The Odds on Obama (or: Things that creep me out)

Weren't very good, but then again he was as safe a bet as Bill Clinton. Regardless, both were better off than MJ or W, as well they should have been--if only because Obama would be hard-pressed to fuck up as royally as George Jr. But, that's also why it was a stupid move (in the words of some diplo-type "Absolutely stupid"--thanks M.) to give Barack the award: he hasn't really done anything yet, and the few things he has done aren't worth the approbation. And, perhaps not as importantly but more annoyingly, this is just the kind of thing the Right will use to support their horror that the world is sucking at the teat of Obama-nation.


Still, what's most disturbing about the whole affair is this creepy graphic The Economist used in their reaction piece about the award.


Heard George Packer (of The New Yorker) on the radio say Obama should not accept it (didn't know it was an option), that they should put it on hold, so to speak, until he has accomplished something. I completely agree.



Otherwise, I've mostly been creeped-out by science. Like the oncoming war of man versus machine ala Terminator. There's the singularity that Ray Kurzweil talks about, explained on this podcast from Future Tense, a weekly science/tech show. Basically, the rate of technological advance will increase so much that soon we'll be able to live indefinitely, if only virtually. But first computers are just going to get smarter than we are, hence the possible catastrophe. According to The Economist, it will be here soon.

"How soon before evolvable machines become cleverer than people? Little over a decade is the current consensus. One such machine has already been awarded a patent for something it quietly invented on its own."

Crap.



Alongside the computers outsmarting us, not only will medical technology increase, but we'll be incorporating computers into our biology, like some of us already (or soon will) have. Though for now technology only tacks on a few years, eventually it will allow us to live a really, really long time. Ready for that?

"'Very long lives are not the distant privilege of remote future generations -- very long lives are the probable destiny of most people alive now in developed countries,' Kaare Christensen of the Danish Aging Research Center wrote on Friday in a study in the Lancet medical journal.

Many governments in developed nations are already making moves toward raising the typical age of retirement to try to cope with aging populations."

What? As soon as people start living a little longer they talk about making us work more? Screw you Reuters.



"The researchers said this was an important strategy, and added that if part-time work was considered for more of the workforce, that could have yet more benefits.

"If people in their 60s and early 70s worked much more than they do nowadays, then most people could work fewer hours per week.... Preliminary evidence suggests that shortened working weeks over extended working lives might further contribute to increases in life expectancy and health."

Oh, okay, I like the sound of that. But still:

"'People younger than 85 years are living longer and, on the whole, are able to manage their daily activities for longer.'

But for people older than 85, the situation is less clear, the researchers said. Data are sparse, and there is widespread concern that exceptional longevity -- with ever larger numbers living to 100 and more -- could be grim for the people themselves and the societies they live in."

Crap.

More from the "bogus 'war on the wealthy' storyline."

Excuse the excessive borrowing, but this budget is too important... If you care about reality and stuff. Again, from Media Matters:

The media's tax fraud

by Jamison Foser

Last week, President Obama unveiled a budget outline that extends the Bush tax cuts for all but the top two percent of taxpayers and makes permanent a tax credit of up to $800 for low- and middle-income workers that was included in the recent stimulus package, among other tax cuts.

On the other hand, individual taxpayers with taxable income above $200,000 ($250,000 for families) per year would pay more in taxes under Obama's plan, under which the tax rates paid on income in the top brackets would revert to their levels under President Clinton in the 1990s -- from 33 and 35 percent to 36 and 39.6 percent. Slate.com's Daniel Gross estimates that for someone with $350,000 in income, this will amount to about $1,500 a year in increased taxes...

If the expiration, on schedule, of tax cuts that were always scheduled to expire is described as a policy of raising taxes, that makes a mockery of the entire tax policy debate of the past decade. It rigs tax debates in favor of Republicans, who find it easier to argue for tax cuts for the wealthy if they can argue that the cuts won't cost very much -- by making them "temporary" -- but who then get to argue that the scheduled expiration that they included in order to make the cuts look affordable would constitute a tax increase. The GOP gets to have it both ways, describing tax cuts as temporary when it helps them, and pretending they were intended to be permanent when it helps them. It's no great surprise Republicans want to have it both ways -- but that doesn't mean the media should go along.

The actual change the Obama proposal makes to the Bush tax rates is making permanent the cuts for those who make less than $200,000. The proposal doesn't actually increase income tax rates for anyone compared to current law, and it reduces them for the vast majority of taxpayers. Yet the "increase" -- mandated by a law signed by President Bush, and scheduled to occur for nearly a decade -- has gotten all the attention, while the cuts have largely escaped notice from the major media...

You have to wonder how media stars like Blitzer and Gibson have lost touch with their viewers so badly that they think $200,000 incomes are typical.

Charlie Gibson reportedly makes $8 million a year and is paid less than his counterparts at CBS and NBC.

Might that have something to do with his lack of perspective? How could it not?

How could it not, indeed.

"Peggy, that boy ain't right." -Hank Hill, from King of the Hill

Figuring out how best to assess--alright, brutalize--the boy-wonder from down under, Bobby Jindal, I found my self simply shaking my head in bewilderment; much like the fictional cartoon character quoted above talking about his son Bobby (seen above).

As for Jindal, the odd mix of brown face and good 'ol boy voice, smothered in the down home temperament of George W., made for the uneasy digestion of my dinner, to say the least.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, Jindal admits to changing his name--no surprise there--to Bobby because of another, albeit corporal, character from the TV show, The Brady Bunch. Any wonder whether or not Jindal would have been voted in sans Bobby? Me thinks not.

(Hm, makes you wonder if Barack should have changed his name? What would it have been? Tommy Obama? Kinda rolls of the tongue, no?)

Admittedly, I feel like I missed the boat on this guy--sorry folks. I had just recently decided how much I hate this guy--one of two new-brown-hopes for the Republican Party--when he goes and self-destructs before I had a clean shot at him. I mean, jeez, what's the point now? It's not as fun to kick a person when they're down. Well, not as fun. So, lets, shall we?

If you've watched any news in the last week, you'd be aware of the slow-speaking, seemingly, perpetually sweaty-palmed, pre-adolescent voiced governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal. Much like his fellow douche-bag from the north, who came from relative anonymity to "revitalize" the GOP in the presidential election, his bark turned out to be equally as flaccid as his bite. And like Sarah Palin before him, it didn't take long for the loud, proud swaggering of this good 'ol fashioned American to fizzle into the same old individualist, government-hating conservatism.

And though the guy seems like he might be a few IQ points higher than his female comrade (and Bush Jr. as well), he still speaks out of the same half-smirk, and with the same condescending, pedantic-while-still-trying-to-be-friends tone, rife with snarky jingoism, of his predecessor. Like: I don't really blame for listening to some guy named Hussein and wanting to believe him because you're sooo stupid; but now I'm going to tell you why he's full of shit and why I'm right.

It's to be expected that some Republican would have to rebut anything and everything that the President (that's still so cool to write) said, even if the suggestion was that the sky is blue and the grass is green. "The man must be color blind!" no doubt would be barked from the ill-fitted suit of some politico. And, indeed, that's just what happened.

Only, what usually comes next, didn't. Instead of the partisan seesaw of point/counterpoint about who was more effective or "won" spilling over into the media and blog-world, what's surprising is the evisceration, by even Fox News and the like, of his response to Obama's speech to Congress last week. He's been getting it at both ends, so to speak.

Of course, from a feckless media, focused on the drama of the political tennis match rather than content of these types of things, coverage was utterly devoid of any political analysis of Obama's speech or Jindal's rebuttal, other than the latter's image creation ala Regan-retread.

And here I was thinking there'd be no one to kick around for awhile.

But thankfully the GOP is always quick to proffer up some born-again, intelligent design-believing, anti-abortion/pro-death penalty (every life is sacred, huh?) moralist that appeals, more and more exclusively, to older white people of non-urban areas.

A slogan during an election run for Jindal was "Bubbas for Bobby." This ain't your (my) Jewish bubba, either. There's a 60 Minutes interview with Jindal and his wife in which they said they consider themselves non-Indian and tried to downplay their ethnicity. As well, he converted to Christianity from his family's Hindu background. (Wonder if the Bubbas would've accepted Jindal if his conversion was from Islam, which also is heavily represented in his parent's native India.)

But what my real ire is reserved for: the governor of Louisiana saying that a) the lesson from Katrina is that big government sucks (I can't even deal with how fucked this is in this post) and b) although he is philosophically opposed to President Obama's Stimulus plan (including the tax increase of less than 5% for only 5% of the country; really only done effectively by the expiring Bush II's tax cuts, bringing the rich back to Regan-era levels), he plans on taking almost all the money allotted to his state--all except additional unemployment benefits.

For the many thousands of newly out of work people, at no fault of their own, in his state, Jindal is unwilling to help them in this supposed economic crisis because that violates his other ideological relic from Economics 101. (Dick.) Namely, that unemployment benefits decrease the incentive to find new work, or so the theory goes. You know, much like the proverbial, Pavlovian dog. Only I don't feel that we're dogs. What we have to come to realize is that this is exactly what the neo-liberal economist thinks of human decision making.

It's as if Jindal, and others (but I'll get to them another time), went to the first class or read the first few chapters of a freshman Econ class, and then stopped (indeed, there's no lacking of these scratch-the-surface intellectuals on the left too; like only reading Marx's The Communist Manifesto and not Capital).

I have a decent perspective on this as I am currently taking a freshman Econ class, but, I've already gotten farther than that. And, although I can prove to you with graphs and curves and calculus (oh my!) why, in the perfect world of the free-market economy, the minimum-wage is actually bad for workers--that doesn't make it so in our not-so-perfect world.

Of course, to hear Jindal speak, it sounds as if he's hardly taking anything from the stimulus bill, you know, because it's sooo bad for the country. But the fact is, it will be more like + 97% what's offered to the state. Hypocritical dick.

Slam Dunk... Really!?!

I would think this wouldn't need to be articulated, but I just witnessed some think-tank policy-wonk, who definitely should have thought of this, use the now (or so I thought) infamous phrase, uttered by George Tenet in response to the validity of questionable intelligence that effectively started the war in Iraq.

Really!?! You mean when you hear the words "slam dunk" and you don't think of the pock-marked spy guy giving a verbal thumbs-up to the stupid looking, funny guy who resembles a monkey? (I'm looking at you Georgy-boy.) Really?!

Fine, then I'll state it here: the phrase "slam dunk" or "it's a slam dunk" can only be used ironically, preferably in a snarky, derisive manner, for the purpose of sarcasm.

Some is better than none.

17,000 or so people, mostly but not all Cambodians, entered a small high school in downtown Phnom Penh, in the second half of the 1970's. The three main buildings of relatively equal size in a U-shaped layout, are a couple of blocks off a main avenue. The three or four stories had balconies connecting the doors to the rooms facing the court yard enclosure of the buildings on three sides, the street on the fourth.

They weren't students; they were prisoners. They didn't ask questions, but were asked them. They didn't write; instead, they dictated long personal histories, transcribed by others who were not teachers. Not taught, these "confessions" were elicited by torture; there was no exercise, except that of the others who were not teachers, in its administration.

They didn't paint, but years later one man would. That man was made to sculpt the image of another man, Pol Pot, over and over again. Because of this, the artist, Van Nath, would be one of the dozen or so who would live through the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Still, some is better than none.

Look familiar? Indeed, it should. The above is one in a series made by Nath of the varied tortures used in Tuol Sleng, as the school became known, referring to the once school as "poison." It is a depiction of a man being waterboarded. Looks like torture to me. Apparently it felt like it as well to Christopher Hitchens, who allowed himself to be waterboarded by ex-military trained in the practice. You can watch the video here. He lasted a only few seconds. But, some is better than none.

Today, the former head of the prison, Comrade Duch, will go on trial, more than 30 years after its opening. This represents the first major figure in the Khmer Rogue to ever be put on trial. Pol Pot, the Stalin/Mao figure of Cambodia was allowed to die in the same jungle from which he waged his campaign of terror.

No wonder: the democratically (sort-of) elected, current and long-time Prime Minister of Cambodia was himself a high-ranking comrade in the Khmer Rouge. For this and other reasons, some in the country say this will be the only trial of a top official to be allowed to take place. In custody, waiting for trial sit a handful of other top Khmer Rouge. And, still, some is better than none.

Here at home, there are similar calls for justice for some of past Administration. At least a "truth and reconciliation," if not criminal charges for Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, et al. There doesn't seem to be much interest for this in Congress, from the press, or from the President. But, who knows, maybe they'll get Colin Powell on knowingly lying to the U.N. or Condi Rice on her incompetence as National Security Advisor before 9-11 (hm, funny, they're both black.) My vote is for George "slam dunk" Tenet, or some other higher-up at the CIA; less for the bad intel concerning Sadam's (lack of) WMDs and more about the Company's failure to alert the FBI--or someone--to their knowledge that the 9-11 hijackers were in the country.

Now, even 30 years down the line, some would be better than none.