You can't help but psychologize this...

Back from my little vacation (camping at Lake Chelan, with my son, who loved it), I noticed this bit from Kos quoting George W. Bush from this article:

"But whether it be here or in Washington or anywhere else, there's somebody who has got something to say to the president, that's part of the job," Bush said on the ranch. "And I think it's important for me to be thoughtful and sensitive to those who have got something to say."

"But," he added, "I think it's also important for me to go on with my life, to keep a balanced life."...

"I think the people want the president to be in a position to make good, crisp decisions and to stay healthy," he said when asked about bike riding while a grieving mom wanted to speak with him. "And part of my being is to be outside exercising."

I'm in pretty good shape but I don't exercise 2 hours every day. The fact that he's avoiding a grieving mother - as Kos says - he fears facing the consequences of his actions - illustratges his fear of accountability- even Bush knows, deep down, that he's screwed up royally. Let's face it: every single - every single- justification that's been made for this war has been founded on a lie. And the situation there is worse for our being there, not better.

It's why the right wing slime machine's been manufacturing outrage against Sheehan. They want to deny the consequences of their actions at all costs: it is sociopathy as foreign policy.

As Cindy Sheehan herself says:

George Bush took a 2 hour bike ride on Saturday, and when he got back, he was asked how he could go for a two hour bike ride when he doesn't have time to meet with me, and he said: "I have to go on with my life." (Austin Statesman, August 14) WHAT!!!!!????? He has to get on with his life!!! I am so offended by that statement. Every person, war fan, or not, who has had a child killed in this mistake of an occupation should be highly offended by that remark. Who does he think he is? I wish I could EVER be able to get on with my life. Getting on with my life means a life without my dear, sweet boy. Getting on with my life means learning to live with a pain that is so intense that sometimes I feel like throwing up, or screaming until I pass out from sorrow. I wish a little bike ride could help me get on with my life.

need to focus on the positive, though, and there is so much. I had so many amazing things happen today. I couldn't walk through Camp Casey or the Crawford Peace House today without hugging people and getting my picture taken. Now I know how Mickey Mouse feels at Disneyland. I had a soldier from Ft. Hood come out today and he brought me a small stone with a First Cavalry insignia painted on it and the pictures of three of his beautiful buddies who were murdered there by George's reckless policies. It was such an incredible moment for me when he said: "Keep on doing what you are doing. We are so proud of you. Casey would be so proud of you."

This is the other thing that Bush - and the right wing slime machine fears: a sincere response to the insanity - sincerity to the point of spirituality.

Bush cannot possibly "get on with his life" without truly "meeting" the Cindy Sheehans. Cindy Sheehan need not meet with Bush to know she has already accomplished something.

Cindy Sheehan is only asking Bush to be what he said he would be way back in January of 2001: to be president of all the people.

Off for vacation....

Don't expect anything profound till next week...

Update:

Washington State Gas Prices... and Portland Area Gas Prices...

shop wisely...

Sheehan: not being angry anymore...

Michael Moore highlights Cindy Sheehan and links to Gold Star Families for Peace.

Michael Moore may get things wrong from time to time, but he's essentially right, and the right is essentially wrong about most of the things he targets.

But I think what really gets the right is that, unlike Michelle Malkin, he's actually entertaining without being - well, hateful and angry.

And that seems to be the theme of Cindy Sheehan's post today at the Huffington Post.

It's good that folks like Sheehan are transcending anger, because although anger can provide the energy to affect change, it is a dangerous thing when uncoralled.

But like Sheehan anger can be transformed into something better.

And the right is clearly unsettled with Sheehan, because she's the real deal. She's someone who sacrificed her child - the righties I see smearing her have never really understood sacrifice, have never understood the cost of freedom has to be paid by acting freely, and most importantly, have never understood that anger and resentment aren't meant to be fed with more anger and resentment, but can only be sated by compassionate action.

She's not simply aping MLK or Gandhi here in calling Bush and the righties to accountability- and even if she was, the call to accountability would still be sincere, and would still demand a response.

And responsibility is all she's asking. It's all anyone ought to ask of those who are employed by us, such as Bush.

Even better investment advice...

Why the little guy can't win and the best he can do...

WHEN I started out on this new book," David F. Swensen was saying the other day, "I thought I was going to take what we do at Yale and make it accessible to the individual investor." Oh, lucky day! Mr. Swensen, the chief investment officer of the Yale endowment - and to my mind, the best manager of institutional money in the United States - was going to show you and me how to invest the way he does.

To his surprise, however, the book Mr. Swensen eventually wrote, "Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment," published this last Tuesday, turned out to be the opposite of what he intended. Its title notwithstanding, it doesn't show the little guy how to invest like Yale. Instead, it shows why the little guy will never be able to invest the way Yale does.

For all the "democratization" that has taken place in the world of personal investing the deck is still stacked against the individual. That was Mr. Swensen's fundamental discovery. And his willingness to change course and turn "Unconventional Success" into a polemic aimed primarily at mutual fund companies, but also at other Wall Street types who fleece the little guy, is to his everlasting credit...

His new book has given Mr. Swensen a greater appreciation of the enormous advantages he has as an institutional money manager, starting with the obvious fact that he has a staff that spends full-time researching investment possibilities. Thus, he takes it as a given that individuals shouldn't pick stocks themselves. "I see every day how competitive the markets are, and how tough. So the idea that you can do this yourself, that's out the window."

What is it about mutual funds Mr. Swensen finds offensive? Just about everything. He hates the way the loads and all the hidden fees mean that the investor is always behind the eight ball. (When I asked him about hedge fund fees, which are much higher, Mr. Swensen replied: "I don't mind paying a lot for actual performance. Besides, when we negotiate fees, it's sophisticated investor versus fund manager. It's a fair fight.")...

So does Mr. Swensen offer any hope at all? Some. He thinks we'd all be better off sticking with index funds, instead of trying to beat the market. He thinks we should get our index funds from Vanguard, with its rock-bottom fees. (As a not-for-profit company, Vanguard also doesn't have the central conflict of interest.) We should have a diversified portfolio of index funds, for the same reason Yale does. We should be disciplined in our approach, especially in rebalancing our portfolio to stick to our diversification targets. Of course, this invariably means paring back on winners and increasing our investment in laggards.

The original words to the tune for "Johnny Comes Marching Home."

The song was orignally called "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye; this is actually a song that is very evocative of the horrors of war.

While goin' the road to sweet Athy, hurroo, hurroo
While goin' the road to sweet Athy, hurroo, hurroo
While goin' the road to sweet Athy
A stick in me hand and a drop in me eye
A doleful damsel I heard cry,
Johnny I hardly knew ye.

With your drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo
With your drums and guns and drums and guns, hurroo, hurroo
With your drums and guns and drums and guns
The enemy nearly slew ye
Oh my darling dear, Ye look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ye.

Where are your eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your eyes that were so mild, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your eyes that were so mild
When my heart you so beguiled
Why did ye run from me and the child
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run, hurroo, hurroo
Where are your legs that used to run
When you went for to carry a gun
Indeed your dancing days are done
Oh Johnny, I hardly knew ye.

I'm happy for to see ye home, hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home, hurroo, hurroo
I'm happy for to see ye home
All from the island of Sulloon
So low in flesh, so high in bone
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.

Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg, hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven't an arm, ye haven't a leg
Ye're an armless, boneless, chickenless egg
Ye'll have to put with a bowl out to beg
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.

They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again, hurroo, hurroo
They're rolling out the guns again
But they never will take our sons again
No they never will take our sons again
Johnny I'm swearing to ye.

Via Brad de Long.

I didn't know the orignal words; but now I do know another piece of war propaganda trivia...

Economics blogs now driving investment trends...

So says the WSJ:

While many investors continue to take their cues from traditional outlets, the real news junkies -- including those who aim to get a trading idea before they hear about it from their broker -- have bookmarked the blogs, or Web logs. Even Wall Street itself is paying heed.

"It's all about the 'memes,' " says Stan Jonas, head of interest rate strategy at Fimat USA in New York, employing a word that describes ideas that spread quickly by word of mouth -- or Web. "Those guys say it and about a week or two later, the guys on Wall Street pick it up."

via The Big Picture...

The econ blogs mentioned:

(1) http://www.econbrowser.com
(2) http://macroblog.typepad.com
(3) http://voxbaby.blogspot.com
(4) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type
(5) http://bigpicture.typepad.com
(6) http://www.truthlaidbear.com
(7) http://Dailykos.com
(8) http://economistsview.typepad.com
(9) http://www.stern.nyu.edu/globalmacro

It probably bothers some to see Kos here (I don't have access to the original article, and don't know why "Truth Laid Bear" is there for the life of me), but good economic insight is often posted by Kos diarists.

It's made me money.

I'd also add seeking alpha, and especially his economics blog resource pages.

Notice how fair and balanced I am??? I've even linked to a page that links to Becker and Posner's blog...



Want great investing advice? If you're looking to see what makes money, don't have ideological blinders on, but do understand that others will act on behalf of ideology. It's no crime to make a wise investment that supports your own ideology though.

"Advice?" Here's better advice:

Andrew Pryor (publisher of Sound Mind Investing, "America's best-selling financial newsletter written from a biblical perspective") guest blogs at Evangelical Outpost on, well, investing, ostensibly, but it looks more like a plug for his site when you do the click-throughs.

What is there, and posted, looks more like standard bromides:

The right investing decision is one that is prudent under the circumstances. Does it pass the "common sense" test? How much of your investing capital can you afford to lose and still have a realistic chance of meeting your financial goals? The investments that offer higher potential returns also carry greater risks of loss. The right portfolio for you is not always the one with the most profit potential.

For example, it's usually best not to have a majority of your investments in a single asset or security. For that reason, people who have large holdings of stock in the company they work for often sell some of it in order to diversify. If the stock doubles after they sell it, does that mean they did the "wrong" thing? No, they did the right thing. After all, the stock could have fallen dramatically as well as risen (ask the former employees of Enron). What would a large loss have done to their retirement planning? The right investment step is the one that protects you in the event of life's occasional worst-case scenarios. Generally, this moves you in the direction of increased diversification.

So, while I'm all in favor of diversification, I also think it's suicidal to be brain dead for the "long term."

So here's my observations and advice for diversification:

• Absent a major devaluation in the dollar, manufacturing and services will continue to be outsourced. Interest rates will continue to rise, and the "boom" we're having right now is going to come to a close.
  
  
• Absent a major move away from America's dependence on oil in particular, and the dependence on low cost petroleum for manufacturing, shipping, and agriculture, oil prices will rise in the long term, although at present I don't think calling the situation now a speculative bubble is out of the question.
  
  
• Yes, Virginia, the US is in the midst of a real estate bubble. (Update: but it's beginning to go hissss in places...)
  
  
  
  

What does that mean for diversification?
For the "near term," (about the next 6 months to a year):

• In general, with the exception of energy, forget US large caps, the Dow and the S&P 500, except as a hedge against increasing oil prices. They go up when oil goes down and vice versa.
  
  
• For the long term, it's a good idea to hold at least some ETFs in oil related fields.
  
  
• It's a good idea to have funds in the Asia and emerging markets region. It's also good to diversify within this market: some funds do significantly better than others.
  
  
• Some money in ultrashort bonds is good. So is some money in unhedged foreign currency bonds or bond funds to hedge against a drop in the dollar.
  
  
• Research, research, research.
  
  
• Buy lower than you sell. (A bromide, to be sure, but often forgotten. Nobody ever went broke taking a profit.)
  
  
  

At least in the past year (longer, if I checked) this has returned well over the return on the DOW, the return on the S&P 500, etc.

武道 (ぶどう) , or, why the "101st Keyboarders" are clueless:

Link 1

故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必敗

One hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the most skillful. Seizing the enemy without fighting is the most skillful.

It is better to save your army than to go down fighting...

Link 2

The easy way is always mined.

Never draw fire; it irritates everyone around you.

The enemy invariably attacks on two occasions:
when they're ready.
when you're not

And finally, a quote from Cindy Sheehan (via Kos):

The President says he feels compassion for me, but the best way to show that compassion is by meeting with me and the other mothers and families who are here. Our sons made the ultimate sacrifice and we want answers. All we're asking is that he sacrifice an hour out of his five-week vacation to talk to us, before the next mother loses her son in Iraq. He says he is spreading peace. How can you spread peace by killing people?

That is the main point: the big principle of the art of war, West or East, is to engage in war only as a way of ending strife and conflict.

Bush - and his supporters on the right- don't have specifics about how they are engaging this thing in order to end it. In fact, it's only expanding, which should call to mind the first principle of holes- when you're in one, stop digging.

The oil we eat

It's the name of another article from Harper's

The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized...

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

And sure enough, there go food prices:

High gas prices may not only pinch your wallet at the pump but also at the supermarket. Some stores and even restaurants may have to charge more to cover their costs.

Talk about sticker shock. Hal Spradlin couldn't believe pump prices when he filled up his delivery truck Tuesday morning. Usually $65 gets him close to a full tank. But Tuesday? "Three-quarters of a tank," Spradlin said. And by week's end, Hal will nearly pay three times as much. "It's an average of $180 a week to fill this thing up. Twenty cents a gallon makes a big difference," said Spradlin.

If you think what Hal pays at the pump doesn't affect you, you're wrong. Hal delivers produce for Sam Okun, a food wholesale business in downtown Toledo. Even though the company does not charge extra for gas, the increase cost is built in to the price of some products. "Lettuce that cost us $8 before, we were getting $10 now. We are [selling it for] $10.50.

And that's not all the other areas where petroleum impacts the food chain.

Oh boy...we're in trouble...

Able Danger? You're kidding...

Righties are touting the "Able Danger" story as proof that See! 9/11 was Clinton's Fault!

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.

Al Felzenberg, who had been the commission's chief spokesman, said Tuesday the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.

It did not make it into the final report because the information was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said. The commission has gone out of existence, although a follow-up organization called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project continues to follow closely the Bush administration's progress in implementing their recommendations.

...According to [ Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees] a classified military intelligence unit called ''Able Danger'' identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the unit's recommendation that the information be turned over to the FBI in 2000.

According to Pentagon documents, the information was not shared because of concerns about pursuing information on ''U.S. persons,'' a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners legally admitted to the country.

Felzenberg said an unidentified person working with Weldon came forward Wednesday and described a meeting 10 days before the panel's report was issued last July. During it, a military official urged commission staffers to include a reference to the intelligence on Atta in the final report.

Felzenberg said checks were made and the details of the July 12, 2004, meeting were confirmed. Previous to that, Felzenberg said it was believed commission staffers knew about Able Danger from a meeting with military officials in Afghanistan during which no mention was made of Atta or the other three hijackers.

Staff members now are searching documents in the National Archives to look for notes from the meeting in Afghanistan and any other possible references to Atta and Able Danger, Felzenberg said.

He sought to minimize the significance of the new information.

''Even if it were valid, it would've joined the lists of dozens of other instances where information was not shared,'' Felzenberg said. ''There was a major problem with intelligence sharing.''

Er, ummm... if you didn't already know it the 9/11 Commission report was a whitewash:

The most momentous subject before the 9/11 Commission was: What did President Bush know about the Al Qaeda threat to the United States, when did he know it, and if he knew little, why so? The Commission reports that on several occasions in the spring and summer of 2001 the President had “asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States.” The Commission further reports the President saying that “if his advisers had told him there was a [terrorist] cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it.” Facing his questioners in April 2004, the President said he had not been informed that terrorists were in this country.

Conceivably it was at or near the moment when Bush took this position that the members of the Commission who heard him grasped that casting useful light on the relation between official conduct and national unpreparedness would be impossible. The reason? The President’s claim was untrue. It was a lie, and the Commissioners realized they couldn’t allow it to be seen as a lie. Numberless officials had appeared before the whole body of the Commission or before its aides, had been sworn in, and had thereafter provided circumstantial detail about their attempts—beginning with pre-election campaign briefings in September, through November 2000, and continuing straight through the subsequent months—to educate Bush as candidate, then as president-elect, then as commander in chief, about the threat from terrorists on our shores. The news these officials brought was spelled out in pithy papers both short and long; the documentation supplied was in every respect impressive.^[2]

Nevertheless the chief executive, seated before the Commission, declared: Nobody told me. And challenging the chief executive as a liar entailed an unthinkable cost—the possible rending of the nation’s social and political fabric.

This stuff isn't going to be forgotten, even if there were snafus in the Clinton era.

Another banner day for the George W. Bush oil bubble...

$66 a barrel, "with a bullet", as they used to say about the Billboard charts.

So what would it take to bring prices down? Short of a global recession that would significantly push demand down, analysts and traders see no end to the exceptional price rally that began nearly two years ago.

But I still think there'll be a Sept 10-11 pullback in prices.

Ties found between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government!!!

Only thing is, it's the Iraqi government the US installed.

Aug. 10, 2005 - A former Washington-area man accused in court papers of being the “American contact” for an Osama bin Laden “front organization” is now believed to be working for the new Iraqi government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, two U.S. law-enforcement officials and a longtime associate of the man tell NEWSWEEK...

Tariq A. Hamdi, who allegedly delivered a satellite-telephone battery to bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998, has left the United States and has told associates he is currently employed in the Iraqi Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, said the government officials, who asked not to be identified because of pending legal charges against Hamdi.

Hamdi's precise status with the Iraqi foreign ministry could not be immediately determined. But one of the U.S. law-enforcement officials said that federal prosecutors were concerned enough about Hamdi’s current status that they undertook a legal review with the State Department to determine if it would prevent them from charging him with federal crimes because of diplomatic immunity. But the prosecutors determined that his diplomatic status was “irrelevant” because the crimes they were considering charging him with took place before the current Iraqi government even existed, the official said.

Hamdi, an Iraqi-born American citizen who formerly lived in the Washington suburb of Herndon, Va., and worked for an Islamic think tank, has long been under scrutiny by federal law-enforcement agents in connection with a broader, three-year long probe into a web of Islamic charities with suspected terror links.

Really, Iraq was more important to Bush than going after al Qaeda. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

Uh-oh for Bush: There go the NASCAR dads...

Link

MIAMI -- More than 600 truckers gathered in their big rigs Wednesday to protest the rising gas prices in South Florida, NBC 6's Hank Tester reported.

The trucks, which included tractor-trailers, dump trucks and box trucks, gathered at the intersection of Okeechobee Road and the Florida Turnpike in Miami-Dade County.

Traffic in the area was at a standstill as the trucks started a caravan headed toward Miami City Hall.

The trucks traveled 20 miles to present a petition requesting a fuel surcharge break for independently owned trucks.

The truckers claim that the high cost of gas has made it impossible for them to earn a living.

"The airlines are charging passengers. The steam ship lines are charging the shippers. Everyone who's got clout is getting a surcharge," said Ron Carver of the Teamsters Union. "But the truck drivers who have to buy their own fuel are going into bankruptcy because they don't have the clout to demand this. So they're here today asking Congress to pass a mandatory fuel surcharge to keep them afloat."

I guess at that September 11 Country Western concert they'll have to confine the singers to songs about lost love and the savior, as well as mothers, prison, trains, farms, Christmas, and dead dogs.

Two Ways to Remember September 11...

Method Number 1:

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The Pentagon will hold a massive march and country music concert to mark the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an announcement tucked into an Iraq war briefing Tuesday.

"This year the Department of Defense will initiate an America Supports Your Freedom Walk," Rumsfeld said, adding that the march would remind people of "the sacrifices of this generation and of each previous generation."

The march will start at the Pentagon, where nearly 200 people died on Sept. 11, and end at the National Mall with a show by country star Clint Black.

Word of the event startled some observers. "I've never heard of such a thing," said John Pike, who has been a defense analyst in Washington for 25 years and runs GlobalSecurity.org.

The news also reignited debate and anger over linking Sept. 11 with the war in Iraq.

"That piece of it is disturbing since we all know now there was no connection," said Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq veteran who heads Operation Truth, an anti-administration military booster.

Rieckhoff suggested the event was an ill-conceived publicity stunt. "I think it's clear that their public opinion polls are in the toilet," he said.

Method Number 2:

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Ongoing concerns over conflicts in the oil-rich Middle East lifted crude-oil futures to a new intraday record of $65 a barrel Wednesday, even though U.S. data reflected ample domestic supplies, with imports at their second-highest weekly average ever.

Refinery outages helped tighten U.S. gasoline inventories further last week -- sending futures prices for the fuel to uncharted territory, but the strong imports help raise crude supplies by as much as triple some market expectations.

September natural-gas futures mirrored the strength among its energy peers to end above $9 per million British thermal units, the first time since November of last year on a monthly average basis.

Crude for September delivery climbed as high as $65 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. That was the first time a benchmark contract has ever reached a level that high. The contract closed up $1.83, or 2.9%, at $64.90 a barrel -- the highest close ever for a benchmark.

"The market shows crude stocks have indeed increased, but the market fails to believe we are building a comfortable cushion in inventories," said John Person, president of National Futures Advisory Service.

Instead, "traders are pricing in the worst fears from the Middle East tensions [and] Iran's nuclear program is an issue," he said. Added to that, there's the question of governmental stability in Saudi Arabia, and the "ongoing Iraq military policing action that no one wants to call a war," he said.

Those are "the real culprits behind the energy market's high prices," he said.

I think that it's a given that we'll see prices rise - not steadily perhaps- until at least after Sept. 11.

After all, it's not like we're asking the Saudis to, you know, actually bring democracy and religious freedom to the place that spawned al Qaeda...

And of course lost in all of this is actually, you know, remembering the dead, and trying to execute a coherent policy for dealing with the root causes of Islamic fundamentalist religious terrorism connected with our greed for oil.

Just remember:

For every Cindy Sheehan, there's not only a Casey Sheehan, but also a Gennaro Pellegrini, and their experiences carry far more weight than the 101st Keyboarders.

I'm sure the right is scrounging right now to find some dead soldier's mother who - in the midst of her grief- can't bring herself out of her denial to admit that George W. Bush needlessly brought on her son's death.

News bits:

Yesterday, I was at a loss for particularly interesting things to blog, even though Jerry Garcia was 10 years dead, and Abe Hirschfeld died yesterday.

So, I'll just summarize here whatever might be of interest:

Kansas still doesn't like evolution.

TOPEKA, Kan., Aug. 9 (AP) - The State Board of Education has approved the latest draft of science standards that include greater criticism of evolution.

The board approved the draft on Tuesday by a vote to 6 to 4. It then voted to send it to be reviewed by outside academics. The board is expected to give its final approval in October.

The draft says the board is not advocating the teaching of "intelligent design," which contends that some features of the natural world are best explained by an intelligent creator, not evolution. But the language favored by the board does come from advocates of intelligent design.

Conduct unbecoming an officer:

DENVER (AP) -- An Air Force Reserve colonel could face criminal charges for allegedly vandalizing cars at Denver International Airport bearing pro-Bush bumper stickers.

Lt. Col. Alexis Fecteau, director of operations for reserve forces at the National Security Space Institute in Colorado Springs, is believed responsible for defacing at least 10 parked vehicles between December and June, police spokesman Sonny Jackson said Tuesday.

A bait car left by a police detective was also defaced and the detective tracked down Fecteau, who turned himself in Friday. He was released on bond.

China reveals what's in its basket but not how much:

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- China disclosed for the first time Wednesday the composition of the basket of currencies used to set the yuan's value, saying it mainly includes the dollar, euro, yen and Korean won.

The currencies of Singapore, Britain, Malaysia, Russia, Australia, Canada and Thailand are also considered in setting the yuan's foreign exchange rate, Zhou Xiaochuan, the central bank governor, said during a speech to launch a new operations center for the People's Bank of China in Shanghai.

Huawei wants Marconi:

After computers, cars and oil, will China's foreign acquisition target be telephones?

British news reports say Huawei Technologies Inc., China's biggest maker of telecommunications equipment, is in talks with Marconi Corp. PLC on a possible takeover of the struggling British firm, the Associated Press reported.

The news suggests that corporate China hasn't lost its appetite for foreign assets despite the acrimonious, highly publicized withdrawal last week of CNOOC Ltd.'s US$18.5 billion (euro15 billion) bid for U.S. oil and gas producer Unocal Corp.

A Huawei-Marconi deal, if completed, would be hugely symbolic: The purchase of a British industrial landmark -- one that traces its roots to the inventor of radio -- by a 17-year-old firm that represents China's new economic vigor and high-tech ambitions.

A Huawei spokesman declined Tuesday to comment. Marconi issued a statement in London saying it was exploring "all strategic options" with other firms. It didn't confirm whether that meant Huawei and warned that there was no assurance it could make a deal.

Huawei and Marconi make telecom switching equipment -- the guts of a phone system that the public doesn't see but that is critically important in the age of cell phones and the Internet.

Unlike CNOOC's bid, a tie-up between them would have more in common with successful acquisitions involving struggling foreign companies that actively courted Chinese buyers as corporate saviors.

The deal could be worth 560 million British pounds ($1 billion), according to London's Sunday Times.

The Yen is doing well in early trading...

he yen surged higher in European morning trade on Wednesday amid a potent cocktail of buoyant equity markets, a strengthening Japanese economy and signs that Junichiro Koizumi may be returned as prime minister after September’s snap election.

Opinion polls released on Wednesday showed an increase in Mr Koizumi’s approval rating, while a majority of respondents said they supported Mr Koizumi’s plans to privatise the postal service, the issue that brought his government down.

Moreover Japan’s domestic corporate goods price index, a measure of wholesale prices, rose 1.5 per cent year-on-year in July, outstripping forecasts and raising hopes that deflation may be on the way to being defeated.

Furthermore Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 stock market index rose 1.7 per cent on Wednesday, extending Tuesday’s 1 per cent gain and pushing the index to its highest close since April 2004. Foreign investors are likely to be playing a part in the rally - supporting the yen in the process. In July foreigners bought Y1,323bn of Japanese equities, the highest figure since March 2004.

As a result the yen rose Y1.1 to Y110.83 against the US dollar, Y1.1 to Y137.39 against the euro and Y1.1 to Y198.93 against sterling.

“The yen has clearly been the big mover in the foreign exchange market with a notable pick-up in demand reflecting rising optimism over the economic outlook and falling pessimism over the political outlook,” said Derek Halpenny, senior currency economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi.

James Dobson invokes Godwin's law again, but without any real swastika-wavers, unlike folks who criticize the Minute Men.

Sometimes, you invoke Godwin's law because there really are Nazis

Or at least when some folks carry around Nazi flags, it does cause for some confusion, now wouldn't it?

It's the economy...

I'm amused by the fact that righties like to bash Kos; generally the economic outlook posed by their diarists has been spot on and has been the very good for making investment decisions. Included in the above is this diary:

1. Real inflation paid by real people is moderately high.
2. Since wages are nowhere near keeping pace, real wages are dropping.
3. Real unemployment - that is the kind you and I feel, rather than the kind Greenspan feels - is also reasonably high historically. (Check out the graph).
3. Historically speaking an inflation rate of 5.8% and an unemployment rate of 7.2% is a crisis that calls for drastic government action.
4. That's why Bush is unpopular...

But wait there's more. (Of course there's more, that's what more means) Housing inflation is heavily weighted to the two coasts. Again checking the same numbers as before - only for the coastal areas, one finds that housing inflation isn't adding about 2.6% to places like New York - but closer to 5.5% This means that if you live in the bicoastal areas, inflation doesn't feel bad, it feels blood awful...

What looking at real economic statistics says is that the US has been hovering above recession for over a year now. What is propping up the economy is a huge binge of spending - both war time spending such as the Iraq war and its associated costs, tax reductions that pump money into the economy, and huge pork bills like the transportation bill, the agriculture bill, the perscription drug benefit and the new energy bil.

In short, Bush is attempting to take America down the same road that Japan took in the wake of their 1987 crash: build a bubble in housing prices to keep the ruling party in power, and then use huge public spending injections, and geographic gerrymandering, to prevent the economy from completely meltingdown...

The problem is that no one else could do that much better. You see, the divergence between the real world and the government statistical world, creates a policy bind. The Fed can only do one thing at once. The fed is in a policy bind when it has to do opposite things. The last major policy bind was in 1998. Greenspan had to raise interest rates to cut off the stock bubble, and he had to lower them to deal with the world currency crisis. A better policy regime would have realized that two were the same problem - too much money flowing into the US - and done one thing to fix both. But the FM economy couldn't fix that problem...

I'll not in passing that the "FM economy" is reall a misnomer here; it's more of a "preserve the national banks" system...

The bottom line is that the old policy regime that has ruled since Reagan is faced with a crisis. That crisis is that while the economy is doing as well as it can do in its current form - as evidenced by "good" economic numbers - that economy is not generating enough activity to keep people happy. Governments are tottering in England, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Canada and Japan - that is to say 7 of the G-8 - while there are job riots in China and India.

The economic statistics that show why people are unhappy - the inflation number with housing thrown in, the employment slack number, the GDP deflator with housing costs correctly calculated - show an economy in stagflation, propped up by massive borrow and squander policies.

Also great: this post on the quality of life in the US. Must reading.

Yes, Bush let bin Laden get away....

This had been widely reported before the run-up to the Iraq war, it has been denied by Bush partisans, but this story just won't go away:

[I]n a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."

In his book—titled "Jawbreaker"—the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger. (Berntsen would not divulge the book's specifics, saying he's awaiting CIA clearance.) That backs up other recent accounts, including that of military author Sean Naylor, who calls Tora Bora a "strategic disaster" because the Pentagon refused to deploy a cordon of conventional forces to cut off escaping Qaeda and Taliban members. Maj. Todd Vician, a Defense Department spokesman, says the problem at Tora Bora "was not necessarily just the number of troops.

Krugman explains the housing bubble...

Forget what Atrios says (can't figure out for the life of me why he'd be critical of Krugman on this), this primer's as good as it gets:

Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

Then there are the numbers. Many bubble deniers point to average prices for the country as a whole, which look worrisome but not totally crazy. When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.

And Zoned Zone housing prices, which have risen much faster than the national average, clearly point to a bubble...

I hadn't heard that the Dow 36,000 folks had gotten into the act... but with the re-appearance of George Gilder in "Intelligent" "design" I'm not surprised.

Krauthammer "Intelligent" "Design" is OK, as long as he gets the Iraq debacle...

James Wolcott called my attention to it: "[P]eople of my ilk care a lot more about Iraq than about textbooks in Kansas.”



Yeah, neocons just don't care about veracity.

Already obsolete model on the yuan...

The NY Times business section I think specializes in conventional wisdom...it's article on the backfire effects of the rising yuan was something that was mentioned on this blog at least 4 months ago...

Most analysts have already figured out that the yuan's climb so far has been insignificant. But some of the most ardent advocates of yuan revaluation are still hoping for an appreciation of 6 to 7 percent a month in the currency, the maximum drift that the Chinese central bank will allow, according to its original announcement. Senators Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, are aiming for a total appreciation of around 27.5 percent. M. Brian O'Shaughnessy, chief executive of Revere Copper Products in Rome, N.Y., said he needed 40 percent immediately. "Otherwise, it won't have any impact," he said.

But even a yuan revaluation of 40 percent wouldn't significantly improve the overall balance of trade of the United States. For that to happen, the currencies of other developing countries would have to rise in tandem. If they didn't, the loss of competitiveness of Chinese manufacturers would move Americans to buy their products only from low-cost countries like Bangladesh, reallocating, but not reducing, America's external shortfall.

"The dollar has to fall not only against China but against the whole trade-weighted basket," said Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Still, assuming against all odds that all this happened, what would the results be for the American economy? Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics who has been calling for the yuan to rise, says some American manufacturing jobs could be saved.

He acknowledges that it wouldn't help all industries. Much of the less complex stuff that Americans buy from China is no longer made in the United States. Some of it moved to Japan a long time ago. Then Japan lost that manufacturing to South Korea, and South Korea lost it to China. It's unlikely that the United States will ever recover it, he said.

Yet for manufacturers of products like semiconductors or molded plastics - which aren't so low tech that they moved overseas long ago, but are not so high tech that labor costs are of no relevance - a currency shift of 20 or 25 percent could be important. It could make the difference between staying in the United States, where the going wage for a manufacturing worker averages about $16.50 an hour, or moving to China, where it is nearer to $1.25 an hour.

Two words sums up the obsolecence of this position: peak oil.

All this globalization is predicated on the assumption of cheap energy to move goods around the world, and to power lots of servers to outsource internet based services.

What happens when the energy becomes very expensive?

Which is bigger - labor costs or energy costs? Depends on the industry.

Deconstructing content and content creation

The NY Times magazine article on "Red vs. Blue" is good reading..

Whenever a friend discovered a particularly cool stunt inside Halo -- for example, obliterating an enemy with a new type of grenade toss -- Burns would record a video of the stunt for posterity. (His friend would perform the move after Burns had run a video cord from his TV to his computer, so he could save it onto his hard drive.) Then he'd post the video on a Web site to show other gamers how the trick was done. To make the videos funnier, sometimes Burns would pull out a microphone and record a comedic voice-over, using video-editing software to make it appear as if the helmeted soldier himself were doing the talking.

Then one day he realized that the videos he was making were essentially computer-animated movies, almost like miniature emulations of ''Finding Nemo'' or ''The Incredibles.'' He was using the game to function like a personal Pixar studio. He wondered: Could he use it to create an actual movie or TV series?

Burns's group decided to give it a shot. They gathered around the Xbox at Burns's apartment, manipulating their soldiers like tiny virtual actors, bobbing their heads to look as if they were deep in conversation. Burns wrote sharp, sardonic scripts for them to perform. He created a comedy series called ''Red vs. Blue,'' a sort of sci-fi version of ''M*A*S*H.'' In ''Red vs. Blue,'' the soldiers rarely do any fighting; they just stand around insulting one another and musing over the absurdities of war, sounding less like patriotic warriors than like bored, clever video-store clerks. The first 10-minute episode opened with a scene set in Halo's bleakest desert canyon...

...Video-game aficionados have been creating ''machinima'' -- an ungainly term mixing ''machine'' and ''cinema'' and pronounced ma-SHEEN-i-ma -- since the late 90's. ''Red vs. Blue'' is the first to break out of the underground, and now corporations like Volvo are hiring machinima artists to make short promotional films, while MTV, Spike TV and the Independent Film Channel are running comedy shorts and music videos produced inside games. By last spring, Burns and his friends were making so much money from ''Red vs. Blue'' that they left their jobs and founded Rooster Teeth Productions. Now they produce machinima full time...

...Perhaps the most unusual thing about machinima is that none of its creators are in jail. After all, they're gleefully plundering intellectual property at a time when the copyright wars have become particularly vicious. Yet video-game companies have been upbeat -- even exuberant -- about the legions of teenagers and artists pillaging their games. This is particularly bewildering in the case of ''Red vs. Blue,'' because Halo is made by Bungie, a subsidiary of Microsoft, a company no stranger to using a courtroom to defend its goods. What the heck is going on?

ure, Rooster Teeth ripped off Microsoft's intellectual property. But Microsoft got something in return: ''Red vs. Blue'' gave the game a whiff of countercultural coolness, the sort of grass-roots street cred that major corporations desperately crave but can never manufacture. After talking with Rooster Teeth, Microsoft agreed, remarkably, to let them use the game without paying any licensing fees at all. In fact, the company later hired Rooster Teeth to produce ''Red vs. Blue'' videos to play as advertisements in game stores. Microsoft has been so strangely solicitous that when it was developing the sequel to Halo last year, the designers actually inserted a special command -- a joystick button that makes a soldier lower his weapon -- designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue.

''If you're playing the game, there's no reason to lower your weapon at all,'' Burns explained. ''They put that in literally just so we can shoot machinima.''

Other game companies have gone even further. Many now include editing software with their games, specifically to encourage fans to shoot movies. When Valve software released its hit game Half-Life 2 last year, it included ''Faceposer'' software so that machinima creators could tweak the facial expressions of characters. When the Sims 2 -- a sequel to the top-selling game of all time -- came out last year, its publisher, Electronic Arts, set up a Web site so that fans could upload their Sims 2 movies to show to the world. (About 8,000 people so far have done so.)

This is one more instance of the maxim that once a medium for communication and content delivery is created, the end consumer will deconstruct the relationships between content creation and distribution in ways unforseen by the creators, as anyone who's seen a 2 year old with a VCR knows.

Savvy producers of content and content creation/rendering devices will let consumers mess with it to create new content...a sort of Mystery Science Theater 3000 for everyone...


Red vs. Blue videos can be watched here. Some are laugh out loud funny.

The Rove- Novak relationship raises more questions...

Robert Novak got benched this week from CNN for saying "bullshit" more or less out of the blue, as anyone who's seen the now famous Novak meltdown will attest.

Well, the NY Times follows up today with a retrospective on Rove's relationship with Novak, ...

In 1992 in an incident well known in Texas, Mr. Rove was fired from the state campaign to re-elect the first President Bush on suspicions that Mr. Rove had leaked damaging information to Mr. Novak about Robert Mosbacher Jr., the campaign manager and the son of a former commerce secretary.

Since then, Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak have denied that Mr. Rove was the source, even as Mr. Mosbacher, who no longer talks on the record about the incident, has never changed his original assertion that Mr. Rove was the culprit.

"It's history," Mr. Mosbacher said last week in a brief telephone interview. "I commented on it at the time, and I have nothing to add."

But the episode, part of the bad-boy lore of Mr. Rove, is a telling chapter in the 20-year friendship between the presidential adviser and the columnist. The story of that relationship, a bond of mutual self-interest of a kind that is long familiar in Washington, does not answer the question of who might have leaked the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, to reporters, potentially a crime.

But it does give a clue to Mr. Rove's frequent and complimentary mentions over the years in Mr. Novak's column, and to the importance of Mr. Rove and Mr. Novak to each other's ambitions.

"They've known each for a long time, but they are not close friends," said a person who knows both men and who asked not to be named because of the investigation into a conversation by Mr. Novak and Mr. Rove in July 2003 about Ms. Wilson,...

I guess that source is Rove's lawyer Luskin, but it begs the larger question: if they're not friends what are they? Lovers? Prostitute and customer? Acquaintences? Scumbags thinking they're using each other?

About Novak I have this today: he should have been fired 20 years ago from every media outlet he was on; the most striking thing I've seen about him was his almost pathological ability to avoid the truth.

As is commonly said in the lefty blogosphere: the guy outs a CIA operative and keeps his job, but he says "bullshit" and gets fired?

Geez.

Cheap Labor Conservatives

The folks at Powerline wonder why the Bush regime's handling of the economy isn't praised more highly...(these folks would be right at home in Stalin's Russia or Kim's North Korea...)

The oddest thing about the strong economic growth that has taken place over the last several years is how stubbornly many people refuse to recognize it. Polls continue to suggest that most Americans are unaware of the economy's excellent performance. Can that really be true? No doubt inadequate news coverage is a factor, but I can't believe that a majority of Americans really have no idea how the economy is performing. I suspect that when asked about the economy in opinion surveys, many people focus on what they perceive to be negative at the time--budget deficits, the price of gasoline--either because that's what's in the news, or because they hope to influence the government by voicing dissatisfaction.

But of course that only points out a very obvious fact: the folks at Powerline are a bunch of elitists disconnected from the needs of average Americans.

The New York Times editorial page - yeah, the folks who brought us Judith Miller- are right on this point:

With July's number, the average monthly job creation so far this year comes to 191,000. (Since the spring of 2003, when job losses bottomed out, the monthly average has been 152,000.) That's enough to absorb the 150,000 or so new workers who enter the labor force each month, and then some. Still, it's not robust. If jobs were being created today at the same pace as in other economic recoveries since World War II, the monthly average would be about 250,000.

Employment rates - the share of the population that is employed, broken down by groups - tell a similar story. The rates ticked up slightly for most groups in July, including for African-American men and high school dropouts. That's encouraging because it's generally assumed that if the least-advantaged workers can find jobs, higher-skilled workers will do even better. Nevertheless, employment rates are still well below their most recent peak, in 2000.

Because the demand for workers has been subpar for some four years now, wages have suffered. Average hourly wages rose a surprising 0.4 percent in July, the strongest monthly surge in a year. But they're up only 2.7 percent over the past year, hardly keeping up with inflation. Asked about that yesterday, Secretary Chao replied that overall compensation - which includes employer-provided health care and other benefits - was rising faster than the cost of living. That's correct, but somewhat disingenuous. The fact that workers' raises are, in effect, being diverted to cover the exploding cost of benefits is hardly a positive development.

Can the folks at Powerline be so utterly clueless to not realize that the weakness in the job market, combined with exploding health care, reduced returns on retirement investments, and the increasing cost of energy's impoverishing America?

HT: Atrios, oddly enough, who cited Bush's radio address, and implying obliquely that stuff like lots of troops getting killed this week was "left out," but even on Bush's chosen topic the truth was left out.

Over a barrel

Link

Terrorists yesterday struck oil facilities in the US and Saudi Arabia, pushing oil prices to a record $120 a barrel and doubling to $5,214 the expected annual petrol bill for the average US household. Economists warned of the imminent collapse of the US's economic recovery and a loss of more than 2m jobs, the largest drop since 1945.

While none of this is true, the scenario is thoroughly plausible, according to high-ranking former government, military and intelligence officials who made up the US cabinet in a simulation exercise that is gaining increasing attention from members of Congress, the White House and oil executives.

"The risk of supply disruption in the oil markets now appears to be at one of the highest levels in history, primarily because of the thin cushion of spare capacity," John Dowd, analyst at Sanford Bernstein, which prepared the simulation's price reactions, ...

For the scenario, which included the evacuation of foreign workers from Saudi Arabia and unrest in Nigeria, analysts at Sanford Bernstein calculated that a 4 per cent reduction in world oil supply would increase prices by more than 170 per cent...

The mock cabinet concluded that the strategic petroleum reserve was of limited usefulness in such a crisis – it chose to tap it only when prices went to $120 a barrel. Using some of the emergency barrels too early could send prices higher, they said, because traders would worry that less emergency oil would be available if a more serious disruption ensued.

But the limited size of the stocks – the equivalent of two months of US imports – meant the reserve was useless for longer-term disruptions, such as an evacuation of all foreign personnel from Saudi Arabia, which was one of the scenarios presented in the role-play...

Oil closed at a record today.

Chip off the ol' block...

My son turns 4 on Monday, and already he's showing a precocious prediliction for le bad cinema.

He seems to love the latest video rental he insisted I get for him: "37 Ninja Kids."

See John Seal's review for "plot" and overall character of the film. Even my son gets that it's a cheesy flick.

Really, the "scientific" righties didn't expect this?

Paul Krugman draws the obvious line from supply side economics, to global warming to "intelligent" "design." (He left out the propaganda of the Iraq fiasco and the phony "ties" of Saddam Huessein to al Qaeda , but it's in the same box...)

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."...

Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory.

Now the second sentence of the above is often why people don't like Krugman, but he has a point here: these people all didn't care to keep an open mind and see where the facts, observations, and experiments would lead them. So it's kind of amusing that the "scientific righties" (see here and here for examples) are shocked, shocked that George W. Bush, to pander to the theocratic wing of his party, would actually speak in favor of "intelligent" "design."

Look, they've been slinging delusional horse feces for years because political effectiveness was the priority.

Why do they think Bush would quit if he's goring hard sciences, when he's already gored economics, social sciences, and military science?

Spare us the outrage. As one of Balloon Juice's commenters says, "Hey, you invited these idiots to the party. Too bad we all gotta dance with them."

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's crackpots in the Democratic party, too. But they don't have a scintilla of juice in the current climate.

Update:

• PZ Meyers picks up the Krugman story.
  
  
• In response to my link, I suppose, Richard Bennett thinks a) some Buddhists are snake handlers (?) and b)Paul Krugman being partisan against Bush or Republicans is somehow unprincipled or dishonest. Note to Richard: using facts to make a negative statement about someone, as opposed to ad hominem attacks and just making stuff up is far more effective, and that's why Krugman's got cred and neocons don't.
  
  
  

Another post on Kos well worth reading...

One man - who performs abortions- speaks up against acts of terrorism aimed against him.


It's one thing to be against abortion - or to have any position on the subject. It's yet another to try to justify an incitement to violence against those who are doing legalized abortions. And denial of an incitement to violence does not negate the fact that it is an incitement to violence.

Another scandal of Plame size proportions?

For some reason, yesterday, I kept thinking Raw Story would break something significant, but I didn't see anything...but today...they're citing a soon-to-be-published Vanity Fair article claiming:

[FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds] reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert relationship with...Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information...

And in case anybody doesn't know about Edmonds...

On top of the usual prohibition against disclosing classified information, the Bush administration has smothered her case beneath the all-encompassing blanket of the “state-secrets privilege”—a Draconian and rarely used legal weapon that allows the government, merely by asserting a risk to national security, to prevent the lawsuits Edmonds has field contesting her treatment from being heard in court at all. According to the Department of Justice, to allow Edmonds her day in court, even at a closed hearing attended only by personnel with full security clearance, “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.”

Edmonds’ attorney, who works for the ACLU, says: “It also begs a question: Just what in the world is the government trying to hide?”

If this is true- that officals in the Bush regime were actively trying to thwart an investigation into Hatert- to me this would be a crime comprising the very essence, the sine qua non, the genuine article, of a high crime against the United States of America.

And whoever did that ought to, you know, have their own special prosecutor on their heels..




HT: BarbinMD on Kos.

Real flesh and blood people are dying...

Regular commenter Matthew Goggins lost an acquaintance in Iraq.

Last night, Steven and his translator, Noor Al-Khal, were abducted off the street in Basra and subsequently shot and dumped outside. Noor Al-Khal is hospitalized in serious condition, but Steven was killed.

His murder was perhaps in retaliation for an op-ed of his that appeared in this past Sunday's New York Times. The op-ed is highly critical of "Islamic extremists and their Western-trained police enforcers" in Basra. His murder may also have been meant to keep him from writing his forthcoming book about Basra and southern Iraq.

From my added hyperlink:

... security sector reform is failing the very people it is intended to serve: average Iraqis who simply want to go about their lives. As has been widely reported of late, Basran politics (and everyday life) is increasingly coming under the control of Shiite religious groups, from the relatively mainstream Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq to the bellicose followers of the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Recruited from the same population of undereducated, underemployed men who swell these organizations' ranks, many of Basra's rank-and-file police officers maintain dual loyalties to mosque and state.

In May, the city's police chief told a British newspaper that half of his 7,000-man force was affiliated with religious parties. This may have been an optimistic estimate: one young Iraqi officer told me that "75 percent of the policemen I know are with Moktada al-Sadr - he is a great man." And unfortunately, the British seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The fact that the British are in effect strengthening the hand of Shiite organizations is not lost on Basra's residents.

"No one trusts the police," one Iraqi journalist told me. "If our new ayatollahs snap their fingers, thousands of police will jump." Mufeed al-Mushashaee, the leader of a liberal political organization called the Shabanea Rebellion, told me that he felt that "the entire force should be dissolved and replaced with people educated in human rights and democracy."

I often disagree with Matthew Goggins on many points, but on this we can agree: real people are caught up in this. This is not talk radio continued by other means, but it is people sacrificing their lives. Real lives.

Is the IMF about to go medieval on us?

Link

WASHINGTON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The global economy's watchdog is growing nervous.

For years, the International Monetary Fund has warned that swelling budget deficits in the United States -- its biggest and most influential shareholder -- were feeding global economic imbalances that threaten world growth.

Now, worried that Washington is turning a deaf ear to its warnings, the IMF plans to lean harder on the world's rich nations to help fix the U.S. trade deficit as well as slow growth in Europe and Japan.

In April, the fund complained in its semi-annual World Economic Outlook that politicians around the globe were not keeping their promises to tackle these imbalances.

The IMF will seek to buttress its case in a September report on why the world's economic powers need bolder action...

U.S. officials also disagreed on the need for a more ambitious effort to cut the deficit, the report said, and argued this would not necessarily do much to help rebalance the global economy.

"More significant differences of view have emerged on the size and speed of fiscal consolidation and global current account imbalances," the report said in a highlighted box calling attention to points of contention.

"The (U.S.) authorities have disagreed that the large U.S. current account deficit -- which they see as largely reflecting weak demand growth in key partners -- poses a significant risk of 'disorderly adjustment,' or that it argues for more aggressive fiscal adjustment," it said...

The Bush administration, in a recent updated forecast that takes into account an unexpected surge in revenue, estimates the gap will shrink to $333 billion, or 2.7 percent of GDP, in the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30.

"We have a pretty good handle on what the strategy is to accomplish those goals," Treasury's Fratto said. "We don't see a reason to change that tack."

However, many economists -- as well as the IMF -- warn the deficit narrowing is likely to prove short-lived.

If foreign investors decided to pull their money out, the dollar could tumble and U.S. interest rates could surge, damaging both the U.S. and global economies, the IMF says.

Iraq costs money...empires cost money...

Outsourcing Hollywood...

Thomas Friedman today mentions the woeful state of technology in the US...he's right of course (but the fact that defense sucks up so much talent isn't mentioned)...but...as usual... Friedman misses the mark when he gets to:

The technological model coming next - which Howard Dean accidentally uncovered but never fully developed - will revolve around the power of networks and blogging. The public official or candidate will no longer just be the one who talks to the many or tries to listen to the many. Rather, he or she will be a hub of connectivity for the many to work with the many - creating networks of public advocates to identify and solve problems and get behind politicians who get it.

Dean's working on it - and the near win by Paul Hackett in one of the most Republican districts in the country shows how it can work.

But I digress a bit...


I rented House of Flying Daggers last night. The movie has its flaws... a shot or two where a foreshadowing is expected but never delivered, a loose end of the plot here and there, a couple of shots on horesback a few seconds too long, and about one too many plot convolutions.

But... it is probably the best movie of its genre I've ever seen. It has something for everyone over the age of about 10 or so - with the exception of an abundance of profanity, gore, and explicit nudity. Its special effects blend with surrealism; its character developments are superb, it shows the effects of people who know how to capture an image. They guy who directed this knows about good moviemaking. (For other viewpoints, Rotten tomatoes is a good starting point.)

I've been amazed at the state of Chinese cinema- anybody who's seen The King of Masks, or Shadow Magic, for example knows that Chinese cinema does things that Hollywood for some reason can't or won't do. In a country that admittedly doesn't have a great reputation for civil liberties in the US, they are producing better content than the US, which, for all its vaunted Hollywood muscle, can't produce anything better this summer than a movie about penguins.

I suspect that it's only a matter of time before China gets the hang of making movies for an explictly American audience- and then Hollywood will be doomed. Or irrelevant, if China makes movies that the rest of the world likes better than American movies about TV shows ... I mean, really, a movie based on the Dukes of Hazard???

Is it any wonder that the world is turning its back on brand America?

The US is increasingly viewed as a “culture-free zone” inhabited by arrogant and unfriendly people, according to study of 25 countries' brand reputation.

The findings, published online on Monday, will add to concerns that anti-Americanism is hurting companies whose products are considered to be distinctly “American”. The Anholt-GMI Nation Brands Index found that although US foreign policy remained a key driver of hostility, dissatisfaction with the world's sole superpower might run deeper.

“The US is still recognised as a leading place to do business, the home of desirable brands and popular culture,” said Simon Anholt, author of the survey. “But its governance, its cultural heritage and its people are no longer widely respected or admired by the world.”...

“Right now the US government is not a credible messenger,” said Mr Reinhard, chairman of DDB Worldwide, the advertising group. “We must work to build bridges of understanding and co-operation and respect through business-to-business activities.”...

That the world takes a dim view of the US people will surprise most Americans themselves: the study's American respondents consistently placed the US at the top of all six categories polled.

HT: Atrios on the Friedman article...

What's behind the oil price rises this week...

Buried in a Marketwatch report, was this tidbit:

The reality is that "Abdullah's been in charge for 10 years and won't change policy," said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research Inc.

Defense Minister Sultan bin Abdulaziz was nominated crown prince, but "with Abdullah and Sultan both in their 80s, it is important for the Saudis to identify a younger man as future leader of the kingdom," said James Williams, an economist at WTRG Ecnomics in a recent note to clients.

Looking ahead, "oil will become more and more sensitive to geopolitical rumblings the smaller the spare capacity gets. Therefore volatility is expected to increase toward the last quarter of this year as traditionally consumption starts to pick up," analysts from Fortis Bank wrote in a research note.

Clearly the Saudis are like the Soviets in the early 80's before Gorbachev. They're running out of old people to keep things as they are.

Good investing news....

Hopefully, regulators will approve this ETF commodity fund.

A good way - if it's soundly done- to diversify.

Speaking of reincarnation...

Now I don't literally take claims of reincarnation and souls seriously...(and I think Buddhism's take on it is generally far more sublte than is often presented by critics), but given:

a) the fact that the elements that compose us have been recycled quite a bit - every breath we breathe contains molecules breathed by Caeser or Socrates... and

b) our bodies recycle themselves

it's more of a superstition to see "our bodies" as fixed objects into which a "soul" is poured...

From the above link...

Whatever your age, your body is many years younger. In fact, even if you're middle aged, most of you may be just 10 years old or less.

This heartening truth, which arises from the fact that most of the body's tissues are under constant renewal, has been underlined by a novel method of estimating the age of human cells. Its inventor, Jonas Frisen, believes the average age of all the cells in an adult's body may turn out to be as young as 7 to 10 years.

But Dr. Frisen, a stem cell biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, has also discovered a fact that explains why people behave their birth age, not the physical age of their cells: a few of the body's cell types endure from birth to death without renewal, and this special minority includes some or all of the cells of the cerebral cortex...

Prevailing belief, by and large, is that the brain does not generate new neurons after its structure is complete, except in two specific regions, the olfactory bulb that mediates the sense of smell, and the hippocampus, where initial memories of faces and places are laid down.

This consensus view was challenged a few years ago by Elizabeth Gould of Princeton, who reported finding new neurons in the cerebral cortex, along with the elegant idea that each day's memories might be recorded in the neurons generated that day.

Dr. Frisen's method will enable all regions of the brain to be dated to see if any new neurons are generated. So far he has tested only cells from the visual cortex. He finds these are exactly the same age as the individual, showing that new neurons are not generated after birth in this region of the cerebral cortex, or at least not in significant numbers. Cells of the cerebellum are slightly younger than those of the cortex, which fits with the idea that the cerebellum continues developing after birth.

So maybe it's just some cells that are "reincarnated" around a new body recycled eveyr 7-10 years.

I don't think about it all that much though...some Tibetans, I understand, hold that
rebirth takes places in fractions of seconds...

But - like hell- I think that there's a point beyond this birth/death dance that's more important...and it's not a "place" we go when we die...

I don't think it was all that important to the historical Buddha anyway- it's simply that the prevailing religion in which he found himself- Hinduism- already had that structure, but "where" he was birth and death were transcended- meaning that they did not become obstacles (factoid: "obstacle" and "diabolic" have the same root words).

Kos gets this one right....

I have a problem with the DLC: they have failed to address the real problems facing America, and for years wanted to be nothing more than "Republican lite."

Kos lays out the real reasons for the power struggle now, - or should I see retreat by the DLC forces- and illustrates why Hilary made a big faux pas by cozying up to them:

DLC became a power player in the party by becoming a conduit for corporate money at a time when the Democratic Party was starved for funds. The price -- the party had to abandon working-class Americans on behalf of those Big Corporate interests. As for the DLC, it was the financial gatekeeper, and enjoyed all the associated perks.

Suddenly, a centrist governor burst into the scene -- Howard Dean. Just a year or two prior, Dean had been lauded by the DLC for his centrism, yet they weren't happy with the new-look Dean. Part of it was his anti-war stance, in an organization stock-full of chickenhawks. But more threatening to the DLC was the source of Dean's funding -- people. Regular people, like me and you. Dean no longer had to prostrate himself before the DLC's corporate masters and pay proper homage. The DLC no longer played gatekeeper. And if From and Co. can't control the flow of money, they lose their influence.

That's the root of this feud. It isn't about middle, center, right, left, liberal or whatever. Witness how often Armando has linked to the DLC's Ed Kilgore (a well-liked, genuinely nice guy) in the past. And rarely (if ever) in a way that offended my own politics (nor most of yours, I would venture to guess). Remember that when the DLC cries that the Big Bad Liberals are out to stamp out the Poor Moderates in the party.

In reality, it's about who controls the money. And that's why the DLC is becoming irrelevant (hence the importance to them of the Hillary pact), and why it is doomed to irrelevance.

I have no idea what Kos's "plan" is, but I do know this: the new democrat network (spawned from the DLC, but not associated with them today) has a real agenda, and the DLC doesn't.

In case you wanted an instance of someone calling a returning Iraq war vet a "baby killer"

Here'a a good example of one.

Now I will admit, this right wing guy didn't call Ohio congressional candidate Paul Hackett a baby killer because of his service to our country. But that still does not make Hacket a baby killer.

This should shock people with a conscience...

Link

Around the nation, [Prison Health Services] has drawn criticism from judges, government overseers, and whistle-blowers, and has paid millions of dollars in fines and settlements. In New York, state regulators have faulted Prison Health in several deaths, and are investigating whether it is even operating legally in the state. Yet the company has continued to grow, absorbing rivals and winning new contracts; its largest, serving New York City's jails, was renewed in January, as Dr. Chijide was lodging her complaints...

Read the whole article; and then ask yourself: who is funding this? For how much? Who owns Prison Health Services? How much money are they making? Prison Health Services does not appear to be publicly traded.

More from Pai Chang...

Link

A guest staying at the monastery said, ‘I do not know which of these three - a Vinaya master (upholder of monastic discipline), a Dharma master (skilled preacher), or a Ch’an master - is the greatest. I beg you, Master, out of compassion for my ignorance, to make the matter clear to me.’

M: ‘The Vinaya masters expound the discipline section of the scriptures and transmit the ancient tradition for preserving the infinite life of the Dharma (doctrine). Seeing clearly who are the upholders and who are the trans-gressors of the disciplinary rules, they know how to encourage the former and to restrain the latter. They know how to comport themselves in accordance with the rules and regulations in a manner which inspires respect. They officiate at the three kinds of confession which precede transmission of the Vinaya, and they teach the initial steps leading to the four grades of sainthood. Unless they have spent their lives virtuously up to the onset of old age, how will they dare take charge of those duties? The Dharma masters sit crosslegged upon their lion-thrones pouring forth rivers of eloquence to huge crowds, expounding means of chiselling a way through the Mysterious Pass, or of opening the marvellous Gates of Prajna by which the voidness of giver, receiver and alms is revealed."’ Who, unless they can trample all before them like a lion or an elephant, would dare undertake to be a match for all this? The Ch’an masters grasp at essentials and gain a direct understanding of the Mind Source. Their methods consist of revealing and hiding, of exposing and covering reality in a crisscross manner, which responds adequately to all the different grades of potentiality (for enlightenment).

They excel in harmonizing facts with the underlying principle, so that people may suddenly perceive the Tatha-

gata; and, by pulling up their deep samsaric roots, they cause their pupils to experience samadhi on the spot. Thus,

unless they are capable of achieving tranquillizing dhyana and imperturbable abstraction, they are certainly bound

to be flustered under such circumstances. Although the three methods of training - discipline, dhyana and wisdom differ in that they present the Dharma in a manner suited to the capability of each individual, once a disciple has awakened to their profound meaning by forgetting all about the wording, how do they differ from the One Vehicle?’O Wherefore it is written in a sutra: "In all the Buddha-realm-is of the ten quarters, there is only the Dharma of the One Vehicle" - there is neither a second nor a third, except in so far as the Buddha employed relative terms in his expedient teaching for the guidance of sentient beings.’...

7.Q: In the coming generation, there will be many followers of mixed beliefs; how are we to live side by side with them?

A: Share the light with them, but do not share their karmas. Although you may be staying with them, your minds will not dwell in the same place as theirs. There is a sutra which says: ‘Though it follows the current of circum-stances, its nature is unchanging.’ As to those other students of the Way, you are all studying the Way for the sake of that great cause - liberation; so, while never despising those who have not studied the Dharma, you should respect those who are studying it as you would respect the Buddha. Do not vaunt your own virtues nor envy the ability of others. Examine your own actions; do not hold up the faults of others. Thus, nowhere will you encounter obstruction and you will naturally enjoy happiness. I will summarize all this in the form of a gatha:

Forbearance is the best of ways;

But first dismiss both self and other.

When things occur, make no response

And thus achieve true Bodbikaya...

This oughta be worth 3K words...