by Monolycus
(lifted from a comment)

Stanford University’s Philip Zimbardo makes the case that it wasn’t inherent rottenness, but the "Lucifer Effect" which turned all those good, honest, God-fearin’ US soldiers into sadistic, twisted tormentors at Abu Ghraib.

"The Devil made me do it." Yeah. In a Christian theocracy, that
defense will, nauseatingly, go pretty far. At least it’s slightly less
patently disgusting than "These were just frat pranks."

Why doesn’t anyone twig on to the obvious answer that the culture
produces sick, twisted fucks? Oh, yeah… this is an election year and
we don’t won’t want to actually tell anyone that their baby is ugly.

But the apologist Dr. Zimbardo comes tantalizingly close to making a
very genuine observation while pussyfooting around with the trite
rationalizations: "If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse."

Now, where-oh-where can we look for people given "power without
oversight"…? I’m sure the dank, dungeons of Iraq or some other third
world hole will give us all manner of "powerful" and "unsupervised"
folk.

No need to look for that in your own backyard. No need to apply
that formula to the TASER-happy cops on every street corner of the USA or the bullying TSA agents waiting in every airport to flex their authoritive muscles.  We should certainly
not apply that maxim to a demonstrably corrupt executive, legislative
and judicial branch of US government who only classify something as
torture if it might be applied to them.

Let’s keep coming up with excuses about how what happened at Abu
Ghraib is exceptional and does not represent who we are. And, you know,
I’m aiming this scattershot at non-US citizens and governments as well.

Western culture produces sickness… maliciousness… inhumanity…
exceptionalism… and all the rest. US citizens are not
psychologically, genetically, culturally or in any quantifiable way
special enough for this to only apply to them. Every new piece of data
which points to the inescapable conclusion that humans are disgusting
causes us to jump through new hoops to point to why it is "those guys"
that are really the disgusting ones… or "that circumstance" that
caused them to be that way.

The root of exceptionalism is that we don’t see any of this as applying to us.

This is an odd announcement:

The U.S. Navy has moved the guided-missile destroyer USS Cole and other ships to the eastern Mediterranean Sea off Lebanon, Pentagon officials said Thursday.
…
The destroyer and two support ships are close to Lebanon but out of visual range of the coast, Pentagon officials said. Another six vessels, led by the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau, are close to Italy and steaming toward the other three, the officials said.
U.S. Navy ships move closer to Lebanon

Why is this odd?

Because the U.S. is sending empty ships.

Cont. reading: Empty Ships to Lebanon?

The most important issue for U.S. voters is the current economic downturn. It is important to point out to them that the economic mailaise is a direct consequence of rightwing policies.

The U.S. puts a higher percentage of its population into jail than any dictatorship in this world. This is very expensive and driven by rightwing "law and order" policies and false incentives, i.e. privatization of prisons and lobbying by prison owners.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 percent increase when adjusted for inflation.

Crime rates in comparable countries with less people incarcerated are generally lower than in the U.S. So why should this expensive policy continue?

The War on Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the U.S. some $3+ trillion. What do the taxpayers get for $138 per month they are paying for these wars (other than the right to also pay $103 per barrel of oil)?

Support of Israel has cost the U.S. taxpayer a lot of money. What is the positive result from this investment? Currently the USS Cole and the amphibious assault ship USS Nassau are on the way to the Lebanese coast to cover for an Israeli attack on Gaza. How much does this cost? What is the return?

The current economic downturn will highlight these questions.

The above policies should all be changed for other than financial reasons. But I’ll not be picky if they will be changed because of financial pressure on the U.S. population.

Can we hope that taxpayers will demand and end to these policies because of their costs?

Haaretz: IDF kills 18 Palestinians in Gaza, W. Bank, including 5 children

Israeli security forces struck a range of targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing a total of 18 Palestinians, including five children. Meanwhile, militants in Gaza continued to fire rockets at southern Israel, striking as far north as Ashkelon.

The deaths come a day after IDF troops killed 12 Palestinians and an Israeli was killed in a Qassam rocket strike on a college in Sderot.

…
Four children – all under the age of 16 and three from the same family – were killed in an IAF strike in Jabalya, a refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian sources said. Witnesses said the children were playing soccer when the missile struck. Another boy wounded in that strike, a 12-year-old neighbor, died later, hospital officials said.

Professor James Petras just published a piece on The Israeli Agenda and the Scorecard of the Zionist Power Configuration for 2008.

Petras forsees changes in U.S. support for Israel in 2009 and thinks that Israel will use 2008 to push as much as possible of its agenda down the U.S. throat. It is a longer read but well worth your time.

The lede describes the strategic aims of Israel. These do not include to let Palestinian kids play soccer:

The strategy of the Jewish state is the complete Zionization of Palestine, the takeover of land, water, offshore gas (estimated to be worth $4 billion dollars) and other economic resources and the total dispossession of the Palestinian people. Tel Aviv’s tactics have included daily military assaults, giant walls ghettoizing entire Palestinian towns, military outposts and controls undermining commerce and production to force bankruptcy, poverty, severe deprivation and population flight. The second priority of the Israeli colonial state is to bolster the Jewish state’s political and military supremacy in the Middle East, using preposterous arguments of ‘survival’ and ‘existential threats’. The key postulate of Israeli Middle East policy is to destroy or intimidate the principle adversaries of its Zionization of Palestine and its expansionist Middle East policy.
…

Bernanke signals another rate cut and Greenspan tells the Gulf countries to get out of the dollar.

The effect of this is are a record low dollar, record high commodity prices and higher inflation.

Yesterday the rating companies Moody’s and S&P renewed their first-class AAA rating for mortgage insurer MBIA. This is a bad joke and exposes the whole rating system as a fraud.
Mish compares MBIA with pharma giant Pfitzer, which was downrated from AAA in December:

• Profit margin -61.76% vs. +17.07%
• Return on Equity -35.54% vs. +12.13%
• Revenue $3.12 Billion vs. $48.61 Billion
• Earnings Per Share -$15.22 vs. +$1.20
• Total Cash $5.73 Billion vs. $20.30 Billion
• Total Debt $17.44 Billion vs. $8.69 Billion

So why does Moody’s give an AAA rating to MBIA when it is obvious that MBIA is financial junk?

The decisions by Moody’s and S&P to retain the ratings protected as much as $637 billion of debt from downgrade, avoided fire sales of municipal bonds and helped save banks from as much as $70 billion of losses, based on Oppenheimer & Co. estimates.

The banks pressed Moody’s to keep the music going and the Fed and the Federal Exchange Commission seem to agree that lying is currently the best thing to do. The problem is of course that everybody looks right through this and any trust in the U.S. financial system erodes.

With the loss of trust the music one day will stop and there will be no chairs to sit down on. Then the government will bailout the banks by nationalizing the banking system.

The FT’s Martin Wolf says a $1 trillion national bailout of the banking system will not matter much. Well, maybe not to him.

But U.S. taxpayers will have to pay for this one way or another. Either through decades of higher taxes or through inflation. Most likely we will see both.

These are the penalties for the U.S. for living beyond its means. But while the profits of living beyond the means went mostly to the rich, the costs will be put on everyone.

The BBC reports about a project for a new interpretation of Islamic scripture. This is indeed big news.

I have written about these scriptures, Islamic law interpretation based on them and how they reflect the Shia-Sunni divide.

To recap – Islamic law is based on:

• Quran – God's own words written down by the prophet Muhammad
• Hadith – Historic tales of the "practice of the prophet" as a supplement to the Quran
• Ijtihad – case-law developed through interpretation of the Quran and Hadith
• Quiyas – For the Sunni school of Islam Ijtihad was closed several hundred years ago and development of new case-law is not allowed. Application of Islamic law to new social circumstances and technical development is therefore based on analogies, quiyas, from the old case law. Scholar consensus, Ijma, is needed for acceptance of a analogy-interpretation.

For the Shia school of Islam Ijtihad is still open and religious/legal scholars can and do develop new case-law.

Both Shia and Sunni see Quran and Hadith essentially as given. Whoever doubts these is accused as aposta and heretic.

An official program for a new reading of the Hadith is therefore an enormous and risky endeavor. Here, BBC reports, Turkey is taking the lead:

Cont. reading: A Fresh View on Islamic Law

In the Texas primary debate Obama came out with a story from a captain in Afghanistan. The captain claimed he lacked personal and had to use captured weapon and ammunition because he couldn’t get the stuff he needed through the army logistics. Obama was attacked as telling a lie, but it was confirmed that the captain really told that story.

In a Senate hearing yesterday Gen.Casey testified that the story is indeed plausible:

Gen. George Casey, the Army’s chief of staff, said Tuesday he has no reason to doubt Barack Obama’s recent account by an Army captain that a rifle platoon in Afghanistan didn’t have enough soldiers or weapons. But he questioned the assertion that the shortages prevented the troops from doing their job.

Casey was the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq and did not want more troops there, i.e. he was against the "surge". His main point was that troops did not get enough rest and the army would fall apart.

But here is some interesting detail missing in the reports from yesterday hearings. When the Senate confirmed him for his new job as chief of the army, McCain and Clinton voted against Casey, while Obama voted for him.

What does this do the horserace? I don’t know. But support of the anti-surge military fraction for Obama is an interesting detail which should be mentioned.

Cloned Poster writes:

The price of US support for Turkey’s incursion into Iraq:

• Turkey sending an operational brigade of soldiers to Afghanistan.
• Turkey opening up the way for US soldiers to transfer out of Iraq using Turkish soil.
• The setting up of a missile system in Turkey.

Point 1 will be difficult for Turkish domestic policy reasons, point 2 is no problem and point 3 will inevitably end up with something like this:

In 2011, the U.S. deployed 15 IRBMs (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) at İzmir, Turkey, aimed at the western Russian cities, including Moscow. Given its 1,500-mile (2,410 km) range, Moscow was only 16 minutes away.

Medvedev publicly expressed anger and personal offense from the Turkish missile emplacement. The Cuban missile deployment — the first time Russian missiles were outside the country — was his response to U.S.  missiles in Turkey.

Former democratic Governor Siegelman of Alabama was prosecuted for some bribe issues that never happened and is still in jail.

Yesterday’s 60 minutes report about the case was blacked out in Alabama with a sorry excuse.

It is another example of a corrupted Justice Department and republican politicalization of the judicative and media.

Scott Horton at Harpers has been all over the case for a long time. The questions I have is: Why hasn’t the democratic led Congress acted forcefully on this case yet? Will it ever?

by Uncle $cam
lifted from a comment

Excellent. Thanks for that post JJ, @56 …

When Zinn says,

This seizes the country every four years because
we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in
determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. It is a multiple choice test so narrow, so specious, that no self-respecting teacher would give it to students.

he is speaking to me. Bellgong wrote something in the ot to the effect of it taking, "7 of the next 9 election cycles or so .."
or some such, I’m not sure we have that long, nay, I’m damn sure we
don’t, and even if we did, who the hell has the time to wait?

Like Neil Young sang, "… I’m getting old …"

I’m tired of waiting, I’m sick of being Charlie Brown ever trying to
kick that football, I’m ready to smash Lucy in the face for once,
metaphorically speaking of course, I’d never attack a female cartoon.

How many years do you guys have?

I’ve been waiting, and working and hoping, voting for "change" for
decades, as I imagine most of you have, and every year it gets a little
bit worse, slowly, mind you, ever so slowly, so we aren’t aware of it,
but the water keeps rising and we keep adjusting to it.

We collectively are like the Katrina victims left alone to drown,
only slowly, ever so slowly and our social intelligence tells us
something is wrong. But we dare not look. Better to not see the social
and moral and material decay around us.

We best not look to hard, because the water is up to the back porch by now.

But it’s getting to the point, that we can not not look anymore, in other words, it’s damn near in our face, inside and out, now.

Inside within even our own immediate families, outside within our
communities, and civil infrastructure. I’m reminded of a post by Loose
Shanks, or tante amie or someone talking of …

… ahhh, here it is, about being lost in the wilderness, indeed:

Wilderness is tryin’ to make it to Social Security age, when the
cost of living is up and going through the roof, with your paycheck
worth less and less in phoney US dollar play money. That’s what I’m
talking about … Wilderness.

Wilderness is having poor relatives calling you for a handout, and
everyone staying away from Uncle Ernie’s funeral, because nobody can
afford the bill …

Tenebrous, and witty but oh so true, oh so serious. At least from
where I sit. Anyway, it’s been two years and that post still sits with
me, I’d encourage you guys and gals to go and read it.

/rant

I’ll go rant somewhere else now, thank you…

Two days ago this year’s CeBIT opened in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT is the world’s biggest information technology trade show with about some 6000 exhibitiors and half a million visitors.

This year’s fair special, a Future Forum, is all about Green-IT:

In order to give the "hot" issue of climate protection the major attention it deserves throughout the global ICT industry, the makers of CeBIT are launching a new "Green IT Village" in Hall 9, a "Green IT Guide" plus an array of forums and lectures dedicated to the topic.

Also at CeBIT Intel attracted huge crowds of desktop PC users with a brandnew motherboard:

The Intel Desktop Board D5400XS, when paired with two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors, forms the foundation of the Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform. Hardcore gamers will welcome the opportunity to enjoy multiple simultaneous graphics card solutions featuring either NVIDIA SLI or ATI Crossfire for today’s latest graphics-intensive titles.

According to my dead tree computer geek magazine, a full D5400XS system with four graphic cards will have an electric consumption of some 1.4 kilowatt.

Intel’s remarkable and somewhat fitting marketing name for the new product is ‘Skulltrail‘.

We live by your comments …

… please feed us …

McCain has declared two days ago:

No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding.

He had declared something different in 2002:

"I was contacted by Mr. [Lowell] Paxson on this issue"

Mr Paxon agrees with the older version:

Paxson said yesterday, "I remember going there to meet with him." He recalled that he told McCain: "You’re head of the Commerce Committee. The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter."

And what has McCain’s lawyer to say about this:

"We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?" Bennett said.

Now it is obvious that McCain was caught on the ‘Straight Lie Express’. I don’t care about that. Politicians lie all the time.

But being President is about hiring good people.

McCain hires people who can not recognize the difference between "did speak" and "did not speak".

That is a big problem.

Because you will not read it in the "western" media without heavy obfuscation and bias we reproduce the original:

Latest Iran Safeguards Report Delivered to IAEA Board, 23 February 2008

After the report was circulated, Dr. ElBaradei made the following comments:

"Our task in Iran is to make sure that the Iranian nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes.  We are at it for the last five years.  In the last four months, in particular, we have made quite good progress in clarifying the outstanding issues that had to do with Iran´s past nuclear activities, with the exception of one issue, and that is the alleged weaponization studies¹ that supposedly Iran has conducted in the past.  We have managed to clarify all the remaining outstanding issues, including the most important issue, which is the scope and nature of Iran´s enrichment programme.
…
We need Iran to implement the Additional Protocol². We need to have that authority as a matter of law. That, I think, is a key for us to start being able to build progress in providing assurance that Iran´s past and current programmes are exclusively for peaceful purposes.  So we have the Protocol issue and we have the weaponization, alleged weaponization studies. I should however add that in connection with the weaponization studies, we have not seen any indication that these studies were linked to nuclear material.

(Emphazis and notes added by b)

¹The "alleged weaponization studies" are unproven accusations based on U.S. intelligence, reportedly from the Niger papers Laptop of Death and given to the IAEA only two weeks ago. They do not refer to anything nuclear.

²Iran had voluntarily signed, but not ratified, the additional protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Following the IAEA Board decision, in a rare non-consentual vote, to report Iran’s file to the UN Security Council, Iran informed the IAEA that it would suspend voluntary adherence to the additional protocol.

Whoever said that people don’t care about Iraqis was wrong? They do.

screen-shot of news.yahoo.com – story

Turkey just launched a large scale invasion of north Iraq:

Turkey’s military said the land offensive — the first major incursion in a decade — had fighter aircraft in support. Turkish TV said up to 10,000 troops had entered Iraq.

The operation was prepared with aerial bombing and artillery attacks on PKK position throughout the last days. PKK is a Kurdish rebel group fighting for autonomy in south-east Turkey.

The PKK operates unhindered in the Qandeel (Kandil) mountain range in north east Iraq:

Cont. reading: Turkey Invades Iraq

Why can’t The Independent hire headline writers with reading skills or some basic geographic knowledge?

full screen-shot

link

Where will the next economic bubble evolve?

I have long argued that basic materials and commodities, including agricultural products and energy will lead to a financial bubble. With record pricies in these areas we can already see it forming but are not yet in zones of parabolic price rises and a speculative build up of overcapacities.

In a Harper’s piece Eric Janszen, a longtime venture capitalist, is trying to answer the question too and finds a different though related market where a bubble might evolve.

Janszen starts off with a good overview of U.S. monetary history and concludes that a big change happend when the Bretton Woods system ended with Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard.

After 1975, the United States would never again post an annual merchandise trade surplus. Such high-value, finished-goods-producing industries as steel and automobiles were no longer dominant. The new economy belonged to finance, insurance, and real estate—FIRE.

The FIRE system became an end in itself that creates bubble after bubble to keep going.

Janszen then explains how the Internet stock bubble evolved, exploded, and the tech stocks markets deflated back to their longterm historic trendlines.

The need for a new bubble arose and, as the conditions were already in place, it evolved around housing. Janszen applies the same parameters to the housing bubble he observed during the Internet bubble bust. According to his calculations a reverse to the historic trendline in housing requires prices to drop 38% from their peak, will take about 6 years and will reflect a loss of $12 trillion in nominal value.

Now a new bubble is urgently needed. It will appear in a certain market only when several preconditions are in place:

Cont. reading: The Next Bubble – Where?

So it looks like Obama is the chosen one.

The advantages over Clinton in the recent primaries looks high enough to give him the decisive momentum.

Clinton is running the wrong campaign strategy. The negative stuff her surrogates spread against Obama does not drag support to her. Quite the opposite – it turns people away from her.

If Hillary still wants to have a chance, she will have to turn that around and run positive again. But that is not the general mindset of the Clinton machine and I doubt that she is able to do so. Time is getting short for her.

Buying off superdelegates or trying to convert pledged delegates would backfire too. People are sick of such stuff. They associate it with Republican politics. The delegates will think about that too.

If Clinton would somehow become the general election candidate by fudging, the great advantage the Democrats have in this election will drop dramatically. Many Democratic voters would then abstain and not give a vote for her. That is the huge risk and the delegates know this.

With Obama the general election will likely be a landslide victory for the Democrats. Bush is despised as a 19% job approval poll rating can attest. With Obama as candidate there essentially needs to be no campaign at all against McCain. Simply show the picture of him taking refugee in Bush’s arm over and over.

The racists will still vote against Obama but most of them seem to have left the Democratic side long ago.

So it’s gonna be Obama, the "last, best hope". Funny how the comments in that thread about Lincoln and ‘vision’ moved into sci-fi territory.

So there is the Muad’Dib. It is likely that he is also the Kwisatz Haderach.

Will he keep the spice flowing?

My last economy posting was about the monoliners. Credit insurance companies who actually have two lines of business, municipal bond insurance and CDS/CDO/junk insurance. As the second business line is in the doldrums, there were attempts to split the sound business from the risky one. Two arguments have come up against this.

The first, by Roubini, says that the municipal credit insurance will likely turn out to be a bad business too. The housing crisis will hit municipals hard and some might well default. For examples look at the problems of Vallejo, CA or Lavon, TX.

The second reason is that astonishingly no one is volunteering to be on the losing side of such business split and people are threatening to litigate:

It appears they have discovered that they lack a legal basis for preferring the muni policyholders over the others, and even if they try not to prefer one group over another, it is going to be well nigh impossible to come up with a formula that won’t be contested.

When the bond insurers will be downgraded, the debt they insured will be downgraded too. 

Then the Banks who hold such debt will need $20-30 billion in additional reserves, i.e. real fresh capital, or go into bankruptcy. That can not be allowed because the systemic effects of large bank defaults would threaten to tear down the whole Jenga tower of the finacial system. We will therefore likely see some big U.S. banks getting nationalized and their losses socialized. (The system might come down anyway.)

Cont. reading: The Big Bailout