Monthly Archives: July 2013
July 16 – 23 Rambles
July 16:
I watched some of Rachel Jeantel’s court testimony yesterday. Yes, she was sometimes hard to understand, but the speech problem was pretty obvious if you were really looking and paying attention. Her answers were short, and sometimes she was impatient with Don West. I thought the way he treated her, badgering and asking the same questions over and over, was poor. His was an obvious effort to confuse her and destroy her credibility in front of a basically all white jury. It was like watching the cultural divide between black and white in this country, the often total lack of empathy and understanding between the groups. She sometimes didn’t understand him, and more often he didn’t understand her (or pretended to). He may have achieved his goal, but I thought his was a pretty disgraceful performance. Watching Trayvon’s parents cry at her treatment was another painful part I suppose juror B37 just missed. At one point Mr. Martin just leans over and shakes his head, then his shoulders start to heave. What torture! How do we bridge the divide when we don’t even speak the same language or even try to?
I’ve also now seen the Piers Morgan interview.
What a contrast! Here she’s wearing makeup, her hair done and with a pretty outfit on. You see the black humor of a good girl who knew her friend very well. But the language is “black talk” – something white America needs to learn, remembering that a lot of the words and phrases we use in “white talk” are just as unintelligible to them. How do we get people to spend some time with each other listening as well as talking, asking questions and learning to understand?
July 20
It amazes me that people are so quick to condemn something they’ve seen on the cover of a magazine or heard about through gossip and feel free to say the most awful things about stuff they know nothing about. This week’s cover of Rolling Stone is one example. People just saw that face and went off, or they heard about it and went off. The other is the President’s remarks yesterday on the Trayvon Martin shooting. I doubt that many of them actually listened, but off they went making the most outrageously awful, ugly and prejudiced statements on Facebook. The Media say we’re polarized. I think there may be more to it than that. Both the stories are tragedies for Tzarnaev and his family, and for Trayvon’s family. Are they both victims of the hate that gets thrown around on the internet under a cloak of anonymity? The remarks about Obama’s speech that I saw had little to do with what he said, it was more about the writer’s hatred for him. Todd Starnes Facebook page is an education in right wing nasty looniness. I must be living in some other country where people try to reach across divides and understand each other no matter what their differences. This is what Todd Starnes said that began the discussion:
President Obama is now our Race-Baiter in Chief. His remarks today on the Trayvon Martin tragedy are beyond reprehensible. Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said. He actually said the outcome might have been different if Trayvon had been white.
Folks – we have reached a very dangerous point in this nation when the president of the united states begins to question the judicial system.”
That’s a deliberate misinterpretation of what the President said. He questioned the validity of one particular law, not the entire judicial system.
A kind of “balance” can be had it you also check out Newshounds. At least it’s somewhat better written and more understandable than Starnes’ site. (Why do I read this stuff, anyway?) It’s hard to know what the folks on Starnes’ site actually believe. What would they say if confronted in person about their words? Quite possibly, like the crowds of Obama haters at their rallies.
July 21:
Another Rolling Stone article that shows the appalling effects of confrontations between people when gun carrying is permitted, especially confrontations between races and folks of different ages. Why does an older white guy pull a gun on a carful of black teenagers whose music, he thinks, is too loud? Would the result have been the same had the carful of teens been white?
Politifact Florida has some interesting data on murders that have to do with this. And here’s another link to some interesting information on the same site.
July 23:
Zimmerman is said to have helped the family in a car crash. It’s reported in various places on the internet. Is no one skeptical of this report besides me? The responding officers have reported this, but we’ve heard nothing from the family involved. Z was supposedly with another man & both helped. Is this related in any way to the guy here in Ohio who’s raising money so Z can replace his gun? Somehow, the story of this “rescue” doesn’t fit with the portrait of Z that came out in the trial. I can see him standing by and watching as his friend really helps pull people out of the overturned van, but I can’t see him physically participating. It doesn’t fit with the pudgy, flabby, out of shape guy we saw at the trial. Is it media manipulation to restore a better image? Again, we don’t have enough details to be sure – and that’s a problem all by itself. No amateur video. That’s a surprise. No video from the police. Could it be that his buddies in the police department are trying to clear his name by making some sort of “hero” out of him?
The story is reported on CBS news, Foxx News, and USA Today, but I have seen it nowhere else. I’m still suspicious, even though it also turned up at the LATimes . There are no pictures of him at the scene, though CBS says the “rescued” family identified him. George has friends on the Seminole County police department who reported the incident. They might have an interest in the rehabilitation of his reputation. Why did the rescued couple cancel the interview they were supposed to give? Knowing what we know about what happened in the missing Sunil Tripathi case, and the way the media works these days, I’m going to hang on to my doubts.
July 1 – July 15 Rambles
Hey, I’m catching up!
July 1:
I’m not sure the US understands democracy any better than those in the Middle East who crack down with their militaries on populations demanding better treatment. George Bush left many poisonous programs behind when he left office, and unfortunately, those who were held over by Obama have persuaded him of the same paranoia about terrorism – that safety comes before anything and everything, including the Constitution. Government lawyers have justified anything as we learned in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, in the name of “national security”, when many of us thought that with Obama the abuses would stop. Some did, but the worst ones, as revealed by Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald and the British newspaper the Guardian, just kept growing and growing until they encompassed everyone in the world with an internet connection. Our government seems to be seeing terrorists behind every event no matter how small, even threatening journalists for doing their jobs or writing books, while creeping ever more steadily to the authoritarian corporate state where everything they do is considered a “state secret”.
As I read it, the Constitution does not charge the President with keeping the nation “safe”. Congress is enjoined to provide only for the defense of the nation, not it’s complete safety from all harm. Such a concept of “safety” is a logical impossibility, and those who demanded it after 9/11 have done more to harm our constitutional rights and our republican form of government than anything since our beginnings. George W. & Co were terrified by what happened on 9/11 (as they were meant to be). Their reaction was one of panic and vengeance that has led us to where we are today, cowering behind wholesale snooping of friend and enemy alike, standing in endless lines to undergo ridiculous searches just to board an airplane, looking suspiciously at anyone with a different way of dressing, or of a different skin color. The fear promoted throughout the country has led to a whole slew of unrelated abuses in the service of a moral rigidity that is anything but inclusive. States are depriving children and families of support for their nutrition and education. They are depriving women of access to adequate healthcare. The elderly are being deprived of meals and services. Innocent people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere are being killed by missiles from the air directed by pilotless drones. All in the name of keeping a certain class of US society “safe” and comfortably secure in their belief that they know what’s best for all of us. Everything our governments have done has made us less safe, and that includes states as well as the federal government.
It should be enough to defend the territory of the US without the pseudo-macho actions involved in “taking the fight to them”. Have we gained anything from the blood spilled and the dollars spent? Only the corporations who made the militarization possible have gained.
George W’s invasion of Iraq may have had some influence on the Arab Spring. It certainly stirred up the religious sectarian fight now going in in both Syria and Iraq. The Bush administration also began the wholesale secret data mining program at NSA. Some of the original abuses were eased by finally using the intermediate step of the FISA court, but as the tools grew better and better the temptation to go wholesale on the gathering of data in the present government atmosphere of paranoia must have become too strong to resist. Secret programs always have this tendency in the US, but inevitably the abuses leak out. The people of the NSA would have done well to read Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, on the sorry history of the CIA. My question is, how is this huge mass of data ever going to be useful to anyone? By the time it can be filtered and analyzed, it must surely be too late to prevent much of anything from happening, regardless of what people have said about how “useful” the program has been in stopping attacks. I’m not sure that we really have the tools to sort through vast data banks of bits in that kind of timely manner. The FBI had information about the 9/11 hijackers that was never passed on to anyone who could use it, and no one connected the dots on the Tsarnaevs. Since the proliferation of contractors and analysts, who is going to be able to read and evaluate their reports, especially considering the Republican effort to shrink government? When contractors may have their own axes to grind such as staying in business, how trustworthy can their reports possibly be?
As far as I can tell, Edward Snowden has not released anything that directly harms the United States no matter what the politicians in Washington may be yelling. He has embarrassed the government plenty, which also explains the over the top blacklash, but like the Wikileaks revelations which caused acute embarrassment, I don’t see the harm. You can tell me all you want about super “secret tool” that can do all these marvels of spycraft, but I say “show me”, and have no need to believe on faith.
I can’t imagine that such a massive data mining program could not have been known or suspected by both our friends and enemies. Osama bin Laden had already stopped using the internet to transmit his messages, but used trusted human messengers instead. Surely this information has spread among all but the most isolated of islamist groups. They aren’t stupid, and they use the internet for their own purposes. Yet our officials act like little boys with their hands caught in the cookie jar, and than blame the messenger for their own foolishness. Secrets and democratic practice do not mix.
Senator Diane Feinstein, according to the NYT, is a staunch supporter of the NSA data mining program, and thinks that Snowden is a traitor. “I feel I have an obligation to do everything I can to keep this country safe,” she said. Senator Feinstein, with all due respect, you’re wrong. The “safety” you intend is not worth having at such a high price as our 4th Amendment Rights. I’m not even sure that it’s safety at all. It certainly didn’t protect the Boston marathoners from the Tsarnaev brothers. Even though it is already too late to do anything about it, I don’t much like living in a country where the government and all the techno industrial complex spy on the rest of us. Just because it goes on and “everybody does it” does not make it right. It gives me the creeps when I see the last item I looked at on some site turn up as an ad on all the other sites I visit, and I wonder how much information has been collected about me because I write this blog which is so often critical of the government and its politicians. We humans often seem to think that if only if we build walls high enough, buy enough policemen, surveillance cameras, fancy weapons systems, and trip alarms we will be safe inside our gated communities from the marauding hordes. I don’t know that such a program has ever worked in history for very long. Even the Chinese couldn’t keep out the “barbarians” forever. The impulse to police the entire world, falls prey to the failure to see the devils within and the impossibility of knowing anyone else completely. Besides, those “marauding hordes” are us.
Trayvon Martin (July 15, 2013)
He’s dead. The trial is over. George Zimmerman is free to walk the streets if he dares. A travesty of justice has been delivered because of badly written overly broad laws allowing something called self defense, and a system of justice that often is expected to prove the impossible.
This is what we know. George saw Martin. Thought he was up to no good. Left his car and followed the boy. Somehow a fight got started, but we don’t know who started it. We don’t know what was said, either. Somehow George ended up with some scratches and a broken nose, and Trayvon ended with a bullet in his heart. George gets away with murder.
When is America going to come to its senses? Too many guns; too much fear and too much hate.
I hope someone helps Trayvon’s parents sue in civil court for wrongful death. That may be the only avenue that will cause George Zimmerman to end up in jail.
June Ramble
It seems as if every Muslim leader, when confronted with popular upheaval is prone to crack the whip instead of seeking compromise. Even Turkey’s democratic leader Erdogan has refused to budge on his plan to bulldoze Taksim park. Maliki hasn’t listened to the peaceful protests of Sunnis in Iraq, but gone after them with guns instead. Assad wouldn’t talk to the peaceful protesters in Damascus and earned himself a civil war and a destroyed country. Mubarak wouldn’t talk to the protesters either, nor would the leaders of Tunisia and Libya. Their countries are all in various stages of coming apart. Is this reaction the traditional one of the Muslim leader at any level, including fathers? Or is this something that just affects the dictators? Why do Muslim leaders all seem to become authoritarian while proclaiming democracy? Is there something about the way they raise their sons that gives them a dictatorial bent? Would leaders who are women be the same? Is the seduction of power so great even when there are riots in the streets?
Morsi in Egypt has followed the same pattern. Escalating without talking, and the results have been ugly.
(Note added in July: Morsi’s inability to govern in a way that made the lives of people better, his inability to get the military or the bureaucracy on his side doomed his rule. An election does not establish democracy. Others now have the awesome job of avoiding mob rule and the disintegradion of Egypt.)
Who’s to say the same won’t happen here? How would Republicans react to huge demonstrations in the street? Law & Order crackdown? No concessions? Our government has already inched in this direction under Obama. Washington doesn’t seem to be listening to the real concerns of people about jobs and health care, inequality and fairness, black and white issues and food security. It wouldn’t take much of a push for conservatives to justify martial law and the imposition of authoritarianism. We’ve already given away so much in search of that non-existent “safety”.
Ramblings in May
This is more of the same type of all-over-the-place stuff I posted earlier.
Wed., May 1
Yesterday I scanned through the newest items at Josh Landis’ Syria Comment. With McCain and Grassley and their ilk shouting for war, reading through it made me realize how stupid that pressure is (as usual). I got a picture of splintered groups of fighters, some true Freedom Fighters, some Salafi al-Nusra types, and some just thugs out to make money stripping factories and offices of equipment and other things to sell in Turkey. There was even a video of people who have learned to “refine” Syrian oil for resale inside the country – gasoline, kerosene for cooking etc. It sounds more like Somalia and Iraq than anything else, and it is certainly not a place for the US military.
(I’m sitting in the computer lab, baby-sitting kids who aren’t being tested, or who are late getting to school as well as those who finish before the rest of their class is done. There are 2 “velcro” IA’s in the room plus the gym teacher, me and 6 kids. Overkill.)
Richard Falk from his blog of April 19 on the Boston bombing and America’s place in the world- the last paragraph:
“Aside from the tensions of the moment, self-scrutiny and mid-course reflections on America’s global role is long overdue. Such a process is crucial both for the sake of the country’s own future security and also in consideration of the wellbeing of others. Such adjustments will eventually come about either as a result of a voluntary process of self-reflection or through the force of unpleasant events. How and when this process of reassessment occurs remains a mystery. Until it does, America’s military prowess and the abiding confidence of its leaders in hard power diplomacy makes the United States a menace to the world and to itself. Such an observation is as true if the more avowedly belligerent Mitt Romney rather than the seemingly dovish Barack Obama was in the White House. Such bipartisan support for maintaining the globe-girdling geopolitics runs deep in the body politic, and is accompanied by the refusal to admit the evidence of national decline. The signature irony is that the more American decline is met by a politics of denial, the more rapid and steep will be the decline, and the more abrupt and risky will be the necessary shrinking of the global leadership role so long played by the United States. We should be asking ourselves at this moment, “how many canaries will have to die before we awaken from our geopolitical fantasy of global domination?” “
Ok. Ok. So the hawks finally drag Obama into arming rebels, a no-fly zone and bombing raids. Then what? The FSA is not a coherent group, and doesn’t seem to have the capacity for governing. It has set up no councils in its areas, nor has it seemed to hand out much in the way of relief to battered civilians. Al-Nusra seems to be better at all that, and it is allied with Al-Qaeda. Even if our help would bring down Assad, there is nothing but a vacuum to replace him, and there won’t be any Occupation as in Iraq to force unappetizing solutions down the throats of the locals. What then? And why is McCain so determined to get us into another war? What’s in it for him?
Our own government seems to be falling apart. 1. The IRS over does going after TeaParty claims for 501(c)(4) status. Really? It’s too bad they weren’t smart enough to pepper “progressive” groups the same way, if only to cover themselves. (Only, as it turned out later, they did)
2. The Justice department has gone after the phone records and other data of AP reporters who reported on an operation in Yemen that was supposed to be secret. Part of the drone assassination plans?
3. Then there’s the hoopla in Congress about the supposed cover up of the real “facts” about the tragedy in Bangazi.
On the first two. The trend began in the Bush administration driven by Cheney’s fear of the “enemy”, but the administration under Obama seems to have taken it to a huge extreme charging people with violating the “Espionage” Act which has been used over time since 1917 as a government tool to punish people it didn’t like – “reds”, “Communists”, government employed leakers of information, reporters, and others. Few of these seem to have posed any real dire threat to the US. Much of the time, the government simply wants to avoid being embarrassed as in the WikiLeaks affair. If private Manning remains in jail for years, or gets the death penalty because he had a moral perception of right and wrong would be a gross miscarriage of justice. Embarrassment musn’t produce that kind of an ending.
The President doesn’t have a magic wand. He sits atop of the government, but he doesn’t have control over all of it. These days, he can’t even put his own nominees in charge of the various departments. Looking in from the outside, some of us Americans seem naively to think that the President personally directs every department of government. He’d never get anything done if that were true. His appointees must carry out the policies he lays down, and when such people turn out to be less than adequate managers, disagreements and scandals can happen. Obama does not have a machiavellian prince like Cheney with hands on all the threads to make people push the same policies. Congress also has itself to blame for stalling even the most mundane appointments, and basically crippling the State Department by denying it funds. All the “leadership” in the world is not going to change that. Bush sent the military on diplomatic missions for this reason, but generals, no matter how intelligent and well trained, are not diplomats and that caused other problems, mostly in places like Pakistan where they don’t take kindly to being ordered around by America. Lastly, we as voters need to take responsibility for our own government. We put these people in office so we must share the blame for whatever goes wrong, and we have elected some pretty stupid people over the past 12 years.
May 22: Wonderful quote:
“You want another great president, pray for another great crisis. Only nation-encumbering calamity tames our political system, making elites and the public receptive to allowing a president to lead America the Unruly.” Aaron David Miller in Foreign Policy
(Maureen Dowd should read this article. Maybe then she wouldn’t keep harping on the lack of presidential “leadership”. The office of the President doesn’t give the man a magic wand to make to world perfect in her eyes.)
Reflecting on the impossibilities of the job, Mr. Miller sums it up this way:
“What to do? Just get over it. Lower expectations. Don’t give up the search for quality leaders, but be honest about what a president can and cannot do. Don’t wait around to be rescued by The One — that’s not the American way. Maybe by controlling our presidential fantasies, we can stop expecting our presidents to be great, and allow them to start being good.”
Seriously, one of the most thoughtful pieces I’ve read in a long, long time.
Stephen Walt has a wonderful blog post in the same issue of FP titled “Top 10 warning signs of ‘liberal imperialism'”
As cure, he recommends the following:
…reading Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten’s “Forced to Be Free?: Why Foreign-Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization” (International Security, 2013), along with Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan and Peter Van Buren’s We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.
I’ll have to look for the first 2.
May 28:
McCain has turned up in Syria for an obviously well-planned meeting with leaders of the Opposition. They undoubtedly have told him exactly what he’s been wanting to hear, so he will come back to the Senate and demand that the US provide a no-fly zone, heavy arms and ammunition, and more to the rebels. Trouble is that McCain’s credibility on these trips reeks of all the mistakes he made in Iraq, including the fraudulent walk in the market without a flak vest to prove how “safe” it was, ignoring all the hundreds of soldiers who had been detailed to protect him. He wants to support the rebels in Syria hoping that “democracy” will emerge if they win, but there’s no guarantee of that, and it’s far more likely that the country will fall apart into fighting factions of warlords, spreading even more unrest in that part of the world than there is already. He’s also undermining Obama’s efforts to gather a peace meeting between all the parties, which might have a chance of starting some negotiations between Assad and those fighting against him. Some rebels have refused to meet with the dictator which may make that angle fruitless.
Ramblings in April
It’s been several months since I’ve had time to post anything here, but I kept jotting things down as they occurred to me. I thought I’d divide them up in monthly chunks so the pages wouldn’t be so long to slog through. This is copy and paste stuff, so we’ll see what happens.
Tues. 4.16.13
Maybe after all the ugliness and horror of yesterday’s bombing of the Boston Marathon it’s time to look at something very beautiful to balance the soul.
There was a link to a video of Sasha Cohen doing the rite of Spring, which doesn’t seem to be there anymore.
Found it!
Thurs 4.18.13
It’s time for voters to take control from Republicans who only listen to special interests with lies and gobs of cash! The woman who shouted “Shame!” in the Senate yesterday was right. Many Republicans say they support a “right to life”, but yet they also support those who promote the use of firearms that take that right away. Are they setting up their targets for the future? How many of those unwanted babies whom they say they want to protect will end up as victims of shootings as an adult?
Controversy over gory photos published after the Boston bombing leaves me a bit stunned. Americans have been inflicting that kind of mayhem in various places around the world for 12 years. (And on many other occasions as well) We should know what the consequences are; see it in all its gory detail. Then maybe we’ll think more carefully the next time the rabble rousers urge us on to a lethal assault somewhere in the world. Maybe if we live it and see it and realize that it’s not a game or a far away thing from which we’re excepted, safe, cocooned in our continental vastness, we’ll be less hasty to inflict on others that which we’re not prepared to suffer ourselves. The photos I’ve seen from Baghdad have been far worse than worse has been shown so far about Boston.
Tues. 4.23 13
I read the transcript in the Globe of Tsarnayev’s hearing in the prison hospital. (Unfortunately, I no longer have the link to the Globe, but you can read it here.) It gave me a weird feeling. I imagine him lying there, tubes coming out of all sorts of places, perhaps a bit groggy from pain medicine, with the doctor, agents, lawyers, judge and clerk crowding around , yet being adjudged lucid, alert and able to answer questions. “I find that the defendant is alert, mentally competent and lucid. He is aware of the nature of the proceedings.” The description doesn’t seem to fit what they have said about his wounds to the face, neck, legs and hand. I don’t see how this can be a fair hearing. At least he was Mirandized.
The accounts of the brothers in the Globe seem to mix the brothers up sometimes, and now they want to tie them to another horrible murder in 2011? They seem to lose track of who was radicalized, the older Tamerlan or the younger Dzhokhar. Most accounts indicate that it was Temerlan who became devout, grew a beard, and became more radicalized, but sometimes in the writing it’s not clear at all which brother is being talked about.
A question I saw posted in the Twitter feed on Sunday that perhaps Tamerlan had been hit in the head too many times in boxing which could have caused a personality change. I went to look for it yesterday, but came up empty. It was a comment from one of the women reporters in the Globe Twitter feed. No one else seems to have picked it up, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere I’ve looked. It could make some sense though.
Polarized?
It amazes me that people are so quick to condemn something they’ve seen on the cover of a magazine or heard about through gossip and feel free to say the most awful things about stuff they know nothing about. This week’s cover of Rolling Stone is one example. People just saw that face and went off, or they heard about it and went off. The other is the President’s remarks yesterday on the Trayvon Martin shooting. I doubt that many of them actually listened, but off they went making the most outrageously awful, ugly and prejudiced statements on Facebook. The Media say we’re polarized. I think there may be more to it than that. Both the stories are tragedies; for Tzarnaev and his family, and for Trayvon’s family. Are they both victims of the hate that gets thrown around on the internet under a cloak of anonymity? The remarks about Obama’s speech that I saw had little to do with what he said, it was more about the writer’s hatred for him. Todd Starnes Facebook page is an education in right wing nasty looniness. I must be living in some other country where people try to reach across divides and understand each other no matter what their differences. This is what Todd Starnes said that began the discussion:
“President Obama is now our Race-Baiter in Chief. His remarks today on the Trayvon Martin tragedy are beyond reprehensible.
“Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” he said. He actually said the outcome might have been different if Trayvon had been white.
Folks – we have reached a very dangerous point in this nation when the president of the united states begins to question the judicial system.”
That’s a deliberate misinterpretation of what the President said. He questioned the validity of one particular law, not the entire judicial system.
A kind of “balance” can be had it you also check out Newshounds. At least it’s somewhat better written and more understandable than Starnes’ site. (Why do I read this stuff, anyway?) It’s hard to know what the folks on Starnes’ site actually believe. What would they say if confronted in person about their words? Quite possibly, like the crowds of Obama haters at their rallies.
areesandeirene.com 