brainiac conspiracy

Not Keen on This at All

So we've already established that Donald Sterling is a racist shit, but even racist shits have some rights, and one of them---presumably---is the right to hold racist-shit views. His beliefs may be repugnant, but I don't see how you can bar someone from his chosen profession for being a racist shit without trampling all over his First Amendment rights to be a racist shit. Okay, I know why the league is doing it---because they've conveniently overlooked all the other horrible ways he has treated people throughout his career as an owner---but it sure seems to me that he'd have a decent court case if he wanted to contest them. He might not bother since his sponsors are deserting him in droves, and that, not the league, is what may ultimately force him to sell off his team.

---Baron V

Still More Minimal Blogging Day

Because your humble blogger, well, is turning into a minimalist. Or something.

---Baron V

Birth Pangs

Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And that's what's going to happen here:

[A]s Iraq prepares for its first national election in four years on April 30, it is hard to imagine democracy activists rallying weekly in Iraqi streets. For months, suicide bombers have been dynamiting themselves in crowded Shiite markets, coffee shops, and funeral tents, while Shiite militias and government security forces have terrorized Sunni communities. The Iraqi state is breaking apart again: from the west in Anbar province, where after weeks of anarchic violence more than 380,000 people have fled their homes; to the east in Diyala province, where tit-for-tat sectarian killings are rampant; to the north in Mosul, where al-Qaeda-linked militants control large swathes of territory; to the south in Basra, home to Iraq’s oil riches, where Shiite militias are once more ascendant; to Iraq’s Kurds, who warn that the country is disintegrating and contemplate full independence from Baghdad.

More than 2,500 Iraqis have been killed since the start of the year, including nearly three hundred in the first ten days of April; in the capital itself, which has become a showcase for the country’s multiplying conflicts and uncontrolled violence, there have been several brazen attacks on government buildings, and a terrifying string of car bombings, including eight on April 9 alone.

Thousands of innocents were needlessly slaughtered while America's thought leaders cheered on the carnage. But hey, looking forward.

---Baron V

Nothing New, Really

I know I kvetch and moan a lot on this blog about income inequality, widespread poverty that's about to get much worse, etc. And yeah, it's a problem! But it's probably instructive to remind ourselves that the fine Christian men who founded the Republic believed that only people like themselves deserved the franchise, and that inequality is a feature, not a bug, of American life. Doesn't mean we should stand for it, of course, but we also shouldn't act as though it's some modern-day phenomenon, either.

---Baron V

More Worst Personhood

This seems awfully petty for an allegedly great nation:

President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law a bill barring entrance to the U.S. for any foreign diplomat seen as a threat to American security or who has engaged in "terrorist activity"---a measure that effectively bans Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations.

Washington said earlier this week that it would not issue a visa to Iran's pick for U.N. envoy, Hamid Aboutalebi, because he is suspected of involvement in the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Can't really believe that the people who govern us would care to keep fighting this ancient conflict. Besides, the Iranians had plenty of reasons to be furious with us. Not to justify hostage-taking, but we shouldn't forget that it only happened after we granted asylum to the guy who we had installed by deceit, and who had tortured, jailed and executed many of their compatriots. Maybe we should choose sides more carefully in the future.

---Baron V

Tell Us Something We Didn't Already Know

I'm old enough to remember when people could leverage mass movements to directly affect public policy. They could take to the streets en masse to earn the franchise for women and minorities, gain bargaining rights for workers, and even stop wars! And eventually, the people who governed us were forced to accede to their demands, as is the normal state of affairs in a thriving liberal democracy.

But that's all a distant memory now. In postmillennial America, we no longer matter.

---Baron V

The Dude-Bro Administration

I suppose every presidential administration has been dominated by Type-A Alpha males, but for some reason, the current administration seems to have established a new paradigm. There's nothing intrinsically bad about this, mind you, but when you have too many men who are all convinced that they're the smartest guys in the room, you run the risk of cultivating an intellectual monoculture that is insular, self-reinforcing, and deaf to the possibility that they might all be incompetent at their jobs.

---Baron V

Of Course it was a CIA Op

And that's why they tried to cover it up.

More to the point, one of these days we will need to engage in a little conversation over whether or not it is in the best interests of the Republic to have an agency of the federal government that has no wider mission than destabilizing unfriendly governments and harassing leftist political movements. It costs a lot of money, it makes a lot of enemies, and it hasn't proven itself capable of protecting us from attacks. So we have this agency siphoning money from the federal budget for . . . what reason exactly?

---Baron V

Dead Horse, Flogged

Yeah, I know I do this a lot of it on this stupid blog, but it bears repeating that there has always been---and always will be---a strong moral imperative for convening that Truth & Reconciliation Commission. Because Iraq is a gift that keeps on giving:

[T]he Iraqi government is poised to legalize child marriage for the nation’s majority Shiite Muslim population. But the law, which some expect to pass before this month’s parliamentary elections, would do significantly more than that.

Called the Jaafari Personal Status Law, it would prohibit Muslim men from marrying non-Muslims, prevent women from leaving the house without their husband’s consent, automatically grant custody of children older than two to their father in divorce cases and legalize marital rape.

The law, which proponents say will save women’s “rights and dignity,” would also permit boys to marry as young as 15 and girls to marry as young as nine. Girls younger than nine would be permitted to marry with a parent’s approval.

These practices were banned under the tyrant Saddam. They are being reintroduced by our Friends in Freedom. When you think about the millions of people in the Middle East whose lives we have permanently fucked over, it really is amazing that we don't see truck bombs detonating every day in cities across America, now, isn't it?

---Baron V

Monday Night Music Blogging

Because congratulations are in order for a job well done. Keep it up!

---Baron V

Lies We Tell Ourselves

Nobody likes to think they've offered up their sons and daughters in defense of their country when in reality, they're actually offering up their sons and daughters for no reason whatsoever, so to compensate, we mythologize our wars, and an unpleasant side-effect of this is a tendency for the people who fight our wars to mythologize their own accomplishments. For this reason (among others), we should expect to hear the time-tested "stabbed in the back by Obamabots and communists" line to reemerge from the primordial swamp as soon as the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan. And they will. It's their turf, and forewarned is forearmed.

---Baron V

Everything's Related

If there's a time that future historians will point to as the moment the American Experiment began its irreversible decline, I am guessing it will probably be around the year that we invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses, slaughtered tens of thousands of people for no reason whatsoever, instituted a regime of torture on many innocent people, made no attempt to atone for it, and suffered no penalty for it after the fact. I don't want to get too otherworldly here, but it sure seems that ever since Iraq, the nation has been visited by an epidemic of brutality---mass shootings, police beatings, prisoner abuse, etc.---and I don't think that these are entirely unrelated events. I think they speak to a coarsening of the national psyche that has occurred since Iraq, and I fear it is likely to get worse until there is an honest accounting of how we got there, and offer to make amends for our crimes. A thriving liberal democracy cannot endure when a culture of state-sanctioned violence is allowed to metastasize.

---Baron V

Keeping Us Safe

The people who govern us never cease to remind us that protecting us against the threat of cyber-terror is Job 1 for them. Notwithstanding all those times when, you know, it isn't.

I am guessing we know where Heartbleed originated, and it wasn't with some hipster in Silicon Beach.

---Baron V

Moral Authority

As long as we keep evading responsibility for this shit, our nation will have none:

[T]he August 2002 Justice Department legal memo authorized sleep deprivation for Abu Zubaydah for 11 consecutive days, but Mitchell kept him awake far longer, the U.S. officials said, citing classified CIA cables. Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, strapped into a chair and doused with cold water to keep him awake. He was then interrogated and asked what he knew, at which point, his attorney told Al Jazeera, Abu Zubaydah was “psychotic” and would have admitted to anything.

Additionally, the report allegedly says that Abu Zubaydah was stuffed into a pet crate (the type used to transport dogs on airplanes) over the course of two weeks and routinely passed out, was shackled by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell and subjected to an endless loop of loud music. One former interrogator briefed about Abu Zubaydah’s interrogations from May to July 2002 told Al Jazeera that the music used to batter the detainee’s senses was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

If you had asked me five years ago if the incoming administration would simply turn its back and abjectly ignore the depravities of people who committed horrible crimes in our name, I'd have said you were crazy, that they'd at least make some symbolic gesture towards human decency: a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, perhaps. The fact that they haven't even discussed this and have actively run interference for the torturers is, well, crossing over into "evil" territory, much as it pains me to say it.

---Baron V

We Need More Snowdens

In the absence of a Truth & Reconciliation Commission, it's the best we can hope for.

Snark aside, this report needs to be released in full before the White House can take a black Sharpie to it. History demands it, and in the name of human morality, we should too. We paid for this shit, after all!

---Baron V

Paycheck to Paycheck

This is, of course, the way many millions of our countrymen live. Maybe you too? Either way, it underscores the greater reality that we'd have a much more robust and thriving economy if the people who govern us had showered billions of QE money on the populace-at-large instead of giving it to the same people who crashed the global economy so they can do it all over again a few years hence. I realize that policy that works to the benefit of the commonweal is a foreign concept to most people in Washington these days, but some of us still believe in the ideal, and aren't quite ready to throw in the towel and become expatriates. Don't tempt us!

---Baron V

Quote of The Day

John Cole:

They got away with, well, murder, and now they are going to run their mouths until someone is finally forced to do something about them.

In one way, I'm about ready to hold the current administration more accountable for this glaring moral failing than the previous one. After 9/11, some of Bush gang probably convinced themselves of the reality of their own bullshit and truly believed---then and now---that they were doing the Lord's work. The current team in the White House is smart enough to know better, and for reasons only known to them, they've decided of their own free will to do nothing---which only ensures that these crimes, and likely worse, will happen again. In case Iran-Contra wasn't a teachable moment for you . . .

---Baron V

Today's Worst Person

We could retire the award with this awful person.

Honestly, when did Team Democrat become so infested with privatizing grifters? Sure, there have been corrupt Democratic mayors and party chiefs in the past---Boss Tweed, Boss Daley, et al---but at least they were considerate enough not to bankrupt their own employees while doling out the spoils.

---Baron V

Why Snowden Matters

Because the people who govern us can't be trusted to be honest with us.

Hate to say it, but given their proven track record on national security matters, I really don't believe that this White House deserves the benefit of the doubt on this. The whole Senate report needs to be made public, by leaks if necessary, minus the redactions of White House censors. If crimes were committed, we deserve to know about every single of of them. We paid for them, after all---in blood and treasure and our reputation around the world. We deserve to know what our money was good for.

---Baron V

Election Fixes

Public financing. No private funding of any kind. Six-week primary and post-nomination campaign seasons. Weekly televised debates. Balloting on weekends. And no paid political ads, period. Yeah, I realize that these can only ever be affected in the aggregate by way of Constitutional amendment(s), and while the odds are slim of making it happen, we can improve them by electing people to office who will pledge to propose and vote for them. Anyone who pledges this---even Republicans!---deserves our support. Anyone who doesn't---even Democrats!---doesn't. It really is that simple sometimes.

---Baron V