Spot the mistake.

From the conservative magazine, Weekly Standard, in 2004 (yes, I’m aware that this is a bit late), something that was pointed out to me:

“President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.”

It’s a bit of a trick asking you to spot the mistake, because technically there are two. The less egregious one is the fact that the sentence is itself false; President Roosevelt actually set up a commission to investigate Pearl Harbor almost right after the event itself, skewering May’s claim that it’s somehow unprecedented and slightly unseemly for the executive to be immediately held accountable for mistakes and errors that have been made.

But there’s an even bigger mistake than that, amusingly.

Urge to kill… rising…

From tigrismus, a commenter at Sadly, No!, comes the single most boneheadedly stupid thing I have ever heard, ever.

Witness Stu Bykofsky, a man who is willing to say the things that other people won’t say, because other people would consider them nasty, shallow little ghouls who care about nothing but their petty little ideological agendas, and his column for the Philadelphia Daily News:

“To save America, we need another 9/11.“

I shit you not. Not content with the possibility of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, for the sake of some nebulous “unity” (by which Mr. Bykofsky means “people will once again line up under Bush to go and bomb some brown people who didn’t actually have that much to do with the attack, whilst we can demonise those who dissent as traitors again”) the man is wishing, almost orgasmically waiting for Al-Qaeda to strike again, at perhaps places like “The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.”

Who is it that hates America, again?

The wonders of the corporate state

The most infuriating thing about libertarians isn’t that they have an unfortunately pessimistic view of humanity and government, or that they are applying the dictums of basic economic theory which only apply in specialised conditions to more complex market structures, or, much like the Leninists of old, the belief that the system can never be failed, it is some nefarious outside force that is corrupting the pure scientific and natural outcomes. These are all exceptionally annoying, but not the worst. It is the belief that it is only government power we should worry about when our lives are getting regulated and catalogued, our personal freedoms violated, but the corporate power to do that is just fine and dandy. Libertarians, so high-and-mighty when it comes to the protection of our freedom of speech, so wonderously fighting for the little guy when the government comes calling, go strangely quiet when our employers try to silence us. Well, that’s not true, actually, they don’t go quiet. They start loudly fighting again, but for the the large corporation’s “right” to poke, prod, snoop, anywhere it wants to.

Take, for instance, Clarian Health, a US hospital system, that is going to start fining people for being unhealthy:

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

Clarian has been making headlines for its aggressive and unusual approach to covering escalating health-care costs. Rather than taking the more common step of giving employees incentives for merely participating in its wellness programs, such as joining a smoking cessation group or using a health coach, Clarian is actually measuring outcomes. And unlike most employers, it is penalizing workers for poor health instead of rewarding them for taking healthy steps.

[...]

At Clarian, employees who have blood pressure that’s above 140 over 90, blood glucose levels over 120, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol over 130, or a BMI over 29.9 could be subject to the paycheck deductions. Of the company’s 13,000 employees, about 8,000 are enrolled in the company’s health plan. The company estimates that as many as 34% of its employees will meet the definition of being obese, while it expects lower levels for other health measures. About 26% are tobacco users. The fines are waived for employees who can provide a doctor’s note stating it’s not advisable for them to try to meet the benchmark — employees will be able to submit new notes from their doctors quarterly — and that they are complying with the proper diet, exercise, and treatment plan.”

Work! Be happier, fitter, more productive! Do what you are told! Feel good, or you shall pay! Smile, or you shall be thrown out into the cold! Don’t say anything about what you might see that is unfair! See, this is the bait-and-switch that the libertarians pull. Far from being rebels against an unfair, dictatorial system, man, libertarians support one unfair, dictatorial system over another. Although in this system, you can’t at least choose the boss that’s fucking you over. Oh, well, I suppose you could go and get another job, but in this market? And what about the benefits you’ve already accrued? And of course, it doesn’t matter where you get a job if they’re all doing it, like the article suggests may happen in the near future.

This is the real problem with libertarianism; the refusal to acknowledge that private interests can have as much power over a person and violate their liberties as much as government can, and that this power is far less democratically controllable.

Fuck you, libertarians.

Continuing the theme…

Everyone continues to dogpile on Nick “Waah, Fascist” Cohen, as evidenced by this hilarious thread over at Crooked Timber taking the piss out of the World’s Only Lefty.

A highlight comes from the delusional sod himself:

“Rather than accepting the psychological consequences of confessing error, people lose their bearings. They talk only to friends. They imagine conspiracies as they seek the worst possible motives for their critics. They retreat into coteries and speak in code … To cut a long story short, they go a little mad.”

And he is speaking about the people who were right about Iraq.
Repeat after me, people:

Cunt.

Wednesday 1st August- Some things change, others stay the same.

On the 1st August 2007, Gordon Brown obtained a moral and foreign policy victory during his visit to the States, by securing enough votes to send a 26000 strong UN peacekeeping force to Sudan. Of course, there needs to be a political solution to the problem to ensure a lasting peace and hopes run high for a meeting between the warring factions on Friday and the deployment of these troops was indeed watered down to suit the Chinese government’s interests in Sudan. However, it is undeniable that the deployment of these troops is the most progress the international community has made in stopping what key political figures have been referring to as genocide for the past two years. The ethnic cleansing of Sudan by the Janjaweed rebel forces has been going on for four years now and the 7000 strong African Union troops have been struggling to restore peace. The deployment of these troops marks a clear victory for Brown as the series of groundwork laid by foreign office staff in the run up to his visit to the UN and the personal intervention of Brown in persuading China to agree to the resolution, resulted in the most positive steps the UN has taken in alleviating the violence that has claimed at least 200 000 lives. Nevertheless, the success was limited as the force does not have the power to disarm militias or track suspected war criminals, and Brown’s threat of implementing UN sanctions if the Sudanese government failed to comply was omitted from the resolution. The UN troops will be the largest peacekeeping force in the world and will be mainly drawn from African nations, thus removing a key factor behind the Sudanese government’s initial opposition to the force. The meeting on Friday will hopefully result in a peace deal that will end the violence and allow the displaced refugees in the Darfur camps to return home in safety.

On the 1st August 2007, Perez Hilton wrote a blog post about a picture of Matthew Perry on which the celebrity blogger wrote ‘baked.’ This man (Perez Hilton, not Perry who is now my second favourite character on Studio 60) is the dregs of society yet is given money and attention from celebrities like Victoria Beckham to write his disgusting and sometimes, near illiterate, blog posts. His idea of news is scribbling on pictures of celebrities. Even my 6 year old niece has better writing skills than Hilton, and she spells my name as “Dhsd”. I refuse to link to his site as it offends me deeply and the man will not get any traffic from the Patch. It just makes me sad that on a day when a remarkable achievement has been made in ensuring peace in Sudan, there is someone out there who will never know because Perez Hilton chose to write about how ‘baked’ Matthew Perry looks. Cunt.

Nick Cohen: Still a cunt

Johann Hari, who can be a bit of a mixed bag, has on his site a devastatingly effective critique of Nick Cohen’s contemptuous little screed, What’s Left?, which you might remember I wrote about earlier.

Meanwhile, what is the erstwhile Only True Lefty, the Saviour of Enlightenment Against the Encroachment of the Evil Islamic Fascist Movement writing about?

That movies these days aren’t showing enough evil brown people blowing themselves up for Allah.

Cunt.

Well, obviously…

Best. Headline. EVAR:

Man who left £8million to Tories in will “deluded and insane.”

Minor notings of interesting things

Continuing my love of all things Ezra Klein (it’s purely platonic, I assure you), this post by a colleague of his noting that not only are the neoconservatives perfectly happy starting shit with the entire Muslim world, they wanted to fuck with an actual nuclear power, as well. My God, is there anything stupid that the current American government will not do?

Also good is this takedown of the myth of social mobility in America. The American Dream has long been a dream, since it is actually social democratic principles and policy which result in actual social mobility (as you can see, the Nordic countries have exceptionally high social mobility), rather than libertarian, neoliberal, or lassez faire policies, a theme I will return to later, and probably repeatedly. We should also look at what the conservative revolution has done for us Brits; our social mobility is just as low.

Kos says smart things about the failed plot by Islamic militants to bomb JFK airport, noting that the right-wing talking points about the War on Terror (”it’s useless just using law enforcement methods to fight terrorism”, “we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to over here”, “infringement of civil liberties are needed to fight modern terrorism”) are straight-out bullshit.

Scottish election update

Strange, strange times up here, where the election is turning out to be a little more bizarre than previously thought. In marginal seats, whilst the Labour vote isn’t declining much (previous polls suggested it was in freefall, which seems to me to mean that a lot of the Labour vote was very undecided and swithering up until the election itself), the SNP vote is going up leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, some other seats are showing sharp falls in Labour votes and large rises in SNP votes. As such, the SNP is failing to gain some exceptionally close marginal seats, such as Cumbernauld & Kilsyth, but slashing the huge majorities of others, such as in Airdrie & Shotts. However, in all cases it seems to be failing to live up to the promises suggested in the opinion polls.

The analysis on TV suggests the reason for the greatly increased SNP vote is because the SSP aren’t standing anyone in the constituencies and a lot of the SSP vote is transferring to the SNP. I’m not so sure that the SNP and the SSP transfer as fully as the talking heads suggest (I, for instance, wouldn’t vote for the SNP, and damn well didn’t), and quite a few of those constituencies don’t neatly fit into that SSP/SNP transfer model.

Rumours continually pop up that the SNP are doing well on the regional vote, but we’ll see.

One day to go.

Since what’s going on in the UK is at the moment, hopelessly boring for our esteemed correspondents, I guess it’s up to me to stifle a yawn about one of the most important elections that Scotland has ever had. (Somewhere, somehow, a few hundred thousand English people are wondering how on Earth the SNP get mileage out of this “London-controlled, nobody cares about us” schtick, and get hit in the face with ten tons of irony. But I digress.)

Despite the Labour Party throwing everything possible at the SNP, in polls the SNP have continued to lead, now having around 8% lead in the constituency vote, and a 5% lead in the regional vote. This would, without doubt, make the SNP the largest party in the Scottish Parliament, and, more importantly, would probably rule out a Labour/Lib Dem majority coalition, thus allowing the Lib Dems to cave in on their principles, as usual, for power. Add to this the hundreds of seats Labour will lose in the council elections, which is not just to do with their unpopularity, but also the switch from First Past The Post council wards to Single Transferable Vote wards, which are more proportional, and it looks like a devastating body-blow to the Labour Party in Scotland.

But that’s by the by. Frankly, I like the slightly insane minor parties in every election, like the Scottish Jacobite Party, who want to extend Scotland as far south as Newcastle (take that, Geordies!), or my personal favourite, the 9% Growth Party, a bunch of insane classical liberals who maintain that they can achieve 9% economic growth in Scotland, because it was done in Ireland, forgetting, alas, that Ireland before the wonderous Celtic Tiger reared its’ handsome head lagged severely behind the other Western European economies and had a primarily agricultural economy, which meant it was growing from a low base-line, and catching up based upon various institutional and demographic advantages (such as a fairly good educational system). In contrast, Scotland is an advanced industrial economy and simply cannot achieve the growth rates of developing countries. Neither can America, Germany, France, or any other developed economy, and to believe that they can, especially just by cutting corporation taxes, is to ignore basic economic evidence to the contrary. Also, they don’t believe global warming exists. Oh, it’s a hoot.