Category: Rants

A brief tale in pictures:

Please note that this has nothing to do with our current economic problems. That is why it is never discussed in the news, during elections, or by elected officials.

Our problems may be due to a lot of different things, including but not limited to:

– Outsourcing blue collar jobs
– Costly wars
– Tax cuts during costly wars
– The collapse of the dollar
– Poor monetary policy
– Lazy, entitled poor people
– Shiftless minorities
– Spanish language billboards
– Snake-handlers
– Al Worthington of Al Worthington Chevrolet in Grand Forks, ND
– Solar wind
– The death of Billy Mays
– Infrastructure destroyed by the Sasquatch, Rodan, or both
– Reckless disregard for official signage
– Jews

But not inequality. So keep moving, there's nothing to see here.

The social sciences are a great place to be a cynic. Acquire even a passing understanding of the cumulative research in political science, sociology, psychology (I know, they resist being lumped into this group), or economics and it quickly leads to the conclusion that humanity is unfit to feed and clothe itself let alone govern or live in society with one another. However low your expectations of the "average American" may be, spend a few hours with the literature of political science and sociology and recognize how generous you were being. Americans know next to nothing, believe absolute nonsense, and lack any interest in social, political, and economic issues. There is nothing more trite or true than stating, "Americans are idiots." It isn't even controversial anymore.

So the question, and a particularly problematic one for the courts, is just what we can reasonably expect Americans to understand about the law and their rights.
online pharmacy elavil best drugstore for you

Last week the Supreme Court issued a split (5-4) and controversial decision in Berghuis v. Thompkins, allegedly weakening the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. As is often the case with Supreme Court controversies, the reaction focuses on the decision and ignores the facts of the underlying case. Briefly, an individual was arrested and read his Miranda rights but he made no statement either invoking or waiving them. That is, he didn't say much of anything. For over 2.5 hours police asked him questions about a murder while he said nothing, and after 3 hours he made a self-incriminating statement.

Statements made after invoking the right to remain silent are inadmissible. The defendant's attorney claimed that he invoked his rights by remaining silent for nearly 3 hours. The lower courts agreed, but the 5-4 majority on the SC disagreed. The majority bloc (Clarence Thomas, Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy) is not one that I often side with, but in this instance I see the logic of their decision, even though the implications are troubling.

The basic question is a thorny one: what can and should police assume? Now, we know that I am not a friend of American police tactics and what we mockingly call a justice system.
buy singulair online buy singulair no prescription

But this fuels my belief that asking police to assume anything is a dangerous enterprise. On the one hand, the dissenters on the Court and liberal groups are arguing that 3 hours of silence should be interpreted as invoking the right to remain silent. On the other, the majority argued that responding to any questions should be interpreted as waiving the right.

Much of the reaction has echoed Sotomayor's dissent in arguing that:

A) The burden should be on the police to prove that the rights were waived, not on the defendant to prove that they were invoked. As the original Miranda decision states, a "heavy burden rests on the government to demonstrate that the defendant knowingly and intelligently waived his privilege against self-incrimination and his right to retained or appointed counsel."

B) Our rights have been weakened because police can hypothetically pepper a silent person with questions for hours until he or she finally responds. I agree with the first part, but the second only holds if we assume that Americans have not the slightest understanding of how their rights work. That might not be a bad assumption, of course.

A person need only say "I wish to remain silent" or "I don't want to say anything" and everything beyond that point becomes inadmissible in all but a few unique situations. The real question at hand here, then, is whether it is reasonable to expect that an adult under arrest should know this. Can we expect them to know that they should affirmatively state their invocation of the right? Interrogations would be so much less effective at extracting confessions if people simply remembered what any half-decent lawyer will tell you: don't say anything and ask for a lawyer. That people don't understand this is the Cops' Best Friend. But how far do police have to go to make people understand it? After they state "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you choose to say can be used against you at trial.
buy clomid online buy clomid no prescription

" do they need to take out finger puppets and crayons until the point is clear?

As for silence being interpreted as invoking the 5th Amendment, that too is very problematic for the dissenters' argument. What about the rest of Miranda? Does silence also invoke the right to have an attorney present? Ideally we want police doing as little "interpretation" as possible. The fewer points of law they have to think about, the better. I for one don't want them trying to interpret the meaning of silence. ANY statement, even as simple as "I have nothing to say, asshole", will invoke the 5th. Furthermore, the suspect in this case was given the "extended" Miranda and was informed that he could choose to invoke his rights at any time before, after, or during questioning.

I'm a pretty good civil libertarian and I recognize that most people know very little about their rights under arrest. And the Court has been cognizant of that over the years with Miranda, ruling that a Miranda warning is only valid if the suspect affirmatively indicates that he understands his rights and that it must be read in a language understood by the suspect. Is it too much to ask people to state their intent to invoke their rights after those rights have been explained to them?
online pharmacy nolvadex best drugstore for you

Sadly, the answer is probably yes, so I sympathize with Sotomayor's argument about the burden resting on the state to prove that the right was waived. That said, it isn't hard to see the majority's point that there is a limit to what we should expect of the police. After informing suspects of their rights and explicitly asking them (as is near-universal in American law enforcement) ""Do you understand each of these rights? Understanding each of these rights, do you now wish to speak to the police without a lawyer being present?" I fail to see what more can reasonably be done to make individuals understand that saying "No" invokes legal rights that protect them.

Two independent discoveries.

First, several months ago I received an email from my mother regarding Tea Parties. She does not pay much attention to politics and wanted to know what they were because she was receiving emails about them from co-workers…and she is employed by the public school district (K-8) in her town.

Second, I work for the State of Georgia at a public university. I recently discovered that a co-worker is a self-described huge fan of all things Teabagging.

It's difficult to shock me these days, as my view of human nature and the intellectual capacities of my fellow Americans can scarcely be any bleaker. But I could spend a decade meditating with monks in the mountains of Tibet and still not be able to wrap my head around the idea of people who work for the government jumping on this ridiculous bandwagon.

I could expend thousands of words explaining all of the things wrong with this picture or I could do no work at all, simply linking to Teabagger writing about how much they hate government employees ("The Recession's Fat Cats: Government Employees"). Instead I will choose a path between the two. Let's keep this simple: is your primary source of income a paycheck containing any of the following phrases?

If so, only a superhuman amount of self-complacency can get you within 100 yards of a Tea Party event. The idea that I have co-workers (as does my mother, apparently) who cannot connect the very large, close dots between government tax collection and their own salary, benefits, retirement plan, and life savings is mind boggling. Can anyone be that dumb? Yes. Of course they can.

How? Well, it takes some mental gymnastics to turn that kind of display of raw ignorance into (what one believes to be) a consistent worldview, but it boils down to a case of fiscal NIMBYism. They see the money the government spends on their salary and benefits as good/justified/appropriate, as is the entire annual budget of whatever government agency happens to employ them.

It's all that other money the government spends that is wasteful. So Mary the Public School Secretary wants lower taxes, less spending, and a smaller deficit, all of which should be accomplished by leaving the Public School budget untouched and cutting elsewhere – usually something nonspecific and illogical like "earmarks" or "pork" or "welfare.

" You know, shit that amounts to peanuts in comparison to A) the budget as a whole and B) the money spent employing public servants, bureaucrats, and other people receiving government paychecks.

"Pork" and "waste" are just code words for "Government spending that does not benefit me directly.

" Every member of Congress sees the projects in her district as necessary – nay, indispensable – examples of appropriate government spending whereas the other 434 districts are cesspools of waste. The average American sees every tax dollar or government service that benefits them as Good Spending and everything that does not as Bad.

In other words, most of us stopped maturing when we turned 10 and we're oblivious to how selfish we are – not to mention how little sense our political worldviews make.

Three related things about Israel and the Gaza blockade.

1. From The Economist:

I'm not sure it could be more painfully obvious that the sole purpose of this blockade is to be senselessly obstructionist – in essence, to fuck with people in Gaza and manufacture an excuse to slow the flow of supplies to a trickle. If there's a valid military or strategic purpose to more than a fraction of the stuff that is "banned" (by a country that totally isn't an occupying power, it just controls the borders and everything that passes through them) I'd be shocked. But what could be more pointless than trying to derive logic from Israeli foreign policy.
buy stromectol online buy stromectol no prescription

Banning an item appears to require no more than a fertile imagination, raging paranoia, and balls the size of geodesic domes – see David Frum's matter-of-fact explanation of how concrete is banned because it "could be used to build bunkers." And food could be used to feed terrorists, so you should probably ban that too. I have a future in Israeli politics.

In any case, if there was any real strategic purpose to this blockade they wouldn't have goddamn fertilizer – star of such homemade explosive hits as The Oklahoma City Bombing and the first World Trade Center attack – on the Permitted list.

2. Not to get all stuff-you-don't-care-about on the average ginandtacos reader, but let's briefly scratch our heads at the blockade idea from a strategic perspective. Israel has one of the largest, most active, and most expensive militaries on the planet, but one thing they don't have is much of a navy.

It would not be out of line to say that their navy is pretty pathetic. Their air force may be laden with 4th-generation fighter planes and their ground forces may be among the most formidable (esp. their mechanized infantry) but their navy is basically a bunch of lightweight patrol boats and three corvettes. This is about the lamest navy that has ever attempted to blockade something larger than a retention pond.
buy albuterol online buy albuterol no prescription

If a real warship from a real navy sailed with a future "flotilla" heading to Gaza there wouldn't appear to be a whole hell of a lot that Israel could do about it except sink it (presumably from the air). Sinking a ship with a European, Russian, or Chinese flag would require a level of stupid that even the Israeli far-right can't reach. So this scenario merits a lot of attention if/when it happens. What are they going to do if confronted by a real vessel?

3. I am starting to understand why the pro-Israel lobby gets along so famously with neocons. Listen to Jennifer Rubin:

There is a single question that every individual, group, and nation must answer. To borrow from the most pro-Israel president since Harry Truman: if you are not with Israel, you are against her. And if you do not oppose with every fiber of your being and every instrument at your disposal that which intends the Jewish state harm, you are enabling her destroyers.

And what's more, if you don't send a monthly donation to AIPAC you personally murdered a dozen Jews in Buchenwald.

I struggle to recall a more fascist opinion expressed in print recently without resorting to links to fringe websites. This passes as not only mainstream opinion but a fairly widely held one – the kind of thing one can express at a cocktail party without being thought a tinfoil-hatted extremist or a potential truck bomber.

Oh, Israel. You're going to be entertaining for the next few months, aren't you?

The past decade has proven that the American public and their elected leaders have very little restraint when it comes to waging war. The financial costs don't matter. Neither does international law or opinion. Ditto the inevitable and often substantial civilian casualties. Hell, we don't even need a reason to go to war, hence we concoct one with little regard for accuracy or logic and present it as a formality. The only thing we care about, unsurprisingly, is ourselves. We care how many of Our Guys are going to get killed. Four or five thousand KIA in Iraq and Afghanistan – spread out over nearly seven years – is an acceptable loss to Congress, the public, and two White House administrations. The 60,000+ over the same seven years in Vietnam were unacceptable. Justification and intent are largely irrelevant to the strength of public opposition to wars these days. It's largely just a question of body counts – American ones, anyway.

Understandably, the Department of Defense spends a lot of time and money trying to minimize the number of American casualties in combat. A slew of technological advances have led to dramatically reduced casualty rates over the years. Some of it has involved the nuts and bolts of war (armor, field medicine, etc.) but lately the research has been focused on taking the soldier out of combat. This is doubtlessly a good thing for the American soldier. It is less clear that this is a good thing for our political system and the process by which decisions about going to war are made.

You've heard remarkably little but presumably some nonzero amount of news about drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) were originally used for reconnaissance but, as the military promised it would not do when introducing the technology, they are now armed with missiles. Military personnel pilot these drones over the skies of South Asia and the Middle East from the air conditioned safety of the Nevada desert. By any remotely objective account, this is a messy way to conduct war. Estimates are on the order of ten civilians killed in drone strikes for every "militant" – although conventional manned airstrikes suffer the same problem, of course. They do appear to be quite effective at killing al-Qaeda's "number two in command", though. As a note to the un- or under-employed, do not take a job as the #2 or #3 in al-Qaeda, as USAF drone strikes kill about four of those every week according to the press releases.

Although problematic in the extreme, I'm not talking about civilian casualties at the moment. I'm more concerned with the extent to which the calculus of going to war is altered when increasing portions of it can be conducted remotely. Predator and Reaper are but two of many UAVs in use or under development, many of which are man-portable or barely the size of an apple. Soon the Army hopes to have tiny autonomous R2-D2 analogues buzzing around the streets of Baghdad as part of an all-seeing surveillance network. DARPA has been developing autonomous land vehicles for the better part of two decades. Won't it be great when the military can send in the tanks without having to put crews in harm's way?

Yes and no. The fewer casualties, the better. But what becomes of our reluctance to send the military galavanting around the sordid parts of the world once American casualties are taken out of the equation? We have almost no restraint as it is. I shudder to think of how easily Presidents and legislators will make the decision to go to war when the attitude of "We can just send robots to do it!" becomes entrenched. We saw what the advancements in design of cruise missiles in the 1980s did to the Executive Branch; if someone's acting up, just lob a dozen Tomahawks at them from a few hundred miles away. It became the easy way to intervene without actually making a commitment or putting Americans at risk. Collateral damage isn't much of a deterrent to our political class. UAVs are another step in that direction, a step toward a future with more remotely operated and even autonomous means of doing the dirty work.

It's great that technology allows more American soldiers to come home alive and in one piece, but if we remove the U.S. body count from the decision-making process the only restraints on waging war will be common sense, morality, and logic. Yeah, let's start taking bets on how well that works.

For most of my life I believed that the close relationship between the U.S. and Israel was analogous to that of an eccentric scientist/inventor and a superhero. America has, and has had for the last six decades, an obscenely large and powerful defense industry with a captive market for its products. The Department of Defense will buy just about anything at the drop of a hat as long as it's newer, somehow More Advanced, and either kills people or keeps Americans from getting killed a little better than whatever is in use at the time.

But the problem, frankly, is that the U.S. just doesn't get that many chances to try out all these fabulous toys. I know that sounds silly given our fondness for military engagement since WWII – Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq I and II, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, etc. etc. – but the defense industry is so adept at selling new product to the DoD that even all these conflicts aren't enough to keep up.

We can test this stuff in the Nevada desert, of course, but it's just not the same as using it on brown people and/or Commies. This is where Israel comes in. Those sonsabitches are always fighting, frequently with weapons of American vintage. So the DoD was like the Whistler to Israel's Blade. "Hey guys, I invented this new (whatever). Give it a try tonight and let me know if it works, OK?"

Pictured: Golda Meir

Since the George W. Bush era, however, I realize that I have been wrong. Our special pals arrangement with Israel is based mostly on the fact that both nations have the same fundamental view of international law and foreign policy: exceptionalism.
buy avapro online andnewonlineblo.com no prescription

One set of rules for Me, a different set for Thee. Our motives are pure and thus Our actions justified; Your motives are evil and thus so are Your actions. That's really what connects us. Not the pro-Israel urgings of the Religious Right, not the AIPAC-led Israel lobby (what foreign nation doesn't lobby in Washington?), not the common enemy, and certainly not an American desire to stand up for a country we didn't care about until the Soviet Union started handing out MiGs like candy in the Arab world. America and Israel just fundamentally see the world similarly.

Despite the close ties at present, even America has gotten weary of our Special Friend lately. George W. Bush expressed frustration, as did his predecessor and successor. Israel, for its part, has seemingly been engaged in a contest since 2005 to see how quickly it can make its long-time supporters stagger away mumbling "Jesus, what a bunch of assholes" under their breath. I actually thought that this Gaza kidnapping/boarding/shooting incident would inspire some kind of moderation from Israel and the pro-Israel people in the blogosphere. You know, something like "Man, this doesn't look good. Maybe we should chill out for a few days." That would seem like a good reaction to boarding a group of ships full of humanitarian aid (not to mention 25 EU parliament members) and killing a bunch of people. I was quite wrong (and that's one of the saner right-wing commentaries).

"They attacked us," the Israelis say, perhaps unintentionally parroting what the U.S. military and private contractors say whenever they gun down a group of Iraqi civilians. And that's the end of the discussion. We decided that we were threatened and we reacted with what we defined as the appropriate response. We have thoroughly investigated the matter and determined that we have done nothing improper. Here, these are the pen knives, metal rods, and slingshots (fucking slingshots!) with which they were "armed", thus justifying our use of automatic weapons.

Does this not sound like an argument that Washington policymakers could love? And as always, Israel has the luxury of deflecting any criticism of its government with the pathetic, tired recourse to accusations of antisemitism.

As the last 10 years made clear with the United States, the world can no longer tolerate one set of international laws for Israel and another for the other 191 countries. Their foreign policy ranges from the counterproductive (Hmm, I wonder if strangling Gaza with a blockade is somehow making Hamas stronger there?) to the indefensible. I claim no expertise in Middle Eastern affairs and I recognize the overwhelming complexity of the cultural, religious, and military history of the warring parties. Nonetheless, it strikes me as ridiculous to see the Western governments, and particularly mine, tiptoeing around the obvious. This shit isn't helping. It's driving the odds of peaceful coexistence close to zero. Like the U.S., Israel usually adopts the "We don't care if anyone else likes us" attitude, which strikes me as a very strange position for a country that very badly needs allies. Perhaps they actually mean "We don't care as long as Washington has our back." How much longer that will be the case remains to be seen, although I suspect that Americans will continue to see enough of themselves in Israel to stand by them as they drift farther away from a justifiably militant foreign policy and closer to state-sponsored terrorism.

It's a sad commentary on the ideological breadth of American politics that people accuse the Democratic Party of being Marxists, socialists, or any equivalent thereof. Granted, most of the people applying those labels haven't the slightest idea what they mean – Commies are the bad guys in Red Dawn, right? – but regardless of the proper term there is little doubt that Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are indeed leftist zealots…in America, anyway.

The fact remains that American politics is slanted so far to the right that our "liberals" and "conservatives" are unrecognizable to most of the democratic world. To some extent this is an artifact of the two-party system (Thanks, Duverger's Law!
buy antabuse online redemperorcbd.com/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/antabuse.html no prescription

) in comparison to multi-party systems. The latter tend to keep some of the crazy out of the major parties by providing electoral incentives to small parties. Countries like Italy, for example, have proportional systems that practically beg for minor parties to form. We also have a far more extreme brand of Christianity intertwined with our politics; many countries are highly religious but not many countries have Southern Baptists.
online pharmacy cipro best drugstore for you

The end result is that the Democratic Party is a socialist conspiracy in the U.S. but would barely qualify as a mainstream conservative party elsewhere. The Republicans would be a fringe nationalist party in most of Europe or Asia…and we have an active splinter group trying to drive them further to the right.

Take a look at the new British PM David Cameron. He is:

1. Pro-choice
2. About as far left on the environment as any American liberal
3. Candid about his limited interest in religion ("I believe in God and I try to get to church more than Christmas and Easter, but perhaps not as often as I should, but I don't feel I have a direct line.")
4. Open about the fact that taxes can't be cut during fiscal emergencies ("I don't think it's sensible today to write a Conservative budget for 2009 or 2010, with specific pledges on tax reduction.")
5. Opposed to capital punishment
6. A supporter of the National Health Service (which even Thatcher couldn't touch)
7. Staunchly opposed to far-right proposals for National ID cards, describing them as ineffective and in violation of basic human rights

Sure, there's a healthy dose of economic conservatism – free market this, deregulation that – to remind voters that Cameron is in fact representing the party of St. Margaret. I'm not arguing that he is not a true Conservative. The point is simply that British Tories are as liberal, if not moreso, than the average American Democrat. Given how completely the Democrats have surrendered on New Deal economic liberalism to basically reinvent themselves as the party of Reaganomics Lite, one might be hard-pressed to point out the significant differences between that party and the British Tories. David Cameron wouldn't simply be a liberal in the American context, he'd be a member of the loony left. No death penalty? Not a churchgoer? Pro Choice? Someone get a rope, we've found a witch.
online pharmacy azithromycin best drugstore for you

It must be nice to live in a system in which even the conservatives are inclined toward common sense. As easy as it is for political elites and activists to browbeat the Democrats into moving further and further to the right with every election, it's no wonder that our conservatives are absolutely bonkers and the Democrats are barely able to call themselves centrists. That Barack Obama is a pinko commie Marxist socialist to much of this country proves that Americans will repeat anything they hear on AM radio and that our party system has the ideological diversity of an NRA meeting in Abilene, Texas.
buy cipro online redemperorcbd.com/wp-content/languages/new/prescription/cipro.html no prescription