President's speech on pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord

Okay, just read the President's speech on climate change and on his pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

1. Is the economy "coming back?" The latest jobs report is not horrible, but not really that impressive. There is no sign of a Trump boom and good reason to worry.

2. He goes through a series of promises kept, one of which is "putting in place tough new ethics rules." Erm, yeah. About those "tough" rules, the Trump Administration has already made 16 exceptions, a number that, in five months, is equal to Obama's over eight years.

3. One commitment that was very clearly not kept was the commitment to not touch Social Security or Medicaid. As AARP puts it "The proposed [AHCA/Trumpcare] legislation would also make huge cuts to Medicaid by taking $880 billion out of the program by 2026" and SSDI benefits are slated to be cut as well. Yes, the President keeps his promises, but in a highly selective manner. Some promises he takes seriously. Others, not so much.

4. The promise to renegotiate the Paris Climate Accord is dead on arrival. Won't happen.

5. From the speech: "The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries..." Erm, no. Preventing global warming is good for all humans on the planet. "Climate change resulting from rising greenhouse gas emissions is expected to lead to increasing temperatures and changing rainfall patterns over the next century that will, among other things, significantly affect human livelihoods. Since the beginning of this millennium, natural hazards, such as hurricanes, have triggered disasters, which have reversed years of development work." In fact, climate change is already making us sick. The Navy is very much aware that rising seas pose an enormous danger to coastal military bases.

6. The WaPo has an extensive fact-checking piece that thoroughly debunks the speech.

Update: People have asked how serious the President is on this issue.  I really don't think there's much room for doubt. He's taken the same position consistently since 2012, that global warming is a hoax. His position may be completely cynical, but he's held for a long time.

Fake News and the sites I use

I posted a link to a Daily Kos piece that praised the NY Times for doing a really good job with a piece that examined Syria’s actions in the chemical attack that President Trump felt obliged to respond to with an attack by 59 drones. Then, I posted a piece from Crooks and Liars that took the NY Times to task as the paper was now supporting a climate change denier. A commenter said: “The NY Times does not promote climate denial.“ and “Do not believe everything you read, especially if the source is a sleazy tabloid like this one.”

I read the piece that C&L criticized and am unimpressed. The author starts off by suggesting that the Hillary Clinton campaign somehow misread or didn’t fully grasp the poll numbers and so was blindsided by the 2016 election results.

But that’s not true. Clinton was maintaining a small, but steady lead over Trump. Trump was trying very hard, but couldn’t bridge that gap. The real problem was that FBI Director Comey came out of the blue with supposedly new emails that he hadn’t yet examined himself. That threw a giant monkey wrench into the campaign and pushed Trump over the top.

From there our author goes on to call into question the authority of climate science and suggests that we should be much more cautious about claims that sound too certain.

My own view on certainty is that if you feel someone is wrong, it’s up to you to show where and how the person is wrong. If you’re simply saying “don’t be too certain,” then you’re just trying to create doubt and confusion and yes, you count as a denier. And yes, back in late 2002, early 2003, the NY Times ran some editorials that were skeptical of the Iraq War, but they also published Judith Miller’s “OMG! Saddam Hussein’s got WMDs!!!” stories on their front pages. So yes, on balance, their promotion of the Judith Miller pieces outweighed their cautious editorials and they promoted the war.

Okay, so how do we properly judge news sources? I regularly check a number of sources that have weird names, Balloon Juice, Hullabaloo, Informed Comment and Talking Points Memo. I once told a right-winger that some information I was presenting came from the magazine called Mother Jones. He thought that was a stupid name and so therefore, my information must not have been any good.

If we say that we can’t tell how good or bad the reporting on a blog is by the name of the blog, in other words, if a quickie, surface examination is insufficient, how are we to tell how reliable a source is?

One major criteria of mine is whether the blog gives you a way to verify what they say. If the blog regularly provides links to their sources and quotes their sources accurately, that’s a very good start. If the blog sometimes just quotes the terribly provocative thing that was said without even bothering to add editorial comments, even better. Media Matters is especially good on this. They’ll frequently just allow the provocative comment to stand by itself without any further editorial comments from them.

Modest editorial language is a plus, but sometimes the provocation really calls for some serious cussing. If a blog generally shows restraint, but occasionally lets loose (Balloon Juice does this) with Not Safe For Work (NSFW) language, then that’s a pretty good sign their information is reliable.

And of course, there’s the matter of track record. Dean Baker was an economist that I became familiar with in the late 1990s. He decided in 2002 that the US had a housing bubble (the bubble had actually started in the late 1990s, it took Baker a while to figure it out). The NY Times columnist Paul Krugman agreed with him. These two became rather tiresome with their constant warnings that when the bubble burst, it was going to be awful. Well, sure enough. It burst in late 2007 and the result was indeed awful. So yeah, I give these two lots and lots of credibility.

There’s no such thing as a source that’s always right. So developing a list of reliable sources is a waste of time. Even the lefty sources that I like and regularly check can be wrong. There are many tests that one can apply to news stories to see whether they’re credible or not. The NY Times is often right, but they can be wrong as well and we can run tests to see whether they’re right or not. I’ve mentioned a few such tests. I’m sure that I regularly apply a few others that I can’t recall at the moment.

Suggestion that we intervene in Syria against ISIS

So I saw this piece today: “The Pentagon could send conventional military forces into Syria”

My major problem with it is of course that it would be an utter quagmire as the US has no natural allies in Syria, except perhaps the Kurds and they’re only in the Northern part of that country. We’d get bogged down again even worse than we were in Iraq. But, an even worse problem is that the Daesh/ISIS problem is largely solved anyway.

Let’s put this in terms of World War II analogies. Everyone knows about the battles of Stalingrad (Nazi Wehrmacht vs the Soviet Union), Midway (Imperial Japanese Navy vs the US) and El Alamein (The Nazi Afrika Corps against the British), where the German/Japanese advances were stopped. Then there were three battles where the Axis powers might possibly have been able to stop the Allies and reversed the course of the war, but didn’t and victory for the Allies was never really in doubt afterwards. These were Kursk (In the Soviet Union), Guadalcanal (In the Pacific) and the Normandy Landings (France).

The situation with Daesh right now is comfortable after the Kursk/Guadalcanal/Normandy stage. Daesh has lost a great deal of land and people. They’re hanging onto a part of the city of Mosul, the Western part, but they’ve lost much else of their Iraqi territory. There’s even talk of their leaving Raqqa, their capitol in Syria.

Are there further battles the US may wish to fight in the region?

The main conflict in Syria’s civil war pits President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and Shi’ite militias, against an array of rebel groups aiming to oust him, including some that have been backed by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies.

This is a battle the the US really doesn’t want to get into, even though we’re obviously involved to some degree anyway. It’s really not clear that we wouldn’t be better off by simply abandoning the region. The main thing keeping us there is the oil supplied by the Gulf monarchies and global warming/climate change is a strong motivation to get ourselves off of fossil fuels anyway. The Saudi Arabians see the writing on the wall and have determined to get themselves out of the oil-supplying business during the 2020s.

No, we don’t need to send troops into the Mideast. We don’t need to throw US troops into a war against Daesh that Daesh has largely lost anyway and we really don’t want to “gin up” a conflict against Russian/Iranian forces.

My LTE to the WaPo

So the Washington Post (WaPo) published "Appeals court says Texas voter-ID law discriminates against minorities." The Philadelphia Inquirer changed the title a bit to "U.S. court orders fixes in Texas voter-ID law." I wrote a Letter To The Editor (LTE) in response, sent it to the Inky and decided that as the piece originally came from the WaPo, I'd send my LTE to them, too. To my surprise, the WaPo go back to me, saying they wanted to publish it. They wanted an assurance though, that the LTE wouldn't be copied to anyone else. I said sure and sent an email off to the Inky, asking them to confirm they weren't going to print it. To my further surprise, they requested to be able to print it! I regretfully told them no. So the WaPo told me that it would be printed in their Sunday (July 24th) edition.
Problem: The LTE is not online. The Horsham Library doesn't carry the WaPo, neither does the Norristown Library. I checked with Temple University and they used to carry it, but not anymore. The Reference Librarian checked more thoroughly than I had, but he couldn't find it online, either. The Abington Library carries the WaPo, but they only have the 17th as of the 26th.
So, I guess it'll be available in Abington next week. When I copy the full wording to my blog, I'll re-run this post. 

Democrats vs Republicans, any real difference?

Okay, so I was challenged to come up with a list of differences between the two major parties so as to prove they’re not just one party with two names. Here’s the opposing list of where there’s not much difference between the parties:

War

Brutal sanctions preceded the Iraq War, but Democrats left the actual military invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan up to Bush. Yes, Obama reinforced the Iraq War and then carried out the Bush plan to pull out by the end of 2011. In contrast to Republican charges that came out after Daesh (ISIS) appeared, the Obama Administration tried very hard to remain in Iraq longer, but neither the Iraqi nor the American public wanted any such thing to take place. 

the Democrats' support for NAFTA, TPP
Formally and officially, Hillary Clinton opposes TPP, but a major criticism of NAFTA was that labor and environmental groups were heard from as an after-thought. If Clinton had truly learned from NAFTA criticism, those groups would have been in on the ground floor for TPP.
 
bank deregulation

True, but Dodd-Frank has had a modest effect on restraining “too big to fail” financial institutions. Not a major effect and not right away, but “what is clear is that Dodd-Frank sent notice to banks and other financial institutions that they couldn’t continue with as little scrutiny and oversight as they had in the past.”

welfare "reform"

Yes, a very bad move on Bill Clinton’s part.

social security "reform"

Bill Clinton was planning on major “reform” but thanks to Monica Lewinsky, he wasn’t able to. The Simpson-Bowles “Cat Food Commission” certainly tried to “reform” SS, but Rep. Paul Ryan thought it wasn’t destructive enough and Rep. Jan Schakowsky thought it went too far, so there was no consensus report, just the recommendations of Simpson and Bowles to gut SS. So not really sure what’s meant by that.

NSA spying

Yep, definitely a bipartisan thing.

corporate welfare for the insurance industry - aka Obamacare (originally a right wing thinktank policy first implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney)
Actually, many people have interpreted that as a clever move by Obama. By going as far to the right as was possible and still having a workable system, that left the Republicans with nothing to recommend in its place. The new Governor of Kentucky ran on dismantling the ACA/Obamacare, but found that he had no way to do so without throwing 300,000 citizens off of their health plans and thereby directly causing 300,000 people to become loyal, committed Democrats, so he backed off on that.
Also, the Democrats did have a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, but they had to keep right-wingers like Senator Joe Lieberman and others aboard, so the set-up had to be kept modest. We can’t blame the right-wing Democrats entirely. there’s evidence Obama wanted to blame Lieberman for his dropping the public option and that Lieberman agreed to be the scapegoat, but that Obama was really the one that wanted to drop it. 

bailing out the banks in 2009 but not Main Street

Yeah, Obama wasn’t in office yet, but he signed off on that.

refusal to fight for serious campaign finance reform
Another bipartisan thing.

refusal to tax the rich
Obama raised taxes on the wealthy a bit, but yeah, we could return to the Kennedy-era 70% rate without damaging the economy at all.
 
or cut the military budget
I’m personally disappointed Star Wars/SDI/Missile Defense is still being researched. Complete boondoggle. The A-10 “Warthog” attack plane simply doesn’t need replacing. Nor does the B-52, for that matter. Both planes are extremely well-designed for their function. The F-35 is another complete boondoggle that’s good for putting money into defense contractor pockets  and not much else. From 2011 to 2014, that is, from the pull-out from Iraq to the appearance of Daesh, US military spending went down a few hundred billion (it went back up again), but yes, way too much being spent.
 
refusal to prosecute makers of illegal wars and torture
Again, yup. Obama made a deliberate decision not to prosecute.

So what can we list as being real differences between the two parties?

Legislation. Enacted laws went from 460 during the last term under G.W. Bush, to 385 under a period of Democratic control of both the House and Senate, but also when Republicans got more and more filibuster-happy. Was at 284 and 296, then crashed to 165 (so far as of June 2016) when the GOP took over the Senate. Speaker Paul Ryan, formerly the Republican Budget Director, can’t seem to pass a Budget Resolution that’s, by the way, required by law. There’s no filibuster in the House and Republicans have a solid majority, so Democrats get zero blame for that. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell regards a Trade Promotion Authority bill (One of those bipartisan things listed above) and a bill concerning the Obama Administration deal with Iran as his two biggest accomplishments of the current Senate. Not really sure what the latter bill did as it would have canceled the deal with enough votes, but they didn’t get those votes and it’s not at all clear that the critics of the deal got anything else out of the bill. 

Republicans just don’t seem to like passing legislation as much as Democrats do.

Zika. After sitting around for two months and essentially twiddling their thumbs, the House finally decided to take money out of the response to Ebola and put it into Zika. Problem is, the fight against Ebola isn’t over. Neither Congress nor the Senate has voted on a bill that gives the Administration the full amount it’s requesting. And Congress left town in late May without doing anything to fix the problem. “Dozens of Democrats staged a media event on the steps of Capitol to decry the Republicans who control the House and Senate for leaving for the week-long break with what Democrats argued was so much unfinished business.”  How serious is Zika? Very!

Republicans just don’t seem to like fixing problems.

Abortion. One of the effects of Zika is that it affects babies in the womb, causing them to be born with microcephaly. That is, their brain is much smaller than normal because it hasn’t developed properly. One would think that, being allegedly very, very deeply concerned about babies in the womb, that anti-choicers would be all over this issue. They aren’t. Problem is, Zika and the called-for response contradicts the anti-choicer crusade against Planned Parenthood that was kicked off by a series of highly edited, misleading videotapes released by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP). Studying fetal tissue could help combat the effects of Zika, but the issue of women who have abortions and then donating fetal tissue is what’s at the heart of the CMP videos. A fourth federal committee was established (a dozen states had already investigated Planned Parenthood and exonerated them in every case) to further investigate Planned Parenthood to “find the truth.” As of June 2016, the committee has turned up zip. 

Conducting ideological crusades appears to take priority over solving real-world problems.

Holding up nominations. The Supreme Court nominee blockade, the blocking of any person nominated by the current president to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia is utterly and absolutely unprecedented in American history. Just as an example of the grossly excessive blocking of legitimate nominations, Senator “Tehran” Tom Cotton put a block on “Obama's ambassadorial nominations in order to pressure him to do something about the leaks coming out of the Secret Service. Eventually, that issue was resolved, and Cotton lifted all of the holds except [Cassandra] Butts'. When she met with him to ask why the hold remained on her nomination, Cotton told her "that he knew that she was a close friend of Obama’s — the two first encountered each other on a line for financial-aid forms at Harvard Law School, where they were classmates — and that blocking her was a way to inflict special pain on the president."

Shorter Senator Cotton: “I’m holding up a legitimate appointee because, fuck you, that’s why!”

Priorities.  Senate Majority Leader McConnell was asked about Donald Trump’s racist attack on a judge and responded “I think the Party of Lincoln wants to win the White House.” In other words, yeah, yeah, attacking a judge strictly for his ethnicity is, y’know, maybe not so great, but hey, winning is all that matters!

Winning is more important than maintaining basic decency.


No, I’m sorry, the two parties are not as different as I’d like them to be, but they are indeed different. It does make a difference whether you vote or whether you blow off the voting booth. It does make a difference whether you vote for the Democrats or for a third party.

How's the political opposition doing these days?

What John Kasich reveals here is where his head is at. He's asked about voting rights, a subject one would think would call forth an American, inclusive response that everyone could get behind. Instead, he shows us, just as Senate Majority Leader McConnelll did a few weeks back*, that he's thinking entirely in narrow, partisan terms. He wants less voting because if there was more voting, those extra votes might go to Democrats.

*Asked about the Senate perhaps becoming, y'know, er, productive, the Majority Leader responded thusly:

As proof of the Republican Congress’ “incredible” productivity, McConnell quickly pointed to the Keystone XL pipeline, which was vetoed by President Obama. The Senate Majority Leader immediately added, “We put the repeal of Obamacare on his desk. We put defund Planned Parenthood on his desk*.” Neither became law.

In other words, McConnell was asked about how inclusive and bipartisan his Senate was being and he responded by talking about efforts that were designed to stick it to the President and the Democrats and to raise the middle finger of Senate Republicans to them. Is there any hope for the two sides to get along and for both of them to focus upon the needs of the American people? Sure, but not with the current mind-set that prevails on that side of the aisle these days.

So how's the other Republican-run branch of the US Government, the House of Representatves, doing? Yeesh!

"I think I do it better," the House speaker told CNN during an interview this week, adding that his leadership style is different than his predecessor, whose resignation last year shocked Washington. "Not to knock John [Boehner], but I spend more time with all of our members on a continual basis."

[...]

Republicans say the speaker’s agenda project — the product of several task forces and dozens of meetings among rank-and-file House members — will provide specifics, and perhaps even draft legislation, on key issues of importance to conservatives, including health care, taxes and national security.

Ri-i-i-ight! Well, Ryan sure makes it sound as though the House were a beehive of activity with people accomplishing great things left and right. How does the reality look? Well, there's the rather important fact that Ryan couldn't make the mandated budget deadline of April 15^th. Ryan should have produced a detailed budget document by that date and that document is nowhere in sight because of deep disagreements between those who wish to carry out the agreement that Boehner arranged before he left the Speaker's office and those who wish to make even deeper spending cuts than anybody outside the Freedom Caucus has signed onto.

Boehner managed to make the budget deadline every year he wa Speaker and remembe, Ryan used to be the Chairman of the House Budget Committee. So much for all that “I spend more time with all of our members” guff. What good does it do to spend more time with members if you can't get your most basic, fundamental job done? As the saying goes: “You had one job...”

As for getting out a health care alternatve to Obamacare, “Why, that’s something the Republicans have been working on so long that … exactly no one is still waiting for them to provide a solution.”

But hey, we can still provide imaginary solutions to problems that we've already made rat progress on! Ryan tells us: “College and heath care keep getting more expensive. ISIS continues to spread.” As far as I know, college costs continue to rise, but the cost of health care? Politifact points out that “On average, premiums have risen by about 5.8 percent a year since Obama took office, compared to 13.2 percent in the nine years before Obama.” So actually, there has been a substantial slowdown in the rise of health care costs. How are we doing on Daesh (ISIS)? Daesh is not doing as well as they'd have everyone believe.

Even in Syria and Iraq, Daesh holds territory only because the states have collapsed. I remember people would do this with al-Qaeda, saying it had branches in 64 countries. But for the most part it was 4 guys in each of those countries. This kind of octopus imagery is taken advantage of by Daesh to make itself seem important, but we shouldn’t fall for it.

No, Daesh does not have an air force or a navy and just about every target that is identified as important to Daesh gets bombed (In January, the US located ther Treasury building and bombed it, leaving their soldiers in a tough spot for a while), so it's not the succesor to Nazi Germany and will never have the capacity to become a world power.

So, not surprisinly, Speaker Ryan, who used to be regarded as a golden boy wonk who could do no wrong, is taking some really serious hits to his image. 

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Other items: Back in the old days, people could rely on the magazine Foreign Affairs because it was rigorously fact-checked. Unfortinatey, that's not the case anymore. Their latest piece on global warming is complete mess. To survive past the year 2100, we don't need to come up with awesome new inventions, we need to deploy what we have. We need to be constructing windmills and installing solar panels as quickly as possible. Of course we should work on both developing new technology and on improving what we already have, but we're not doomed because we don't have new tools and inventions. We just need to get cracking and to speed up deploying the stuff that we already know works.

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Yeah, 120,000 voters were improperly purged from the voting rolls for the primary on April 17^th, but did the pro-Hillary people cheat in Brooklyn? That's not at all clear and it's really not clear that Bernie would have won without the voter purge. Bernie suporters would be well-advised not to throw around wild accusations.   

Mess-cranking

Back in the Navy, my rate/rank designation was PN3 (Pronounced pe-en-three, we always fully spelled out our designations). That stands for Personnelman (My rate or specialty) and Petty Officer Third Class (My rank, it was equivalent to being an Army Corporal). During our first term of four years, we served four months on the mess decks (food storage, preparation, serving and eating area) where we, for all intents and purposes, lost our rate designation and became just Petty Officer Third Class or Seaman or whatever our rank was.

One of our duties was Pier Sweeper. I was sent out to the pier with instructions to clean up any trash that I saw. I went out and saw one piece, then another, then another. Pretty soon, I was dragging a big, formerly empty box full off trash back to the dumpster close to where the beginning of the pier was. Finished, I went back up to the Quarterdeck to report to the Officer Of the Deck that I was finished and was headed back to the mess decks. The OOD returned my salute and said how impressed he was.

I had been taking so long, he figured I had just gone back onto the ship by the other entrance (That would have been the Midships Brow) and so he was pretty impressed to see me dragging such a large load. I indicated that my actions were all in a day's work and not a problem and headed down below.

A month later, an announcement came out over the 1MC that another ship of the same function as the one I was on was coming into port, would load up and head right back out again to get to Miami, which had just suffered a hurricane (Hurricane Andrew in 1992). They wanted to take a few volunteers from our crew down with them. I was initially depressed and discouraged and wished I could go with them. Then I thought about my situation and realized that there was no reason I couldn't. I asked my immediate supervisor, who gave his okay and then went to the group that was assembling.

Guess who was in charge of the volunteers? Yup, it was the OOD who was impressed by my Pier Sweepers performance a month earlier! He very cheerfully approved me for the trip and I was on my way! I packed a few things into my duffel bag and walked over with the other 20 or so sailors who were approved for the trip. We tossed off our duffel bags at our assigned racks (Our sleeping areas that contain a bed, a under-the-bed storage area and a small stand-up locker for shoes and hanging shirts and pants) and went back up to help load a food shipment onto the ship's mess decks.

The next day, I introduced myself to a female Petty Officer First Class (Two ranks above me). and she said she remembered me and noted approvingly that I was a hard worker. We had gotten off on the right foot!

The trip to Miami was good. I got a Letter of Commendation out of it. We didn't get ashore much, but I got into town on our last day there.

Can we speak ill of the dead now?

I presume that the desire to not speak ill of the dead comes with a time limit after which it's perfectly okay. In updating prawnworks, I came across this piece from early this January. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia advocated an absolutely dreadful idea, that government should take the side of religion over non-religion. 

Sorry, but I see a very short, steep and slippery slope between religion vs non-religion and, say, Roman Catholic vs Baptist. People might recall that, back in the old days, being declared a heretic, a non-Christian, someone who was Christian, but believed the wrong things, or was a witch, led to many people being burned at the stake and executed in many other ways.

Pride, Prejudice and Zombies

Had a hard time choosing what film to see tonight as usually, Michael Moore is like Quentin Tarantino, if I learn he's putting out a film, that's reason enough for me to see it. But I had the feeling PPZ was kind of a boutique film, one that wouldn't be in the theaters long. Sure enough, on the film's second week at 8:00pm on a Friday, the film was in a back theater and there were only about 10 other audience members. 

Awesome stuff, though! I read all of the major Jane Austen novels for a course back in the 80s and the film was very true to the spirit of the novels while having lots of fighting (The characters have a connection to both China and Japan, so the heroes get to use the long, curved, samurai swords). I thought I recognized our heroine, Lily James, and sure enough, it turns out she played Cinderella in 2015.

Conspiracy theories

Had an online conversation with someone who believed that the Illuminati and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) were exerting immense influence on our politics. I ran a search on “Illuminati Front Group Council on Foreign Relations,“ and the first six pages of results got me lots of authors and publications I never heard of. Wikipedia shows up on the 3rd page, the actual CFR shows up on the 6th. Which establishes, I guess, that even if some people take the Illuminati/CFR theory seriously, they're on the fringes and not part of the usual left-right dialogue.

Snopes is a pretty good debunking site (His answer to Snopes was “Snopes is ran by a Leftist couple out of their home,” which I don't consider a particularly meaningful or relevant response) and they say that Illuminati is a general, catch-all phrase identifying a mysterious, sinister agency where, yes indeed, if you type Illuminati backwards, it does indeed get you to an NSA website. But generally, “Illuminati” is a pretty vague, mysterious reference that doesn't refer to any particular individuals.

Ron Paul is a believer in CFR conspiracies. He says some good, peacenik-supporting stuff here and there, but I generally don't regard him as much of an expert on anything.

Good thinkpiece on the whole subject. The author feels the CFR generally does wish to establish a one-world government, but if they intended to be secretive about it, they're not doing a very good job of that, as it's quite easy to see what they've been saying and doing since they were founded.

As with other conspiracy theories, the CFR theory is plagued by sloppy research. The New American purports to tell us the history of the 1948 Marshall Plan. Slight problem is that it identifies David Rockefeller's study group as the inspiration for the plan, but the Marshall Foundation published a six-page PDF that reviewed the history of how the Marshall Plan came to be. It reproduces several memos, none of which are authored by Rockefeller. In 1999, Rockefeller was awarded a second George C. Marshall Foundation Award for “his long-time commitment to positive international economic development, his humanitarian service to community based on the recognition that a healthy, vibrant society depends upon a sound economic base.“ Nothing about his study group designing the plan. Bio.com doesn't write a terribly lengthy biography of Rockefeller, but it rather notably covers the immediate postwar years by talking entirely about his tenure at the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Rockefeller Center similarly doesn't give him any credit for the Marshall Plan. Sourcewatch draws all sorts of connections between Rockefeller and NAFTA, the Bilderberg society, the Trilateral Commission, etc., but again, nothing about inventing the Marshall Plan. Not sure all this completely debunks the New American theory, but it certainly doesn't give me any confidence that New American knows what it's talking about.

A major problem I have with the idea of secret societies covertly pulling the levers of power and arranging big changes behind the scenes is that it's actually pretty hard to keep lots of things a secret. The Koch brothers are two people who are determined to shape American society to their specifications. Their ideas are truly awful. David Koch ran as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1980 and the party got about 1% of the vote. In 1984, he founded Americans for Prosperity and has been an outsider-manipulator ever since. The Kochs played a substantial role in creating the Tea Party, for instance.

Now, the Kochs are trying convince people that they're running an “apolitical and altruistic reform movement to enhance the quality of life—as 'a movement for well-being,'“ as opposed to being a crassly materialistic movement that wants to throw the weak and helpless over the side and to reward the already rich and powerful with still more riches and power. It's not working out that well because the higher the profile they get, the more people notice them and the more investigative reporters poke and prod at, and break down, their carefully-constructed and maintained public images.

Archie

The famous (and chaste) love triangle of Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge was born in Archie Comics #1 in 1942. In 1954, Archie's cultural cred was established by Mad magazine via a Will Elder/Harvey Kurtzman parody. I read a number of Archie stories in the late 60s and early 70s. 

For many decades, Archie comics have been relegated to the “kid's corner” of comics shops while the more mature super-hero titles occupy the main section (Some comics shops have a far-back section where they keep the sex comics, but that sector isn't anywhere near as big as it once was). The company that publishes Archie has been trying lately to break out of the kid's corner by first introducing a gay character and now by introducing a re-boot of the comic with much better artwork and a more complex, mature storyline.

Heh! Betty prepares to go out on the town and gets herself all glammed up over the course of nine silent panels where she struggles mightily with all sorts of beautification processes. I checked the credits and sure enough, the comic has a female artist. I got the feeling she was being a bit autobiographical by depicting Betty's struggles.

Unfortunately, Archie is presented as such a klutz who screws up so badly that he tries to work on the mansion of the Lodges, who have just arrived in Riverdale, and accidentally sends a bulldozer into the wood frame of the mansion, collapsing it entirely. Veronica catches a glimpse of Archie running off and reacts by blushing and going “Tee-hee.” Sorry, I realize that Archie is a silly romantic comedy, but that's stretching “suspension of disbelief” a bit too far. I think Archie is going to remain in the kids corner for awhile yet.  

Ant-Man

Very happy that I saw Fantastic Four first and then Ant-Man, it was like going from canned tuna fish to broiled sea scallops, Ant-Man was WAY better! Not that the characters were really deep or complex, but both movies contained corporate villains that wanted to steal what the heroes had and make a profit off of it, but the Ant-Man villain was much less a routine, by-the-numbers bad guy and had at least some semblance of human-like motivations.

One of the founders of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, usually makes a small cameo appearance in Marvel films. He didn't appear in the third Fantastic Four, but did appear in Ant-Man.

Special effects in both films were completely credible. The art of doing those has progressed enormously.

Fantastic Four

I had heard some pretty awful things about the new Fantastic Four, all of which were unfortunately true. Problem is, the characters were invented in 1961, the first movie came out in 2005 and the second one in 2007, so it's not like people didn't already know all about the premise of the show. The writers changed a few details. For instance, Sue Storm is adopted by an African-American dad, so her brother Johnny is also black. Doctor Doom in the comic is a combination scientist/sorcerer and ruler of an Eastern European country, here he's just a transformed thing that was once a person. 
An idea here is that instead of going into near outer space to gain their powers, they go to another dimension. It really bothered me that Sue worked on outfits with which the new dimension could be safely explored, but unlike with the actual Moon landings in real life, where we had a pretty good idea as to conditions up there, the characters here never send monitoring equipment on ahead, so no one had any idea of what conditions in the other dimension were like, so Sue is basically working in the dark. She has no idea what she's designing the suits to be able to guard against. 
I hate to use the word “cartoonish” to describe the villains in this, but it really fits. Very, very shallow, one-dimensional characters. Yeah, if I were writing this, I'd spend about 10 to 15 minutes on the origin and the rest on a real action thriller. They spend the entire movie just doing the origin.  

Second Clinton vs Third Bush

Jesse Ventura ran a list of how Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are two peas in a pod.

My responses:

1. is interesting. I ran a search on “hillary clinton entitled” and the first two pages of results are solidly hard line right-wingers. Not surprised to see that lefties don't see her that way, but interesting to see that middle-of-the-road people don't see her that way, either.

5. False equivalence. There's no evidence Clinton is hiding anything by having used a private email account. I didn't agree with her doing so once I heard about it, but her supervisor didn't object to it. Bush has not hid anything so much as he's made selective disclosures of his email. He's been completely silent on many very important subjects, but if his brother doesn't get subpoenaed then he won't either.

9. Good to hear they both believe that climate change is a real and serious thing.

10. Clinton has kept away from loudly and forcefully criticizing the TPP, but she certainly hasn't praised it either, so I wouldn't count her as a supporter.

13. Green groups are divided on how close she is to the oil industry. “Her environmental record as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 includes launching a global initiative to reduce emissions of soot and some greenhouse gases, though not targeting carbon dioxide, the main culprit in global warming.”

Interesting piece, but I wouldn't regard it as the final word. Yes, there's some tension between her commitment to stop global warming and her oil industry ties. Certainly worth following to see how that plays out.

Update: This is a very hopeful sign. Clinton makes a strong bid to support renewable energy. A very good thing in any event, but especially good concerning her oil industry ties.

Comics and popularity

So I was scanning an old comic (Spider-Woman 37, 1981), scanning allows me to save an electronic copy while passing on the paper copy, and I see that it has circulation figures. Back in those days, the shops ordered as many comics as they thought they could sell and returned the unsold comics to be pulped. Nowadays, they order as many as they think they can sell and how they deal with the extras, well, that's their business. As there's a healthy back issue business (A customer can purchase an issue printed years ago, sometimes an issue will be sold and re-sold a few times), the issues often sell long after their usual time on the shelf has expired.

So I see that for Spider-Woman (Her title was being written by the acclaimed X-Men writer Chris Claremont and drawn by Steve Leiloha*) the average number of an issue printed was a bit over 283,000, the average number of issues actually sold was over 127,000. So I figured, hey, with all of these superhero movies out and with Spider-Woman having been revived (The first series ran from 1978 to 1983 and she started off again in a new series in 2009), the sales for today's Spider-Woman must be pretty good.

I looked at the sales figure for May of this year and was surprised to see that it was a little under 30,000. Granted, it ranked at number 75 out of all the titles and the list had almost 400 titles on it (Knights of the Dinner Table was ranked at 396 with not even 2,500 issues sold, various zombie titles, Grimm Fairy Tales and God Hates Astronauts all sold in the plus-275 rank and all had below-5,000 sales) and the really big-selling titles selling over 500,000 in the case of Secret Wars and almost 150,000 in the case of Star Wars, with issues ranked from six to 16 selling from 120,000 to 80,000. A 1981 issue of the Comics Journal (number 64) shows 109 issues on sale for that month.

As they say, the lead actor is frequently just a handsomer version of the director. Hmm, the artist is half-Hawaiian.

Has the popularity of comics declined or have they stayed about the same? I think one could make a pretty good case that comics have remained roughly the same in popularity and that buyers have just spread out to purchasing many more titles, but as I was told when I tried to sell off some old issues, TV shows, video/computer games and other electronic amusements have bit very deeply into the popularity of printed comics. So I think, overall, superheroes are much more popular, but the actual printed comics are at about the same level of popularity.

Update: It makes sense that price would have an effect. Marvel Comics went for $0.50 in 1981 and go for $3.99 today. The InflationCalculator says $0.50 in today's dollars would be $1.31 now. So Marvel makes an extra $2.68 today, over and above inflation. Is that a good deal for the consumer? Actually it is, as it means both better paper and better printing, but it also probably more than enough to push a comic out of the price range of more casual buyers and thereby lowers the number of issues sold. 

*Comics are drawn first by a penciller, who often collaborates closely with the writer, and is then inked so that the lines will show up for the printing plates. The inker can have a serious effect on the finished artwork. Leiloha had been an inker for many years before taking up the pencilling job on Spider-Woman. So although he was new to the job of pencilling, his work was well-known to comics fans

Ted & Ted 2

Saw that Ted 2 was playing in the theater and regretted that I never saw Ted. Finally caught Ted on cable and just saw Ted 2 tonight. There are rules for fantasy films. The characters can exhibit fantastical, amazing abilities and characteristics, but the rules have to be applied consistently and the story has to ring emotionally true. The dialogue has to sound like what people would actually say. In this regard, the Ted films pass with flying colors.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Very cool! Takes place entirely in a desert except for a few spots here and there. No real buildings anywhere and the one tree we see in the whole film doesn't survive (not that anyone wanted to destroy it, but hey, y'know?). Lots and lots of specialized vehicles and as no one wanted to fall off or get left behind, it was kind of like it was taking place at sea, with a few islands every now and then. And yes, I've seen all three of the earlier episodes.

Between rock and hard place

Senator John McCain (R-AZ) complains about Obama's approach to ISIS. Problem is, McCain is in kind of a bind. On the one hand, Iran is acting against ISIS on the ground in Iraq. ISIS is a truly awful, terrible outfit that commits atrocities. We're conducting active hostilities against them, bombing them very frequently. Iran is the entity we're negotiating with about their not-yet-built nuclear weapon and is supporting many not-friends in the Middle East. Iran is also actively conducting hostilities against ISIS (A point that Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) appeared to be very confused on a while ago). McCain wishes to replace Iran in Iraq with American “boots on the ground,” but Americans are very unenthusiastic about getting back into a war in Iraq. A Quinnipiac University poll (18-22 Nov 2014) asked respondents: "Do you think the United States military should have combat troops on the ground in Iraq or not?" The response was that only 37% of the public is in favor of that, 55% said no. 
 
Speaker of the House John Boehner is also very unhappy and is also in a bind. He's very unhappy with the draft AUMF that President Obama has proposed for authorizing a war against ISIS. Also, “For years, Boehner and other GOP leaders have complained that Obama is an out-of-control tyrant, hell-bent on ignoring the Constitution and amassing excessive power in the executive.” So, Boehner's statement on the situation is: “President Obama should scrap his war powers request to fight Islamic terrorists and go back to the drawing board, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Tuesday.”

But why is the President the one who has to “go back to the drawing board”? Why can't Congress draft and pass its own AUMF? There's no obvious reason that anyone is able to see for Congress to delegate this job to the President. Yes, it's a difficult process, with lots of clashing priorities. That doesn't get Congress off the hook. Boehner is a Speaker “with a large majority in the House at his back and a longing for historical significance in his heart, Boehner is determined to be remembered by history as someone who did something.” But in order for a legislator to be remembered as a significant figure, that means doing the hard work of governing, not just slacking off and expecting others to do your work for you.

ISIS and Iran and the unwillingness of the American people to re-engage in Iraq makes for a tough, hard-to-resolve situation. It's not difficult to see that there are no quick and easy and simple, expedient answers. It appears that the Republican Congress and Senate are both so used to simply saying “No” to everything, they've forgotten how to do the hard work of governing.

Avengers – Age of Ultron

Very cool! In the first Avengers movie, someone ran a property insurance program to see how much money would be needed to reconstruct New York City after all the events in the movie occurred. They figured about $160 billion would do it. Later, for Man of Steel (Superman), they ran it again and figured it would take about $700 billion. For Avengers – Age of Ultron? Whooo-weeee!!!!! Dunno, but it would add up to WAY more! Civilian casualties? There would have been some, but the heroes make very determined attempts to see to it that casualties would be minimal. 

I described how an old comic series featured an Iron Man who assumes the role of the villain (Machine Man takes place in what was then the far, far future of 2020) and someone asked if the comics featured anyone going the other way, from villain to hero. As a matter of fact, this second Avengers movie features just such a transformation.

Interesting changes in some of the characters from the way they are in the comics. The changes to their powers and origins are minor, but make good dramatic sense.

Bush speaks on Obama's Mideast policy

G.W. Bush “at first remarked that the idea of re-entering the political arena was something he didn’t want to do.” His first impulse was the correct one. He really should have stayed quiet.

Bush relied on an old friend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), for advice on how Obama should have dealt with the Iraqi insistence that the US should have stuck to the originally schedule of withdrawal by the end of 2011, as the agreement Bush and the President of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, specified back in 2008. Bush suggests that Obama could have renegotiated that agreement to allow a least a substantial contingent of US troops to remain. But Global Policy cited three works, all from 2006, showing that Iraqis in general had a very negative opinion of seeing permanent US bases in Iraq. It's highly unlikely that Iraqis would have changed their minds by 2011 as US troops had made themselves very unpopular during their stay there and the Iraqi people were given no reason to want to see them staying on. Did the surge have a dramatic effect on convincing Iraqis that Americans were good guys? No, the surge temporarily quited things there, but there were no serious political changes afterwards.

Also, reconstruction was a complete and utter bust. Just a few months after the war of 1991 with the US and a coalition of nations, the evil dictator Saddam Hussein completed “bubble-gum and scotch-tape” repairs to his country's infrastructure, but the American reconstruction effort after the invasion of 2003 was a complete waste.

Virtually every senior Iraqi, in sharp contrast, said the decade-long U.S. occupation was beset by huge misspending and waste and had accomplished little. The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money-laundering. Such a huge investment "could have brought great change in Iraq," Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, but the gains were often "lost."

How reliable is Graham for policy analysis? Well, in November 2014, CNN asked him to respond to the report on Benghazi put out by the Republican House Intelligence Committee. Basically, the report said he was completely wrong on everything he had said about the case. He got very heated about a very secondary issue concerning talking points that were put out later and made stern and angry pronouncements based on that. This is hardly unusual for Graham, as in his public career, Graham has rarely been correct on any matter of substance.

Bush said he views the rise of the Islamic State [IS, ISIL or ISIS] as al-Qaeda’s 'second act' and that they may have changed the name but that murdering innocents is still the favored tactic.

First off, “murdering innocents” is hardly a tactic unique to al Qaeda. That alone does nothing to connect the two groups. As a blogger points out in Informed Comment:

Like Al-Qaeda and other militants, ISIS offers a militant warped and distorted Salafi ideology/religious rationale or rationalization to justify, recruit, legitimate and motivate many of its fighters. Much of what they do violates Islamic law, its unabashed acts of terrorism: slaughter of civilians, savage use of beheadings, killing of innocent Muslims and Christians. While there are similarities between ISIS and other terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda in their ideological worldview and tactics, there is also distinctive difference. ISIS seeks to create a state, to occupy and control areas, to govern, not just to dream of or speak of but to create and impose their version of a transnational caliphate, with its harsh version of law and order. At the same time, they are far more ruthless in driving out, suppressing and executing Shiah and Kurds, Sunni imams/religious leaders and others who disagree, as well as minorities such as Christians and Yazidis, demanding conversion to their warped and extraordinarily violent brand of Islam. Having populations forced to publicly pledge their allegiance (baya) to the caliphate in exchange for which they are offered security, a mafia like version of “protection” and social services.

So no, ISIS is a very distinct and separate group from al Qaeda.

Yes, under Bush, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was captured. But,

...where Bush officials brazenly dismissed law as an inconvenient obstacle and sought to deal with suspects outside the law, Obama has said that the struggle with Al Qaeda must adhere to our nation’s first principles. He argues that the rule of law lends our struggle legitimacy and helps to isolate and defeat our enemies.

Obama has fallen short on applying these principles, but he has adhered to them far better than Bush ever even tried to.

Did Bush's policies decrease terrorism around the world? Actually, according to the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, terrorism increased under Bush sevenfold. Plus, if one is interested in holding back Iran and keeping Iran from territorial expansion, taking out Saddam Hussein of Iraq was a pretty terrible move. For all of Saddam's faults, and he had many, Iraq was a stable state that stood fast against Iran. Now, of course, the need to combat ISIS has opened up room for Iran to operate in Iraq. In a piece about a proposed bill to aid forces in Iraq that are friendly to the US, The Guardian points out that

Those Shia militias, many of which are sponsored by Iran, have played key roles in fighting Isis, to include spearheading the recent monthlong battle to retake the Sunni city of Tikrit.

Here's an interesting comment:

[Bush] said that if you have a military goal and you mean it, “you call in your military and say ‘What’s your plan?’ ” He indirectly touted his own decision to surge troops to Iraq in 2007, by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

So Bush says that leaders should listen to the military, which is all very fine and well, but Bush's military leaders actually disagreed with the surge. As Commander in Chief, Bush insisted on it anyway, as was his right, but this is a case where Bush very clearly departed from his own advice. Reporter Bob Woodward reported that, on “60 Minutes” in September 2008, "The records of the joint chiefs show that the idea of five brigades came from the White House, not from anybody except the White House."

In the same month, presidential candidate Barack Obama admitted that the surge was indeed succeeding. What was clear was that a reduction in violence was occurring. But why that reduction was occurring had to do with the Sunni Awakening (Al Qaeda was overdoing the violence and alienating Sunni Iraqis), Muqtada al-Sadr decided that his Mahdi army should cease operations and the US was paying many groups of guerrillas to fight on the side of the US. Unfortunately, the whole political purpose of the surge was never carried out and no political transformation ever took place during the “breathing room” that the addition of five brigades were supposed to have secured for Iraq's leadership. Thus was set the stage for the rise of ISIS.

Putin’s domestic popularity comes from his control of Russian media, according to Bush. "Hell, I'd be popular, too, if I owned NBC news," he said.

Actually, Bush claimed in 2002 that Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN arms inspectors in 1998. What actually happened was that Clinton wanted to bomb Iraq, told the UN inspectors to leave for their own safety and, when the bombing was over, Saddam refused to let inspectors back in. Pretty much the entire US media dutifully repeated Bush's lie that Saddam had kicked out the inspectors, which of course, had the added advantage of making Clinton look weak and helpless in retrospect. Bush may not have formally controlled the media, but he had virtual, de facto control anyway.

After it became clear that Iraq didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, Bush claimed several times that Saddam Hussein was given a choice prior to the invasion of 2003, to let in weapons inspectors or to be invaded. Bush maintained several times that Saddam refused to let the inspectors in and so sealed his fate. But everyone knew that wasn't true. Inspectors came into Iraq and inspected everything they wanted to. But the press corps permitted Bush to lie unchallenged.

So I'm really not sure what Bush's problem with the press corps is. They permitted many lies to go unchallenged. Their discipline did break a few times, notably in the case of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, but by and large, they maintained a rigid, lock-step discipline and didn't permit themselves too much independence.

No, if Bush became unpopular, that was due to his staggering ineptitude and horrible policies, not because the press was biased against him. I remember reading back in early 2009 that several Bush Administration members got together and talked over old times. They identified four disasters, 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, New Orleans/Katrina and the collapse of the housing bubble that resulted in the Great Recession. Problem is, in all four cases, Bush and his people had a great deal to do with either initiating the disaster or in not responding properly. In none of the cases could they plausibly claim to have been innocently taken by surprise. No, if Bush is regarded today as something you'd scrape off of the bottom of your shoes, his own actions had everything to do with that.