on the overall culture-- cultural things that everybody should know. People getting out of high school should know how many Supreme Court justices there are. Most Americans don't.
Well, now this feeds back into our current political process. You wonder why judges and what kind of judges people will appoint why more of the American public doesn't understand it. Well, if you don't know that there are nine judges then you don't know that George W. Bush's last two judicial appointments, Samuel Alito and John Roberts, have put us one vote away from having a Supreme Court which really believes that religion should have a much more active role in public life, that's likely to overturn Roe v. Wade. But you have to know there are nine justices before you know that we're up to a five out of nine sure votes--
BILL MOYERS: Yeah.
SUSAN JACOBY: --to know how really important the composition of the Supreme Court is in the next election. I think our schools are doing a bad job of teaching history and science.
BILL MOYERS: You claim that right-wing intellectuals are dangerous because they have command of the vocabulary that makes wishful thinking sound rational.
SUSAN JACOBY: Uh, first of all, there are right-wing intellectuals. But one of the great successes of the intellectual right, is that they have succeeded brilliantly during the last 20 years at pinning the intellectual label solely on liberals so that a lot of people think that to be an intellectual means that you are a liberal alone. And one of the reasons that I think that right-wing intellectuals are so dangerous is they've been so clever at doing this. They've been much more clever than liberal intellectuals have been.
They've made it look like liberals are the only-- are the, quote, elites. And-- but they're just, you know, people-- people who get huge salaries from business-financed, right-wing foundations. They're not the elites? Of course, they're the elites. I don't have-- I object to their ideas. I don't object to them. But the liberal intellectual community is really caught asleep at the switch by these people. And one of the points I make in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, which is why I think I'm going to get killed from both the right and the left is anti-rationalism in America is not the province of either the right or the left.
It's the province of both. For example, when you will talk to right-wing intellectuals about the Iraq war-- it doesn't matter that it hasn't worked out to them. They still think it was right. And the evidence of how it got started, how it got started on false pretenses and so on, it doesn't matter to them.
BILL MOYERS: That's making wishful thinking--
SUSAN JACOBY: Yeah. The--
BILL MOYERS: --rational.
SUSAN JACOBY: They make wishful thinking sound rational. It's the same thing now when we're hearing that the, quote, surge is working. Well, the surge is working as long as we have those troops there. But when anybody says to me in the right-wing intellectuals that the surge is working-- it's working. There are fewer people being killed in suicide bombings every day because we have a lot more young soldiers there in harm's way than there were six months ago. How many people were killed in suicide bombings in Baghdad before America entered the war? I believe the answer is none. So what they're doing is comparing, you know, apples and oranges. The left-- on the other hand-- to be intellectual is not necessarily to be rational. And there are many-- there are many anti-rational intellectuals.
BILL MOYERS: And you're pretty hard on some of them. You say they won't acknowledge the political sig-- talking about liberal intellectuals-- won't acknowledge the political significance of public ignorance. Quote, "Liberals have tended to define the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years. And to see an outraged citizenry ready to throw the bums out as the solution." And what you say is that that's the cheap and wrong way out. Right?
SUSAN JACOBY: It's the cheap way out and the wrong way out for this reason. And we've heard it over and over in the primaries from candidates who supported the war and changed their minds. "We were lied to," they said. If we'd known then what we know now we wouldn't have done it. And they say to the public, "You were lied to." But the deeper conversation we need to be having is why were Americans so willing to be lied to, not only average citizens, but politicians. And certainly when you have legislators, many of whom didn't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, and you have a geographic Roper poll that I quote in my new book-- they polled Americans between ages 18 and 25. Only 23 percent of college-educated young people could find Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Israel, four countries of ultimate importance-
BILL MOYERS: Right.
SUSAN JACOBY: --to American policy on the map, a map, by the way, that h-- it had the letter-- country's lettered on it. So in other words, it wasn't a blank map. It meant they didn't really know where the Middle East was either. So 23 percent of the college-educated and only six percent of high school graduates. Well, I would say that if only 23 percent of people with some college can find those countries on a map that is nothing to be bragging about. And that has to have something to do with why as a country -- we have such shallow political discussions.
BILL MOYERS: You say left of center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in-
SUSAN JACOBY: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: --Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory. The ignorance and erosion of historical memory that makes serious deceptions possible and plausible. Talk about the power and importance of memory.
SUSAN JACOBY: Memory. Well, first of all-- one of the things that we don't remember is what our Constitution actually says. One of the things we don't remember is right now, even as we sit here, the Bush administration is trying to claim that it has the right, without Congressional approval, to make permanent agreements for military-- in our military involvement in Iraq. Constitution says these things need to be ratified by Congress as were the treaties that you and I grew up with, the NATO treaty, for example. It was ratified by Congress. If we don't know what our Constitution says about the separation of powers then it really-- it really certainly affects the way we decide all kinds of public issues.
BILL MOYERS: Remember George Orwell talked about memory being about important knowledge like that being flushed down the memory hole?
SUSAN JACOBY: The memory hole. The--
BILL MOYERS: Because when that happens then the people in power can rule without any reference to the past. Any standard, any remembrance.
SUSAN JACOBY: For example, what the right-wing says about judges is-- our unelected judges are overstepping their powers. They talk as if judges-- judges have no right to interpret the Constitution. But that is what the unelected federal judiciary exactly was set up to do. It says so in the Constitution. But if you don't know how could-- oh, we-- yeah, we don't-- be-- in other words, people confuse the fact that they may not like certain judicial decisions with the right of judges to interpret the Constitution, indeed the duty of judges under our Constitution to interpret the Constitution. Now it's used commonly.
BILL MOYERS: When you wonder, as you do in the book, if any candidate has the will or courage to talk about ignorance as a political issue I find it hard to imagine a politician going very far, getting very far by telling his or her constituents--
SUSAN JACOBY: They're dopes.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. You're ignorant. By ignorant you mean lack of knowledge, unaware.
SUSAN JACOBY: Lack of knowledge, right.
BILL MOYERS: You don't mean stupid, which means--
SUSAN JACOBY: No.
BILL MOYERS: --unintelligent.
SUSAN JACOBY: No.
BILL MOYERS: Or dimwitted.
SUSAN JACOBY: No.
BILL MOYERS: But I can't imagine a politician succeeded by saying, "We're an ignorant culture and an ignorant people."
SUSAN JACOBY: No. But I can imagine a politician succeeding by saying, "We as a people have not lived up to our obligation to learn what we ought to learn to make informed decisions." I can imagine candidates saying, "And we in the Congress have been guilty of that too." Because it's not just the public that's ignorant. We get the government we deserve.
In other words, you wouldn't say to people, "You're a dope." You would say, "We have got to do better in-- about learning the things we need to know to make sound public policy." We can't learn the things we need to know from five-second sound bite commercials. We can't learn the things that we need to know from a quick hit on the Internet to see the latest person making a fool of themself on YouTube. We can only learn the things we need to know from talking to each other, from books. And we all need to do a lot more of that.
You know, what I don't see on the campaign trail-- if universal healthcare were one of my priorities as a candidate, first thing I'd be doing, I'd be having sessions all over the country with three groups of people, nurses, doctors, and patients. You don't need to know what the insurance industry thinks. Because you know what they think. They're going to oppose anything that they think will place any limits on medical spending and their ability to charge you higher health insurance premiums. But I'd be sitting down in unscripted sessions with people so that when-- if I was elected I could take that knowledge with me into the White House. So I could get my message across before Harry and Louise. That's what being an educator means.
And I think a candidate could say that to people. Not, "You're dopes." But, "We all need to know a lot more than we know." We've become satisfied with too little. We've become satisfied with the lowest common denominator. It is not good enough when 23 percent of our young people who have had some college, only 23 percent of them can find these countries on a map. We all need to be able to learn how to find these countries on a map.
BILL MOYERS: The book is THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, published by coincidence or providence on Darwin's birthday, right?
SUSAN JACOBY: 199th anniversary of Darwin's birth.
BILL MOYERS: Susan Jacoby, thank you for joining me on THE JOURNAL.
SUSAN JACOBY: It was my pleasure.
© 2007 Public Affairs Television. All Rights Reserved.

UPDATE: I just came across this article from Sunday's WaPo:

The Dumbing Of America

Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces
by Susan Jacoby Sunday, February 17, 2008; B01

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the

White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by

Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the

National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August,

University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.
I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be.

Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that

Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced

Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the

National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

2007 Can Kiss My Ass

Today is the last day of what almost everyone I talk to agrees was a shitty year. Congressional Democrats flopped like a third rate palooka, while Republicans continued their spectacular display of hypocrisy. Stoopid words were added to the English Language while stoopider ones were removed. Some good music got released; also, some shitty music. And some good musicians did some stoopid things, while some old musicians reclaimed their thrones for good or ill. The housing market took a dive, along with the rest of the economy, but don’t worry, folks, it’s still not a recession. (Whew!) Well, as Randy Newman observed, “The end of an empire is messy at best, and this one’s ending like all the rest.”

Happy New Year.

Happy Zappadan!

This is from a show called "The Cutting Edge." (Oddly enough, on a show called "The Cutting Edge," you are evidently not allowed to use the word "masturbation." ) BTW, I realize BDM is dangerously close to becoming a music blog.

So sue me.

[Swiped from Blue Gal by way of C&L]

Here's Your Hat & Coat -- What's Your Hurry?

According to a new study conducted at the request of the Canadian government, peer-to-peer file sharing actually increases record sales. Researchers found that for every CD downloaded, the guilty parties purchase o.44 CDs.

What, then, accounts for the sharp decline in CD sales over the last seven years? Well, in this interview with the hosts of Sound Opinions (it's show #104), the study's co-author, Birgitte Andersen, speculates that it is a semantic argument. Music sales, she suggests, haven't declined, CD sales have. Many music consumers (god, I hate that word) are downloading music legitimately from sites like Itunes, rather than purchasing them the old fashioned way at record shops. Large labels foolishly devoted to an obsolete business model are cleverly manipulating the wording in order to blame teh interwebs for their own shortsightedness. Sony, Virgin, Warner Bros., Capitol, et al. are pining hopelessly for the old days of radio stations and retailers during an era of satellite radio, online podcasting and self-produced releases. Moreover, the sharp improvement in home recording technology combined with online distribution strategies has resulted in an epidemic of tiny, ultra-indie labels that don't register on the RIAA's radar. While it's true that things are bad for the aforementioned recording industry behemoths, things are great for the many, many niche labels that have emerged over the last decade or so.

Labels like this. And this. And this.

Like turn-of-the-century carriage makers who couldn't adapt to the changing times, big labels are actually trying to outlaw a new technology that they failed to anticipate, and there's only one thing for us to say:

Buh-bye, dickhead.

The Bicycle Thief

From Salon:

Bike activists face an uphill climb against Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who claims bike paths are not transportation and are stealing tax money from bridges and roads.

By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sep. 14, 2007 Imagine you're the federal official in the Bush administration charged with overseeing the nation's transportation infrastructure. A major bridge collapses on an interstate highway during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring an additional 100. Whom to blame? How about the nation's bicyclists and pedestrians!
The Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1 led Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters to publicly reflect on federal transportation spending priorities and conclude that those greedy bicyclists and pedestrians, not to mention museumgoers and historic preservationists, hog too much of the billions of federal dollars raised by the gas tax, money that should go to pave highways and bridges. Better still, Peters, a 2006 Bush appointee, apparently doesn't see biking and walking paths as part of transportation infrastructure at all.
In an Aug. 15 appearance on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer," Peters spoke against a proposal to raise gas taxes to shore up the nation's aging infrastructure. The real problem, the secretary argued, is that only 60 percent of the current money raised by gas taxes goes to highways and bridges. She conveniently neglected to mention that about 30 percent of the money goes to public transit. She then went on to blast congressional earmarks, which dedicate 10 percent of the gas tax to some 6,000 other projects around the country. "There are museums that are being built with that money, bike paths, trails, repairing lighthouses. Those are some of the kind of things that that money is being spent on, as opposed to our infrastructure," she said. The secretary added that projects like bike paths and trails "are really not transportation."
Peters' comments set off an eruption of blogging, e-mailing and letter-writing among bike riders and activists, incensed that no matter how many times they burn calories instead of fossil fuels with the words "One Less Car" or "We're Not Holding Up the Traffic, We Are the Traffic" plastered on their helmets, their pedal pushing is not taken seriously as a form of transportation by the honchos in Washington, D.C.
Bike paths are not infrastructure? "There are hundreds of thousands of people who ride to work, and millions who walk to work every day, and the idea [that] that isn't transportation is ludicrous," says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists, who has biked to work for almost 20 years on a path paid for with federal dollars. Clarke fired off an angry letter to Peters, and invited the 25,000 members of his organization around the country to do the same. "The guy in his Humvee taking his videos back to the video store isn't any more legitimate a trip than the guy on the Raleigh taking his videos back," says Andy Thornley, program director for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition.
In fact, only about 1.5 percent of federal transportation dollars go to fund bike paths and walking trails. In the meantime, 10 percent of all U.S. trips to work, school and the store occur on bike or foot, and bicyclists and pedestrians account for about 12 percent of annual traffic fatalities, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "We represent a disproportionate share of the injuries, and we get a minuscule share of the funds," says Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bike Coalition in the San Francisco Bay Area, who calls the Peters' comments "outrageous." Plus, he notes, with problems like global warming, the obesity epidemic and energy independence, shouldn't the U.S. secretary of transportation be praising biking, not complaining about it?
What really drives cyclists around the bend is that while they're doing their part to burn less fossil fuel -- cue slogan: "No Iraqis Died to Fuel This Bike" -- they're getting grief for being expensive from a profligate administration. "War spending, tax cuts for the rich, and gas taxes are all big sources of funding. Bike spending is not," fumes Michael Bluejay, an Austin, Texas, bike activist, in an e-mail. "The few pennies we toss toward bike projects is not enough to fix our nation's bridges, not by a freaking long shot."
One of the many communities that benefit from federal dollars for bicyclists and pedestrians is the very one where the bridge collapsed. For the St. Paul, Minn., program Bike/Walk Twin Cities, administered by Transit for Livable Communities, $21.5 million of federal dough is being spent to create bike lanes, connect existing walking and biking trails with one another, and install signage to alert drivers of the presence of bicyclists and walkers. Despite the cold winters, Minneapolis is something of a biking Mecca, with 2.4 percent of all trips to work made by bike, significantly higher than the national average of 0.4 percent, according to Joan Pasiuk, program director of Bike/Walk Twin Cities.
It's hard to argue that walking paths and bike trails are robbing federal coffers when states can't even spend all the federal money they've received to repair bridges in the first place. In 2006, state departments of transportation sent back $1 billion in unspent bridge funds to the federal government, according to the Federal Highway Administration. "The fact that there is a billion dollars of bridge repair money sloshing around in the system not being spent suggests that it's not the fault of bike trails," says Clarke.
Congressional Democrats agree. "It's a red herring to point to bike paths and even imply that if we didn't build another bike path we'd have all the money we need to fix our highways and bridges," says Jim Berard, communications director for the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. "You can't build very many bridges with the amount of money that you would save if you didn't build any bike paths."
So why is Peters suddenly taking on bikes and pedestrians? Her comments are especially odd since she sang the praises of bikes as transportation in a speech at the National Bike Summit in Washington, in March 2002. Has she simply forgotten the glory of two wheels? One theory: Peters is on a campaign to quash the idea of raising the gas tax, as she editorialized recently in the Washington Post. A key proponent of raising the gas tax to fund bridge restorations in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse is Democratic Rep. Jim Oberstar of Minnesota, who has advocated for bike and pedestrian paths in his district. By putting a culture-war spin on the bridge collapse, Peters is hoping to run his gas tax proposal off the road.
Does Peters herself buy this theory? Does she really think that bike paths do not qualify as transportation infrastructure? Why does she say that things like bike paths steal money from bridge repairs when states have more than enough money to fix bridges? The secretary would not respond, but Jennifer Hing, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation's Office of Public Affairs in the Office of the Secretary, would. She answered all the specific questions with one resoundingly uninformative e-mail: "The federal government should set high standards for and invest in the ongoing safety, reliability and interconnection of the nation's transportation network. State and local communities should have the flexibility to then set local transportation priorities."
For their part, cyclists have been weaving through political land mines for decades. In the perennial struggle to gain public support for bike paths, they remain philosophical. Says Thornley of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition: "Before there were automobiles, and after there will be automobiles, there will be bicycles moving people around for transportation."

War With Iran?

War with Iran? We—meaning Anglo-American financial interests—have been at war with Iran for nigh on two hundred years.

The conflict began in 1856, when British forces attacked Persia to force them out of portions of Afghanistan. Constant skirmishes with Russia and its Mid-East neighbors had eroded Persia’s sphere of influence more or less to present day Iran, and the newly throned Qajar Dynasty was intent on re-establishing lost territory, but those intentions went unmet as Tehran fell prey to foreign influence, first from Russia and later from England.

In 1888, the Ottoman Empire inked a deal with Germany to build the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway; the discovery of oil a few years later turned England against the scheme. England had developed an oil monopoly in Iraq, and by 1901, they had a similar arrangement in Iran. A German railway into the region would weaken England’s hold on the world’s newest strategic resource: oil. Some historians cite this as the main impetus behind World War I.

The Oil Concession of 1901 spelled the beginning of decades of British tyranny in Iran, as the Anglo Persian Oil Company (later, the Anglo Iranian Oil Company) bought politicians, bullied legitimate opposition and foisted laws upon the people. By 1951, the people had had enough. They toppled the Shah and elected a semi-socialist prime minister named Mohammed Mossadegh, who quickly nationalized Iran’s oil production. The AIOC was reduced to simply one of several competing entities allowed to bid on Iran’s oil fields.

The following year, British intelligence operatives drew up plans for a joint Anglo-American plot to overthrow Mossadegh and install a new puppet regime. President Truman killed the idea, however, and it was shelved until Eisenhower became president in 1953. By then, it had become a CIA operation codenamed TP-AJAX. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., Teddy’s grandson, led the scheme. In 1954, AIOC reinvented itself as British Petroleum, regaining a 40 percent share of Iran’s oil production, and positioning itself as the preeminent oil producer in the region.

History repeated itself, as it so often does, in 1979, when the Shah was again overthrown. This time, however, instead of a Socialist, Iranians elected a Muslim extremist, Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, who framed his takeover in religious destiny terms. The current Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, though not a religious figure, has maintained Khomeini’s hardline stance towards the West. And recent British and American actions suggest our leadership is repeating itself too.

PWNED! Diebold Propagandists Exposed

From Wired [H/T: Cryptogon]

See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign
By John Borland 08.14.07 2:00 AM


CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith built a search tool that traces IP addresses of those who make Wikipedia changes.
On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of Cal Tech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Inspired by news last year that Congress members' offices had been editing their own entries, Griffith says he got curious, and wanted to know whether big companies and other organizations were doing things in a similarly self-interested vein.
"Everything's better if you do it on a huge scale, and automate it," he says with a grin.
This database is possible thanks to a combination of Wikipedia policies and (mostly) publicly available information.
The online encyclopedia allows anyone to make edits, but keeps detailed logs of all these changes. Users who are logged in are tracked only by their user name, but anonymous changes leave a public record of their IP address.
Share Your Sleuthing!
Cornered any companies polishing up their Wikipedia entries? Spotted any government spooks rewriting history? Try Virgil Griffith's Wikipedia Scanner yourself, then submit your finds and vote on other readers' discoveries here.
The organization also allows downloads of the complete Wikipedia, including records of all these changes.
Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.
The result: A database of 34.4 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.
Some of this appears to be transparently self-interested, either adding positive, press release-like material to entries, or deleting whole swaths of critical material.
Voting-machine company Diebold provides a good example of the latter, with someone at the company's IP address apparently deleting long paragraphs detailing the security industry's concerns over the integrity of their voting machines, and information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President Bush.
The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, "Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism."
A Diebold Election Systems spokesman said he'd look into the matter but could not comment by press time.
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.
As has been previously reported, politician's offices are heavy users of the system. Former Montana Sen. Conrad Burns' office, for example, apparently changed one critical paragraph headed "A controversial voice" to "A voice for farmers," with predictably image-friendly content following it.
Perhaps interestingly, many of the most apparently self-interested changes come from before 2006, when news of the Congressional offices' edits reached the headlines. This may indicate a growing sophistication with the workings of Wikipedia over time, or even the rise of corporate Wikipedia policies.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told Wired News he was aware of the new service, but needed time to experiment with it before commenting.
The vast majority of changes are fairly innocuous, however. Employees at the CIA's net address, for example, have been busy -- but with little that would indicate their place of apparent employment, or a particular bias.
One entry on "Black September in Jordan" contains wholesale additions, with specific details that read like a popular history book or an eyewitness' memoir.
Many more are simple copy edits, or additions to local town entries or school histories. One CIA entry deals with the details of lyrics sung in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.
Griffith says he launched the project hoping to find scandals, particularly at obvious targets such as companies like Halliburton. But there's a more practical goal, too: By exposing the anonymous edits that companies such as drugs and big pharmaceutical companies make in entries that affect their businesses, it could help experts check up on the changes and make sure they're accurate, he says.
For now, he has just scratched the surface of the database of millions of entries. But he's putting it online so others can look too.
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, did not respond to e-mail and telephone inquiries Monday.

UPDATE: Radar O'Reilly describes FOX News' Wiki-tweaking efforts here. [H/T: Wege]