Obsidian Wings

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties...

by hilzoy

So, did you hear the one about the blogger who forgot to set up her internet connection before she moved?

Ha ha ha.

In an attempt to thwart my normal disorganizedness, I had a great long list of Things To Do before I moved. Somehow, contacting the cable company slipped my mind. Of course, that meant that I still had internet service at my old house, where I am now. But where had I put the ethernet cable I needed to hook myself up here? In the shoebox marked 'Cables Etc.', of course, but where was it? Answer: in one of the millions of identical boxes that now adorn my new home. (I finally found it, obviously.)

I have no idea where the nearest internet cafe is, never having needed one before. And all my neighbors seem to be very good about securing their wireless networks...

My cats have begun to get over the move. Mr. Nils spent the first 36 hours or so hissing in all directions. Miss Annika, who is terrified of everything under the best of circumstances, tried desperately to escape from the horrid threatening new house. First she tried to climb up the chimney; then she tried to burrow under the stove; finally, in a move that nearly broke my heart, she hid under the towel in her cat carrier. To appreciate this, you should know that both of my cats hate the cat carriers above all things, since the only time I use them is when we're going to the vet. When I take them out, the cats hide: they know what's coming. That Annika would enter her carrier voluntarily, as a refuge from the horrible new house, was a pretty amazing statement.

Now, however, they seem to have adjusted a bit. Nils only hisses a little, and Annika periodically comes out of hiding. I, meanwhile, am surrounded by boxes, and have zillions of things to take care of -- and it doesn't help that the guy who is supposed to be inspecting my heater at my old house is not showing up. Also, after a wonderfully cool spring, the weather abruptly turned hot and muggy on the very day of my move. And the movers managed to punch a hole in one of the walls.

Ah, the joys.

Cable service at the new house starts on Thursday. I'll only be in sporadic contact until then. Cheers!

This is the most important subject in the world

I must disagree with Kevin Drum's view on Jacob Weisberg's hit piece in Slate regarding Senator Clinton's IPod:  Everyone knows that what you listen to on your IPod (or red-haired Mpeg-playin' stepchild) defines the very substance of your being.  Indeed, it is vital that we all share ten songs recently played on our IPods with the world.  Drum's attempts to misdirect notwithstanding, this is the most important subject in the world.  Mine are below the fold.

Why the long silence from this loyal ObWingian?  Why might some assert that this post is "pretty frivolous" and "totally lacking in substance"?  Let's put it this way:  after being blasted by the conservative wing of the Republican party for failing to offer sufficient support for President Bush, I am now informed by the conservative wing of the Republican party that President Bush is, in fact, a liberal Republican.  Whiplash is a serious injury with long-term consequences.  The recovery is painful.  It takes time.   

Moving: Still A Bitch

by hilzoy

Had I known that I would be moving tomorrow, I would never have agreed to be a marshal at commencement today. And had I known before yesterday that I would be moving tomorrow, I would have had the nice people come in to pack stuff up earlier. As it was, however, they arrived at 8:30 and were done just in time for me to leap into my cap and gown and arrive at commencement on time, after which I got to stand around for an interminable amount of time while people lined up, etc., and then go to commencement. It was fun, especially when someone produced beach balls that we all batted around while all the names were read. Somehow, this evening, I have to pack everything else up -- "everything else" being all the stuff on various counters, etc., that I told the packers just to leave.

Yikes!

A few notes:

* I am glad that Lay and Skilling were convicted, both because they deserved it and because I gather there was a real question about whether the case would be too complicated for the jury. I'm always glad when the answer to those questions is "no!" -- both intrinsically and because it would be bad for corrupt CEOs to conclude that incredibly complex accounting gave them immunity from conviction.

* Dennis Hastert is under investigation by the FBI.Have we reached the point where it becomes appropriate to prosecute the Republican House membership under RICO?

* As the Republican party implodes before our eyes, I want to remind people of this post by Mark Schmitt, which I think is absolutely right, and one of many reasons why I'm glad my party does not have the kind of discipline the Republicans had. (It might need more discipline, but not that much, or that kind.)

"A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than "government sucks," they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes -- look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn't fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday."

* The American Prospect has a very interesting article on the history of our refusal to negotiate with Iran. (To those of you who don't read the Prospect, you should. It's really, really good, and its policy articles, while liberal, present the evidence and arguments clearly, without ducking inconvenient objections. It's everything a liberal magazine should be.)

In any case, I don't know whether that article would be available if I weren't a subscriber, so I'm reproducing a key section below the fold.

Cultural Humiliation, Islamist Extremists and Other Terminologies

by Charles

Several terms and phrases have floated across my computer screen the last few days, and I thought I'd dig into a few of them.  In a prior post on Muslims, a certain prominent commenter stated that there is a "massive sense of cultural humiliation in the Muslim world."  Perhaps there's some truth to it, but I can't help but interpret "cultural humiliation" to mean "we lost and our feelings are hurt!"  I don't believe it's a sound idea to craft policy based on another group's emotional state.  After all, the saying goes, we can only control our own emotions, not the feelings of others.  It also sounds suspiciously like the victim card is being played, with those facing "cultural humiliation" to be the next candidates for interest group status.  Approaching psychobabble levels, there's even a feelings-based community ready to fertilize and generate interdisciplinary research (both intra and interculturally) on macro, meso and micro levels.

In a Google search, "cultural humiliation" is oft applied to Iraq, Guantanamo detainees, Abu Ghraib, black American women, and so forth.  In a February 2004 essay by Jessica Stern of the Harvard Kennedy School of Goverment:

Individually, the terrorists I interviewed cited many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause. But the variable that most frequently came up was not poverty or human rights abuses ­as has been posited in the press but perceived humiliation. Humiliation came up at every echelon of terrorist group members ­leaders and followers.

Moving Is Time-Consuming

by hilzoy

Hi everyone, and sorry for vanishing. I haven't even moved yet, but somehow doing moving-related things (getting estimates on various things, driving down to let various people in, etc., etc.), along with finishing up the rest of the term, has eaten my life. I hired a painter, who has spent the weekend painting the study sage green, and the dining room a color that I intended to be a sort of apricot, but turned out to be more like a light version of butternut squash. I really like it, though I would never have dared to choose it: too many ways to go wrong. And when choosing paint colors, I always go wrong. I think this is the first time I've ever chosen colors (other than white) that have not been disastrous.

Besides that, I've been in a funk about politics. Possibly the move is at work: I don't feel stressed about it, but it may be operating at some deeper level. In any case: for the past several days, I have been thinking that I had to write something about Khaled el-Masri and about Rep. Murtha's claim that a Pentagon report will show that our marines massacred civilians in cold blood. But I seem to have run out of words for these stories; and until I had written about them, I couldn't write about anything else. But all the words I could come up with just froze in my mouth or fell dead on the page.

More generally, every so often the news just gets to me, and this seems to be one of those times. We have more than two years of Bush's presidency left, and I cannot see how it will be anything other than a disaster. And that's just the things he will probably do; when I really want to get depressed, I think about what someone could have done, as President, with these last six years. And while I very much hope that we can take at least one house of Congress, there's nothing to be done about Bush himself, and that means that any version of political sanity -- liberal or conservative -- will have to spend the next two years and change fighting off horrible new initiatives, as opposed to doing good.

On the bright side, in about a week I will actually move, and then I'll be able to get depressed about politics in my new house, where the butternut squash colored dining room should cheer me right up. (A sign that moving was absolutely the right thing to do: I have met more people in my new neighborhood during the past week, on the sidewalk while carrying things, than I met in my old non-neighborhood during the last six years. And I'm not even living there yet.)

Elsewhere in Islam

by Charles

In the last few weeks, I've been mulling over the idea that Islam is not a religion of peace, but of submission, by its very definition.  It is a noble concept for a person to voluntarily submit himself or herself to God and to put into practice the tenets of the faith.  But it's another thing altogether when a person decides that others must also submit.  When self-described Muslims decide to militantly force their religious ideology down others' throats, then we have a War Against Militant Islamism.

While we've long heard and read from many on the Left about American imperialism and hegemony, there is also an imperialism problem with large numbers of Muslims throughout history, as documented by Efraim Karsh of the University of London.  The history of Islamic imperialism and subjugation neatly play into current events.  For instance, just in the last week or two:

Mallomars: Good Or Evil?

by hilzoy

In response to Slarti's request: "Oh, mighty blog Deities, please grant us this day an open thread. Preferably one having a light, fluffy, humorous center."

Discuss.

Heavens Roll Up Like Scroll! Seas Turn To Blood! Mountains Skip Like Rams, And Little Hills Like Lambs!

by hilzoy

Actually, the truth is even more surprising: House Ethics Committee Shows Signs OF Life!:

"After 16 months of inactivity and partisan infighting, the House ethics committee launched investigations last night into bribery allegations against Reps. Robert W. Ney (R-Ohio) and William Jefferson (D-La.) and a separate inquiry into the widening scandal surrounding former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.).

The committee said it would have ordered another investigation, into the overseas trips of former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), had the once-powerful lawmaker not announced that he will resign from the House on June 9.

The inquiries by the long-dormant House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, as the ethics panel is formally known, come after the Justice Department intensified corruption investigations of Ney and Jefferson, and after Cunningham pleaded guilty to accepting $2.4 million in bribes and was sent to prison.

But as those and other scandals were unfolding, the ethics committee sat on the sidelines while Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for grinding the ethics process to a halt. Democrats said GOP leaders had changed the rules unfairly to thwart investigations that could have negative ramifications for the party. Republicans charged that the Democrats were dragging their feet on the committee's reorganization to bolster their accusations of a coverup.

That logjam was broken last month when Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (W.Va.), the committee's ranking Democrat, was forced to leave the panel amid accusations that he used his congressional position to funnel money to his own home-state foundations, possibly enriching himself.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi named a fellow Californian and committee veteran, Howard L. Berman, to take the top slot. Berman quickly joined with the committee chairman, Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), to get the panel moving again."

Good for Pelosi, Hastings, and Berman. It's long past time for the House to make a stab at reclaiming its honor.

They Did What?

by hilzoy

Via TPMmuckraker: A GAO report (pdf) issued today says that the Department of Defense stopped processing security clearances about three weeks ago because of a billing dispute with the Office of Personnel Management. Long story short: DoD's clearance investigations procedures were screwed up; those investigations were handed off to the OPM so that they could be done better; the OPM was allowed to charge a premium for this; last January the DoD decided it didn't need to pay the premium; the issue wasn't resolved; now they've just stopped processing security clearances.

TPMmuckraker says that the disputed sum of money is $40 million; I can't find a clear statement in the GAO report, but it does say that the OMB has collected $50 million in the disputed premiums so far. In either case, this is not nearly enough money to justify calling a halt to new security clearances.

As the GAO report says (p. 5):

"Problems in the clearance program can negatively affect national security. For example, delays reviewing security clearances for personnel who are already doing classified work can lead to a heightened risk of disclosure of classified information. In contrast, delays in providing initial security clearances for previously noncleared personnel can result in other negative consequences, such as additional costs and delays in completing national security-related contracts, lost-opportunity costs, and problems retaining the best qualified personnel."

Yep. This is an incredibly dumb thing to do. But what's even dumber is that no one with the authority to do so has stepped in and resolve the issue. If Bush and Cheney can declassify documents at will, bypassing the entire declassification process, surely they could just decide who owes what to whom, and order the DoD to start processing clearances again.

In a functional government, this situation would not have been allowed to fester until it reached this point. If, somehow, it slipped through the cracks, as soon as DoD stopped processing new clearances, someone would have done something about it.

In a functional government.

Political Health Care Rationing

--by Sebastian

I realize that the UK has different ideas about free speech than the US.  So it doesn't come as a complete shock to me that someone might be jailed for a month for sending allegedly offensive pictures of aborted fetuses to hospital staff.  (I presume that katherine wouldn't be thrown in jail for sending pictures of torture victims to Gitmo) But look what else happened:

Ms. May said she received an envelope of “very upsetting and offensive literature” and became tearful when she told the Press, “It is upsetting for everyone. I believe people who work for the NHS, and particularly at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, are passionate about providing excellent care for their patients.”

Since the court case, Mr. Atkinson has been removed from the hospital’s wait list for an evaluation for hip surgery and has been banned from anything other than life-saving treatment as a punishment for his activism. A hospital spokesman said he had broken its “zero tolerance” policy by ignoring its warnings to stop. Hospital staff said they were upset and “quite disturbed’ by the images.

The hospital said, “We exercised our right to decline treatment for anything other than life-threatening conditions.”

As reported by the TimesOnline:

Mr Atkinson sounds like an unpleasant crank, and I am as much in favour of legalised abortion as he is against it. But his treatment (or the lack of it) is a scandal. This is about admitting a man to hospital, not electing him to Parliament. Even unhip old bigots need replacement hips.

Ruth May, the hospital’s chief executive, claims that the ban is justified because the “offensive” publications he mailed caused “great distress” to her and her staff and thus contravened the NHS policy of “zero tolerance”. Some may already feel that such policies make it seem as if a hospital’s priority is to protect its staff against the patients, rather than protecting patients from illness. This case goes farther, equating the posting of offensive photos with punching a nurse on the nose.

Why on earth should hospitals be distressed by pictures of the sort of operations that they carry out? An aborted late-term foetus can certainly make a grisly spectacle, and there is no point trying to sanitise abortion. But neither need anybody be intimidated by the handful of zealots who like to wave around such bloody abortion porn.

That sounds very close to government health care discrimination based on the political viewpoint of the patient.  I'm not comfortable with punishing him at all for free speech, but I'm really appalled that the hospital thinks political viewpoint discrimination regarding health care treatment is ok.