Waffle

Andrew Sullivan on why Sarah Palin still matters. Because somebody needs to be held to account for selecting the worst vice-presidential candidate in history. (via Lawyers, Guns and Money)

Michael Lewis on the End of Wall Street’s Boom. This long article by Michael Lewis, writer of Liar’s Poker is financial porn: It explains in lurid detail just how complex some of the financial instruments used on Wall Street are, and just how poorly the financiers themselves understood them. You’ll be amused and outraged at the same time. (via Naked Capitalism, but I can’t find the link anymore)

Is it too much of an exaggeration to claim that the Bush presidency is over, and that President Bush hasn’t been succeeded by Dick Cheney or any of the four people on the Presidential election ticket, but by an unelected Chancellor?
From Naked Capitalism:

This is a financial coup d’etat, with the only limitation the $700 billion balance sheet figure. The measure already gives the Treasury the authority not simply to buy dud mortgage paper but other assets as it deems fit. There is no accountability beyond a report (contents undefined) to Congress three months into the program and semiannually thereafter. The Treasury could via incompetence or venality grossly overpay for assets and advisory services, and fail to exclude consultants with conflicts of interest, and there would be no recourse. Given the truly appalling track record of this Administration in its outsourcing, this is not an idle worry.

(read the rest for context)

Spare us: In the gym with Barack Obama.

HE CURLED 32 KILO DUMBBELLS NEXT TO ME +++ BARACK IS TOP FIT +++ HE DIDN’T SWEAT AT ALL

This shit annoyed the hell out of me four years ago, but for some reason I didn’t think to say anything about it. Let me correct this now:

If Barack Obama’s ability to arm-curl 32-kilogram weights is at all relevant to whether he should become President of the United States at all, why doesn’t he just arm-wrestle John McCain for the presidency? That way we could skip the rest of the election campaign and be spared all the tedious and costly circus that comes with it.

From Scary Go Round - US customs as seen from the point of view of someone who travels in a lot.

For the longest time, I’ve been telling myself I wasn’t going to travel to the United States - not as long as being in transit means I have no rights, not as long as I have to be fingerprinted, prodded, questioned and poked before I’m allowed in, not as long as shit like this can happen, not as long as George Bush is President and the dumb fucks who voted for him in 2004 are still allowed not just to vote, but to drive as well.

Well, I’ve changed my mind. I have a damned good reason. However, it’s the same reason this Italian traveler had, so reading about that struck a chord:

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.

Domenico Salerno, with his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper, in Rome on Sunday. He was held for 10 days in the United States after being denied entry.

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit - meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon - eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

Now the odds of this happening to me are, realistically, slight. It’s the principle that matters though. This is what can happen and if it happens to you, you have no rights. I wonder, though, whether Americans understand how much this hurts them. The American authorities have permanently deterred Mr. Salerno from returning to the US, spending his valuable Euros there and doing the volunteer work in the community he was a guest in (more on that below). Any tax moneys spent on Ms. Cooper’s education will be benefitting Italy instead once she’s tunneled her way out of the Land of the Free. People reading the story, like Martin Wisse who I got the link from, will be thinking twice about traveling to the US while the conditions above apply, and they also won’t be bringing their Euros in. This shit adds up.

Aggie and I discussed this incident a bit, and without wanting to put any blame on Mr. Salermo, there are probably lessons to learn about what kind of behaviour to avoid when traveling to the US. I guess by now all reasonably intelligent people understand that you don’t say things like "I have a bomb strapped to my chest! Allahu Ackbar!" when customs ask you if you have anything to declare. It’s probably not a good idea to testify to your own character by telling Immigration you’ve done volunteer work in your host community and that you’re integrating well with it, especially if your English isn’t too good. It’s not clear from the article whether Mr. Salermo did that, but it’s a possibility and I’ll add it to the list of behaviour to avoid for the 17 hours or so of nonpersonhood on my trip. It’s probably an even worse idea to do that while being Meditterranian-looking.

After my summer trip, my next visit will be after the elections, but before the next President’s inauguration. The post-Bush restoration project will be a long and arduous one, but I hope that they’ll find time to look at the policies that make abuses like this one possible.

From a very link-rich post at A Fistful of Euros focused on telling us who the people are that make such dire predictions of European demographic collapse and where there funding comes from, comes this long post from 2004 clarifying some demographic trends among muslim immigrant communities in France, particularly that the fertility rates in these communities are falling and will fall further. I argued the same point privately a couple of days ago but didn’t have a source ready.

The AFOE article itself collects several links to articles that are too long to read in the time I have between breakfast and work, so I’ll just quote a bit from it links and all:

The Nation’s Kathryn Joyce takes a look at the politics of Eurabia; nobody should be surprised that it’s pretty ugly. Essentially, there’s a gaggle of thinktanks/campaign groups/whatever closely connected to the Mormons and Senator Sam Brownback, and specifically to their extreme “quiverfull” wing, which advocates having absurdly (8+ kids) large families. It looks a lot like an effort both to find a new market for their politics in central Europe (Kazcynski’s Poland was Target One) and also to gin up a foreign-policy scare that would energise their base in support of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Well, that went well.

It’s also amusing that Joyce describes their view of Poland as “the anti-Sweden”. I don’t know to what extent this is a true misrepresentation, but it’s worth pointing out that they’ve placed their strategic bridgehead on the wrong side of the Baltic. It’s as if the Normandy landings had taken place somewhere on the coast of Portugal or Ireland. In yet another cracking DM post, this time by “AFOE Principal Investigator” Edward Hugh, we learn that Sweden is the last place in Europe that needs to worry. Well, except for France. Poland, on the other hand, is solidly in their problem group of countries with very low total-fertility rates [...] France? Sweden? You can almost hear the authoritarian personalities creak and groan with the cognitive dissonance. Of course, there’s a very good reason why they didn’t go to either France or Sweden, which is that they would have been laughed out of town.

But what especially amuses me is this:

The result is the spread of US culture-war tactics across the globe, from the Czech Republic to Qatar–where right-wing Mormon activist and WCF co-founder Richard Wilkins has found enough common cause with Muslim fundamentalists to build the Doha International Institute for Family Studies and Development.

Doha? As in Qatar? Yes. Unless you’re in the oil or natural gas business, there’s one reason to locate a new institution - especially a profoundly subsidy-dependent one like a thinktank - in Qatar, which is that the sheikh is probably paying for it.

I’ve read part of the Joyce article so far, and it’s a cracking good read. I for one am amused at findind out that the story about wolves recolonising eastern Germany was supposed to scare us. I was all "Yay, wolves! Arrroooo!" when I read that.

I’ve seen a lot of justified outrage over this: The trial and conviction of an illiterate woman as a witch in Saudi Arabia. Yes, the Saudi legal system and government really are that backward, vicious and barbaric. As Human Rights Watch writes in its original report on the case:

The religious police who arrested and interrogated Fawza Falih and the judges who tried her in the northern town of Quraiyat never gave her the opportunity to prove her innocence against absurd charges that have no basis in law.

“The fact that Saudi judges still conduct trials for unprovable crimes like ‘witchcraft’ underscores their inability to carry out objective criminal investigations,” said Joe Stork, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Fawza Falih’s case is an example of how the authorities failed to comply even with existing safeguards in the Saudi justice system.”

The judges relied on Fawza Falih’s coerced confession and on the statements of witnesses who said she had “bewitched” them to convict her in April 2006. She retracted her confession in court, claiming it was extracted under duress, and that as an illiterate woman she did not understand the document she was forced to fingerprint. She also stated in her appeal that her interrogators beat her during her 35 days in detention at the hands of the religious police. At one point, she had to be hospitalized as a result of the beatings.

The judges never investigated whether her confession was voluntary or reliable or investigated her allegations of torture. They never even made an inquiry as to whether she could have been responsible for allegedly supernatural occurrences, such as the sudden impotence of a man she is said to have “bewitched.” They also broke Saudi law in multiple instances, ignoring legal rules on proper procedures in a trial.

The judges did not sit as a panel of three, as required for cases involving the death penalty. They excluded Fawza Falih from most trial sessions and banned a relative who was acting as her legal representative from attending any session. Earlier, her interrogators blocked her access to a lawyer and the judges, and denied her the right to professional legal representation, thus depriving her of the opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses against her. She claims that some of the witnesses were unknown to her and that others had made statements against her only as a result of beatings.

As I say, the outrage is justified, and Saudi-Arabia deserves widespread condemnation and ridicule. However, condemnation and ridicule aren’t going to stop Fawza Falih from getting executed. So I’ve been asking myself and others "what are we going to do about this?"

And I don’t have an answer. It’s easy to think of fun things you can do to protest. We could threaten to reprint cartoons representing the prophet Mohammed until the Saudis relent, or we could boycott Saudi oil until you forgetthey relent, or, and I should stress that my next suggestion won’t be any less feasible than the previous ones, we could collectively travel back in time to September 12, 2001 and put that loathsome backwater in our crosshairs along with Afghanistan and instead of Iraq.

The only thing I can think of that ordinary people can do is to talk to both the Saudi government and their own. Write letters to your Saudi consulate or embassy, write to your MP/congressman/whatever, write to your Foreign Secretary, and tell them, politely (in other words, don’t borrow phrasing from this blog post), why you think Fawza Falih should not be executed. Unfortunately, neither HRW nor Amnesty International provide ready templates, but you and I can do this in our own words. Campaign.

By the way… I’m not suggesting that this is the only thing that can be done. Just that I can’t think of anything else, but this is likely to be a failure of my own imagination as much as anything else. If you have a better idea, or even a hare-brained idea that might lead us to a better one, tell me. reinder.dijkhuis@gmail.com.

Contact info for the Saudi embassy in the Netherlands
HRW’s letter to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia

Three posts by Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings that I want to be able to quickly find again should the need arise, concerning Barack Obama’s track record in office, why Hilzoy endorses him and the inadequate response to the Obama phenom by the Clinton campaign:

Mistakes are Expensive
Barack Obama (posted in 2006)
Obama actually.

Nothing to add to these—I’m just posting them for future reference.

Starship Stormtroopers, an eminently readable essay, or perhaps a transcripted speech, by Michael Moorcock from 1977, about authoritarianism in Science Fiction and Fantasy literature:

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them — a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants — a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence — a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn’t disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkien or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of ‘decadence’ in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping — not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I’d been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I’d never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be ‘apolitical’ but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to ‘have a point’). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes — but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn’t enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie’s request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

Read on and take notes. And get yerself some John Brunner novels. They’re good. (via)

Note: misspelling of "Tolkien" in the quoted section corrected because I’ll have no part in spreading it around.

Being Unhealthy Could Cost You
Clarian Health is taking a novel approach to reducing health-care costs: It’s penalizing workers for indicators of poor health For employees at Clarian Health, feeling the burn of trying to lose weight will take on new meaning.

In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index [BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat] is over 30. If their cholesterol, blood pressure, and glucose levels are too high, they’ll be charged $5 for each standard they don’t meet. Ditto if they smoke: Starting next year, they’ll be charged another $5 in each check.

But why stop there? The real money’s in cancer and heart disease. I’d say lung cancer should be worth at least $150 per paycheck, and a heart attack should be cause for immediate suspension without pay. That should teach people to take care of themselves! (Via Sadly, No!)

I have nothing to add to this

As recently as the 1980s [...] Ronald fucking Reagan could not-so-boldly call for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and be widely regarded as having departed only ever-so-slightly from the hardcore militant industrialist anti-communist line. Ronald Reagan! Mr. “Evil Empire” himself wanted, or so he claimed, to eliminate all nuclear weapons from on Earth! Now it’s seen as a risky move (with a whiff of sixties fervor) for a Democratic primary contender to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against small, decidedly non-nuclear asymmetrical threats holed up in friendly nations? What? What dank, perverted path are we on? Twenty years from now, will Unity ‘28 scion Chelsea “LeMay” Clinton sadly note the unseriousness of those neo-stinking robo-hippies opposed, on principle, to nuking PETA? Or the NEA? A meth lab, maybe? The odd Mexican?

Twenty years ago, everybody in this country (give or take a baker’s million blazing nutjobs) understood that the use of nuclear weapons was a cataclysmic, final act of madness, a step towards global suicide to be avoided at (almost) any cost. Now, absent an enemy with any real ability to do us harm, the idea that nuclear weapons should be available to use on caves full of crazy idiots armed with weapons that were the height of military sophistication approximately seventy years ago, this idea is the conventional wisdom? Of the Democratic Party? The party that ostensibly wants to end the war in Iraq? Where have you gone, Robert McNamara / A nation turns its loony eyes to you, doot doot doo.

What the fuck, seriously. What. The. Fucking. Fuck. I want off this ball, blundering downhill. I want to go home, to the nation I imagined I lived in.