Bad Upholstery

Peter Singer

2007-08-29T15:38:00.000-04:00

The animal rights ethicist, unsurprisingly, agrees with me in an interview with TNR on Michael Vick:

That comparison that you just asked me to make between dog fighting and sport-hunting is interesting in itself because these are both really very minor cruelties in the terms of the scale of things. The big thing that is going undiscussed here is the industrial raising of animals for food. Just in terms of the numbers, it's so vastly greater than sport-hunting, which in turn is a lot bigger than dog fighting. We're talking literally about billions of animals each year being reared in conditions that don't enable them to have a minimally decent life and then being killed in mass-production factory ways that again often are not painless. So that's the schizophrenia, that all of this hidden suffering that's engaged in by supposedly respectable corporations and that people then buy in their supermarkets is the thing that is unspoken. It's not the recreational activities that we should be focusing on.

As a meat eater, however, I have only one morally consistent position available to me: Free Michael Vick!

Music

2007-08-24T17:11:00.000-04:00

These guys are fun. I've been listening to their London Calling cover and it's actually quite pretty.

Weird

2007-08-24T16:03:00.000-04:00

Perez Hilton claims they've got exclusive sources that say Fidel Castro has died. Hopefully he died without any underwear, while getting out of a car, and Perez has got the pix.

Lobbying for Kurds

2007-08-24T15:54:00.000-04:00

A follow up...Here's what the Kurds got out of their BG&R contract (via Washington Post, 4/23/07):

On June 3, 2004, Barbour Griffith & Rogers agreed to represent the Kurdistan Democratic Party for $29,000 a month.
Qubad Talabani said the firm lobbied the White House for the $4 billion.
Twenty days later, on June 23, the U.S. occupation administration in Iraq gave the Kurds $1.4 billion in cash. The U.S. military flew the money -- brand-new $100 bills in shrink-wrapped bricks -- to Irbil on three helicopters.
Although officials with the occupation authority maintained that the payout was the Kurds' share of Iraq's 2004 capital budget and was unconnected to lobbying, Kurdish leaders insist otherwise.

FARA

2007-08-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

Ayad Allawi's representation by Washington lobbying powerhouse Barbour Griffith & Rogers reveals Washington's slimy inner workings, as Glenn Greenwald points out.

To get a taste of the cocktail of services these lobbying firms offer foreign agents, both brutal and benign, check out these excerpts from a BG&R's Foreign Agency Registration Act disclosure forms for their work with the Kurdistan Regional Government. (click for the full documents)

Access to government officials:
Op-ed placement:
Speeches and testimony:News stories:
(notice the use of post-NYT Judith Miller, once the most dangerous lazy journalist in America, to promote the Kurdistan cause...)

As revealing as these documents seem, they provide a carefully cropped and largely incomplete picture. Ken Silverstein's Harpers expose explains:

"no one has been prosecuted for ignoring the act, so there are few risks for non-compliance. Those firms that do register generally reveal little information beyond the names of their clients, the fees they pay, and limited information about whom they contact. Because disclosure requirements are so lax, it is nearly impossible to monitor the activities of foreign lobbyists. What little knowledge we do have of lobbyist-orchestrated diplomacy—including most of the projects discussed above—has been gleaned not from FARA filings but from serendipitous revelations or investigative reporting."

Iraq Slogger got their hands on Allawi's contract with BG&R. Stay tuned for BG&R's six month supplemental filing that ought to disclose their Allawi-related activities and reveal the extent of the cynical anti-Maliki manipulations.

Justice Sans Frontieres

2007-08-23T14:32:00.000-04:00

Via Subtopia, a bleak vision of the global imperial "justice" of the future:

"I can’t help to imagine a future global landscape slowly becoming more and more populated by this roving network of militarized tent cities, rounding up thousands of assorted “terrorist suspects” every day – linking them through some minimally publicized court system within a larger fragmented geography of “mini-Green Zones” and armored ‘Rule of Law Complexes’ perpetually on the prowl. Prodded by a so-called 'Long War (On Terror)' they become increasingly autonomous and less tethered over time, meandering in complete disregard for national and political boundaries, stealthily ballooning on strategic hilltops, in secret valleys, catching, detaining and sentencing terrorists over night. Altogether, expanding this greater amorphous Green Zone of spatial exception that creeps along in a spotty connection of spawned fortresses, temporary courtrooms, and nomadic detention sites..."

PHOTO: New York Times, A "rule of law" complex in Iraq, built to house the judges, lawyers and court officials of the embattled US-sponsored Iraqi justice system.

Post Post-Industrial

2007-08-23T10:06:00.000-04:00

Ithaca, NY may be bidding farewell to a hulking feature of their post-industrial landscape: the Ithaca Gun factory. Long abandoned, this lead-contaminated host to many a spooky high school video project (guilty) has piqued the interest of developer Frost Travis who wants to turn the site into 33 condo townhouses and a 2 acre public access point to view nearby Ithaca Falls.

The Ithaca Gun Company, which abandoned the factory in the mid eighties, manufactured an array of relatively successful shotguns including the Ithaca 37, used by the Los Angeles Police Department, and the Deerslayer series (which gave the Field & Stream gun blogger "subdural hematomas").

The factory lies up the hill from Ithaca's Fall Creek Elementary School (where mom teaches music) and currently functions mostly to slowly contaminate the neighboring waterfall and creek with asbestos and lead. But the smokestack, which pierces the Cornell University clogged skyline with a splinter of urban blight, is a stark reminder of Ithaca's manufacturing past.

The development will require a lot of clean up, about $2.4 million worth, which Travis hopes to secure with a grant from New York State. The $200,000-$300,000 condos would be no taller than the existing factory and would enjoy a spectacular view of Cayuga lake. Ra ra, more tax revenue for the city. Ra ra, a pretty access point to Ithaca Falls.

But when the gun-victim ghosts start haunting the bobo condo dwellers, there may not be state money available.

New Feed

2007-08-22T17:34:00.000-04:00

Was having some trouble with the old feed. Re-subscribe here. Sorry for the hassle.

Google Infinity And Beyond

2007-08-22T16:51:00.000-04:00

This is very, very exciting.

France's Neocon

2007-08-22T16:19:00.000-04:00

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has just from three days in Iraq during which he pledged "under President Sarkozy, France would no longer sit on the sidelines saying 'we told you so'." The trip was the first visit to Iraq by a French envoy since the 2003 American invasion.

This shift in French policy comes as no surprise to people familiar with Kouchner's past. The founder of Doctors Without Borders (MSF), he was not only one of the only French politicians to support the "principle" of ousting of Saddam, but was also a key character in Paul Berman's "Power and the Idealists," which traced the political development of the 1968 radicals from rabble-rousing anti-fascist activists, to third way moderates and liberal interventionists.

Here's Berman, beginning responding to excerpts from Kouchner's book, "The Warriors of Peace":

"'Intervention — the word was frightening, it seemed synonymous with rape. But nothing is more consensual, so long as intervention always responds to a cry for help.' Rape, consensualness — these were preposterous words. Still, it was clear enough what Kouchner meant to say. He wanted to be a Résistant, not a collabo — even if resisting meant shoving international law aside for a moment, and pushing his way into some other country. That was his reasoning, and he gave this reasoning a label, and the label was generational. 'Our generation wanted to react,' he said. In this one passage Kouchner defined the moral logic of the people with backgrounds like his own; the logic of the people who had gone into the streets in the ‘60s and early ‘70s and had fought their battles, sometimes foolishly; the logic of people who may even have deluded themselves for a while with fantasies about Che Guevara or the PLO or some other guerrilla mania, and yet righted themselves, eventually; the logic of people who had come to realize that intervention in the Balkan War of the 1990s was the fulfillment of their own ideals...and was not an act of imperialism. This one little passage of Kouchner’s was a sort of generational manifesto."

Sarkozy, by picking Kouchner as his Foreign Minister, was sending a tacit signal of sympathyfor the ideological underpinnings of the "lefty hawk" case for war.

Kouchner's overtures, though, are already receiving major pushback from France's diplomatic elite. One diplomat told the International Herald Tribune: "The prevailing view in a significant part of the French diplomatic community is that mediation in Iraq is futile and that the civil war needs to run its course and hand a decisive victory to one faction before the violence can end."

Slimy, cynical, and probably true. Apparently, though, Kouchner is an old Iraq hand and has some cachet with the various factions, having "longstanding and close relations with Kurdish and Shiite leaders" and a personal relationship with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani giong back three decades. This, at least according to the IHT, puts him in a unique position to negotiate some type of agreement between the parties. It's unclear, however, how much power these aging leaders have over the roving militias whose youthful leadership has few connections or allegiances to the old powers of Europe.

UPDATE: Another motivation:

"Kouchner's trip...renewed interest in reports that the French oil company Total may seek a stake in Iraqi oil fields...But Kouchner's office said that no executives had accompanied Kouchner to Iraq and that economic interests were not the focus of the trip."

Awesome

2007-08-22T14:15:00.000-04:00

I didn't realize that the sub-prime loans rocking the global economy are referred to in the business as NINJA loans (meaning "No Income, No Job or Assets"). No wonder they're causing so much trouble. Sensei always said, never trust a ninja.

Scoreboard thus far for disrupting global flows of wealth:

Pirates: 1,000,000

NINJAS: 1

Everything's Fine At The Top

2007-08-22T13:57:00.000-04:00

41% of those making less than $30,000 think there is “a lot” of tension between the rich and the poor. Only 18% of those making $100,000 to $150,000 think this.

Image: Joy Garnett, Riot

Vick and Veal

2007-08-22T11:43:00.000-04:00

In a shadowy, secretive world animals are "crammed...into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems." They undergo "neglect, mutilation, genetic manipulation, and drug regimens that cause chronic pain and crippling" all for the decadent delight of humans.

Meat, people. It's where we get our meat.

Why is Michael Vick going to jail for supporting a system no worse than the one we sustain when we order a hamburger?

Is it because dogs are cute? Is it because the people who run dog fights are either rich and obnoxious or scary, poor and black?

Well, rich and obnoxious people order veal all the time, but no one's slapping cuffs on 'em.

I'm on Vick's side. And I don't even like football.

Hysterical Realism

2007-08-22T09:12:00.001-04:00

William Gibson's got the mouth breathers excited over his notion of a "Google aura" around his work. In an interview with Amazon, Gibson says:

"Yeah it's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it's all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I'm sure a lot of writers haven't yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction."

This seems an extreme extension of the "Hysterical Realism" that bores James Wood. In fact, this paragraph from Wood's 2001 essay, written right after 9/11, is about the best take-down of Gibson I can imagine:

"Nowadays anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move, filling his or her novel with essaylets and great displays of knowledge. Indeed, "knowing about things" has become one of the qualifications of the contemporary novelist. Time and again novelists are praised for their wealth of obscure and far-flung social knowledge...The reviewer, mistaking bright lights for evidence of habitation, praises the novelist who knows about, say, the sonics of volcanoes. Who also knows how to make a fish curry in Fiji! Who also knows about terrorist cults in Kilburn! And about the New Physics! And so on. The result - in America at least - is novels of immense self-consciousness with no selves in them at all, curiously arrested and very "brilliant" books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being."

Gibson's "Google aura" is a tactic rooted in the notion that the essence of humanity is our stuff--a comforting materialist idea. In this context, however, this notion seems geeky and shallow, the product of someone more comfortable with a laptop than a loved one.

In Wood's essay he imagined that the horrors of 9/11 would put an end to the Delillo/Pynchon et al. style of grand social novels, and predicted a retreat to the intimate, honest portrayals "that tell us not 'how the world works' but 'how somebody felt about something.'" Gibson and his inevitable followers, however, will charge ahead, arming their hysteria with supercharged search engines in a quest to capture the zeitgeist while leaving their modernity-battered feelings behind.

UPDATE: I feel like I've sold out my soul. I actually think hysterical realism is exciting and fun to read. But writing negative reviews is so easy, and Spook Country isn't as good as I wanted it to be. And, fine, Google-auras are cool...I'm a bit of a mouth breather myself. I wouldn't want to throw in my lot with an asshole elitist literary critic when the guys at the comic book store are so sweet.

IMAGE: William Gibson, by Anthony Hare, 2001

Adams Morgan

2007-08-21T16:03:00.000-04:00

"It’s the sound of Austin, Boulder, Berkeley, Red Hook, Madison, Cambridge, Adams Morgan—of people who tend to think of themselves as engaged, aware."

I take it, Michael Hirschorn of Atlantic Monthly, you've never been to Adams Morgan on a Saturday night.

Reagan

2007-08-20T17:16:00.000-04:00

In the '80s, The Gipper tries to save The New Republic...with his vice-president's fated son:

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."
-- Ronald Reagan in his recently published diaries, May 17, 1986.

UPDATE: The pounding the right-wing blogosphere is giving Beauchamp continues...apparently ex-fiances are fair game as character witnesses these days.

UPDATE 2: Well, the quote is fake. Oh well. Too good to be true, I suppose.

Sarkozy: Post Americanism

2007-08-20T16:08:00.000-04:00

Sarkozy is not marked by his pro-Americanism as much as his post-Americanism. From a New Yorker profile:

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

The Power of Positive Thinking

2007-08-20T13:40:00.000-04:00

The U.S. is giving millions of dollars to the Iraqi Stock Exchange to update their computer equipment (they currently operate with markers and whiteboards). The Stock Exchange opened for foreign investment last month, and Taha Abdulsalam, Iraqi CEO of the Iraqi Stock Exchange, is a paragon of positive thinking:

"Yes, there are many dangers in Iraq. Yes, there are many things you must accept. We have terrorists, we have political problems - any kind of problem you see in the world, yes, we have it...But you must accept that risk because the prices are very low and there is an opportunity for you to be a great investor in Iraq in the future."

...Abdulsalam hopes the computerized system will attract outside investors who may be waiting for the changes to be made rather than leave their money to the perils of erasers and whiteboards.
If investors come calling, the Iraq Stock Exchange will be ready, Abdulsalam said.
"You have to study everything, you have to prepare everything, and then you must move very fast," he said. "We have done everything for the foreign investors, and now we are just waiting for them to act."

Ah, if only investors around the world were really just waiting for new computer systems to start sending their money to Iraq.

Cosmic Quiz

2007-08-20T12:32:00.001-04:00

Why can't Cosmo have more quizzes like this?

Which kind of X-treme Spacer are you?

High Groundhogs

Whoever controls the spacelanes controls the world. Unless you act fast, China, North Korea and/or Iran will soon be destroying vital US orbital assets, just as the USSR did in the 1980s with its terawatt lasers. The shortest path to space is via DynaSoar, X-ray laser battle stations, and Blackstar, because the warriors know how to get things done.
Insurance Adjusters
Something wicked this way comes. It could be the next dinosaur-killer asteroid, runaway climate change, gray nano-goo, or that old standby, thermonuclear war. If your Space Ark hasn't weighed anchor by the time it arrives... game over, man.
Much Higher Consciousness
Sharing a gene pool with E.T. and 2001's Star Child, you are pecking at the shell of the cosmic egg. Once you can gaze back upon the outmoded Earth, you will be transformed. (It's not clear how, but it will be a Good Thing). No radiation shielding needed, as cosmic rays can only speed your evolution.
Free-Fall Enterprise
Space is really about unfettered growth: the New World, the Industrial Revolution, and the Heritage Foundation all in one. We should never have let Big Government get involved. You can't wait for billions in investment to start flowing, as soon as ITAR and the Outer Space Treaty are tossed on the dustheap of history. (NASA should stick around just long enough to prime the pump with COTS contracts, then commit seppuku.)
Goal Tenders
Remember the thrill of your first time? Apollo proved that only the prospect of a flag and a footprint will get us boldly going. You demand a truly inspiring new objective (ideally reddish-brown, somewhere this side of the asteroid belt). Pedantic, bean-counting concerns about a cost-effective space infrastructure will be forgotten in the glow of achievement.
Traveling Salesmen
Do people want clean energy to forestall global warming? You offer solar power satellites and lunar helium-3 (reactor extra). New frontiers to escape a globalized monoculture? Mix and match planetary settlements and O'Neill habitats. Raw materials? Zone-melted asteroids, coming soon. Whatever their future needs, your future's got it. It just happens to be in space.

Cheney's Valentine

2007-08-20T12:04:00.001-04:00

An administration official, quoted in the New York Times' piece on the failure of Bush's democracy agenda:

"OVP [Office of the Vice President] has this little-girl crush on strongmen."

Everything's Bigger in China

2007-08-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

Via Danger Room:

You think the U.S. has problems with trapped miners, collapsing bridges and extreme weather? Well, check out this round-up of headlines from China this weekend:

"Typhoon Sepat hits China after mass evacuation"
"Hopes dim for over 180 trapped miners in China"
"Death toll in China bridge collapse climbs to 64"

Loving Peace, Hating Freedom

2007-08-20T09:43:00.000-04:00

In Summer 2007's City Journal, Bawer has a screed against what he calls the "Peace Racket." He rails against left-wing academics and activists who promote appeasement in the name of peace, a "blame-America first" mentality, and a "zero-sum" view of the world economy that teaches "American wealth derives entirely from exploitation and that Americans, accordingly, are responsible for world poverty."

Fine. Sure. Whatever. Appeasement doesn't always work, America isn't to blame for every single evil in the world, and sometimes a rising tide can lift all boats.

Bawer's argument, though, is sloppy. Is it even worth mentioning that this "fast-growing, troubling movement" (whose "growing power" is evidenced by Kucinich's Department of Peace bill in the House) is utterly marginalized in the American political process, and forces enamored with national strength and violent overthrow of illiberal regimes have been in power for nearly a decade?

Bawer, you've been getting what you want for the past seven years. And the very folks who've been undermining the American freedoms you love so much, the ones who have been grinding down our military preparedness, tarnishing America's image by adopting the tactics of tyrants, and making us less safe with reckless violence, have been attacking their opponents with the same rhetoric that you use here: "freedom-haters," "appeasers," "blame-America first crowd."

Furthermore, your description of these scary scary campus activists and their communist-sympathizing boomer professors bears a striking resemblance to another group of uppity grad-students, out of Chicago, say:

"They want to remake our world. They plan to become politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists, lawyers, teachers, activists. They’ll bring to these positions all the mangled history and misbegotten ideology that their professors have handed down to them. Their careers will advance; the Peace Racket’s influence will spread. And as it does, it will weaken freedom’s foundations."

UPDATE: Found some older writings. As a gay man living in Amsterdam, Bawer does have understandable impatience with European government's embrace of virulently homophobic "moderate" muslims in the name of tolerance:

"On 9/11, I would never have imagined that five years later, a man who refuses to condemn the stoning of female adulterers would be respected as the leading voice of “moderate” European Islam; that European governments would still be funding within their borders mosques and Muslim schools that teach contempt for democracy, Jews, gays, and sexual equality; that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen would argue for accepting the oppression of Muslim women in the West; and that Britain would still be sheltering radical clerics, Queen Elizabeth knighting the likes of Iqbal Sacranie (who calls homosexuality “unacceptable”), and London mayor Ken Livingstone praising as “progressive” the above-mentioned al-Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the execution of gays)."

And he recognizes Bush's failures:

"No question, Bush’s arrogance, incompetence, inarticulateness, deafness to criticism, and tolerance of torture have (in Andrew Sullivan’s words) “managed to muddy the moral high ground against the evil of Islamism” – thereby polarizing Americans and helping alienate Europeans at a time when unity is crucial. (The U.S. military’s dismissal of desperately needed Arabic-language experts for being gay testifies to the endurance of an absurd bias that I thought, on 9/11, would fade in the face of a real and deadly foe.)"

Iranian Wonkette Coming Soon

2007-08-18T15:42:00.001-04:00

PressTV, the Iranian government English language news service, is finally covering the ongoing saga of Deborah Palfrey, the DC Madam.

Image: The PressTV newsroom.

Map Of The Day

2007-08-18T11:48:00.001-04:00

Imperial Indices

2007-08-18T08:42:00.000-04:00

An index to keep your eye on: the price of ammo. It seems post 9/11 police spending, the military's demand for arming soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and China's insatiable demand for metals has driven up the price of ammunition. Domestic gun owners, fearing shortages, have begun hording, driving the price even higher: (via Dallas Morning News)

Manufacturers dramatically ramped up production after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, producing about 1.5 billion rounds last year – more than 3 ½ times the number manufactured in 2001, said Gale Smith, a spokeswoman for the Army's Joint Munitions Command Center in Rock Island, Ill.

But they struggle to keep up with the demand as troop deployments continue in the Middle East. Military spending on small-caliber ammunition increased from $242 million in 2001 to $688 million in 2006.

The ammunition business is also feeling the pinch because of the rising price of global commodities such as copper, brass, nickel, steel and lead.
For instance, China's torrent of construction has added to its manufacturing capacity. And the country is hungry for resources to feed its growth. The components needed to manufacture ammunition are also used for laying power lines and adding buildings to wider skylines.

A price driven by domestic fear, military overreach, and the rise of China.