Monk-y Business

(Photo: AP)

As mass demonstrations spread through Myanamar a good deal of the media’s focus has been on the Buddhists monks who have joined the regular citizens in their protests against new government policies.

The monks provide a great image, identically dressed in bright red robes, and their peaceful philosophy and manner serves as a dramatic counterpoint to the aggressiveness and oppressiveness of the ruling Junta.

The situation looks likely to result in a classic battle of democratic people-power versus despotism, peace and humility of the monks versus the arrogance and aggression of the military. Anyone with a soul will be rooting for the monks and the public to prevail.

But the monks notable participation isn't about freedom of expression and democracy or morality or social justice--it's about a change in economics that is going to hurt the monks directly.

"The protests, sparked by a doubling of petrol and diesel prices, and a fivefold rise in the price of cooking gas on August 15, tapped a deep well of anger in a country in economic crisis. Inflation runs at 40% and most people suffer economic hardship." ( The Guardian )

If the citizens can’t afford the essentials, how are they going to afford the alms that the monks rely-on to survive? Monks contribute next-to nothing to the general economy and the general economic welfare—what they get they keep to themselves--and they are supported in that by the general population.

So don't imagine that the monks are championing democracy, they've got a significant economic interest to protect.

Death and Taxes (and Profits)

This job ad has now been removed from Serco's site.

The position is for a "Personal Effects Specialist" (67 openings available!) who;


“...receives, inventories, sorts, cleans, photographs, packages, and ships to family members (next of kin) all personal effects belonging to military service members and others, including defense contractors, who are killed or severely injured worldwide, especially incident to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

In other words not only do contractors get a guaranteed profit from their "cost-plus" deals with the Pentagon whilst their employees are alive, they charge the expenses of their deaths to the taxpayer too--and make a profit on that!

( hat-tip to Wonkette! for finding the ad--but rather missing the point of the story).

UPDATE:
I wrote a lengthier post on this at NEWSHOGGERS, where Marcie Hascall Clark left a comment with this highly pertinent information...

The Defense Base Act Insurance coverage that each contract company must provide relieves the company of any responsibility of any kind to the employee or their family.The premiums are 10% or more of the employees salary and are included in the contract (taxpayer pays). When an employee is injured or killed the DBA insurance company is reimbursed all medical, repatriation, lost wages, and death benefits they pay out by the Federal Government (taxpayer) plus a 15% admin fee under the War Hazards Act.

The Blog Factor

It’s been two years since I started my blog, and in that time oil prices, the uninsured, the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan and the number of Republicans in jail and under investigation have all gone up. The genocide in Darfur continues and ‘freedomocracy’, once thought to be on the march is actually face down in an alley somewhere being eaten by rats. (None of this is my fault; it is mere coincidence I assure you.)

So why blog, or continue to blog? Simple: Because it matters. The effort of writing a serious post forces me to think, to research, to justify my arguments and opinions. For the few who read my blog, my arguments may inform them. Their comments and their own blogs in turn inform me. And the whole informed conversation that results percolates through an engaged society.

TV news-shows now report-on and reference blogs (to a limited degree); not because they want to but because they have to—some even have their own blogs. But most of them still don’t “get-it” –their posts are either copies of existing print articles or transcripts from their shows that fail to properly exploit the medium, and where original content is offered it is often as dumb as their traditional products—poorly researched, poorly written and condescending (and offering little in the way of discussion as having posted the author often disengages from the comments and in some cases disallows comments altogether).

There’s no question that a few blogs have had an effect on public discourse and current affairs. Several prominent right–wing blogs have done a fine job in rumor-mongering, character-assassination, and in manufacturing pointless “controversy”. A few left-wing blogs have broken important stories of corruption and drawn attention to important issues the traditional media has ignored.
But such blogs are well organized and focused. What purpose then do small personal blogs such as mine, and the hundreds of thousands like it, serve? Are we all just a bunch of whining egotists, yelling at strangers in the hope we’ll get the attention we crave, demanding to be taken seriously? Do our blogs serve anyone (or anything) but ourselves?

As far as I know, no one has bothered to find out, but I suspect that individual bloggers, by virtue of the hypertext link, form a collective that does serve the community and affect change.
Consider the results of the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections.
In 2000 e-blogger was just getting started. The political dialog was still shaped by the oligarchy of TV, Talk-Radio and the major newspapers. At that time any mention of blogs was relegated to computer columns and “tech” segments and was discussed in terms of personal entertainment or as a new-fangled marketing tool or consumer resource.
By 2004 the media oligarchy had begun to reference particular blogs as news sources on occasion (most notably the Drudge Report). Some current-affairs shows set aside air time to highlight what was “on the blogs”, though the selections varied widely in what was deemed noteworthy.
Iraq was the dominant topic and discontent was brewing, but the narrative in the traditional media remained the same and Bush returned to the White House.

From 2004 to 2006 the media oligarchy continued to parrot and promote the administration’s and the GOP’s positions. The Republicans and right-wing pundits continued to dominate in air-time and column inches and the message was always the same—tax cuts helped the economy, the economy is strong, jobs are being created, global warming is a myth, we’re winning in Iraq, if we don’t fight them over there, if the Democrats were in control there’ll be more terror attacks and higher taxes, gays threaten marriage, immigrants threaten America and on and on.

But from early 2005 opinion polls showed that the general public was becoming increasingly skeptical of the messages they were receiving. First, opposition to the war in Iraq edged into a slight majority. Then confidence in the economic outlook for workers and the middle class began to wane. Bush’s popularity began to decline as did the assessment of how well he was conducting the war. The administration’s messages were no longer molding the masses’ opinions. What had changed?

Several surveys found that the public was now more reliant on the internet for their news and information, than on TV, radio and the paper Press. But if the transition from TV, radio and newspapers as sources of information was simply a matter of convenience, and as all the big players had a long established web-presence, wouldn’t their audience simply have migrated from the traditional medium to the new medium, from Fox News to Fox News.com, for example? If the information remained the same, and the sources remained the same, opinions shouldn’t have changed. But they did. Why?

Personal experiences at odds with the optimistic assessments of the government and the pundits wouldn’t necessarily reverse an individual’s opinion of the larger picture—particularly as there was no shortage of pundits spouting grand statistics and telling the public that their problems were their own fault and not the fault of policy makers. Those reliant on the traditional media might not have believed everything they were being told, but they had little or no alternative sources of information.
The internet however provides unlimited sources of information which take little effort to discover. Furthermore the internet user can concentrate on a specific issue without distraction, observe discussions and actually participate in them. The passive news consumer becomes an engaged news user and through blog-commenting and blogging itself the ordinary citizen can disseminate news and information as well.

Between 2005 and 2006 opinion polls showed increasing dissatisfaction with not just Iraq, but with domestic policy issues as well—employment, health, environment, security, justice, corruption, energy, immigration, education and civil rights. As the mid term elections loomed, the GOP’s policy priorities were the exact opposite of the public’s priorities. Clearly the Republicans dominance in the mass media and their infamous message discipline had lost its effectiveness. The public was rejecting their message, because in their gradual rejection of the traditional media in favor of the internet, the public had the option to be better informed, and I believe even the small blogs played their part.

A blog such as mine has an irregular readership of perhaps three-dozen people. My readers tend to have their own readerships, and we all have our own blogrolls where some of the links are common but many others unique. The shared interests we have and the unique links we have create networks of exponential scale. New and useful information is disseminated quite easily, new contacts made, new communities, though mutable, established. News and ideas are transferred very quickly, far and wide. Small blogs that discuss large issues can create a “collective conscious” by virtue of their accessibility. Again, I ask; if the move from traditional media to the internet was just a change in the medium, but not the “message”, why does the message no longer hold sway over public opinion?---because the source of information is different, and because the audience is no longer passive. The public doesn’t have to put-up with being spoken-to, they can speak to each other and they can talk back—and that’s what blogs provide.

I think blogs have made a difference, and that’s why I will keep on blogging. And I hope everyone else does too.

Bush’s New Excuse?—If We Leave Iraq, Iran Will Threaten World Peace!

Bush’s recent speech to the American Legion in which he said that allowing Iran to pursue “technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust” sounds mighty familiar of course.

Now whilst a majority of Americans have finally wised-up to Bush’s crap, the fact that his year-long campaign to push Iran as the next great “threat” has had no takers beyond the usual suspects doesn’t mean a damn. He's still keen on bombing Iran.

As everything Bush has EVER done or said clearly demonstrates, he doesn’t give a shit about what the majority public thinks or needs; manufacturing support for the Iraq invasion was merely useful but now with his established “executive powers” he’s perfectly capable of doing whatever he wants without public support—all he needs is his “Beltway” enablers, of which he has many, too attack Iran.

Interestingly (and scarily) he may have an accidental ally in Iranian President Ahmadinejad:

"The political power of the occupiers is collapsing rapidly," Ahmadinejad said at a press conference apparently after Bush’s American Legion speech, referring to US troops in Iraq. "Soon, we will see a huge power vacuum in the region. Of course, we are prepared to fill the gap, with the help of neighbors and regional friends like Saudi Arabia, and with the help of the Iraqi nation."

This quote may serve Bush well—not in reality, but in his mind and the minds of his warmongering supporters: in addition to the threat of Iran as a nuclear power, Bush could now parse these words to argue even more forcefully for the continued occupation of Iraq; the reasoning would be that an Iran with nuclear ambitions intends to “fill the gap” that would be left by a US withdrawal, take over Iraq and its oil and finance yet more global terrorism!

I’ll go out on what may be a very short limb here and predict that Bush will publicly make this connection in the next two weeks.

Such a connection would actually make no sense to the well-informed, but then that’s never been the US’s nor George’s strong point, has it?

UPDATE (8/30) :

"To a person, they said there would be genocide, gas prices in the U.S. would rise to eight or nine dollars a gallon, al-Qaida would continue its expansion, and Iran would take over that portion of the world if we leave," [John]Porter (R-Nevada) said Wednesday in a phone interview from Las Vegas.

That's one ( not from the WH though)...we'll see if this progresses

Who's The Bimbo?

When Miss Teen South Carolina was asked why she thought one fifth of Americans can’t locate the USA on a world map the very pretty young woman couldn’t locate a coherent sentence:

“I personally believe the U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh...people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and, uh, I believe that our education like such as South Africa and, uh, the Iraq everywhere like, such as and... I believe that they should, our education over here in the US should help the US, err, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future… for it.”


The YouTube clip of her response has now been sniggered-at by millions, and blogged by hundreds (and aired as entertaining filler on ABC News this pm precisely because it’s zooming around the intertubes.)

Magpie notes:

“While it's easy to laugh at [Lauren Caitlin] Upton, I'd submit that she's practicing the same craft that's used by US business leaders and politicians every day: that of saying a whole bunch of meaningless stuff to try to hide the fact that a statement is wrong, incoherent, or nonexistent.”

I had a similar thought before I read Magpie’s perspective which reinforces much of what’s she’s written. Consider these words and ponder who it is who deserves laughter and ridicule:

"I was raised in the West. The West of Texas. It's pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California." -George W. Bush, in Los Angeles as quoted by the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2000

"Border relations between Canada and Mexico have never been better." —George W. Bush, in a press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien. Sept. 24, 2001

"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease." —George W. Bush, at a news conference in Europe, June 14, 2001

"This very week in 1989, there were protests in East Berlin and in Leipzig. By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship in Central America had collapsed." —George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Nov. 6, 2003

"It's the Afghan national army that went into Najaf and did the work there." --George W. Bush, referring to Iraqi troops during a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, Washington, D.C., Sept. 23, 2004

"Wow! Brazil is big." --George W. Bush, after being shown a map of Brazil by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brasilia, Brazil, Nov. 6, 2005

"After all, Europe is America's closest ally." --George W. Bush, Mainz, Germany, Feb. 23, 2005

Going Gonzo

" I need to spend more time with....ehhh..Morgan Fairchild...yeah, that's it...Morgan Fairchild...yeah."

"The unfair treatment that he's been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department," the official said.

This Friday Alberto Gonzalez handed George Bush his resignation and with his characteristic smirk asked the President to “spot” him his share of their burrito lunch, explaining that he was now unemployed and he wouldn’t be getting his social security check for another three weeks.


Gonzalez said that the weeks of interrogation by various congressional committees had been “torture”.

He went on to say that he believed he may have resigned to “give someone else a chance” but he was sure his ouster wasn’t politically motivated.
Asked when he had made the decision to fire himself he said he couldn’t recall, nor was he certain of the criteria he used in his decision but he was certain that incompetence wasn’t a factor.

BREAKING! GONZO LEAVES NATION’S KIDS TREMBLING IN FEAR!

“I’m not going to resign. I’m going to stay focused on protecting our kids.. The department is responsible for protecting our kids, for making our neighborhoods safe, for protecting our country against attacks of terrorism, to going after gangs, going after drug dealers. I’m staying focussed on that” –Alberto Gonzalez (March 22, 2007)

Without Alberto Gonzalez to protect them, millions of children across the nation broke down in tears and clutched their dollies in fear of gangs of drug dealing terrorist immigrants.


President Bush, after accepting Gonzalez’s resignation finished his burrito, read Plato’s Republic, went cycling, cleared some brush and stared at a cow before exercising his recess powers to appoint Marvin Monroe as Psychologist General.

Asked why it had taken him 36 hours to act, the President explained that he didn’t want to scare the kids “and besides”, he added, “Gonzo’s always joking around. When he gave me his resignation I thought he was just trying to get out of paying for lunch. Look…if I listened to everything everyone
told me, Iraq wouldn’t have been freedomized—in other words, oceans don’t protect us and that’s why we’re over there! And that's why I'm doing a heck of a job—it’s called leadership!”

George Will Links Republicans, Neo-Cons, to Nazis

“Come September, America might slip closer toward a Weimar moment. It would be milder than the original but significantly disagreeable.
After the First World War, politics in Germany's new Weimar Republic were poisoned by the belief that the army had been poised for victory in 1918 and that one more surge could have turned the tide. Many Germans bitterly concluded that the political class, having lost its nerve and will to win, capitulated. The fact that fanciful analysis fed this rancor did not diminish its power”.

So writes George Will in his latest Washington Post Op-Ed.

Will is referring to the myth used by military leaders to explain Germany’s surrender which was negotiated by the civilian politicians.
The German military claimed they had never been defeated and would have “won" WWI if not for their betrayal by the civilian government suing for peace, which the generals termed a “stab-in the back” (or Dolchstosslegende)

The facts were that the Germans simply reached the limit of their resources and could fight no longer. The British Navy blockaded German ports preventing supplies from their small empire and outmaneuvered and out-gunned the Kriegsmarine. The Tank broke through the trench defenses, forcing German retreat. The British Army was able to deploy troops from all over the empire (and the Irish served in large numbers and with distinction) and the US provided a very useful replenishment.

Thanks to the blockade the greatest priority was given to the military; the civilian Germans lost fuel, transportation and eventually food to the war effort, and began to starve whilst inflation took hold. The war was simply unsustainable.

But rather than blame the policy that had created the war, the generals blamed the policy that ended it—focusing particularly on liberal intellectuals (which included many Jews of course). Hitler made much use of the “stab-n-the-back” myth to rise to and maintain his power.
This same argument is being used by Bush now in his nonsensical comparison of the “lessons” of Vietnam with the current state of Iraq; and by the Republican and neocon cheerleaders insisting on yet more Friedman units else America will lose--thanks to the liberal intellectuals defeatist policies, not the original flawed policy and gross mismanagement that has led us to this pass.

I’m not sure George Will really meant to compare Bush and his “advisers” and the GOP to the warmongering, racist, authoritarian, militaristic, intolerant and vainglorious Nazis (otherwise I'm sure he'd have included 'Nazi in the title), but when you try to draw parallels, sometimes you end up with a "equals" sign.

Our Surge Robots WIll Be Greeted With Nuts and Bolts!

"The demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply," said Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey last week, referring to Bush’s “surge”.



Shit-for-brains Bush butt-buddy AEI “analyst" and “Surge-On! General” Fred Kagan insists “the longer that you keep American forces there, the longer you give this process to solidify and to make sure that it's not going to slide back."


So how is the Pentagon going to keep the surge going when they don’t have any troops left?







Robots!





It turns out that the Pentagon is about to award a contract for 1,000 reconnaissance robots (on August 24) to be delivered by the end of the year.



And how is the Pentagon going to decide which company’s robot has the right heavy-metal poly-alloy stuff to serve in what is rapidly really becoming the "Army of Whoever W've Got Left"?


Sadly, the decision will not be made by 'hot' metal-on-metal death-match action, but by whichever company promises to deliver 1,000 robots the fastest by year's end, using the most most convincing PowerPoint presentation.





It seems the hot favorite is iRobot--best known for its cat-terrifying, housemaid-unemploying Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner (the company does however already supply the Army with “Packbot” recon and bomb-disposal robots).





And though the company is doing pretty well these days, no doubt they’ll be very happy to rack up around $160 million in sales for four months of work (assuming of course that they aren’t lying about their production capacity).

Now the troops know damn well they aren’t leaving anytime soon, so the delivery of more robots will be at least somewhat welcome news for the extra-dangerous jobs of recon and bomb disposal.

On the other hand the order that suggests they’ll be doing more close-quarter house-to-house reconnaissance in the upcoming months and encountering more IEDs. The robots will provide a valuable assist in tactical operations, but it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference to the strategic, political situation.

Maybe the Pentagon should invest in a few protocol droids as well?

Pentagon Censors Milbloggers, Media and Self but Still Loses to Media, Blogger

“There are plenty of good reasons for the military to be concerned about inadvertent release of "intel". But the fact is the US military as a whole is as guilty of providing such "intel" to a far greater degree than any single military blogger, or indeed of all of them.”

I’m quoting myself here from a post entitled Entire Army Shoots Self In Foot , in which I took the DoD’s arguments and suppositions (as reported in NewYork Newsday ) behind their ‘crackdown’ on "security-risk” milblogs (and their authors) to task.

That was written back in January 2006. Now in August 2007 comes this from Wired.com

"For years, the military has been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual's blog.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assesment Cell (AWRAC) between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

It took a FOIA request to get this information, which is also mighty interesting because I concluded my January 2006 post with this:

“It's hard to draw any other conclusion than that the gagging of milblogs is nothing more than an exercise in political propaganda which does nothing to serve the soldier, the mission or the nation. The Pentagon itself has done far more to provide the "enemy" with the Intel it seeks, and to undermine morale in theater and at home though its incapacity to provide the troops with supplies and listen to their real-time field experience, than any milblog ever has.”

Note that the DoD was all too willing to publicly argue its case at the outset, and the fact that it took a FOIA request to publicly reveal the subsequent research that refutes their suppositions.

Now as gratified as I am at this validation of my arguments and conclusions, this doesn’t suddenly make me an expert, nor provide me with another opportunity to criticize the traditional media (which I and many other have often done and still do).

What it does show, is that an ordinary citizen with no “officially recognized” expertise and limited resources can, with a little thought thrown-in, determine actual reality on their own rather than relying solely on being spoon-fed the versions of self-perpetuating “experts” and “authorities”.

Score another one for the hate-filled, loony, lefty hippie bloggers!

(P.S. On the subject of US military meddling in the truth, here’s an old satirical post about Rumsfeld that might amuse; The Iraqi Free Press (a $100-million value!),
with the bonus of some actual Arabic phrases you can learn!

Bush Baby?

Not my usual type of subject, but Jenna “The Wild One” Bush just got engaged to one Henry Hager who, as an aide to recently expunged Bush-brain Karl Rove, would now seem to be unemployed (just like Jenna herself) and thus eligible for government handouts.

Wedding plans have yet to be announced. Also yet to be announced is why she’s gained so much weight over the past few months when “the other one” is still quite trim, as are her parents. (pictorial timeline of Jenna’s form here at the egregiously gossipy but entertaining Wonkette).

But I should stop right there.
Who am I to pry and poke at the adult First Daughter’s appearance? Why, such a thing would surely breach the bounds of decency!

And to insinuate that she, the daughter of a firm advocate of abstinence before marriage, might be pregnant out of wedlock would be quite beyond the pale. No doubt the proof that Jenna has simply been overindulging in Hamburgers and potato salad whilst vacationing with Sarkozy will be made evident in the next few months.

Indeed on the day of her wedding we should all be able to look forward to Jenna looking radiant and at her very best, as every bride and every groom and every witness desires.

I wonder when the wedding will be. October? I'm just guessing.