over 100,000 barrels/day, three weeks and counting...

The environmental disaster of our century. Spill baby spill (live feed):

wkrg_oil_spill on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Predictable, from a moderate Republican President who hates to impede the "functioning of free markets," but still completely inexcusable:

A month after a surge of gas from the undersea well engulfed the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in flames and triggered the massive leak that now threatens sea life, fisheries and tourist centers in five Gulf coast states, neither BP nor the federal government has tried to measure at the source the amount of crude pouring into the water.

BP and the Obama administration have said they don't want to take the measurements for fear of interfering with efforts to stop the leaks.

That decision, however, runs counter to BP's own regional plan for dealing with offshore leaks. "In the event of a significant release of oil," the 583-page plan says on Page 2, "an accurate estimation of the spill's total volume . . . is essential in providing preliminary data to plan and initiate cleanup operations."

Legal experts said that not having a credible official estimate of the leak's size provides another benefit for BP: The amount of oil spilled is certain to be key evidence in the court battles that are likely to result from the disaster. The size of the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, for example, was a significant factor that the jury considered when it assessed damages against Exxon.

"If they put off measuring, then it's going to be a battle of dueling experts after the fact trying to extrapolate how much spilled after it has all sunk or has been carried away," said Lloyd Benton Miller, one of the lead plaintiffs' lawyers in the Exxon Valdez spill litigation. "The ability to measure how much oil was released will be impossible."

"It's always a bottom-line issue," said Marilyn Heiman, a former Clinton administration Interior Department official who now heads the Arctic Program for the Pew Environment Group. "Any company wouldn't have an interest in having this kind of measurement if they can help it."

The size of the spill has become a high stakes political controversy that's put the Obama administration and the oil company on the defensive. In congressional testimony Wednesday, an engineering professor from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., said that based on videos released Tuesday he estimated that the well was spewing at 95,000 barrels of oil, or 4 million gallons a day into the gulf.

Read more

If it's not a dozen times bigger than the Exxon Valdez already, just wait a couple days. Pretty goddamn clear who owns whom.

Make that 4.4 million gallons/day...

...According to professional independent analysis in testimony before a Congressional hearing, today. The true damage of the BP spill is as bad as 4.4 million gallons, or 104,000 barrels/day. This is week four. You do the fucking math (the networks won't).

From here (see also The Real News Network):

Steve Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., earlier this month made simple calculations from a single video BP released on May 12 and calculated a flow of 70,000 barrels a day, NPR reported last week.

On Wednesday, Wereley told a House of Representatives Energy and Commerce subcommittee that his calculations of two leaks that are on videos BP released on Tuesday showed 70,000 barrels from one leak and 25,000 from the other.

He said the margin of error was about 20 percent, making the spill between 76,000 and 104,000 barrels a day. However, Wereley said he'd need to see videos that showed the flow over a longer period to get a better calculation of the mix of oil and gas from the wellhead.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who led the hearing, said he'd work to get that information from BP.

"The true extent of this spill remains a mystery," Markey said. He said BP had said that the flow rate was not relevant to the cleanup effort. "This faulty logic that BP is using is . . . raising concerns that they are hiding the full extent of the damage of this leak."

Only the white house gets a live video for weeks now, dangerous chemical dispersants used to keep oil from reaching the surface, blocking journalists from taking pictures of the beach...you think?

About the majority of that spill...

Obama is still actively doing nothing, except lying about a ship that isn't even there (not to mention prohibiting journalists from filming oil-covered beaches–"BP's rules, no cameras"...wtf? Does BP own the water and beach now, too?)) Then again, if we continue to not look for those 50 mile plumes of underwater oil (still growing over 3 million gallons by the day), they'll probably just disappear (to another continent)!

...NOAA officials did not respond to repeated questions from the Huffington Post on Tuesday, and therefore did not explain how they could possibly assess or track underwater oil without having any vessels out taking measurements. Nor did they explain how the Gordon Gunter showed up in an administration press release.

Doug Helton, the emergency response coordinator in Seattle who is NOAA's trajectory expert, answered his phone but wouldn't say much. "It's still a pretty dynamic situation as to what's in the field today, as opposed to yesterday," he hedged, before saying he would call back after getting clearance from NOAA's public affairs office. There was no call back.

"The fact that NOAA has missed the ball catastrophically on the tracking and effects monitoring of this spill is inexcusable," said Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska marine conservationist who recently spent more than a week on the Gulf Coast advising Greenpeace. "They need 20 research ships on this, yesterday."

Steiner explained: "This is probably turning out to be the largest oil spill in U.S. history and the most unique oil spill in world history," on account of it occurring not on or near the surface, but nearly a mile below.

"They should have had a preexisting rapid response plan," he told HuffPost. "They should have had vessels of opportunity -- shrimp vessels, any vessel that can deploy a water-column sampling device -- pre-contracted, on a list, to be called up in an event that this happened. And they blew it. And it's been going on for a month now, and all that information has been lost."

Steiner gave credit to the scientists on the Pelican, but noted that at most they had sampled less than 1 percent of the affected waters. "The Pelican happened to drop some of their sampling devices into a plume and found it, but there have to be plumes elsewhere, and the biological implication are vast."

NOAA officials "haven't picked it up because they haven't looked in the right places," he said. "There have to be dozens of these massive plumes of toxic Deepwater Horizon oil, and they haven't set out to delineate them in any shape or form."

Frank Muller-Karger, an oceanography professor at the University of South Florida who will be testifying before the House Energy Committee on Wednesday, said that testing for oil beneath the surface should be a top priority.

"I think that should be one of our biggest concerns, getting the technology and the research to try to understand how big this amorphous mass of water is, and how it moves," he said.

"It's like an iceberg. Most of it is below the surface. And we just have no instruments below the surface that can help us monitor the size, the concentration and the movement."

Muller-Karger said there are all sorts of implements that researchers should be deploying, including optical sensors and current meters. "I think that now people are really scrambling to get some vessels out there," said Muller-Karger. "I think we're going to need a fleet of research vessels."

In addition to measuring the amount of oil, researchers need to study the effect on fish larvae and bacteria, he said. "Very big fish and very prized fish are moving in to spawn -- it's a critical time of the year," he told HuffPost. "Larvae from the fish may end up eating droplets of oil.

On Tuesday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla,) released four new videos showing oil billowing out of the Deepwater Horizon blowout site.

Steiner said NOAA is not only failing to fully measure the impact of the spill, but, he said, "if they rationally want to close and open fisheries, then they need to know where this stuff is going."

As it happens, NOAA announced Tuesday that it is doubling its Gulf fishing ban to encompass 19 percent of the federal waters.

But Steiner said it is quite possible, for instance, that some plumes are being carried by a slow deepwater southwest, toward the coast of Texas. More oil than is already visible could be entering the Loop Current, which could carry it past the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic coast.

"And truly, they really need 20 or 30 vessels out there yesterday," Steiner said. "And I think they know that. And so all the spin -- that they have this under control, that there's no oil under the surface to worry about -- they're wrong, and they know it." (read the whole thing)

Sebastian Junger's War Tourism

A fairly devastating review (via).

What is a philosopher?

The London Times having recently decided to fund investigative journalism? The New York Times at least pretending?And philosophy? It seems too good to last (or, maybe they should charge money). Hell, if there's any extra from the bake sale, some one might also like to fund these people on the Pelican!

Class

Awesome. Smoke 'em out of their mansions. About fucking time.

Nice speech by the Pres

...but why is there only one ship looking for and attempting to study what constitutes the vast majority of the spill, i.e. the so-called underwater "plume?"

Update: make that plural, 10 miles long by 3 miles wide, underwater plumes. Not that BP finds it "relevant." An oxygen-free ocean looking about the same from a CNN helicopter as an ocean with life in it, after all.

Beyond Propoganda...3.5 million gallons/day

That's Big Government Business for you, cheating when they can't get handouts (more whistle-blower video here), just a bunch of criminally rich crack fiends. Multiply the above by at least two, and that's just if they're telling the truth, all of a sudden. Update: They were not. The reason for delaying release of this video now seems clear: we're talking more than ten times more oil than they claimed, 84,000 barrels a day (not 5,000), or, an Exxon Valdez spill every four days. It's the third week now, with no end in sight.

They've been using unprecedented amounts of untested chemical compound dispersant to make the spill look smaller on the surface, while nobody knows how much is still moving underwater, or where. Such reckless poisoning and dishonesty alone should be cause for criminal charges.

You have to laugh at all these eggheads trying to figure out the real numbers...from this short video clip, which somehow BP alone controls the rest of but just prefers not to share. Doesn't the government have any submarines, with cameras? That's legally our oil...it's certainly our nation's (and the world's) economy and ecosystem that is at stake...How long do we just keep trusting BP to (mis)handle it? Ridiculous.

Before...After

Courtesy of personal customer tribute, here. More detail here.

Halliburton, corporatist par excellence

The cause of this soon-to-be unprecedented tragedy now understood most likely to have been Halliburton, criminal corporate mafia, blood-sucking monolith, evil failure. Apparently that cement has to be mixed with a very specific amount of water in order to cure properly; who would've thought?!

No time like the present for some blind chemical experiments!

"They're talking about using dispersants in the deep water where the oil is coming out that would prevent it from hitting shore, but would actually put it into the water column and possibly force it to the bottom of the ocean," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network.

"The environmental impact of that is totally unknown. It could end up killing everything at the bottom of the ocean."

Patchwork blocks

The real deal, 3" thick:

from university to corporation...

"This is a corporation...We are not trying to develop student's value systems or go in for that 'expand their minds' bullshit."

bloodwood

One of a dozen recent projects...








Custom-made for a kitchen in California, with double mortise-tenon joinery allowing smaller board to be removable from top (with handle), and sit flush when set. And yes, obviously with a hidden cleat.

For more: GreenRiverWoods.Etsy.com

Reading a little Roland Barthes this morning...

From The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1957-1979), upon going to hear Billy Graham's troup attempt its great "MyCarthyist" "awakening" and "conversion" of "atheist"("Communist") Paris:

Billy Graham makes us wait for him [...] We recognize in this first phase of the ceremony that great sociological recourse of Expectation which Mauss has studied and of which Paris has already had a very up-to-date example in the hypnotism séances of Le Grand Robert. Here, too, the Mage's appearance was postponed as long as possible, and by repeated false starts the public was wrought up to that troubled curiosity which is quite ready to see in fact what it is being made to wait for. Here, from the first minute, Billy Graham is presented as a veritable prophet, into whom we beg the Spirit of God to consent to descend, on this very evening in particular: it is an Inspired Being who will speak, the public is invited to teh spectacle of a possession: we are asked in advance to take Billy Graham's speeches quite literally for divine words.

If God is really speaking through Dr. Graham's mouth, it must be acknowledged that God is quite stupid: the Message stuns us by its platitude, its childishness. In any case, assuredly, God is no longer a Thomist, He shrinks from logic: the Message is constituted by an outburst of discontinuous affirmations, without any kind of link, each of which has no content that is not tautological (God is God). The merest Marist brother, the most academic pastor would figure as decadent intellectuals next to Dr. Graham.[...] Billy Graham's manner breaks with a whole tradition of the sermon, Catholic or Protestant, inherited from ancient culture, a tradition which is that of a requirement to persuade. Western Christianity has always submitted for its exposition to the general context of Aristotelian thought, has always consented to deal with reason, even when accrediting the irrationality of faith. Breaking with centuries of humanism (even if the forms may have been hollow and petrified, the concern for the subjective Other has rarely been absent from Christian didacticism), Dr. Graham brings us a method of magical transformation: he substitutes suggestion for persuasion: the pressure of the delivery, the systematic eviction of any rational content from the proposition, the incessant break of logical links, the verbal repetitions, the grandioloquent designation of the Bible held at arm's length like the universal can opener of a quack peddler, and above all the absence of warmth, the manifest contempt for others, all these operations belong to the classic material of the music-hall hypnotist...(Billy Graham at the Vel' d'Hiv)

Poor tea-baggers...

Blah blah blah. And: haha.

Goldman Sachs is dead

Apparently the "make them eat shit and die" approach to finance just may be illegal. Watch the carnage in real time here. So will Rahm Emanuel have the balls to finally let Eric Holder out of his cage? It's now or never.

Simon Johnson, "Our Pecora Moment:"

We don’t know where and when, but the SEC action points in one direction only: Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman) in the witness box, while John Paulson (unindicted co-conspirator) waits in the on-deck circle.

Either Blankfein knew what was going on – and is therefore liable before the law – or he was clueless and therefore incompetent. Either way, the much vaunted risk management and control systems of Goldman, i.e., what is supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening, are exposed to be what we have long here claimed: bunk (as I argued with Gerry Corrigan, former head of the NY Fed and long-time Goldman executive, before the Senate Banking Committee when we both testified on the Volcker Rules in February).

“Too big and complex to manage” is actually the best defense for Goldman’s executives and they should offer to break up the firm into smaller and more transparent pieces as a way to settle the firm’s liability with the SEC. The current management of Goldman – along with the team that ran the firm under Hank Paulson – have destroyed the value of an illustrious franchise. Goldman used to stand for something that customers felt they could trust; now it is just a sophisticated way of ripping them off.

John Paulson obviously knew what he was doing in helping to create the “designed to fail” securities – and the consequences this would have. If he cannot be convicted of conspiracy to commit fraud, then the law in this regard needs to be tightened significantly. (read more)

Update: Genuine populists out there (as opposed to those fringe radical dimwits identifying themselves with the name of a certain gay sex act) who maintain their righteous fury at the criminals in our financial industry (and recognize in decades of corrupt Republican policy the elitist big government corporatism that will never ever begin to resemble the source of any real change), should probably follow this man's advice and make some phone calls now. I did.

, yes.

On Mad Men:

...Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.

...The format of the show is to suspend a backstory and subplot from each diminutive stereotype, episode by episode, and sketch some quick pathos around the character to see if it can humanise him or her.

...Whether one finds all of this claustrophobic and ludicrous or tightly wound and compelling depends very heavily on one’s opinion of Don Draper. Draper, as written, is a kind of social savant. He knows how to act in every emergency. He deploys strategic fits of temper to attain his ends. He’s catnip to women. As played by Jon Hamm, though, his manner hardly matches his activities. Hamm looks perpetually wimpy and underslept. His face is powdered and doughy. He lacks command. He is witless. The pose that he’s best at, interestingly, is leaning back in his chair; it ought to be from superiority, but it looks as though he is trying to dodge a blow. Draper is supposed to have a deep secret, but it would make sense only if that secret were his weakness – fearfulness or femininity – instead of the show’s anticlimactic revelation that his mother was a whore and he picked up another man’s identity on the battlefield in Korea: bizarre Gothicisms that belong to some other series. One never sees hunger or anger in Hamm’s eyes, only the misery of the hunted fox. Either he is playing the hero as a schlub in deference to a 21st-century idea of masculinity as fundamentally hollow and sham, or he’s completely underequipped to convey male menace.

The most necessary thing that he can’t do is to justify viscerally why strong women keep falling for him, or why the competitive males in his office accept him as an Alpha. In the classic Hollywood cinema, there was a name for the role Hamm should be playing: the Mug, who seems OK at first but in the end has to give up the girl to Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy (excerpted from the LRB; read the whole thing here).

Without a doubt Mark Greif is one of the best critics writing today in the realm of cultural politics. He does know how to get under the skin of a certain (in my opinion) deserving audience, from which well-intentioned, occasionally complacent and uncritical liberals are certainly not excluded. Unlike some of his more transparently self-serving detractors, his thinking never seems forcibly dressed up or hiding in pedantries, backhanded, or boring. (Those with a less sympathetic politics would of course say just the opposite; they are unconvincing.) He may risk spawning a new class of careerist Bill Buckleys in reaction. I suppose worse things could be happening for our national dialogue (well, and are).

I particularly respect the integrity, intellectual honesty and class of Greif's response to Caleb Crain, regarding Greif's article "On Repressive Sentimentalism" (see the latest issue of n+1, number 9).

Just another woodworker, concerned about the truth of our economy

The "fourteenth banker" speaks out, his name also a reference to this must-read book.

I do like Simon Johnson

His latest, on the essential site for all things marginally progressive but still mainstream acceptable economic: The Baseline Scenario

Dodd in a tough spot

He clearly wants to be *perceived* as doing the right thing, at least...while Ted Kaufman is relentless in showing things as they actually *are*.

(Meanwhile, the GOP remains a bunch of corrupt, unimaginative liars as usual, cf. mealy-mouthed dipshit, Mitch McConnell. How anybody could mistake these violent, idiot-mob-inciting old wrinkled crooks for populists remains a mystery "new" democrats have yet to solve, apparently.)

Finally

Someone from the political class begins to sound like Matt Taibbi, on record, on the Senate floor. The only reason people are not mad as hell about the ongoing Wall Street fraud is because they haven't bothered finding out. Read Matt Taibbi. The more people know the angrier they get. Let's hope the tide is genuinely turning, and the rule of law won't be beaten any further back. Where does the buck stop? Via.

Sometimes, she just stares at the wall...

...Hoping for the sun to glint off her tags.

It all started when we brought home that laser-guided parking system as a toy for the cats.

for sale

The block, not the dog.

Credit where credit is due

John Cassidy has written what may be the one and only puff piece aspiring to respectability on Timothy Giethner that will have ever been historically conceivable.

Appearing as it does sometime before the long-term relentless rise of the real misery index threatens to become unavoidable "news" (if it ever will), but also before the crackhead mentality on Wall Street culminates in another shitstorm of future carbon credit-default swaps or something-else-backed-and-bundled-securities.

The cursory lip wagging Cassidy gives to dissenting views are even more remarkable for being followed by nothing more substantive than the sort of self-certain, vaguely dismissive ideological boiler-plate, generalities and defensive wound licking in the supposed court of public opinion we have come to expect, all while vainly wallowing in the bureaucrats lament of feeling himself fundamentally removed from such concerns, such inevitable collateral, if not realpolitik itself, altogether. In short, Geithner betrays himself as a well-intentioned, self-satisfied ideological conservative at heart. Another moderate Republican, not so much unwilling as developmentally unable to acknowledge, examine and replace the speculative-fed fantasy extortion machine that veneers the grotesque rotting foundation of our financial industry and entire economy. No news there, certainly. At least he doesn't pretend to be something he is not. A real Democrat, for instance.

So the stress tests were actually brilliant and really saved the day despite being so "tough" (8.9% unemployment, anyone?), some won-over speculators now swoon. Huh. One sentence from one article by Matt Taibbi is mentioned in passing, described as unrefined, and no explanation about *how* Goldman actually proves its "capitalized" strength "greater than international competitors" even attempted.

The article does nothing to persuade that Giethner ever was or ever will be the right person to seize what remains the only real political opportunity in half a century (to honestly confront and
change any of the institutionalized injustice, Fed subsidies, F.I. roulette, or for that matter concomitant class war now having all but killed the New Deal)...an historic gift now mostly squandered.

Nationalization might have worked but would have been quite difficult. No shit.

So he "saved" the financial industry (from symptoms of withdrawal, and now it's back to shooting heroin, with our blessing). Big whup. Encouraging higher unemployment and lower quality of life having been essential to the "success" of the F.I. since Reagan's handlers won their war against the unions; what matters most is larger historic context. Other signs of stability and new "growth" are not convincing at best, misleading and dangerously deluded at worst.

I'm sure Giethner's sense of being misunderappreciated is sincere, however comically out of touch and frankly, pathetic, and his actions well-thought-out and well-intentioned. His ideological sense of what's possible or ethically necessary remains thoroughly depressing, and
quite possibly without a future.

a rare political post

Seth Ackerman rightly underwhelmed at Ezra Klein's sense of history:

The Democrats shot their historical wad on health care by re-introducing Bob Dole’s bill from 1994 and justifying it as a free-market solution. How is that a “huge progressive victory”?

Taibbi on the continued reign of credit default swaps: "Jesus..."

James K. Galbraith: In Defense of Deficits

Richard Parker: Athens, The First Domino?

Moreover, unlike Wall Street bankers, Papandreou isn't asking for a bailout (let alone a bonus for himself or senior ministers); what he wants is help stabilizing the market for Greece's bonds. And unlike Wall Street in the fall of 2008, Athens isn't being frozen out of the credit markets; in fact, it is still able to borrow....

But Wall Street speculators have swarmed in, playing Greece, as the Financial Times put it, "like a piñata." The country's tiny bond market–barely a billion euros a day were trading in Athens in January–makes an easy and tempting target for traders with big bats; by attacking Greek bonds, the traders get to play on an increasingly pan-European volatility in bond and currency rates, thereby leveraging a little nation's problems into gigantic trading-floor gains. And thanks to the Obama administration's repeated refusal to limit such activities–despite pleas from our European allies since 2008 to jointly regulate global financial markets–what the traders are doing is legal. In fact, massive immediate trading profits are the means by which banks like Goldman, Citi, JPMorgan, Barclays, UBS and Deutsche Bank are rebuilding their balance sheets without providing the lending the real economies of America and Europe need to begin their recovery....

Capitalism is Dead

"Long live the billionaire bailout society."

"just nerves burning out in a vacuum"

Still so relevant:

You see, there isn’t any such thing as just Art or just Experience. Art can be as abstract as you wish, but it must be meaningful. Experience can be “kicks,” it can be as ecstatic as you can make it — but ecstasy as an end in itself is nothing — it’s just nerves burning out in a vacuum.

Courtesy of an ongoing project to re-post all 700 of Kenneth Rexroth's columns from the 1960 San Francisco Examiner, 50 years later to the day, here.

Marco Roth, today:

...By comparison with most of the 19th-century novels, and even with most 20th-century modernist novels of the "stream of consciousness" school, the neuronovels [like Ian McEwans Enduring Love] have in them very little of society, of different classes, of individuals interacting, of development either alongside or against historical forces and expectations.[...]It now seems we've gone beyond the loss of society and religion to the loss of the self, an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science. It's not, of course, that morality, society, and selfhood no longer exist, but they are now the property of specialists writing in the idioms of their disciplines. So the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel's diminishing purview.

Tell me again...

...Why the fuck I work so hard for a living (and without health care) in a world where these fake "profit"-posting professional bullshitters, reloaders and extortionists at Goldman Sachs get Croesus-sized tax-payer government hand-outs every illegal scam they pull, where 90% of the economy is complete bullshit that couldn't give a shit about the average working person let alone any honest investor, and where these juvenile fuckstick assholes are still actively encouraged and enabled by the old bullshitters now in political cabinets to continue running all of us right off the fucking cliff, again and again./?

Taibbi responds to some common criticisms of his newest article here.

Unmistakable signs of overpopulation

Still, that's a fair bit more generous than the people listing "used tissue" or "used toothbrush" and "wanted: Woodway Desmo S treadmill, plus working piano."

I exaggerate, but not much.

Adding insult to injury

From here:

Twelve French wine industry figures were convicted Wednesday of selling 18 million bottles (13.5 million liters) of falsely labeled wine to US wine powerhouse E&J Gallo at an inflated price. The wine was ultimately sold under E&J's ubiquitous "Red Bicyclette" Pinot Noir label.

The convicted were sentenced by a French judge, who gave them suspended jail sentences and fines ranging from 3,000 to 18,000 euros apiece. They had made seven million euros from their massive fraud [...] After a year-long judicial investigation, the defendants were accused of substituting wine made from less expensive local grape varieties for the Pinot Noir, which is popular on the American market.

In handing down the sentences, the French judge said, "the scale of the fraud caused severe damage for the wines of the Languedoc for which the United States is an important outlet."

However, a lawyer for two of the defendants argued that there was no harm, since "not a single American consumer complained."

Deficit Hysteria

A few links to correct for the mass of ignorance out there (for which both the ever-opportunist right wing and our current "moderate Republican" president bear increasing responsibility):

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/obamabiden-deficit-hawks

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/deficit-fever-by-digby-suddenly-you_02.html

Most substantial of all, listen to James Galbraith talk to this obnoxious guy, whoever he is:

http://www.jimbotalk.net/programhighlights?date=20100201


Though granted, putting things in context is hardly an American pastime these days, still plagued as we are by Cheney's desperate and laughable narrative of "the age of terror."

Citing concerns over security...

Aid groups have yet to reach many areas of Washington, DC, where people remain freezing in their unheated homes or risk being victimized by savage, unruly mobs:

NPR seeks out DHorowitz in his infinite wisdom for Howard Zinn obituary

How fitting, really.

(via ATR) More that is well said on the subject, here.

Customer and online testimonials

If you are curious what other people say about my work, feel free to click the following links:

• http://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/11/timber-bookshelves-world-domination-etc/

• http://www.sharpsand.net/2008/04/13/548/

• http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/06/sneak-peek-nick-dewar.html


• http://www.britishblogs.co.uk/similar-to/daphne-with-her-thighs-in-bark/

recently...

Our engagement rings are a light Nambaro (Cocobolo) wood harvested sustainably from Nicaragua with recycled sterling handmade by Marlon Obando Solano of Naturaleza Organic Jewelry (more about his excellent business here and here). Some cool photos here.

Prime Minister's Questions in America

This was brilliant, unprecedented in American politics and great TV...so when does he do the same thing for the Progressive Caucus, or netroots?

I fail to see how giving TV exposure to the genuine left, and the opportunity for the beginning of a response to what are surly some legitimate questions, could do anything but *help* Obama's cause. How else to prove his policies are indeed as centrist as he himself admits, after all?

Anyway if he's serious about inspiring the sort of little-d democracy we saw on the campaign trail (and not much since), there's one obvious way to start, by ceasing the complete censorship of voices from the left. Who knows, if given half the chance their ideas may even sound more eloquent, accurate, practical and courageous than Obama's.

I doubt it will happen, but it should. Until then we'll just keep giving all the ideological "middle ground" to the likes of professional fuckstick David Brooks.

Update: Well Robert Kuttner is less kind still:

Some of my friends think the Baltimore exercise was masterful. About the only thing I cared for was the juxtaposition of the words "Republican" and "Retreat." Obama did a fine job of defending his record and sounding high minded and presidential, but again the plea was for sweet reasonableness.

They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they're grappling with every single day.

Obama ticked off area after area where he agreed with Republican policies. Can you imagine Ronald Reagan giving that to the Democrats? At one point, insisting that he was open to good ideas from any quarter, Obama declared:

I am not an ideologue. I'm not.

You're not? Then why bother? Ideology is not some arbitrary penchant for clinging to stale ideas. It is a principled set of beliefs about how the economy and society work, and should work.

To be a conservative Republican is to believe that markets work just fine, people mostly get what they deserve, and government typically screws things up. To be a liberal Democrat is to believe that market forces are often cruel and inefficient; that the powerful take advantage of the powerless; and that there are whole areas of economic life, from health care to regulation of finance, where affirmative government is the only way to deliver defensible outcomes for regular people.

That's an ideology, one that progressives are proud to embrace. So why does Obama think it virtuous to disclaim ideology in general? The problem afflicting America is not "ideology." It's the hegemony of rightwing ideology. And given presidential leadership, most working Americans -- most voters -- identify with the progressive view of how the world works, especially in an era where conservative ideology has produced financial collapse.

Obama's latest refinements on the politics of common ground make for a pretty pose, but they are too clever by half.

Now, if we are very sanguine, we can read efforts like these as prologue to a stiffening of Obama's spine. This is all a grand design -- he's playing chess, we're playing checkers. Along about March, he will pivot and finally deliver a tough speech declaring that he bent over backwards to accommodate the Republicans. But now, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

But I am increasingly skeptical that he will ever get there. It's just not who he is. So the obstructionism will likely continue, except in cases where Obama makes all the concessions.

Obama may think he is modeling a higher form of leadership. He isn't. If he wants to be loved by voters, it's time for some toughlove directed at Republicans.

UpdateII: Obama takes part of my advice, though the questions remain centrist and uncritical to a fault (at least those on camera) and Fox "news" doesn't even cover it (doing their patriotic best to keep Republicans forever in the dark). Etc. Obviously the damage O'Reilly & Co. continue to inflict on the intelligence of our national dialogue needs to be taken far more seriously (as opposed to simply scoffed at) and better combated.

Sign the petition demanding more regular question time here.

brief foray into dog psychology, cont.

This article (from a friend's facebook page, where all this blogging, er, started), "If Not Dominance...How do we Explain the Development of Social Behaviour?" adds significantly to the discussion below, I think.

Cesar Millan is a Hack?

I'm still educating myself about this debate (more here), the convictions and emotions surrounding which (not to mention cultural and gender predispositions) seem as strong as in any discussion of raising children.

But I will say the contrast between the two methods employed in these two particular videos is pretty striking (Update: An executive producer of the show weighs in (see comments to this post) as to why this may be. For the record I agree with her about common courtesy of at least taking these things in context.):

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1160909300600&oid=20444826822

Howard Zinn

Watching today's DemocracyNow show dedicated to Howard Zinn...I will always remember his "People's History" (recently televised) read like a novel in high school. He was a true intellectual and activist, constantly opening the future by relentlessly exposing and dignifying a more full and contentious truth than the romantic "Great Men" version of history could ever comprise...his latest short piece on Obama printed in The Nation arrived only yesterday:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/forum/6#zinn

http://www.progressive.org/zinn0509.html

http://www.progressive.org/mag/zinn1008.html

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/13/howard_zinn_i_wish_obama_would

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=2606

Update: NPR continues the despicable tradition of hostile and right-wing-framed obituaries for left-leaning intellectuals,uses David Horowitz of all people...what the fuck, Robert Siegel?

Siegel must still have a thing against Chomsky, and it's not healthy. Let NPR hear about it.

Haiti

Watching Amy Goodman walk through Léogâne last week, at that point the only reporter to step foot in an area deemed a "security risk" by the UN and so no aid whatsoever has arrived, although over 90% of the homes have been destroyed and people are still digging out their dead by hand...reminded me again how important it is to support organizations other than the mass bureaucracy of the Red Cross, organizations like Partners in Health who are there for the long term, with infrastructure already in place and extensive community outreach and organization. Christian Missions dropping pieces of bread from helicopters onto the rubble just doesn't cut it somehow.

oh yes

I still read Fafblog. Among other things. Etc, etc, etc.

Kennedy

"...was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.

Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name."

....

Some wonderful capitalism we've got going on today.

...

• We told you so.

• http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=608&issue=125:

There is a significant problem for the left in relating to this anger, however, and the problem is Obama. Obama has presided over the continuation and extension of inequality, escalated the Afghanistan war, forced concessions in the car industry and given way to the private insurance companies over healthcare. The weight of the crisis is being felt particularly sharply by those—especially poor, working class and black voters—at the core of Obama’s electoral support and his support, though still real, is eroding as disappointment sinks in. The impressive movement that the Obama campaign mobilised to deliver the election a year ago has not been marshalled to fight for a public option in healthcare, to fight for jobs or for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which would make it easier for workers to organise and join unions, and is opposed by much of US business, including Citigroup which was bailed out to the tune of $50 billion.

In the absence of a strong movement for reform from the left or pressure from a resistant working class, the louder voices are once more those of a minority of conservative politicians and radio presenters opposed to “big government”. The weakness of the Obama government in the face of deepening economic gloom is stoking that opposition, encapsulating as it does a degree of class anger among “ordinary” Americans which has no other obvious outlet.21

As a result, the Republicans made gains in the recent elections for state governor in Virginia—a state won by the Democrats for the first time since 1964 in the Obama election—and New Jersey. The results suggest, in addition to local factors, that those—mainly white—workers who came late to the Obama campaign have found little in the government’s priorities to alleviate their economic predicament.

The re-emergence of visible manifestations of conservative populism, however, are indicative of the weakness of the Republican Party as a political force; instead the likes of Sarah Palin and “shock-jock” Rush Limbaugh are increasingly vocal and are backing conservative candidates against those chosen by the party machine. The mobilisations of the right, such as those in opposition to healthcare reform, have been small but nonetheless illustrate the potential for anger over economic pain to be channelled by conservative forces if progressive forces sit on their hands.

Gary Younge makes this point about the healthcare protests: “The problem is not that the right were organised but that—with a few exceptions—the left has not been. At the very moment when he needed the ‘movement’ that got him elected most, it appears to have largely stopped moving”.22 It has stopped moving largely because Obama has refused to mobilise it and there is not sufficient confidence and pressure for independent action on a mass scale. It is not a surprise that the US president prefers not to revive a movement that may escape the control of the Democratic Party apparatus. But his equivocation risks alienating his own constituency and those who were pulled into his orbit by the tremendous power of his campaign for change, as well as reigniting cynicism of the “liberal” Democratic establishment that could well benefit the right.

The lesson from the Great Depression of the 1930s in the US is that reform and resistance to the effects of the crisis will ultimately depend on a significant movement from below pushing for them. At the moment that movement is absent. There are, however, other social and political processes taking place that suggest possibilities.

• Naomi Klein

The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. Watching these cringeful attempts, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. "I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate magazine. "They'd say: 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say: 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.'" A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. America didn't have a branding problem; it had a product problem.

I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more battered – Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.

So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its reputation problems with branding – it's just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today's tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desirée Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to Business Week, "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from Cable­vision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshalled every tool in the modem marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); a 30-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).

The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther Kingesque Obama speech, I thought: finally, a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers' top annual award – Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the 1990s, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama's caché (Pepsi's "Choose Change" campaign, Ikea's "Embrace Change '09" and Southwest Airlines' offer of "Yes You Can" tickets).

Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J Crew saw its stock price increase 200% in the first six months of Obama's presidency, thanks in part to Michelle's well known fondness for the brand. Obama's much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama economy" – the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires - at $2.5bn. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Rogers got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she said. "Our possibilities are endless."

The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-90s branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional "experiences" – branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favourite brands. The problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.

Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy". And then their highest compliment: "Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."

Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party ­monopoly through dogged organisation and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in the White House. (read more)

• Taibbi:

Obama, as is his nature I think, tried to take the fork in the road all year, making nice to his base while actually delivering to his money people, not realizing the two were perpetually in conflict. His failure to make a clear choice, or rather to make the right choice, is what has doomed him everywhere politically.

It will be interesting to see what comes next, whether this is just for show or not.

Solar-Powered Clinics in Haiti: Partners in Health

This looks to be an exceptionally worthy cause to support, right now.

predictably odd

Half-baked contrarian Alexander Cockburn still in denial about global warming, pretends to be scientist in the pages of The Nation. There ought to be a name for this sort of stubborn irrationalist tick/dogmatist contrarianism festering in otherwise highly functioning (if profoundly vain) men, like Tom Cruise's or John Travolta's "scientology." And then Zizek could write a book about it (ZCWAB).

AgeofStupid.net

This film (download) should be showing everywhere. Smart reporting, too.

MoveYourMoney.Info

Move your money to local banks. Do it now. They're the only ones still loaning (to anyone besides each other), not on the take and not jacking up fees, after all. And their interest rates are often better. Go figure.