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« Liberal Outrage: January 2006 | Main | Liberal Outrage: March 2006 » Liberal OutrageWhy the Port Deal Matters I've had a discussion about this with a few people, so i thought i should put it my thoughts up here. Generally, reasonable people seem to think that the controversy over Bush administration's decision to allow the United Arab Emirates to have control over our ports is a tempest in a teapot. Prior to this, a British company controlled the ports, and to some people this controversy smacks of racism because we'll let a European country have control but not an Arab one. Other people just think the security concerns are imagined and people are using the controversy to score cheap political points. I see it a different way. Since September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration has told us that we needed to start taking extra precautions in order to be safe. We had to tone down any dissenting opinions. We had to give up our right to due process. We had to submit to wire tapping. We have to be harassed every time we go to the airport. We had to accept the logic that we had to invade Iraq because we couldn't risk the chance of any beligerant Arab country having weapons. I wasn't willing to accept any of that. But a lot of people were, including the majority of pundits in the press. Now Bush is turning around and giving control of our ports to a country whose banks provided the money for the Sept 11th attacks, and whose royal family has ties with Osama bin Laden. When justifying the attacks on Afghanistan, Bush said that those who aid and abet terrorist will be treated no differently than the terrorists themselves. Today he is giving a country with closer ties to al-Qaeda than Iraq ever had access to our ports. It is mind blowing to those who naively took Bush at his word. It's also an opportunity for those of us who have been jumping up and down for the past 5 years saying that we've been hoodwinked press the point. The mainstream Democrats have been acting 'reasonably' all along and have been pushed around and ignored. It's time to stop being reasonable and make an issue of this glaring contradiction between Bush's rhetoric and actions. Port security (an issue Democrats have been trying to push for a while now) is important, and it is an area where we really do need to be extra careful. Millions of crates come into this country every day. The Bush Administration bypassed the routine security check that is required by law when a new company takes over control of our ports. Now they would be in the control of a country that has ties to Osama bin Laden. It doesn't make any sense, and it deserves to be focused on. I have a problem with the deal from another point of view as well. The argument was made years ago that governments are less efficient than private corporations. It's not an argument i agree with - anyone trying to deal with a cable company or an insurance company knows that corporations are just as beaurocratic as you can get, and at least the government is technically accountable to voters. But it's a view that's generally been accepted by people so let's live with it for the sake of this posts: governments are too inefficient to control our ports, so we have to farm the work out to (foreign?) corporations. But the "corporation" that we are farming the work out to is an extension of the monarchy of the United Arab Emirates. It's not private in any way. Is the UAE's government more efficient than our own? UPDATE: Looks like Tom Tomorrow beat me to it by 7 minutes. By fnord12 | February 28, 2006, 10:57 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link It could be a good second choice after Canada. It might even be better considering the Canadians just elected a conservative PM who is pro-Iraq invasion. By min | February 28, 2006, 9:46 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link There's been some debate on the Wachowski brothers' adaptation of V For Vendetta. After the disappointment of the two sequels to The Matrix, could they still make good movies? Was it was close enough to the spirit of the original comic (and should it have to be)? Did the comic book writer Alan Moore's disapproval of the film mean it was no good? Did the track record of awful movies based on Alan Moore comic books (From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) mean that it was impossible to do one right? James Wolcott's review puts all those fears to rest for me (no spoilers). By fnord12 | February 27, 2006, 4:12 PM | Comics
& Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link Apparently, it's Mardi Gras time down in New Orleans. I was given this helpful information thru an email forwarded on a list-serv. This email was even more helpful in that it noted the following "bit of information": Well, isn't that great? Thanks to FEMA, I won't have to worry about evacuees filling up the hotels and making it difficult for me and other tourists to find lodging during Mardi Gras. That would have been a total drag. Not content to rest in their mission to ruin people's lives, FEMA continues to find new and innovative ways to generate more misery. It's heart warming to see there are people out there able to appreciate FEMA's efforts. They aren't throwing people out to free up hotel space for themselves. It's all for YOU. If I should ever have the opportunity to meet this person from the list-serv, they damn well better hope I don't get an opening to bring this up. By min | February 27, 2006, 10:31 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link Here's a little "Compare and Contrast" game for all of you. Depending on which side of the Atlantic you reside, Mars, Inc. will have differing opinions on the health benefits of chocolate. Here in the States, Mars, Inc. has launched a campaign for a new product that claims to be healthy. The article goes on to quote a researcher saying there has been no link established between flavanols and a reduced risk of cancer or heart disease. And with the rising problem with obesity in this country "the last thing we need is for Americans to think they can eat more chocolate." Such a trifle as an "established scientific link" will not cause Mars, Inc. to rethink their campaign nor will it discourage competitors such as Hershey Co. from jumping on the bandwagon. However, if you happen to live on the European side of the ocean, you will be getting a different sort of message. [...] Cadbury Trebor Bassett and rival Mars have joined forces in a £10m information campaign under the "Be treatwise" banner. Both companies will be changing their labelling over the coming months to include a detailed panel containing the nutritional content of their products. So, if you eat chocolate in the U.S., it's healthy, but if you eat chocolate in Britain, it will be accompanied by a health warning. Make sure you take your bearings before chowing down on your next piece of confectionary. By min | February 24, 2006, 1:48 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Two examples of the government classifying information for (what seems to be) no good reason. What's that Jello Biafra line sampled in the Ice-T song... By fnord12 | February 23, 2006, 5:10 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link Josh sent me this link to a debate on Universal Healthcare. I'm sure it's at least partially due to my bias, but i think the pro-UHC guy is more convincing. By fnord12 | February 23, 2006, 5:08 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (2)| Link I don't get vegans who eat at Mcdonalds and then get outraged and sue when the food contains animal products. Nadia Sugich of Los Angeles sued Wednesday, saying she eats no animal products and would not have eaten the fries had she known they contained dairy ingredients. By fnord12 | February 21, 2006, 8:54 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (3)| Link This website has a list of anti-war songs, mostly pre-2001, and then makes this comment: I've seen this complaint about a lack of current bands doing anti-war songs post-September 11th on a lot of lefty blogs as well. The thing is, i'm not sure that it's true. Without thinking too hard about it, you've got: System of a Down - Boom!, among others In addition you've had a couple of Rock Against Bush nu-punk compliations and i'm sure we could think of other examples. Is the problem that a lot of older people are remembering that songs like Merry Christmas (War Is Over) and Masters of War were actually on the radio back in the 60s and 70s, and they are wondering why the people on the radio today (Britany Spears and... my god, i don't even know who is on the radio) aren't coming out with political songs? They do know how commercialized music has become, right? By fnord12 | February 17, 2006, 3:48 PM | Liberal Outrage
& Music | Comments (2)| Link Josh informed me of this terrible development. You'd think i could rely on Wayne for DC related news, but apparently, no. Washed up comic creator Frank Miller is working on a story where Batman fights Osama Bin Laden. The reason for this work, Miller said, was "an explosion from my gut reaction of what's happening now." He can't stand entertainers who lack the moxie of their '40s counterparts who stood up to Hitler. Holy Terror is "a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we're up against." By fnord12 | February 16, 2006, 12:56 PM | Comics & Liberal Outrage | Link I drive a VW Jetta. It has a 14gal gas tank. It's not unusual for me to pay $35 to fill up my tank. I can't tell you how much it warms my soul to read this in the Guardian Weekly: The price on a barrel of oil may keep going up, but luckily ExxonMobil is gouging you, the consumer, so much that it more than makes up for their increased expenditure. I feel another CITGO plug coming on... By min | February 15, 2006, 1:19 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Iowa is debating whether to just give tickets to people who are using marijuana instead of arresting them, or to just ban all rock concerts and football games in the state. By fnord12 | February 14, 2006, 9:23 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | February 14, 2006, 9:21 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Why should we let you come here, with your crazy ideas about naturally grown food? By fnord12 | February 9, 2006, 3:14 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Just kick all the people out of your government that actually know anything, and replace them with partisan yes-men who will provide you with the "evidence" you need. The reorganization of the department's arms control and international security bureaus was intended to help it better deal with 21st-century threats. Instead, it's thrown the agency into turmoil and produced an exodus of experts with decades of experience in nuclear arms, chemical weapons and related matters, according to 11 current and former officials and documents obtained by Knight Ridder. By fnord12 | February 9, 2006, 3:12 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Yep. They just keep trying and trying to come up with better acronyms for spying and data-mining. The latest iteration is ADVISE - Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement. They're data-mining emails, blogs, government records, and with the help of Yahoo and MSN, prolly your internet searches, as well. And you know what the best part is? Congressman with direct oversight of the people in charge of ADVISE don't actually know what's going on. But they're mostly ok with that. Sure he will. Then he'll be sworn to secrecy so that he can't actually do anything about any bits of information they deign to throw his way. Good on ya. Read here for the Christian Science Monitor's article about the data-mining program and here for the FDL blog on it. I wonder what Illuminati symbol ADVISE is using as their logo. By min | February 9, 2006, 12:22 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | February 8, 2006, 4:09 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link From Joe Bageant, which i'll just reprint in its near entirety. Please read. Whatever the case, we no longer depend upon community and other people around us. We live in our houses, idiotically sited vinyl "Tudor-esque" fuck-boxes with brick facade (sorry Neddie, I just had to steal that lick) which grow bigger each year in order to accommodate our massive asses, egos and collection of goods, and we "order out." Or go shopping for it at the mall. Beyond the need to get laid, there is little real reason to be together with other thinking, feeling adults. We do not need each other to do anything important in our lives, because all those things are performed by strangers, often as not thousands of miles away. Including the sex, if your are an internet porn fan. Which leaves us strangers to the natural human community. After all, what can we really do together? Consume. Drink. Consume. Talk. Consume tickets to entertainment. Consume. There is little else to do with other human beings in America than consume. So most of our primary life activity is solitary. We drive, do housework, pay bills, watch television... When we do "get together with friends," there is little to talk about, other than one form or another of consumption, consuming music, or movies or whatever. We can not tell each other anything new because we all get the same news and information from the same monolithic sources. At the same time we try to fill the loneliness for a real human community that we have never experienced by calling any group of people who come together in any way a "community." Online community. Planned community. Still, what about those cages in Gitmo? Or global warming? You and I may presently be yammering our asses off in cyberspace (talk about inauthentic!) about such topics, but most Americans, if they dialogue about those things at all, conduct the dialogue with that voices inside our heads, the one that says: Things cannot be as bad as the alarmists say. They cannot be as bad as I often suspect they are. If there really were such a thing as global warming they would be starting to do something about it. And besides, even if it were true, science will find a way to fix it. If there really were genocide going on in so many places far more people would be concerned. At the same time, every commercial and piece of sports hoopla, every celebrity news item leaves us with the impression that, if we have time and money for such things, then matters cannot be all that bad, can they? If the earth were heating up we would surely notice it. If our soldiers and government agencies were torturing people around the world it would make the news. If millions were being exterminated, it would be more obvious, would it not? Look around. Nobody seems worried. Look how normal everything is every day. Look at your wife and your own family. No one is worried. Things cannot be that bad. Joe Bageant's little inner voice is like everyone else's. Whenever I shudder at the condition of the republic, whenever I feel its utter absence of community, it scolds me and tells me I am crazy: Nothing is wrong. This is merely the way things are. It has always been this way. You cannot change that. You expect too much. Look at your wife. She's not upset. She wonders why you cannot just go ahead and be happy. What you see around you is normalcy. Take care of your own family. Relax. Buy something. And I do too. Which is why I own nine guitars, though I can only play one at a time, and even then not very well. The voice made me do it. I was bored. Bored plus anxious. Hell, I could lose my job. I could lose everything. And if I lost my job I would indeed lose everything. Social status, family, the accumulated net worth of a lifetime. Which, believe me, ain't much after two divorces and a run-in with cocaine. Adding to the anxiety is the lack of evidence that the world needs you or me at all. In this totally commoditized life we are dispensable. Everything is standardized. It really doesn't matter who grows our food or makes our clothing. If we don't make it, it someone else will. If we don't buy it, someone else will. Some other faceless person will step forward to fill in our place. The same goes for the engineers who created this computer and the same goes for your own job. The machine rolls on. With us or without us. Naturally, we have our loved ones and our friends. But increasingly even these relationships are monetized for all classes. Family and leisure activity has become intensely commoditized. Never has there been such a lonely and inauthentic civilization as the American middle class. You would think owning jack shit and expecting nothing would allow a guy slightly more freedom from toil, would you not? Yet, even though I never wish to own a car again, or ever own another house, don't care about clothes, could easily live on grains, fruits and vegetables, and am willing to work maybe 20 hours a week at some mindless occupation so long as it does not contribute to the world's misery and doesn't require heavy lifting or good memory, and willing to live in the tiniest of rooms, it's still impossible to do so inside this nation, once you've signed the middle class blood oath. Even if I managed to talk my wife into such a life, this is the one thing I am not free to do in the good old land of the free. In this country, buster, you keep paying the going rate, even if you don't care about going. Like the Cajuns say, you will know when you are dead because the bills will quit coming in. And so about a year or so ago I swore in print and on the net that I was going to buy a cottage in some warm and simpler place abroad. Someplace VERY cheap that I can go and write and make music with these hands and this tired but willing voice. And I am getting closer to that goal, despite the blackmailers. For starters, I have gotten over the American fetish of ownership -- I can rent a place from some deserving poor native family who needs the income. Maybe build an addition onto their house for them for free. Maybe we can go into business together, a small bodega on a dusty street, mango stand, take in laundry or whatever. I will be the old white guy who lives in the back room, plays banjo and guitar and writes. This is the one promise I intended to keep to myself. I still do. But I never in my life imagined it would be so hard to escape the various American forms of institutionalized extortion and blackmail. Becoming debt free was the least of it. And having everyone you know and love believe your have slipped your moorings is just the beginning. Meanwhile, you become a Kafkaesque character wondering if you've gone nuts, as you simmer in the ambient wrongness pervading American society and watch the futility of our vast life-consuming program of intense management and control of everything, the money, the bombs, the roads, the retirement fund, the communications, the propaganda, the entire buzzing tower of bullshit so massive as to make Babel look like a chicken coop. And you ask every passing stranger in the shopping mall "Is all this fucking necessary?" Only to discover that you are in an isolation chamber, a vacuum, a void in which no one can hear your voice at all. They are sleepwalking. They are shopping. Shhhh ... The loss of our human kinship identities has left us to define ourselves by what we own, where we live or what sports teams we support. But even more insidiously, our lost stories of community and kinship are replaced by the work of unseen professionals over the distant horizon. TV and movie producers, the news media and educational establishment. They provide the answer to the most important spiritual kinship and identity question we will ever ask ourselves: Who are my people? Some of the worst people on the planet are ready to answer that question for us in a way that serves their own ends. They stand ready to answer other questions too, such as, where did we come from? Why are we here? They are the cadre of empire's paid professionals who write the history and the news stories that fill the deep need for a "story of the people." The most horrific events of history have nearly always been set in motion by manipulation of this national story. After a while, it does not matter that the story was manipulated. Deep need for a national story drives most to come to love and accept the story over time. It is the only one they have. And if the story is sufficiently intolerant and mean, we don't care about Iraqi deaths. And we come to love empire and capitalism. Beyond that, many would have become bullies anyway, without any help from the national storyline. They don't value democracy, or the ecology or liberty, but they do believe in authority and discipline. Aw come on! It ain't just Dick Cheney and his pet president Sparky doing all this. At least half the country is loving the queer bashing and the bombing and the god rhetoric. We should quit pretending that a very large portion of Americans are not degraded human beings. They are. Skeptics are welcome to visit me here in the armed and inbred environs of Winchester, Virginia. It no longer matters what or who degraded them. Much time has passed and this is how many Americans have become. Fundamentalist cults abound, both religious and economic. Millions upon millions of Christians live in hermetic worlds of their own, with their own books stores, schools, media. Millions of middle class Americans both conservative and liberal live in suburbs and condos and brownstone row houses completely surrounded by their own kind, all of them worshippers in the American value cult, commodity fetishists. They are differentiated mainly in their own minds and the narratives they have made up for themselves. And of course in their consumption. After 35 years of inattention to these not-so-nice Americans among us (in another time they would have been called fascists, but now they are considered merely a political "base," which is in itself a strange sort of national acceptance of cruelty as part of the national character) we are now watching them consolidate power. For the time being they control the presidency, the Congress, the media, the Supreme Court, the federal courts, most governorships, and most state legislatures. And if their manipulation of congressional districts stays put they could feasibly stay in power indefinitely. Do these people, this half of our population which cheers on unprovoked wars abroad, spying on the citizenry and demonizing of the poor truly hate democracy? Fuck if I know. But after generations of brainwashing and psychological molding and exploitation of their fears, I suspect they never really knew what democracy was. If anyone is going to turn the ship of the republic around, put us on a course more in the direction of liberty and openness, it will require the navigational help of those among us who can still remember what it was like before totalistic capitalism took such grip. People who can remember that genuine good will and intent were once alive in the hearts of most people even if never in the halls of Congress. Remember when at least some human and social progress was evident around us, thereby giving reason to hope. And these sorts of people are indeed still with us, though quiet, perhaps out of insecurity. Only last Saturday I saw them at the Jiffy Lube. Sitting in the waiting room with our little Jiffy Lube paper coffee cups, waiting for our cars to be finished, we were watching on CNN the placement of the casket of Coretta Scott King in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol. To my right there was the huge black lady with corn rows and two bright eyed children hanging on her ankles. There was the thin young 30-something half-black dude who had just got off his cell to his wife (Yeah honey, it's on CNN. Bye.) There was the very straight suburban blonde yuppie woman with her sculpted pony tail sticking through the back of her aubergine Eddie Bauer ball cap. And as those Georgia state troopers on CNN, looking so much like the very same kind who once struck fear into the Martins and the Medgars of the South, were climbing those marble stairs under the gray February Georgia sky, one step at a time, then a pause, then one more step ... There was not a dry eye a dry eye in that Jiffy Lube waiting room. It was not just the cheap emotionalism of televised pandering. Everyone there remembered, by God! Remembered or found reason to believe in, an America that at one moment in history at least, rose from its stupor to struggle forward toward something higher. Something better. And yes, noble even. And when I was finished blubbering inside, I thought to myself, "Well, that small room in St. Kitts, or the tarpon fishing in Belize, they can probably wait one more year." By fnord12 | February 8, 2006, 3:11 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Tony Blair has introduced a plan where antisocial behaviour gets you enrolled in a "rehabilitation" program where you get counseled on how to behave properly. Sometimes you get the counseling in your home and other times you have to move to some dedicated "secure" accomodations. Doesn't that sound lovely? I suppose sending people to re-education camps is a step up from just giving them a lobotomy. The interesting thing is that as much as the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives object to Blair's scheme, they don't seem to be bringing up the scary sci-fi aspect of it. They just say that this plan is not going to work. Perhaps they preferred the lobotomies. By min | February 7, 2006, 1:14 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Found on Kos: I'm almost confused by it but, I mean, it seems to presuppose that these very sophisticated Al Qaida folks didn't think we were intercepting their phone calls. I mean, I'm a little confused. How did it damage this? GONZALES: Well, Senator, I would first refer to the experts in the Intel Committee who are making that statement, first of all. I'm just the lawyer. And so, when the director of the CIA says this should really damage our intel capabilities, I would defer to that statement. I think, based on my experience, it is true -- you would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some kind of surveillance. But if they're not reminded about it all the time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget. (LAUGHTER) By fnord12 | February 7, 2006, 8:53 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Actually, if true, it's nothing we haven't already suspected. By fnord12 | February 6, 2006, 1:21 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | February 6, 2006, 1:19 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link
By fnord12 | February 6, 2006, 10:25 AM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link Republicans cheat at their own elections. By fnord12 | February 6, 2006, 10:23 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link This picture was in the BBC article from the previous post. I can't decide which caption to go with: "And now, young Skywalker... you... will... die!" "Only I surf the causeways of space with the cosmic power granted to me by the Devourer of Worlds" "And how come Batman doesn't dance anymore?" By fnord12 | February 3, 2006, 1:30 PM | Comics
& Liberal Outrage
& Star Wars | Comments (2)| Link According to this BBC article , the US military is working on plans to distrupt global communications. US forces should be able to "disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum". By fnord12 | February 3, 2006, 1:26 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link Link: Not literally. It was a metaphor. For not reducing America's dependence on Middle East oil. By fnord12 | February 2, 2006, 3:38 PM | Liberal Outrage | Comments (1)| Link So two people got kicked out of the State of the Union Address for wearing t-shirts: Cindy Sheehan, for wearing an anti-war t-shirt listing the number of US soldiers killed, and Rep. Bill Young (R-FL)'s wife, for wearing a Support Our Troops shirt. Both were accused of being "protestors" when neither actually did anything other than wear the t-shirt. Sheehan was shaken about a bit and arrested, Mrs. Young was just escorted to the lobby. Today, the Washington Post says that Rep. Young is angry: By fnord12 | February 2, 2006, 3:31 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Penny Arcade knew what they were talking about. By fnord12 | February 2, 2006, 3:29 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: January 2006 | Main | Liberal Outrage: March 2006 » |