The moral shambles that is Israeli apartheid is bad enough, what with illegal settlements adiabatically stealing land from original inhabitants, and relegating the original inhabitants to a second-class or even third-class citizen status, while simultaneously engaging in a process of ghetoization and starvation of the original inhabitants, in a cruel imitation of the European conquest of America, which led to the creation of the United States of America, who finances and provides and muscle for our Israeli friends.

Until I read this article (haaretz.com) it never occurred to me to think of the Israeli settlements as a continuance of European colonialism. The flooring thing, which is entirely new to me, is that Israelis of European descent are racist against Israeli’s of Middle Eastern descent. So take away the religious difference, and we find that the Jewish European invaders (settlers) are racist against Jewish Israeli citizens native to the area. . Apparently the Israeli high court is attempting to desegregate schools in the settlements. If I follow this right, the Israelis of European descent are “Ashkenazi”, while those of middle eastern descent, i.e. the natives, are “Sephardi”. The Ashkenazim parents refuse to let their kids be educated together with the Sephardim. The Israeli police are now seeking arrest for 22 mothers and 2 fathers who failed to show up for two-week jail sentences, for refusing to integrate their children.

According to Yair Sheleg of haaretz.com:

The issue, then, is not Jewish religious law, but rather the racist social norms that characterize the entire ultra-Orthodox worldview. (The Haredim, as we know, also discriminate against the newly religious. )

Heavy stuff (Haredim apparently refers to the ultra-orthodox Ashkenazim).

I find it entertaining to the put the situation into the framework of European Colonialism by way of zombie films. The Ashkenazim have been infected by that European cultural meme of racism and intolerance, which led to our atrocities against the natives, and mexicans, and philipines, and haitians, and central americans (etc etc), the British atrocities against the Indians (and, and, and), the French atrocities against the Indochines (and, and, and), not to mention the Dutch and Spanish, and of course the German atrocities against the Jews. The nazis bit the Jews who are now chomping away at the native populations… the palestinians, and the Sephardim.

Come gentlemen! Ghandi showed us the cure for this meme nearly a hundred years ago. Let’s get busy curing ourselves before we consume ourselves.

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Labor’s problem is basically our problem… Blanche Lincoln, a total corporate sell out, won in a tightly contested battle against her challenger in the Democratic primaries. Labor dumped 10 million bucks in a campaign to defeat Lincoln. Hell, I donated ten buck to get the bitch defeated, and I don’t even live in the states.

What’s the issue? Well, Lincoln worked against the public option, and basically Lincoln works consistently against the public in the factor of corporate interests. Now White House staff has apparently been making nasty comments to the effect that Labor just pissed away 10 million bucks.

The problem here is the problem we all face: What can we do about it? Should labor endore the rabidly anti-labor Republicans come November? All they can do is half heartedly support the bastards that are going to screw them the least. Are you pissed off about the fact that the Obama administration has allowed the shallow off-shore drilling moratorium to expire? Well, what are you going to do, vote for the Republicans?

I’m going to the green party website and donating some money right now…

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I’m really sad about what’s happened to, and with, Helen Thomas. Helen has had a long career of poking holes in the white house propaganda (in every administration since Kennedy). But she made the mistake of speaking honestly about Israel:

Any comments on israel?
Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not Germany or Poland.
So where should they go?
They go home.
Where is their home?
Germany. Poland and America…. and everywhere else.

Here’s the full interview:

The rabbi who interviewed here had this to say about her response (from here).

“I was very surprised when Thomas told me that not only was she opposed to the two-state solution, but that she thought that the Jews should leave Israel and return to the final solution, more or less,”

Now Helen’s conclusions regarding Israel are pretty radical, and in my mind unrealistic, but they are a far cry from being hate speech, and it’s really stretching it to characterize her words as meaning jews should “return to the final solution, more or less”. If Helen has said “they should go back to their countries of origin”, which would be equivalent, it would have made for much better press. This just shows us that Helen’s not as quick witted and careful as she used to be, not that she’s a nazi sympathiser.

Making her comment that “they should go home to German, Palestine, the United States…” into a comment supporting ethnic cleansing is dishonest, and stops us from asking important questions. Questions like: Well, what if we, as an international community, decide Israel was a bad idea? It’s true, they are occupying land that belonged to someone else, they have taken land through invasion and are engaging in starvation and ghetoization tactics. What if we dismantled Israel, and made reparations to the Palestinians, restoring their land? Well, the next step would be to return all of the land that the Nazis seized from Jewish citizens. Then we would have to restore the land that allies, like the soviet union, seized from German citizens. This would be applying a certain kind of historic justice, at the cost of screwing over perfectly innocent people living on the occupied land (in Israel and Europe). I think it’s a bad decision as I think the net harm would be greater than the net good.

The Isreali’s, particularly the right wing, claim that they are the original inhabitants of Israel, and are returning to their proper homeland, in a contract in the bible. Joe Biden has echoed these sentiments while condemning Thomas. So both the Israelis and Joe Biden seem to be advocating returning dispossessed people their lands, regardless of how long ago these people were dispossessed. But if we apply this standard honestly, we must return the United States and Canada back to the remaining American Indians. We should certainly make restorations to African Americans, for the hundreds of years we enslaved, killed and beat their ancestors. What’s the statute of limitations on displacement, genocide, and human enslavement?

Stephen Colbert later interviewed the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and asked why Israel wouldn’t allow an international investigation into flotilla event. The Israeli ambassador shrewdly replied that it was for the same reason that the U.S. won’t allow international investigations and international courts to try American war criminals or American human rights violators. Well, that was the most honest statement that came out of the whole drama It’s also a telling revelation of the harm that our own lack of international ethics causes us in international negotiations.

I’m far from an expert on middle east issues, but I’m also far from being an expert on American or S. African Apartheid — I still know they are wrong. Perhaps a two-state solution is the answer, perhaps there exists a better solution, I don’t really have an opinion. Where I do have a an opinion is on very obvious human rights violations and illegal occupations.

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Theft is newspeak for copyright violation, along with the other newspeak vocabulary “intellectual property”. It’s a very deliberate propaganda aimed at framing the discussion of copyright by mapping it onto a vocabulary which unconsciously prejudices our thinking, by bringing our cultural value of private property into play.

This framing, this point of view is completely and demonstrably incorrect. That fact that this propaganda is so successful has devastating effects on our culture, which will take years to properly understand. But the propaganda is highly successful, primarily because the dominant means for cultural dissemination (film, music, television) are controlled by large corporations. This structure is very effective at censoring and biasing the discussion.

That’s why the following video is fantastic. We need popular media which disseminates the truth: copying is not theft.

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I wish Malcolm X had a holiday, or had some streets named after him. Some years ago, a group called the “Guerilla theatre of the absurd” at Reed College printed up stickers, the size and color of street signs, saying “Malcolm X dr.”, and pasted them on all street signs of some particularly wealthy street in Portland. In essence, they did a citizen renaming of a street.

Now, a study of American history shows that the teaching and preservation of American history is grossly, horribly mangled and abused in order to maintain fealty to a kind of unifying fairy tale. As part of this process, I think Malcolm X is being forgotten, and I find that tragic.

So I’d like to propose a new holiday: From now on, let Feb. 21 be Malcolm X day! How do we celebrate Malcolm X day? We print bumper stickers, the same size, shape and color of street signs in our city, and we do a citizen of renaming of a street, or a part of a street, whatever we can pull off. We do this every year, in every city where we can find some brave soul to join the movement. When do we stop? When they rename a street in your town after Brother Malcolm. After that we can celebrate by getting out and having a parade down Malcolm X drive or Blvd.

So what do you think? We have 9 months to prepare. Start your planning. Post pictures of your civic improvements on the web!

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Leaders are overvalued in our culture.  American history tends to paint social change as happening as a result of the actions of a few great leaders, as opposed to occurring  despite the nations leadership, and due to the agitation of large numbers of affected people.  So while I don’t wish to devalue the work that, say, MLK did, I don’t think the civil rights movement of the sixties was thanks to him.  Rather, MLK was successful because he had so many dedicated, hard working followers, most of whom history will forget.

Now look at the following video.  It makes the case clearly, brilliantly and light heartedly.  A small act of sainthood.  Bravo!

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The New York Times has a lengthy article entitled “A Supersized Custody Battle Over Marvel Superheroes”, discussing an ongoing legal battle over copyrights regarding character created by Jack Kirby between 1958 and 1963.  It is useful to analyse such reporting, to see how consent is manufactured for policies which benefit the power-elite (read large corporations), and harm the public, in this case the public domain.

First, a brief history lesson which needs repeating, as the vast majority of America has never even heard of the public domain, and has no understanding of how copyright law differs from property law, which differences defines how copyright violation differs from theft.  Copyright is (intended to be) a short term abridgement of human rights, specifically the right to free speech, in an effort to encourage and reward creative works.  They provide the creator of a work with a temporary monopoly on the spread of his or her ideas.   The main players behind the creation of copyright and patent law in the United States were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who clearly had mixed feelings on the subject.  The fundamental idea was that through creation of this temporary (state enforced) monopoly, congress could “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”.  A useful brief history can be found here.  Once this temporary copyright expired, the intellectual work would return to the public domain.  The original period of copyright length in the U.S. was 14 years, and the author had the right to extend the copyright for an additional 14  (Details of the historical development of copyright law can be found here).  The feeling was that this was an appropriate length of time to allow a creator the opportunity to benefit from his or her creation with an acceptable abridgement of human liberty.  In other words, copyright is a tradeoff between reward for the creator (incentive) and civil liberty, particularly to provide an incentive for publication and distribution.

As costs and times for distribution and publication decrease, the cost function for this tradeoff change, implying that copyright lengths should decrease.  In the last century copyright and publication has become dominated by an oligarchy of powerful corporations, primarily the members of the RIAA and MPAA, with Disney being a major villain.  These corporations have  championed a series of extension to copyright, each time adding a small fixed amount to the existing copyright lengths,  so that copyrights can now be extended to the life of the author + 70 years.  There is no reason to expect that these corporations will allow their increasingly valuable copyright portfolios to expire, so as waves of valuable intellectual property stand to enter the public domain (where they belong), we can expect the armies of lobbyists to swarm Congress’ halls once again.

So what does all this have to do with manufacturing consent?  In the NYT article, the article never mentions the concept of public domain.  It never discusses the fact that Kirby’s creations, now at 50 years of age, should have entered the public domain 32 years ago (under the original terms of copyright law).  There is consideration of the harm done by such copyright litigation which has no redeeming social value.  Jack Kirby, 16 years dead, is not going to be rewarded by this lawsuit, nor will the current process encourage any kind of creative work, beyond creative legal wrangling.  The underlying message of the article seems to be “look, thanks to the efforts of this lawyer and our wonderful copyright system, this guys heirs are gong to be getting a payday!  Isn’t the American copyright system grand?”  Rather than the message we should all be reading, which is “Look, this legal vampire is trying to make a lot of money of this copyright vampire.  The copyright vampire deserves to suffer, since without it’s machinations these works would be in the public domain and contributing to our culture.  But the legal vampire isn’t contributing anything to our culture either, and giving money to Kirby’s heirs isn’t doing anything for anyone either, other than using the legal system as a kind of lottery”.  The real lesson to be learned here is the following:  We need copyright reform.  We need copyrights to be shorter, and we need them to remain in the hands of the creator, not in the hands of some parasitic corporate behemoth.

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I actually want to write about Obama’s attempt at student load reform, but before I do I want to mention an excellent article at truthout discussing Beck, Coulter, and Limbaugh. The author (one Davidson Loehr) gives a brief review of Julius Streicher, who would seem to be the closest thing to a real life Howard W. Campell Jr. as exists, and compares his crimes (for which he was hung at Nuremburg) to the activities of Coulter, Beck, and Limbaugh. It’s a good read, and mostly on the money. He makes a very strong case against Coulter and Beck, but if the quotes he uses for Limbaugh are the best he could find, his case is pretty weak there. Limbaugh is probably guilty of little more than paving the way for Beck and Coulter and Fox news.

Moving on to Obama’s student loan overhaul: I just read an article at the NYT called Obama’s Student Loan Overhaul Endangered. For those of you who don’t know, the American student loan system works as follows: Most student loans are made by private, for profit companies, with government guarantees. In other words, the private companies take the profit, while the federal government takes the risk. This is essentially the same problem people discuss with the bank bailouts (and the airline bailouts, and the automotive bailouts…) with one important difference: Here the situation is planned in advance. It’s not an attempt at averting an even worse catastrophe, it’s just an example of successful (for the profiteers) lobbying. For federally subsidized loans, the govt makes the interest payments until graduation. Student loans are exempt from bankruptcy, so even if you go bankrupt, you will still owe on the student loans.

Obama’s plan is to loan the money directly, which would save the government billions of dollars, which he would use to expand Pell grant scholarships. This is no-brainer policy reform. The only people who lose out are the lenders, who, let’s face it, are parasitic users who have obtained their risk-free, merit-free profits by gaming the U.S. political system.

But the education bill is strongly opposed by some Senate Democrats, particularly those in states where for-profit student lenders are major employers. In a letter to the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, six Democrats said they disliked the president’s proposal.

“We write to make you aware of our concern with provisions of contemplated student lending reform that could put jobs at risk,” the senators wrote. “Increase our nation’s commitment to higher education funding is a priority, but we must proceed toward this objective in a thoughtful manner that considers potential alternative legislative proposals, while still delivering an equivalent amount of savings over the next ten years.

So, who should be haranguing for this? They are: Senators Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Bill Nelson of Florida, Mark Warner of Virginia and Jim Webb of Virginia. Now, I’m a huge fan of Webb for his courageous attempt at justice reform. He’s also one of the most reasonable and ethically consistent senators with regard to foreign policy. I might not agree with all his conclusions, but I thnk he’s a pretty good guy who works hard at being ethical. So in the end, the system is to blame, not the individuals. I’m not familiar with the others, but probably the same holds true. It’s not hard to see how this probably played out: Contributions buy you access. Once the lenders have access they make a spiel about how this is going to cost their state X jobs, and probably paints the whole thing as a political liability for the Senator in question. At that point the senator in question either cynically decides in favor of the local over the national interests (this amounts to self interest through the election process), or decides that he (or she) has to pick their battles carefully, and this one isn’t worth fighting.

What really gets me is couching the conflict of interest in terms of national interest vs jobs, where the real issue is national interest v.s. private wealth. Why? Well, the loans are going to made anyway, which means the jobs are needed anyway. The only difference is who’s doing the work, and where. So it’s not a question of jobs, it’s a question of whether or not we want to let some asshole(s) with money and connections profit from the student loan process or not. Who are these assholes? Well, Sallie Mae is at the top of the list.

The whole “jobs vs X” line is overplayed, and pretty transparent. It used to be used to great effect to torpedo environmental protections. Of course, environmental protections typically create jobs. It’s automation and outsourcing that destroys work places. Hopefully the american voter is gradually getting wise to this line of bullshit. So write your senator and tell them you don’t fall for that jobs versus X bullshit anymore, and you expect him (or her) to vote with your interests in mind, not with Fannie Mae’s.

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I recently listened to an old Alex Jones – Noam Chomsky interview.  I absolutely detest Alex Jones, who’s essentially the Rush Limbaugh of the tinfoil hat crowd.  What I find reprehensible in his pseudo-journalism is the net effect of it, which is to discredit and marginalize legitimate points of concern in the political spectrum, for example corporate manipulation (well, ownership) of the media and manufacturing consent being perhaps the most vital.

The problem is AJ has a much bigger audience and visibility than intelligent, reasonable individuals (like Chomsky) who are working hard at exposing this stuff and educating people.   So when you start talking about corporate and elite ownership of the media, the average person will likely have heard these concepts first from a wing-nut source like Alex Jones, and will likely glaze over.  So while A.J. ended his interview with Prof Chomsky by calling Chomsky a corporate-elite schill, the truth is that A.J. does far more to further the corporate-elitist agenda.  I’ll be discussing that at some other point, but I want to talk about a concrete example of this kind of corporate media control that’s taking place right now.

Maybe you’ve heard about the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood?  These guys a a national coalition of health care professionals, educators, advocacy groups, parents and individuals whoare trying to “reclaim childhood from corporate marketers”.   They managed to push Disney into offering refunds on their “Baby Einstein” videos, because (surprise!) watching a video doesn’t educate your kids, and in fact watching videos is probably harmful for young kids, no matter what’s being watched.  This wouldn’t be a problem if Disney hadn’t claimed that these videos were “education”.

So Disney had to offer refunds, and the companies involved had to drop the word “educational” from their marketing.  Good news all around.   But mega corporations (and Disney’s among the worst) doesn’t like it when people try to execute some kind of democratic control or accountability.  So Disney called up the Judge Baker Children’s Center (a Harvard affiliated children’s mental health center).     Apparently Disney put pressure on Judge Baker, who in turn pressured the heroes in this story not to advocate against corporations, and not talk to the media.  Wow.  Now the JBCC is evicting the C.C.F.C., apparently because “the mission of the C.C.F.C — to protect children from harmful exploitation by corporate marketers — is not in line with the Judge Bake mission”.

Now Karen Schwartzman said Judge Baker received no money, and no promise of money from Disney, so one has to wonder what form of motivator Disney used?  Hints of research grants (this wouldn’t be money to JB after all, but to the childrens center), or pressure through Harvard (does Disney donate or have joint research programs with Harvard)?  Or perhaps it was just the threat of frivolous lawsuits.  Disney is a particularly nasty beast, because, in addition to having the huge financial resources available to all major corporations, they have such an overwhelming hold on the American collective unconcious.  I think it’s hard for the average American to think of Disney as evil, which no doubt has  helped in Disney’s efforts to plunder and deny the public domain.

There’s a fairly good article at the NYT.

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My mother and aunt Herta called me last night. I forget how we got to it, but I was explaining to Herta how low taxes are here in Switzerland, and how much more the Swiss government provides with that money than the American government manages to provide despite a much higher tax rate. How big is the discrepancy? I have roughly %13 in withholdings, including all taxes and unemployment insurance. Switzerland has a private, but highly regulated medical insurance system (a lot like what Obama is trying to push through), so I do have additional health care costs, compared with other countries. That money pays for an incredibly stable and responsible government, which takes great pains to protect the air and water quality, provide an excellent education system with top class university educational available, virtually for free, for anyone willing to work for it. They have the best mass transit system I have ever seen anywhere. They do a commendable job protecting the environment. Crime is virtually non-existent and emergency systems and infrastructure are second to none.

So we got to talking about how this works so well, and I said I thought it was partly thanks to the excellent system, and partly thanks to the culture (which has its defects, but certainly contributes to the well functioning democracy). Herta made the comment that yes, the Swiss are very conservative, responsible voters. So I took a breath and said, well, yeah, that’s right, the Swiss are conservative in the sense of the english adjective, but not in the sense typically used in American politics.

The problem is, there is no real conservative political group in the United States, if we consider conservative to mean cautious, thinking far into the future, and making sober careful political decisions. American so-called conservatives, i.e. the Republican party, are dangerous radicals. Whenever the Republicans are in power they institute dangerous and radical social, political, environmental and economical changes, whose consequences often take many years to manifest. A real conservative would carefully weigh the merits and demerits of opening new territories for exploitation. A real conservative would have looked at the trends with oil production and the consequences of oil dependence and global climate change back in the seventies, and begun making plans. American so-called conservatives just say “deregulate!”, “drill baby drill”. The Republicans, who call themselves conservatives, essentially follow the greedy-algorithm, which basically consists of the “take the step which gives me the largest immediate gain”. This algorithm leads to dangerously unstable outcomes, both in computational science, and in real life.

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