A Cracker's Rant

FACT SHEET WORTH READING

The accursed ACLU has published their FACT SHEET objecting to the use of "NO FLY" lists in the war on terror.

Wether one agrees with the ACLU or not, this is worth reading. As a society, we should look long and hard at how our lives have changed in the 21st Century. With the advent of the War on Terrorism, security has become a major concern. How many times have you heard a well meaning American say something to the effect of, "it's an inconvienence, but if it makes us safer, it's worth it"?

Why? Why? Why do we trust our government? Were has the skeptical view of governmental power gone? Why are we such blind sheep as to trust the intentions, honesty, dilligence, and honor of the people who rule us? We should be more like one of my favorite red-neckish sayings,

IN GOD WE TRUST. ALL OTHERS PAY CASH!

PEERING INTO THE FUTURE

Dr. Michael Weinstein & Yevgeny Bendersky over at the Power & Interest Report have penned an interesting analysis of the potential future.

If you've ever wondered how long American hegemony might last, you owe it to yourself to give this article a read.

Who do you think is the big, bad, bogeyman lurking in the dark alleyways of the Great Power's playground? If that question didn't make sense, read the article. You'll be able to approximate intelligence as you ruminate (in between bites of tiny hot dogs) on America's potential geopolitical challenges at your next swanky cocktail party.

EVEN A BLIND SQUIRREL FINDS A NUT

I can't believe it. I've been trackbacked by someone OTHER THAN my normal population of two readers (you know - me, myself, & I...where "I" am the author).

It seems the WesternDemocrat and Stygius have also taken an interest in the MotherJones article by Steven Hill. From a brief purusal of each of these sites, they are far more serious than I. I am just a quasi-principaled hack who does a poor job of abiding the English language's rules.

So, at the risk of offending my blog-o-sphere betters, I find their takes on the MJ piece to be entirely too predictable. They, like most contemporary American political animals, are wedded to Otto Von Bismark's famous notion that, "politics is the art of the possible." If you are a political strategist or academic, I can see why you might hold this view. However, I believe our nation would be better served if we updated our political rules. Of course, that would mean changing the federal Constitution.

I am far too idealistic in my disillusionment. Ok, not idealisitc, not even hopefull - I know that long after I am dust, the American Republic will still have it's blasted Electoral College and that such Constitutional reform will not happen. But wouldn't it be grand if the entire nation could talk about what the best form of government should be! Imagine how different the world would look if America was truely a democracy? Instead we commoners are fed plump, juicey propaganda of equality while our neo-aristocratic overlords cycle through Washington's revolving door of power. Afterall, despite denials, Jeb may well be the next installment of the Bush dynasty.

Were we a true democracy, I seriously doubt that our armed forces would be in Iraq. Hell, 9/11 my have never happened as the Muslim world wouldn't hate us. Afterall, post WWII Americans were favorably regarded by most of the Middle East - especially when compared against Britain or France. Why is that? Because they were the imperial powers fucking with the Middle East then - just as we are the imperial power fucking with the Middle East now. The average American doesn't really want us to be there. Our political elite does.

Having a governement that's more responsive to the demands of it's people would be a good thing. Our current political institutions are only responsive to a small slice of America - and that's a shame.

DRIFTING EVER MORE RACIALIZED

I have always been a contrarian. The new millennium has exacerbated this trait - to the point that I am now squarely radicalized. I whole heartedly denounce the current American political structure as biased, corrupt, and unrepresentative. My socially indoctrinated rose colored glasses have fallen away. My unfettered eyesite leaves me sickened by the evil and injustice "my" governement has done to the world - in MY name no less!

Priorly I have ranted about the nasty things America has done as enforcer of the global order: Not today, however. Instead, I am going to bitch about the American electoral system. Many more keen minds than mine have taken up this task. Here's a sample list of examples that I think every American should read:

1) FairVote.org's "Proportional Voting Program"
2) Steven Hill's disection of the American Electoral System's 18th Century bias towards rural ares, entitled "Why the Democrats Will Keep Loosing"

The Winner-Take-All system sucks. It is at the root of many of America's ills, both foreign and domestic. From keeping the powers that be entrenched and disenfranchising everyone else to the "War on Terror" and the tyrany of "Special Interest", the Winner-Take-All system concentrates power. And as the long dead Lord Acton said, "power corrupts" (I'm paraphrasing).

This is key. Failure to critically evaluate the Winner-Take-All system leads many well intention people astray. For example...

1) John Dean's analysis of the voter turn out during the 2004 Presidential election entitled, "Vanishing Voters: Why Americans Don't Vote, And How That Might Change"
2) Harvard University's "Vanishing Voter Project" publication "Young Voters and the 2004 Election".

Both of these article ignore the Winner-Take-All nature of our political system. Instead, when addressing low voter turn out, they talk about "interest in issues" and "ease of voter registration". Certainly these are good issues, but to think they explain the low voter turn out is to miss the boat. It's treatment of the symptons, not the disease. The cause is the unequal structure of the Winner-Take-All system.

There is a rural bias in the electoral system. Most Americans live in cities. This is why Bush can win the 2000 election while getting less TOTAL votes than Gore. Thus the majority of votes are effectively NOT REPRESENTED! Sure, we all have the franchise. But our votes are wasted. Our Representatives do no such thing. They are not representing the loosers. THIS IS WHY THERE IS LOW VOTER TURN OUT!!!!!

Why is that soooo bloody hard to see!?! The 100 million odd Americans who didn't vote did so because the system doesn't listen to them. If you had a question to ask me, how many times would you repeat it if I ignored you? Not many, I'd suspect. So why does much of the media wonder why many people don't vote? The answer should be obvious.

MONEY's GOT GRAVITY

And PBS bends to its force. What the hell is "balance"? And, how is an editorial "ombudsman" going to make sure the scales don't tip?

As the cultural war rages, PBS is now firmly endangered. If the House Republicans get their way, federal funding of PBS will disappear over the next two years. All because the hard core, zealot Republicans believe that PBS is liberally biased. It is not enough to have a conservative Republican as Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Especially when that Chairman has said that PBS should make sure that, "their programming better reflected the Republican mandate." He claims he was joking. Yeah, right.

It's enough to make me want to get the "Save Sesame Street" petition circulating again.

As I've said before, the current Republican leadership is revolutionary. This is just further proof.

IKE! YOU ROCK!
(or, MY GOD - MODERN DAY REPUBLICANS SUCK!)

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower - from a letter to his brother dated November 8, 1954.

This quote seems to be making its rounds in the blog-o-sphere right now. I know I'm jumping on the bandwagon more than a tad late (hey! I never claimed to scoop anyone. I just rant about what I read!).

I have railed against the ineptitude of "unthinking Republicans" for a while. Ike's quote goes to show just how far the baby boom generation Repbulicans have distorted our national dialog.

Sadly, a significant portion of white Americans just don't get it. It is the Shurb and his cronies who are radicals. They are out to destroy the generally accepted, contemporary American life-style. I'm not being sensationalist. In creating:
- a regressive tax system by flattening the income tax rates
- to fundamentally rejecting a redistributive tax (via eliminating capital gains and "death" taxes)
- to "fixing" social security;
the Shrub and his cronies are out to destroy the goverment programs that allow middle-class Americans to stay (however tenuously) middle-class. Coupled with more than a generation of decling real income, is it any wonder the gap between "rich" and "poor" is growing?

That's a revolution - pure and simple. And sadly the people who put the Shrub in office - those that voted for him and who will be hurt most by his policies - call themselves "Republican" and think themselves conservative.

BRACE YOURSELF FOR TRAGEDY

"It's comming", say James Pinkerton in his article for The American Conservative titled "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Imperialists". It's a sobering peace that takes the Neocons to task for ignoring history. Occupying countries is a dirty, nasty, repressive task. Flowery rhetoric of "Moral Clarity" doesn't count for shit when bullets are flying.

In looking to history, Pinkerton offers up his 7th habit, the title above, "BRACE YOURSELF FOR TRADGEDY". He quotes the following poem by Rudyard Kipling:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier

Chilling. He was speaking of young British soldiers from a century ago. Sad that this can be said of young Amercian soldiers now.

How can ignoring the past be called wise? And to think our current government claims wisdom regarding foreign policy. It's disgusting.

THE POLITICS OF GEN-X

I stumbled upon an Atlantic Monthly article from 1999 on the New America Foundation website. I missed this article back in the day. What a bummer, it is a great piece of political analysis. Among other things it offers up a definition of an X-er political consensus as:

"Fiscal prudence, economic populism, social investment, campaign reform, shared sacrifice, and environmental conservation."

That seems pretty accurate to me. This is a long article, but it has some interesting insight into how the current Republican-Democrat hegemony fails the X-er generation.

SUV's ARE NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL

...when it comes to crashes that is. A recent report from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety indicates that when cars and SUV's crash, the SUV occupants are more likely to be killed. Counter intuitive, no?

In collisions between cars and SUV's, 7% of car occupants and 10% of SUV occupants perished in the crash. The current think is that this increased SUV death rate is due to two phenomena:
1) Bigger SUV's tend to carry more people, thus there are more people inside the SUV at the time of the crash.
2) SUV's are more prone to rolling over in a crash due to their higher center of gravity.

So, for non-SUV drivers like myself, SUV's don't seem quite so bad. But their image improvement comes at the SUV passenger's expense - they're more likely to die than me. So SUV are still big, bad wastes of resources, but at least the people who buy them are the ones bearing the risks from the SUV's oversized nature.

If you interested, here are a couple links for additional info:
1) Here are your Risks of Dying in One Vehicle Than Another
2) 2003 Fatality Facts from the Institue for Highway Safety

GREED FUELS MORE THAN BOARDROOMS

Here is an interesting article about a meeting of Asian gangs in Taipei, Taiwan on May 29, 2005. This was a wake for a powerful Taiwanese gang boss named "Mosquito Brother". Read on, it's quite illuminating.

It just goes to show that, when there's money to be made, American Corporate suits are not the only ones who can be enterprising. Take this vinette from a Taiwanese gangers named Big Brother Hsu,

"Let's say someone wants to ship heroin to Japan, Australia or the US. One of the best ways would be to bring it through southern China, across the Taiwan Strait in a fishing boat, and then load it onto a container ship in Kaohsiung [in southern Taiwan - one of the busiest ports in the world]. The shipment could then be met by people at the destination. To do that, a person would have to cooperate with lots of [gangs] along the way."

WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW CAN HURT YOU

Recent research at Washington State University has suggested that certain pesticides can impact multiple generations via the reproductive process. Two compounds, vinclozolin and methoxychlor, are known to impact the fertility of lab rat's male offspring. This new research shows that the male grandchildren's fertility is impacted in the same way as their parent - even when the parents had ZERO exposure to these compounds. In other words, the adverse affects from exposure to these compounds spans generations. For the rats in this research, the deleterious effects persisted through four generations.

Scary, no?

How many other compounds will be found to have similar, persistent effects? We are only now beginning to understand the full scope of how industrialization of mechanical industry and agriculture affects the world we live in. How long will it take to become aware of the unintended consequences of the innovations of our knowledged based world? The circumstantial evidence is scary.

We should not take an "FDA Approval" as iron clad. Vioxx was not the first, and it won't be the last, drug pulled from the market due to safety worries. Consider this list of drugs pulled by the FDA from 1997 - 2001 for safety reasons, it's clear the consumer is used as a guinea pig. In other words, after a review of clinical trials and FDA approval, there is still a "reasonably mitigated risk" of unexpected side affects. Reasonable to the FDA that is. I doubt men who have gone blind from Viagra or the people who's heart's were damaged by Phen Phen would agree that the risk was "reasonable".

Additionally, consider what pain relievers, anti-depressants and other drugs are doing to the environment. Many of the pills we take are not digested by our bodies, nor are they filtered out before our waste water is returned to the lakes, rivers, and aquifers from whence it came. Once there, these compounds have the potential to dramatically affect marine life. Not to mention, if our water systems don't filter them out, how long before the compounds become part of the water we drink in the future?

My punchline? I don't have one except to say our world is not as certain as we all seem to believe. With all of the negative externaties from medical and scientific "progress", is it any wonder people are turning to alternative medicine? (I don't agree with that, but that's a rant for another post).

PS - for those of you interested in some further reading:
1) Check out the Government's database on Developmental Toxicology
2) Frontline (a PBS documentary series) website on alternative medicine.