From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 13:26:47 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:26:47 +0100 Subject: [THS] Finance superstars talk about the massive fraud in our economic system Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314132634.046a5da0@spamarrest.com> Finance superstars talk about the massive fraud in our economic system By Joe Costello, AlterNet http://www.alternet.org/story/145942/ Last Wednesday, I attended a conference initiated by the Roosevelt Institute on the financial mess, called Make Markets Be Markets. The conference's speakers included people with experience on Wall Street, the banking industry, government and academia; Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz, Elizabeth Warren, and other luminaries who have offered an alternative and reformist narrative to our recent financial crisis. At two and half hours, it was relatively short, giving each speaker the opportunity to make their points and providing a sharp focus. One underlying theme of the event was fraud, the great elephant in the room, that neither the press or our government officials acknowledge, though it is a fundamental element to the financial crisis and its solutions. Joe Stiglitz started the conference and stated how reducing transparency and hiding information was an essential element to the crisis. Stiglitz concluded, "Innovation was regulator and tax arbitrage." Wall Street and the banks deliberately added opacity and complexity to confuse clients and consumers. Elizabeth Warren pointed out, "complexity made a lot of profits," for example, she showed how the average credit card contract in 1980 was one page, today it is thirty. This opacity and complexity helped make the financial industry predatory against their clients and customers. Not only did government regulatory agencies fail in stopping this confidence game of historical magnitude, but so did markets. NYU's Lawrence White pointed out the credit agencies such as Moody's and S&P, whose role is to provide independent analysis, essentially became co-conspirators as their business model changed from being paid by investors to being paid by the Wall Street issuers, making it against their interests to issue dour ratings on investments. The only truly rigorous aspect of economics is accounting. It's no surprise that as the banks and Wall Street sought opacity and confusion through complexity, their greatest target would be the accounting system. There were various elements of "accounting innovation", but the largest, most notorious, and completely incredulous was the practice of "off balance sheet" accounting. One of the greatest elements of this off-book accounting was secularization-simply, the practice of taking existing debt, be it mortgages, student loans, or even credit card debt, bundling it together, then selling it as a completely different product. Financial analyst Josh Rosner, who called the Fannie and Freddie accounting scandal in 2001 and the housing peak in 2005 stated: "Poorly developed and opaque securitization markets drove excess liquidity and irresponsible lending and borrowing...securitization markets too often operate in a "Wild West" environment where the rules are more often opaque than clear, standards vary, and useful and timely disclosures of the performance of loan level collateral is hard to come by. Asymmetry of information, between buyer and seller is the standard." While Mr. Rosner pointed to the problems of securitization, Frank Partnoy, a finance and legal expert, went after the greatest scam, the derivatives markets. Mr Partnoy pointed out there is currently $600 trillion in derivative positions on a global economy of $60 trillion. Derivatives are another off-balance sheet innovation, in which speculators may take pure gambling positions, allowing them to take positions on matters in which they have no stake. It was in paying-off derivatives that a $185 billion of tax-payer money flowed through AIG. Today, then New York Fed head Timothy Geithner, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke all claim they didn't authorize this payout, the check seemingly magically sent. To make his point even clearer, Mr. Partnoy put up Citi's official balance sheet, saying it was a "fictional balance sheet", representative of an industry in which financial innovation made the most basic accounting, the one thing which can offer real insight into a company's health, just another part of an elaborate scam. Michael Greenberger of the University of Maryland made the important point that most of what we all call financial innovation is simply the resurrection of many old practices, outlawed in the 1930s, now dressed in new garb. He pointed specifically to the 1936 Commodities Exchange Act as representative of all New Deal financial reform. It insured transparency, open exchanges, anti-fraud, and anti-manipulation. He contrasted this to the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act which gave modern derivatives and open field. Greenberger noted the Act was supported vigorously by then Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. The law turned derivative markets into history's largest casino and its proponents knew exactly what was coming and preempted state gaming laws, thus derivative gambling could be completely unfettered. Rob Johnson of the Roosevelt Institute was the last speaker and talked about the final arbitrage, which is "too big to fail." It is the arbitrage of the republic by looters who have created a system so rife with fraud that it brought down the American economy, throwing millions out of work, paying the very perpetrators trillions of dollars and counting. These very same people bought and sold our elected officials so often in the past several decades, that today DC might very well be deemed the one functional market. You actually get what you pay for. The conference put out a very excellent report available here. http://www.makemarketsbemarkets.org/ If we're going to get our economy up and running again, the first thing we're going to have to do is end the fraud. Read more of Joe Costello's work at Archein. He's been involved in communications, energy and political economy for three decades. He was communications director for Jerry Brown's innovative 1992 presidential campaign and was a senior adviser for Howard Dean's effort in 2004. He's spent two decades thinking and acting on the confluence of information technologies and democratic political economy. He has written extensively on politics, finance and energy. ? 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved. View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/145942/ From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 13:33:15 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:33:15 +0100 Subject: [THS] Ventura: You`re not allowed to ask about 9/11 Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314132846.046a5c58@spamarrest.com> Here's a piece on HuffPost's disappearance of Jesse Ventura's 9/11 article. It ran on Russian Television (RT) yesterday (America's own mainstream press, as ever, choosing not to note the controversy): http://www.youtube.com/user/RTAmerica#p/search/9/m14t8mJnw_E Anastasia Churkina's full interview with Gov. Ventura will air on Monday. Here also is Raw Story's piece: Ventura: 'You're not allowed to ask' about 9/11 | Raw Story www.rawstory.com/08556945.jpg http://rawstory.com/2010/03/ventura-youre-allowed-ask-911/ [embedded links and/or video at url above] Former Minnesota governor and one-time professional wrestler Jesse Ventura has run afoul of the Huffington Post's no-conspiracy-theory policy, and he's not happy about it. "I can't believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship," Ventura says in astonishment. "I've got news for them. ... I won't ever write for 'em again." Ventura had posted an item on Tuesday which took note of a recent conference at which "more than one thousand architects and engineers signed a petition demanding that Congress begin a new investigation into the destruction of the World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11." He also quoted a few paragraphs from his new book, American Conspiracies, to explain why some of those experts see signs of controlled demolition. The item was featured on the front page of Huffington Post when it first went up, but after a few hours it vanished. All that appears now at its original location is an editor's note saying, "The Huffington Post's editorial policy, laid out in our blogger guidelines, prohibits the promotion and promulgation of conspiracy theories -- including those about 9/11. As such, we have removed this post." The note is followed by three pages of comments, enthusiastically arguing the pros and cons of controlled demolition and other 9/11 theories, that were posted during the couple of hours before the entry was deleted and comments were closed. Huffington Post's own guidelines for its bloggers state, "We must -- and do -- reserve the right to remove objectionable, inaccurate, or inflammatory material and, if necessary, suspend or revoke blogging privileges. This also includes propagating conspiracy theories and blogging about behind-the-scenes housekeeping issues that are not of interest to the general public." Anastasia Churkina, a correspondent for RT, interviewed Ventura about the controversy. "He's a man who doesn't mince his words too much," she reported on Thursday. "He was pretty blunt." "I can't believe the Huffington Post today will practice censorship," Ventura told her angrily. "They asked me to be a contributing editor and they said, 'Write about anything you want.' So it was the second time I did something -- and they removed it?" "Well, I've got news for them," he continued. "I won't ever write for 'em again. ... I won't do a thing for the Huffington Post because I don't like it when people censor what I have to say." "All I do is ask questions!" he exploded. "That's what bugs me about 9/11. 9/11 is an event you're not allowed to ask a question about. ... Clearly they don't want any questions on it." Ironically, Ventura had to go to RT, the English-language version of a Russian news channel, to tell his story. Although polls show that large numbers of Americans believe in a broad range of conspiracy theories, and a majority entertain doubts about the official story of 9/11, few of those questions ever appear in the mainstream media. As Raw Story recently reported , "In November of 2007, an online article noted, 'Nearly two-thirds of Americans think it is possible that some federal officials had specific warnings of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but chose to ignore those warnings, according to a Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll.' A national survey of 811 adult residents of the United States conducted by Scripps and Ohio University found that more than a third believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories including the attacks, international plots to rig oil prices, the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the government's knowledge of intelligent life from other worlds. The high percentage is a manifestation, some say, of an American public that increasingly distrusts the federal government." Even liberal websites, however, discourage questions about 9/11, to the point where BooMan of the Booman Tribune had to preface a post at Daily Kos in 2005 by writing "I know this touches on verboten conspiracy theories, but this is a front-page NYT article." "It's kind of hard to tell whether or not a new investigation will be launched," Churkina concluded. "Many people don't think this is going to be happening any time soon, even with such public figures, like Jesse Venture and other, calling for it." From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 13:39:41 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:39:41 +0100 Subject: [THS] What Torture Is and Why It`s Illegal and Not Poor Judgment Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314133913.048e4360@spamarrest.com> http://www.truthout.org/what-torture-is-and-why-its-illegal-and-not-poor-judgment57622 What Torture Is and Why It's Illegal and Not "Poor Judgment" Saturday 13 March 2010 by: Andy Worthington, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis photo (Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: alumbis, *terry) It's now over three weeks since veteran Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer David Margolis dashed the hopes of those seeking accountability for the Bush administration's torturers, but this is a story of such profound importance that it must not be allowed to slip away. Margolis decided that an internal report into the conduct of John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, who wrote the notorious memos in August 2002, which attempted to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, was mistaken in concluding that both men were guilty of "professional misconduct," and should be referred to their bar associations for disciplinary action. Instead, Margolis concluded, in a memo that shredded four years of investigative work by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), the DOJ's ethics watchdog, that Yoo and Bybee had merely exercised "poor judgment." As lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which is charged with providing objective legal advice to the executive branch on all constitutional questions, Yoo and Bybee attempted to redefine torture as the infliction of physical pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," or the infliction of mental pain which "result[s] in significant psychological harm of significant duration e.g. lasting for months or even years." Yoo, notoriously, had lifted his description of the physical effects of torture from a Medicare benefits statute and other health care provisions in a deliberate attempt to circumvent the UN Convention Against Torture, signed by President Reagan in 1988 and incorporated into US federal law, in which torture is defined as: any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person ... Obsessed with finding ways in which "severe pain" could be defined so that the CIA could torture detainees and get away with it, Yoo drew on some truly revolting examples of physical torture, citing a particularly brutal case, Mehinovic v. Vuckovic, in which, during the Bosnian war, a Serb soldier named Nikola Vuckovic had tortured his Bosnian neighbor, Kemal Mehinovic, with savage and sadistic brutality. Yoo dismissed the possibility that other torture techniques - waterboarding, for example, which is a form of controlled drowning, and prolonged sleep deprivation - might cause "significant psychological harm of significant duration," or physical pain rising to a level that a judge might regard as torture. In both of his definitions, however, Yoo was clearly mistaken. No detailed studies have yet emerged regarding the prolonged psychological effects of the torture program approved by Yoo and Bybee, largely because lawyers for the "high-value detainees" in Guant?namo have been prevented - first under Bush, and now under Obama - from revealing anything publicly about their clients. However, lawyers for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was charged in the Bush administration's military commissions, made a good show of demonstrating that bin al-Shibh is schizophrenic and on serious medication, when they argued throughout 2008 that he was not fit to stand trial, and I have seen no evidence to suggest that bin al-Shibh was in a similar state before his four years in secret CIA prisons. An even more pertinent example is Abu Zubaydah, a supposed high-value detainee, held in secret CIA prisons for four and a half years, for whom the torture program was originally developed. Zubaydah's case may well be the most shocking in Guant?namo, because, although he was subjected to physical violence and prolonged sleep deprivation, was confined in a small box and was waterboarded 83 times, the CIA eventually concluded that he was not, as George W. Bush claimed after his capture, "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," but was, instead, a "kind of travel agent" for recruits traveling to Afghanistan for military training, who was not a member of al-Qaeda at all. Zubaydah was clearly mentally unstable before his capture and torture, as the result of a head wound sustained in Afghanistan in 1992, but as one of his lawyers, Joe Margulies, explained in an article in the Los Angeles Times last April, his subsequent treatment in US custody has caused a profound deterioration in his mental health that would certainly constitute "significant psychological harm of significant duration." Margolis wrote: No one can pass unscathed through an ordeal like this. Abu Zubaydah paid with his mind. Partly as a result of injuries he suffered while he was fighting the communists in Afghanistan, partly as a result of how those injuries were exacerbated by the CIA and partly as a result of his extended isolation, Abu Zubaydah's mental grasp is slipping away. Today, he suffers blinding headaches and has permanent brain damage. He has an excruciating sensitivity to sounds, hearing what others do not. The slightest noise drives him nearly insane. In the last two years alone, he has experienced about 200 seizures. Moreover, when it came to defining physical torture, the OPR report's authors noted that, as so often in the memos, Yoo had ignored relevant case history. The key passage in the report deals with the US courts' decisions regarding the Torture Victim Protection Act (TVPA). Yoo had drawn on Mehinovic for his description of physical torture "of an especially cruel and even sadistic nature," and, as the authors noted, he also argued that only 'acts of an extreme nature' that were 'well over the line of what constitutes torture' have been alleged in TVPA cases." The authors continued: Thus, the memorandum asserted, "there are no cases that analyze what the lowest boundary of what constitutes torture."[sic] That assertion was misleading. In fact, conduct far less extreme than that described in Mehinovic v. Vuckovic was held to constitute torture in one of the TVPA cases cited in the appendix to the Bybee memo. That case, Daliberti v. Republic of Iraq, 146 F. Supp. 2d 146 (D.D.C. 2001), held that imprisonment for five days under extremely bad conditions, while being threatened with bodily harm, interrogated and held at gunpoint, constituted torture with respect to one claimant. A close inspection of Daliberti (which dealt with US personnel seized by Iraqi forces between 1992 and 1995) is revealing, as the DC District Court held, "Such direct attacks on a person and the described deprivation of basic human necessities are more than enough to meet the definition of 'torture' in the Torture Victim Protection Act." The judges based their ruling on the following: David Daliberti and William Barloon allege that they were "blindfolded, interrogated and subjected to physical, mental and verbal abuse" while in captivity. They allege that during their arrests one of the agents of the defendant threatened them with a gun, allegedly causing David Daliberti "serious mental anguish, pain and suffering." During their imprisonment in Abu Ghraib prison, Daliberti and Barloon were "not provided adequate or proper medical treatment for serious medical conditions which became life threatening." The alleged torture of Kenneth Beaty involved holding him in confinement for eleven days "with no water, no toilet and no bed." Similarly, Chad Hall allegedly was held for a period of at least four days "with no lights, no window, no water, no toilet and no proper bed." Plaintiffs further proffer that Hall was "stripped naked, blindfolded and threatened with electrocution by placing wires on his testicles ... in an effort to coerce a confession from him." Yoo and his apologists will undoubtedly quibble yet again. There is the threat of electrocution, a threat made with a gun and deprivation of water, in one case for 11 days, none of which feature in the OLC's memos. However, outside of the specific torture program approved by the OLC, numerous prisoners who were held at Bagram before being transported to Guant?namo have stated that they were actually subjected to electric shocks while hooded (rather than being threatened with electrocution), and that being threatened at gunpoint was a regular occurrence. Moreover, it has also been stated that the withholding of medication was used with Abu Zubaydah after his capture, when he was severely wounded, and it should also be noted that numerous ex-prisoners have stated that, in Guant?namo, it was routine for medical treatment to be withheld unless prisoners cooperated with their interrogators. Most of all, however, a comparison between Daliberti and the OLC memos reveals the extent to which the techniques approved by Yoo resulted in "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental," which clearly exceeded that endured by David Daliberti and his fellow Americans in Iraq. First of all, there is waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that has long been recognized as torture by the United States. As Eric Holder noted during his confirmation hearing in January 2009, "We prosecuted our own soldiers for using it in Vietnam." With this in mind, it ought to be inconceivable that anyone could argue that waterboarding Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times could be anything less than torture. In addition, the prolonged isolation, prolonged sleep deprivation, nudity, hooding, shackling in painful positions, cramped confinement, physical abuse, dousing in cold water, beatings and threats endured by the CIA's high-value detainees (as revealed in the leaked International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report based on interviews with the 14 men transferred to Guant?namo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006) completes a picture that surely "shocks the conscience" more than the torture described in Daliberti, especially as those held were subjected to these techniques for far longer periods. Should any further doubts remain about the definition of torture - and how it was implemented in the "War on Terror" - these should have been dispelled in January 2009, when, shortly before President Bush left office, Susan Crawford, the retired military judge who was the Convening Authority for the Military Commissions at Guant?namo (responsible for deciding who should be charged) granted the most extraordinary interview to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Crawford told Woodward that the reason she had not pressed charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was initially put forward for a trial by Military Commission, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and three other men, was because he was tortured in Guant?namo. "We tortured Qahtani," she said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture." "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent," Crawford explained. "You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge," and to conclude that it was torture. As I explained in an article at the time: Al-Qahtani's treatment was severe, of course. As Time magazine revealed in an interrogation log that was made available in 2005, he was interrogated for 20 hours a day over a 50-day period in late 2002 and early 2003, when he was also subjected to extreme sexual humiliation, threatened by a dog, strip-searched and made to stand naked, and made to bark like a dog and growl at pictures of terrorists. On one occasion he was subjected to a "fake rendition," in which he was tranquilized, flown off the island, revived, flown back to Guant?namo, and told that he was in a country that allowed torture. In addition, as I explained in my book The Guant?namo Files: The sessions were so intense that the interrogators worried that the cumulative lack of sleep and constant interrogation posed a risk to his health. Medical staff checked his health frequently - sometimes as often as three times a day - and on one occasion, in early December, the punishing routine was suspended for a day when, as a result of refusing to drink, he became seriously dehydrated and his heart rate dropped to 35 beats a minute. While a doctor came to see him in the booth, however, loud music was played to prevent him from sleeping. The techniques used on al-Qahtani were approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but the impetus came from the torture memos written and authorized by Yoo and Bybee. Moreover, although Crawford was not so principled when it came to considering the treatment to which the high-value detainees had been subjected in CIA custody - on the basis, presumably, that such information would be easier to conceal in a Military Commission than al-Qahtani's well-publicized ordeal - it is clear from the ICRC report on the high-value detainees that their treatment also "met the legal definition of torture." In addition, it seems probable that the treatment of the 80 other prisoners held in secret CIA prisons, the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, before their arrival in Guant?namo and the treatment of over 100 prisoners in Guant?namo, who were subjected to versions of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on al-Qahtani would also constitute torture. For these reasons, David Margolis' whitewash of Yoo and Bybee cannot be the final word. In his memo to Attorney General Eric Holder, dismissing the report's conclusions, Margolis tried to claim that it was important to remember that Yoo and Bybee were working in extraordinary circumstances, striving to prevent another major terrorist attack. In an early version of the report, OPR head Mary Patrice Brown dismissed this argument, asserting, "Situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the client wants to hear." This is correct, but another authoritative source also explains why there are no excuses for twisting the law out of all shape in an attempt to justify torture. As the UN Convention Against Torture stipulates (Article 2.2), "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." The UN Convention also stipulates (Article 4. 1) that signatories to the Convention "shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law" and requires each state, when torture has been exposed, to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Article 7.1). As with Article 2.2, there are no excuses for not taking action, and that includes political expediency, or, as Barack Obama described it, "a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 13:49:37 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 13:49:37 +0100 Subject: [THS] US: Marijuana Legalization? A White House Rebuttal Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314134541.0400edb8@mail.messagingengine.com> Pubdate: Fri, 12 Mar 2010 Source: Christian Science Monitor (US) Webpage: http://mapinc.org/url/IlylTuNa Copyright: 2010 The Christian Science Publishing Society Contact: http://www.csmonitor.com/cgi-bin/encryptmail.pl?ID=CFF0C5E4 Website: http://www.csmonitor.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/83 THE MONITOR'S VIEW MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION? A WHITE HOUSE REBUTTAL, FINALLY White House 'drug Czar' Gil Kerlikowske Lays Out His Most Thorough Arguments Yet Against Marijuana Legalization. They Help Clear Up Confusion Over White House Drug Policy, And Can Serve As Talking Points For Parents And Officials. The Obama White House has finally laid out its most thorough, reasoned rebuttal to arguments for marijuana legalization - countering a campaign that is gaining alarming momentum at the state level. The president's tough position was delivered in early March by his "drug czar," Gil Kerlikowske, in a private talk before police chiefs in California - which is ground zero for this debate. "Marijuana legalization - for any purpose - is a nonstarter in the Obama administration," said Mr. Kerlikowske, a former police chief himself. It's almost certain that California voters will be asked in a November ballot initiative whether to allow local governments to regulate and tax marijuana (similar to taxes on sales of alcohol). Other states are considering similar proposals, which are really a backdoor way to legalize pot. Thirteen states have decriminalized the use or possession of small amounts of marijuana, which is not the same as legalizing it. Selling it is still illegal except in states where it is used for medical purposes. And under federal law, any sort of marijuana use or sale is a criminal offense. The drug czar's remarks are worth notice for two reasons. First, they provide needed talking points for those who oppose legalization but who can't seem to make their message resonate in the face of a well-financed, well-organized pro-marijuana effort. Second, they help clear up confusion about the White House policy on legalization. When Attorney General Eric Holder announced last year that US law enforcement officials would neither raid nor prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries or those using them, states got mixed signals. Mr. Holder explained it as a matter of the best use of scarce federal law enforcement resources, which he didn't want to expend in the now 14 states that have approved some use of medical marijuana. But "a lot of people believe the administration is somewhat in favor of the decriminalization of marijuana," says Scott Kirkland, police chief for El Cerrito, in the San Francisco Bay area. In California, the public, city council members, city managers, even police chiefs have "misinterpreted" the administration's position, says Mr. Kirkland, the spokesman for marijuana issues for the California Police Chiefs Association. The drug czar couldn't have been more plain. On medical marijuana, which has strong public backing in opinion polls, the former Seattle police chief said that "science should determine what a medicine is, not popular vote." As Kerlikowske pointed out, marijuana is harmful - and he has the studies to back it up. Read the footnotes in his speech; they're sobering, especially No. 8. Legalization supporters argue that no one has ever died from an overdose of this "soft" drug. But here's what "science" has found so far: Smoking marijuana can result in dependence on the drug. More than 30 percent of people who are 18 and over and who used marijuana in the past year are either dependent on the drug or abuse it - that is, they use it repeatedly under hazardous conditions or are imparied when they're supposed to be interacting with others, such as at work. This is according to a 2004 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Pot is also associated with poor motor skills, cognitive impairment (i.e., affecting the ability to think, reason, and process information), and respiratory and mental illness. The recent "Pentagon shooter," John Patrick Bedell, was a heavy marijuana user. The disturbed young man's psychiatrist told the Associated Press that marijuana made the symptoms of his mental illness more pronounced. Mr. Bedell's brother, Jeffrey, told The Washington Post that marijuana made his brother's thinking "more disordered" and that he had implored him to stop smoking pot, to no avail. Kerlikowske also effectively knocked down the argument that regulating and taxing marijuana is a great way for states to make money in these deficit-dreary times. Indeed, NORML, the lead group in the legalization movement, is set to launch a digital ad campaign in Manhattan's Times Square next week: "Money CAN grow on trees!" It's a claim that's too good to be true, just as the exclamation point implies. Look at the nation's experience with regulated alcohol. America collects nearly $15 billion a year in federal and state taxes from alcohol. But Kerlikowske says that covers less than 10 percent of the "social costs" related to healthcare, lost productivity, and law enforcement. And what about lost lives? Let's not add marijuana to the mix of regulated substances. "The costs of legalizing marijuana would outweigh any possible tax that could be levied," Kerlikowske explains. In the United States, illegal drugs already cost an estimated $180 billion annually in social costs, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. That number would increase as marijuana became more widely and easily available. The Dutch - so often praised by marijuana advocates - have had to greatly ratchet back the number of legal marijuana outlets because of crime, nuisance, and increased pot usage among youth. Los Angeles, too, now sees the need to scale back the number of private dispensaries of medical marijuana. Many California towns have looked at L.A. and are saying "no" to dispensaries. The California Board of Equalization, which administers the state's sales tax, estimates $1.4 billion of potential revenue from a marijuana tax. Found money? Its reasoning is based on either "a series of assumptions that are in some instances subject to tremendous uncertainty or in other cases not valid," according to an independent study by the RAND Corporation. What's too bad about the drug czar's speech is that it was made behind closed doors at a venue not accessible to the press, then quietly put on the administration's website. Given the confusion over the message, the White House needs to be far more outspoken about this. President Obama himself needs to get more involved than simply letting his drug czar reveal this critical stance below the radar. As a high-profile parent, he can help other parents who are struggling to prevent their children from going down the rabbit hole of drug use. If one message can resonate in this debate, it's that America's young people are most vulnerable to the threat of legalization. They are particularly sensitive to the price of pot (and prices will come down if pot is legalized). They're the most influenced by societal norms (and public approval is growing). And they're the ones most heavily engaged in studying and learning - a process that pot smoking can impair. Individuals who reach age 21 without using drugs are almost certain to never use them. But according to a study by a leading source on young people and drugs, Monitoring the Future, marijuana use among teens has increased in recent years, after a decade of decline. Teens perceive less risk in use - not surprising when states approve of it as medicine. Risk perception greatly influences drug use among young people. The risks of marijuana - and the wisdom of knowing that joy and satisfaction are not found in a drug - are lessons that Mr. Obama could effectively teach the nation. But even so, it can't stop there. The momentum, for now, is with those who want to legalize marijuana. They have been generously financed by a few billionaires, including George Soros, and make strategic use of the Internet and media. It will take clear-thinking parents, teachers, local officials, faith leaders, and law enforcement officers to convincingly articulate why the march to legalization must be stopped. They can, if they use the kinds of reasonable and fact-based arguments that the nation's drug czar has just laid out. ________________________________________________________________________ From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 14:24:41 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:24:41 +0100 Subject: [THS] NATO covered up botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314142305.04284b70@spamarrest.com> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7060395.ece From The Times March 13, 2010 Nato ?covered up? botched night raid in Afghanistan that killed five Jerome Starkey, Khataba Haji Sharabuddin holds up a photo of his sons, one a police commander, the other an attorney, who were among five people killed during a joint US-Afghan night raid in Paktia province Image :1 of 5 A night raid carried out by US and Afghan gunmen led to the deaths of two pregnant women, a teenage girl and two local officials in an atrocity which Nato then tried to cover up, survivors have told The Times. The operation on Friday, February 12, was a botched pre-dawn assault on a policeman?s home a few miles outside Gardez, the capital of Paktia province, eastern Afghanistan. In a statement after the raid titled ?Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery?, Nato claimed that the force had found the women?s bodies ?tied up, gagged and killed? in a room. A Times investigation suggests that Nato?s claims are either wilfully false or, at best, misleading. More than a dozen survivors, officials, police chiefs and a religious leader interviewed at and around the scene of the attack maintain that the perpetrators were US and Afghan gunmen. The identity and status of the soldiers is unknown. The raid came more than a fortnight after the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan issued new guidelines designed to limit the use of night raids. Special forces and Western intelligence agencies that run covert operations in Afghanistan have been criticised for night raids based on dubious or false intelligence leading to civilian casualties. The first person to die in the assault was Commander Dawood, 43, a long-serving, popular and highly-trained policeman who had recently been promoted to head of intelligence in one of Paktia?s most volatile districts. His brother, Saranwal Zahir, was a prosecutor in Ahmadabad district. He was killed while he stood in a doorway trying to protest their innocence. Three women crouching in a hallway behind him were hit by the same volley of fire. Bibi Shirin, 22, had four children under the age of 5. Bibi Saleha, 37, had 11 children. Both of them, according to their relatives, were pregnant. They were killed instantly. The men?s mother, Bibi Sabsparie, said that Shirin was four months pregnant and Saleha was five months. The other victim, Gulalai, 18, was engaged. She was wounded and later died. ?We had already bought everything for the wedding,? her soon-to-be father-in-law, Sayed Mohammed Mal, the Vice-Chancellor of Gardez University, said. On the night of the attack about 25 male friends and relatives had gathered at Commander Dawood?s compound in Khataba, a small village, to celebrate the naming of a newborn boy. Sitting together along the walls of a guest room, the men had taken turns dancing while musicians played. Mohammed Sediq Mahmoudi, 24, the singer, said that at some time after 3am one of the musicians, Dur Mohammed, went outside to go to the toilet. ?Someone shone a light on his face and he ran back inside and said the Taleban were outside,? Mr Sediq said. Lieutenant-Colonel Zamarud Zazai, the Gardez head of police intelligence, said: ?Both sides thought the other group was Taleban.? Commander Dawood ran towards the family quarters with his son Sediqullah, 15. Halfway across the courtyard they were shot by a gunman on the roof. Commander Dawood was killed. Sediqullah, his uncles said, was hit twice but survived. The shooting stopped and the soldiers shouted in Pashto for everyone to come outside. Waheedullah, an ambulance driver, said that their accents sounded Kandahari. Nato said that the troops were part of a joint ?Afghan-international? force but, despite new rules requiring them to leave leaflets identifying their unit, the family said they left nothing. Local US forces denied any involvement. In the hallway on the other side of the compound, women poured in to tend to the casualties. Commander Dawood?s mother said: ?Zahir shouted, ?don?t fire, we work for the Government?. But while he was talking they fired again. I saw him fall down. I turned around and saw my daughter-in-law and the other women were dead.? Mohammed Sabir, 26, the youngest brother of Commander Dawood and Zahir, was one of eight men arrested and flown to a base in neighbouring Paktika province. They were held for four days and interrogated by an American in civilian clothes who showed them pictures of their suspect. ?I said, ?Yes, it?s Shamsuddin. He was at the party. Why didn?t you arrest him?? ? Sabir said. After they were released without charge Shamsuddin ? who had spent five months fixing generators at the local American base ? turned himself in for questioning. He, too, was released without charge. Nato?s original statement said: ?Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed.? The family maintain that no one threw so much as a stone. Rear Admiral Greg Smith, Nato?s director of communications in Kabul, denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up. He said that both the men who were killed were armed and showing ?hostile intent? but admitted ?they were not the targets of this particular raid?. ?I don?t know if they fired any rounds,? he said. ?If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don?t have to be fired upon to fire back.? He admitted that the original statement had been ?poorly worded? but said ?to people who see a lot of dead bodies? the women had appeared at the time to have been dead for several hours. The family were offered, through local elders, American compensation ? $2,000 (?1,300) for each of the victims. ?There?s no value on human life,? Bibi Sabsparie said. ?They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won?t bring our family back.? From vignes at wanadoo.fr Sun Mar 14 14:30:12 2010 From: vignes at wanadoo.fr (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:30:12 +0100 Subject: [THS] PeerBlock Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314142946.04120860@spamarrest.com> http://www.peerblock.com/ PeerBlock lets you control who your computer "talks to" on the Internet. By selecting appropriate lists of "known bad" computers, you can block communication with advertising or spyware oriented servers, computers monitoring your p2p activities, computers which have been "hacked", even entire countries! They can't get in to your computer, and your computer won't try to send them anything either. And best of all, it's free! From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 17:09:07 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:09:07 +0100 Subject: [THS] !!!!! Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314165500.041a36e0@spamarrest.com> An excerpt from Chris Hedges' new book, Empire of Illusion, chapter 1. Highly recommended. "A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates." We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year-old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys?a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity. Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence.24 There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate?a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007,80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.25 And it is not much better beyond our borders. Canada has an illiterate and semiliterate population estimated at 42 percent of the whole, a proportion that mirrors that of the United States.26 Television, a medium built around the skillful manipulation of images, ones that can overpower reality, is our primary form of mass communication. A television is turned on for six hours and forty-seven minutes a day in the average household. The average American daily watches more than four hours of television. That amounts to twenty-eight hours a week, or two months of uninterrupted television-watching a year. That same person will have spent nine years in front of a television by the time he or she is sixty-five. Television speaks in a language of familiar, comforting cliches and exciting images. Its format, from reality shows to sit-coms, is predictable. It provides a mass, virtual experience that colors the way many people speak and interact with one another. It creates a false sense of intimacy with our elite?celebrity actors, newspeople, politicians, business tycoons, and sports stars. And everything and everyone that television transmits is validated and enhanced by the medium. If a person is not seen on television, on some level he or she is not important. Television confers authority and power. It is the final arbitrator for what matters in life. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we are bombarded with the cant and spectacle pumped out over the airwaves or over computer screens by highly-paid pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossip-fueled entertainment networks. And a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not to read. There have been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, has the content of information been as skillfully and ruthlessly controlled and manipulated. Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded. The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children. It impoverishes language. The Princeton Review analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln spoke at the educational level of an eleventh grader (11.2), and Douglas addressed the crowd using a vocabulary suitable (12.0) for a high-school graduate. In the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the candidates spoke in language accessible to tenth graders. In the 1992 debates, Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did Perot (6.3). During the 2000 debates, Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Gore at a high seventh-grade level (7.6).27 This obvious decline was, perhaps, raised slightly by Barack Obama in 2008, but the trends above are clear. Those captive to images cast ballots based on how candidates make them feel. They vote for a slogan, a smile, perceived sincerity, and attractiveness, along with the carefully crafted personal narrative of the candidate. It is style and story, not content and fact, that inform mass politics. Politicians have learned that to get votes they must replicate the faux intimacy established between celebrities and the public. There has to be a sense, created through artful theatrical staging and scripting by political spin machines, that the politician is "one of us." The politician, like the celebrity, has to give voters the impression that he or she, as Bill Clinton used to say, feels their pain. We have to be able to see ourselves in them. If this connection, invariably a product of extremely sophisticated artifice, is not established, no politician can get any traction in a celebrity culture. The rhetoric in campaigns eschews reality for the illusive promise of the future and the intrinsic greatness of the nation. Campaigns have a deadening sameness, the same tired cliches, the concerned expressions of the sensitive candidates who are like you and me, and the gushing words of gratitude to the crowds of supporters. The metaphors are not empty. They say something about us and our culture. Changes in metaphors are, as the critic Northrop Frye understood, fundamental changes. "Are we going to look forward," asked candidate Obama at an "American Jobs Tour" rally in Columbus, Ohio, on October 10, 2008, "or are we going to look backwards?" Audience: Forward! Obama: Are we going to look forward with hope, or are we going to look backwards with fear? Audience: Hope! Forward! Obama: Ohio, if you are willing to organize with me, if you are willing to go vote right now?we've got?you could go to the early voting right across the street, right on?right there. [Cheers and applause.] If every one of you are willing to grab your friends and your neighbors and make the phone calls and do what's required, I guarantee you we will not just win Ohio, we will win this general election. And you and I together, we will change this country and we will change the world. [Cheers and applause.] God bless you. God bless the United States of America. [Cheers and applause.] Celebrity culture has bequeathed to us what Benjamin DeMott calls "junk politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott notes. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes?"meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt, unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."28 Politics has become a product of a diseased culture that seeks its purpose in celebrities who are, as Boorstin wrote, "receptacles into which we pour our own purposeless-ness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror."29 Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on the credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating cliches and slogans. They are hostage to the constant jingle and manipulation of a consumer culture. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. They eat at fast-food restaurants not only because it is cheap, but also because they can order from pictures rather than from a menu. And those who serve them, also often semiliterate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are usually marked with pictures. Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification. Celebrity images are reflections of our idealized selves sold back to us. Yet they actually constrain rather than expand our horizons and experiences. "One of the deepest and least remarked features of the Age of Contrivance is what I would call the mirror effect," Boorstin wrote. Nearly everything we do to enlarge our world, to make life more interesting, more varied, more exciting, more vivid, more "fabulous," more promising, in the long run has an opposite effect. In the extravagance of our expectations and in our ever increasing power, we transform elusive dreams into graspable images within with each of us can fit. By doing so we mark the boundaries of our world with a wall of mirrors. Our strenuous and elaborate efforts to enlarge experience have the unintended result of narrowing it. In frenetic quest for the unexpected, we end by finding only the unexpectedness we have planned for ourselves. We meet ourselves coming back.30 The most essential skill in political theater and a consumer culture is artifice. Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. Those who are best at deception succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of entertainment, who fail to create a narrative or do not have one fashioned for them by their handlers, are ignored. They become "unreal." An image-based culture communicates through narratives, pictures, and pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, untimely deaths, train wrecks?these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images. A governor who patronizes call girls becomes a huge news story. A politician who proposes serious regulatory reform or advocates curbing wasteful spending is boring. Kings, queens, and emperors once used their court conspiracies to divert their subjects. Today cinematic, political, and journalistic celebrities distract us with their personal foibles and scandals. They create our public mythology. Acting, politics, and sports have become, as they were in Nero's reign, interchangeable. In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous, either because of our own attributes or our national character or because we are blessed by God. In this world, all that matters is the consistency of our belief systems. The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish. "Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains of alleged cultural repression," Gabler wrote. "So too was consumption, throwing off the chains of the old production-oriented culture and allowing anyone to buy his way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both entertainment and consumption often provided the same intoxication: the sheer, endless pleasure of emancipation from reason, from responsibility, from tradition, from class, and from all the other bonds that restrained the self."31 When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant. Our national discourse is dominated by manufactured events, from celebrity gossip to staged showcasings of politicians to elaborate entertainment and athletic spectacles. All are sold to us through the detailed personal narratives of those we watch. "The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses," Boorstin wrote. "The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images?however planned, contrived, or distorted?more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself."32 In his book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann distinguished between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads." He defined a "stereotype" as an oversimplified pattern that helps us find meaning in the world. Lippmann cited examples of the crude "stereotypes we carry about in our heads" of whole groups of people such as "Germans," "South Europeans," "Negroes," "Harvard men," "agitators," and others. These stereotypes, Lippmann noted, give a reassuring and false consistency to the chaos of existence. They offer easily grasped explanations of reality and are closer, as Boorstin noted, to propaganda because they simplify rather than complicate.33 Pseudo-events, dramatic productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, television, Hollywood, or advertisers, however, are very different. They have the capacity to appear real, even though we know they are staged. They are capable because they can evoke a powerful emotional response of overwhelming reality and replacing it with a fictional narrative that often becomes accepted as truth. The power of pseudo-events to overtake reality was what plunged the marines who returned from Iwo Jima into such despair. The unmasking of a stereotype damages and often destroys its credibility. But pseudo-events are immune to this deflation. The exposure of the elaborate mechanisms behind the pseudo-event only adds to its fascination and its power. This is the basis of the convoluted television reporting on how effectively political campaigns and candidates have been stage-managed. Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask whether the message is true but rather whether the pseudo- event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion. Those events that appear real are relished and lauded. Those that fail to create a believable illusion are deemed failures. Truth is irrelevant. Those who succeed in politics, as in most of the culture, are those who create the most convincing fantasies. A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes?the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment sky-rocket?the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control. The old production-oriented culture demanded what the historian Warren Susman termed character. The new consumption-oriented culture demands what he called personality. The shift in values is a shift from a fixed morality to the artifice of presentation. The old cultural values of thrift and moderation honored hard work, integrity, and courage. The consumption-oriented culture honors charm, fascination, and likeability. "The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer," Susman wrote. "Every American was to become a performing self."34 Totalitarian systems begin as propagandistic movements that ostensibly teach people to "believe what they want," but that is a ruse. The Christian Right, for example, argues that it wants Intelligent Design, or creationism, to be offered as an alternative to evolution in public-school biology classes. But once you allow creationism, which no reputable biologist or paleontologist accepts as legitimate science, to be considered as an alternative to real science, you begin the deadly assault against dispassionate, honest, intellectual inquiry. Step into the hermetic world of many Christian schools or colleges and there are no alternatives to creationism offered to students. Once these systems have control, the Christian advocates' purported love of alternative viewpoints and debates is replaced by an iron and irrational conformity to illusion. Pseudo-events, which create their own semblance of reality, serve in the wider culture the same role creationism serves for the Christian Right. Pseudo-events destabilize truth. They are convincing enough and appear real enough to manufacture their own facts. We carry within us feelings and perceptions about politicians, celebrities, our nation, and our culture that are mirages generated by pseudo-events. The use of pseudo-events to persuade rather than overtly brainwash renders millions of us unable to see or question the structures and systems that are impoverishing us and in some cases destroying our lives. The flight into illusion sweeps away the core values of the open society. It corrodes the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to grasp historical facts, to advocate for change, and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways, and structures of being that are morally and socially acceptable. A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society. Those who slip into this illusion ignore the signs of impending disaster. The physical degradation of the planet, the cruelty of global capitalism, the looming oil crisis, the collapse of financial markets, and the danger of overpopulation rarely impinge to prick the illusions that warp our consciousness,. The words, images, stories, and phrases used to describe the world in pseudo-events have no relation to what is happening around us. The advances of technology and science, rather than obliterating the world of myth, have enhanced its power to deceive. We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception. Products and experiences?indeed, experience as a product?offered up for sale, sanctified by celebrities, are mirages. They promise us a new personality. They promise us success and fame. They promise to mend our brokenness. "People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence, and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders," wrote Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America. "They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is 'attractively packaged.'"35 And there are no shortages of experiences and products that, for a price, promise to stimulate us, make us powerful, sexy, invincible, admired, beautiful, and unique. Blind faith in illusions is our culture's secular version of being born again. These illusions assure us that happiness and success is our birthright. They tell us that our catastrophic collapse is not permanent. They promise that pain and suffering can always be overcome by tapping into our hidden, inner strengths. They encourage us to bow down before the cult of the self. To confront these illusions, to puncture their mendacity by exposing the callousness and cruelty of the corporate state, signals a loss of faith. It is to become an apostate. The culture of illusion, one of happy thoughts, manipulated emotions, and trust in the beneficence of power, means we sing along with the chorus or are instantly disappeared from view like the losers on a reality show. From psalience at fastmail.fm Sun Mar 14 17:15:13 2010 From: psalience at fastmail.fm (Peter Webster) Date: Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:15:13 +0100 Subject: [THS] ECOLOGIST: How a 22-year-old student uncovered peak oil fraud Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20100314171040.041a3450@spamarrest.com> http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/437079/how_a_22yearold_student_uncovered_peak_oil_fraud.html How a 22-year-old student uncovered peak oil fraud Tom Levitt 10th March, 2010 Lionel Badal was working on his undergraduate dissertation when he suddenly found himself privy to information that he knew must be made public When will we reach the peak of global oil production? It?s a question of crucial importance as governments around the world prepare for a world of declining oil resources, in which we will be much more reliant on alternative sources of energy. The body on which the UK and others rely heavily to make that assessment is the International Energy Agency (IEA) based in Paris and set up in the aftermath of the oil crisis between 1973 and 1974. For years, IEA reports have been reiterating the conclusion that peak oil was not a problem. Behind the scenes however, it is now clear that senior staff thought otherwise. It was only through the work of 22-year-old Lionel Badal, a politics student at Exeter University, that the truth about this cover-up finally emerged. First enquiries... It started innocently enough, as Lionel, working on his undergraduate dissertation on peak oil, set about trying to arrange interviews with politicians and figures working inside and outside the oil industry. He was surprised when the IEA agreed to allow him to interview one of their top officials. In the end the first official pulled out of the interview but he was replaced by one of his colleagues, a senior economist at the organisation. The new interviewee turned out to be far more forthcoming than his superiors might have wanted. December 2008... Lionel met the official at the IEA?s Paris headquarters. His interviewee was initially a reluctant speaker. ?He was very concerned about how I would quote him and where it would appear ? just from this I knew the meeting could be interesting,? says Lionel. ?He then asked if he was the first person I had interviewed still working in the industry. I replied that yes he was (I had tried speaking to OPEC but had been told they did not do interviews). After hearing this he said this was a problem. ?He didn?t say why but it was obvious he did not want to be the only one speaking out.? Most of the interview was ?interesting but nothing revelatory?, remembers Lionel, but that changed towards the end when the official was asked for his opinion on predictions for peak oil. The IEA has repeatedly said oil output can increase until at least 2030 as long as 'adequate investments are made in exploration and development'. Other analysts, including those behind the UK Energy Research Centre report on peak oil, say this is 'wildly optimistic' and that the IEA does not have the evidence to back up this prediction. Far from sticking to the IEA line, the official said he was actually very worried about peak oil and shared some of the more pessimistic concerns. ?From that meeting I understood there was a problem,? says Lionel, ?as publicly the IEA did not say this type of thing.? Over the next few months Lionel continued his research and met with politicians in France. Spring 2009 By early 2009 he had finished his research and contacted the IEA official to send him his dissertation. He also told him about the contact he had had so far with French MPs concerned about peak oil. The IEA official told him that he respected one of the politicians with whom Lionel had met and later agreed to testify to other politicians about the problem. It was a pivotal moment - through his involvement in an undergraduate disseration, a key IEA official was prepared to go public about what his organisation really thought about peak oil. July 2009 By July, Lionel had managed to arrange a meeting between himself, the IEA official and the MEP Corrine Lepage, a former French environment minister and well-known figure in French politics. Clearly pleased to meet such a respected figure, the IEA official became much more open about the downplaying of peak oil concerns at the agency. ?He told her reports had been modified and that there were pressures on the IEA from the US not to make too pessimistic predictions,' Lionel remembers. 'He said just as peak oil theorists claimed, there was a big problem with oil.? By the end of the meeting the IEA official had agreed to write a briefing note for the MEP on the issue. But by then Lionel thought the issue needed to be made public. ?I knew on her own the MEP could not do anything about the problem. But I also knew that some British journalists were writing a lot about the issue, so a few weeks later I asked the IEA official whether he would be willing to testify anonymously to journalists. The official was initially sceptical, preferring to inform politicians in a discreet way. But a few weeks later, Lionel pressed him again on the issue and he agreed. ?I think arranging the meeting with the French MP definitely helped. It gave me some credibility as she was well known. He was certainly not na?ve about the whole process and understood that his career could be at risk.? September 2009 Having been given the green light, Lionel contacted two journalists at the Economist and the Independent. The Independent was slow to respond and did not seem convinced by the story, remembers Lionel, but the Economist journalist agreed to meet the following month when he was in London. However, at the meeting he said he could not immediately write about the issue as he was working on other stories. ?I also got the feeling his position was isolated at the Economist and that the magazine would not want to take a stance by running such a story on peak oil,? says Lionel. October 2009 Soon after these first attempts to make the issue public, the respected NGO Global Witness released a report on peak oil, Heads in the Sand. Reading Guardian journalist Ashley Seager's article on this report, Lionel decided to contact him and sent information about his IEA whistleblower to both Seager and the paper?s environment columnist, George Monbiot. Seager forwarded it onto the Guardian?s energy editor, Terry Macalister. By coincidence the IEA was preparing to publish its latest annual report on oil supply and demand in early November. With the launch scheduled to take place in London, the Guardian had the perfect opportunity to maximise exposure of the story. November 2009 Macalister spoke to Lionel?s IEA official, and on November 10th, 2009 - the same day that the IEA?s chief economist Dr Fatih Birol was launching the agency?s major annual report - the story appeared on the Guardian?s frontpage. As expected, the reaction was huge. ?Peak oil whistleblower? stories were splashed across the media.