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.

PA Senator on nuclear deal with Iran

In "Have a vote on Iran deal," Senator Toomey states: "President Obama wants to remove American economic sanctions from Iran in exchange for Iran's promises to delay its pursuit of nuclear weapons."

Incorrect. The outline of the deal so far calls upon Iran to freeze their development of a nuclear weapon, not to simply delay it. Yes, the deal is for "only" ten years, but the deal can easily be renewed or extended. It is highly premature to state that development will pick up where it left off upon the expiration of the ten-year period.  

"Can Iran be trusted to keep any deal?" Negotiations on a basic framework took as long as they did precisely because both sides mistrust each other and both sides wanted to make verification as foolproof and as airtight as possible. 

Let's consider the list of charges that Toomey makes: that allegedly demonstrate that we're settling for far too little: 1. That Obama previously said he wouldn't anything less than complete dismantlement of Iran's nuclear program, 2. That the US and UN both previously insisted that Iran must surrender all of its centrifuges, 3. That Iran must ship all of its enriched uranium out of the country, and 4. That the facility at Fordham was supposed to be destroyed.

Why would the US and its negotiating partners have decided to not press for any of these? Obviously, because these objectives were going much too far for the leverage we had and pushing for complete victory would have left us with fists holding empty air.

Yes, sanctions got Iran to the table, but other nations are perfectly happy to cancel those sanctions, deal or no. Senate interference that insists on going for maximalist objectives will simply give Europe and China and Russia an excuse to discard sanctions and resume trade. Sanctions have limited effectiveness and we have a limited time period in which to use them. 

What Senator Toomey appears to want to do is to use a limited tool that's only of so much use as though it was an unlimited tool that will effortlessly achieve everything we want. Failing that, Toomey seems perfectly willing to discard the deal framework that Obama has so painstakingly built and to simply go back to square #1, with absolutely nothing having been achieved.

Cleopatra – Vivien Leigh

So, having watched the Claudette Colbert 1934 version of Cleopatra and the Elizabeth Taylor 1963 version, I saw that TCM was showing the Vivien Leigh 1945 version, so I went ahead and taped it. At first, having listened to the book-on-tape Cleopatra: A Life, I griped about historical inaccuracies, but then I found a source that gave me a quickie biography and realized that, actually, none of the movies were all that fussy about precise historical details.

Each era takes from the story what's important to them. In 1936, Cleopatra was a wily and shrewd manipulator; in 1963, the film focused on Mark Antony's (Richard Burton's) obsessive love for Cleopatra; in 1945, the film focused on Cleopatra's childlike nature (She was after all, 21 years old to Caesar's 52) and Caesar's wise, fatherly affection for her (In reality, she had been the effective ruler of Egypt since the age of 18 and she had a son with Caesar nine months after meeting him) calls to mind the shows Father Knows Best (before my time) and My Three Sons (I remember watching this).

Apparently, there's a Cleopatra film in development today and Angelina Jolie is scheduled to star in it. What would a film about her be like today? My guess is that it would focus on her executive abilities (which were considerable, she'd spend a few hours each morning hearing cases and issuing decisions) and she'd probably be portrayed as quite determined to pursue whatever goal she had in mind that day.

Expanding on a Faceboook post

The post describes a new proposed law, that rules separating your employer from you social media accounts should be relaxed. I very strongly oppose doing that.

Back in the Navy, my shipmate was having trouble at work. Our supervisors talked to him about it. He let slip something about his family causing him problems (Personally, I didn't like his wife and thought she was part of his problems at work), so our supervisors followed up and asked him lots of questions, questions that he complained to me about.

I felt bad for him, but also felt that he opened himself up by mentioning his family in the first place. That gave our supervisors a legitimate reason to pursue the matter further.

The WaPo piece quoted here says: "...if say an employee is making slanderous statements about their employer in social media, that the employer has the right to know that.” But why do employers need to know about statements you make on private parts of your social media account? I agree with the statement, but only up to a point. Employers are properly concerned with the public, openly accessible part of your social media account. Yes, having privacy on social media is a two-way thing. If you're not publicly slagging your employer, they have no reason to go into your Facebook or other social media accounts.

But if they feel you're slagging them, then they should have to prove that. They shouldn't simply be given the benefit of the doubt. And no, I don't feel that just because you work with children or for a church or religious group, that the rules on social media should be relaxed and that employers should be able to snoop into your accounts.

Citizens who wish to keep their social media accounts private from their employer should be given the benefit of the doubt and should be shielded from snooping employers. But yes, if an employer has evidence that you're bad-mouthing them or are engaged in immoral activities, then yes, the employee opens themselves up to investigation.  

Update: Just to expand on the privacy issue, I completely agree with this piece in the Inky, that when one posts test questions and/or answers on social media in a manner that's accessible to anyone, no, it's really not a question of privacy. It's not even a question of whether we rely too much on test scores (I think we do), but whether charter schools can legitimately monitor social media and take action on cheating. Yes, I think it's entirely legitimate for them to do so.

If people were truly keeping this information private, if students could only access it via a secure password, that is, that they were members of a defined group, then there might be some privacy argument. But no, if test questions are being posted publicly, then those posting them have no reasonable expectation of privacy and should expect to be found out and pursued.

US Social Forum Philadelphia June 25 - 28

We're very pleased to announce that the upcoming Third US Social Forum (USSF) will be taking place at several sites at Temple University and along American St. in Philadelphia on June 25-28! The USSF is a convergence driven by the understanding that people's movements are what create real social change. This will be an opportunity for regional and issue-specific social justice projects to work towards broader unity and cooperation. 

The Philadelphia USSF is anchored by the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Disabled In Action, and Youth United for Change, and rooted in the themes of immigration, political democracy, disability, and poverty. As a movement we will create spaces for strategy discussions, political education, People's Movement Assemblies, local actions, art and culture, convergences, movement schools, marches, housing takeovers, community building, healing, and collective empowerment. We know that a better world is possible and that it can be achieved.

Learn more by visiting the Philadelphia USSF website at ussfphilly.org, emailing us at outreach@ussfphilly.org or calling 215-869-4753 for more information.

The Kingsmen

Ah, thought I recognized one of the names in the credits. The Kingsmen is based on the comic book of the same name by Mark Millar (Kick-Ass) and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen). Extreme, over the top violence, but as the heroes (Colin Firth plays the mentor to Taron Egerton) are quite mannerly and very rarely get their hair so much as mussed, it's easy to follow the story anyway. Samuel Jackson puts a lot of gusto into his role as the maniacal villain and Sofia Boutella plays a very deadly and acrobatic minion/lover of Jackson's.  

Conservative comedy

Good piece in The Atlantic about conservative humor and how conservatives can't seem to produce any popular comedians. One example of conservative attempts at humor kind of jumped out at me as I remembered a liberal comedian commenting on this general viewpoint just a short while ago.

“What’s the deal with Harry Reid?” [The host of The Flipside, Michael Loftus] asked in a recent episode. “You either hate him or you hate him, am I right? The man is in the business of telling people how greedy they are, and how they don’t pay their fair share, and he lives in the Ritz Carlton … This guy is literally Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.”

I immediately recalled an observation from the liberal comedian Russell Brand:

Some people say I'm a hypocrite because I've got money now. When I was poor and I complained about inequality people said I was bitter, now I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want inequality on the agenda because it is a real problem that needs to be addressed.

Which means that conservatives like Loftus set up a “Heads I win, tails you lose” kind of situation for critics of income inequality with this “observation” on “hypocrisy.” Combine that with the comment on the former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Republicans now have the Senate Majority, so Reid is now the Minority Leader), that “You either hate him or you hate him...” and we have a very sour, mean-spirited “joke” that you have to be a really, really hard-core conservative to appreciate.

On a further note, I don't recall any particular hypocrisies from Mr. Burns. I always saw Mr. Burns as just an greedy elitist who wants to rip everyone off. There may very well have been hypocrisies on his part, but I don't recall any.


Update: Rush Limbaugh gives us a marvelous example of real, genuine hypocrisy. During the time when Democrats controlled the Senate and were considering filibuster reform, Limbaugh though such a thing would be an example of evil, unmitigated tyranny. Now that the GOP is in charge of the Senate, filibuster reform is just a good, All-American thing to do.  

Birdman

Figured I'd better hurry up and see Birdman before it disappeared from the theaters as it was already down the three showings a day and was in one of the very back theaters in the cineplex. Glad I did! The hero (Michael Keaton) has super-powers (Flight and telekinesis), but he doesn't appear to have ever used them to fight crime or evil. He appears to have just used them as aids to his acting career. The fun part of the film is seeing the actors lead these really interesting, dramatic lives away from the stage. Do actors in real life actually lead such stormy lives offstage? Eh, probably not, but it's fun to think they do.

West Philly Families Solidarity March

By Sachio Ko-yin
                                                                                           January 3 2015

You couldn't drive down Baltimore Ave. Police blocked off the street, and down marched an army of children and their parents, wielding umbrellas, kazoos and tambourines.  At least half the marchers rode on shoulders and backs. They held up signs reading, “Black Lives Matter” and “Kids for Equality,” then veered off into Clark Park chanting, “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”

A parent spoke at the end, braving the rain with no umbrella:
“When we were planning, someone asked us, ‘What do we want from this march?’ I thought about it, and realized I want to see you, to meet you. I want to know who else in this community is raising their children to stand up for justice, with the values of activism, against racism and police brutality, for involvement in their community.”



About 40 minutes before the march began, we gathered in the sanctuary of Calvary Church (48th and Baltimore), a room  full of some 100 parents and children and community members. The agenda was simple: Introduce your family to the families around you, and then, find someone you haven’t met yet, and share a hope for your community.



I saw many parents and younger children, but I also heard local high schoolers who were outraged at the verdict of ‘not guilty’ in the Eric Garner case. They came today to express themselves. Their plan was to report back to their class about what marching was like.

An organizer invited parents and children up to the microphone for the speak-out. “Ok, now we can say what’s on our minds, for about 30 seconds. But please remember this is for children, so please keep it short and simple.”



One parent said “I often feel like my life as a parent and my life as an activist are at odds. But for me, being here today, I want my family to meet your family. We are here to dispel the myth that we live in a post-racial society.”

Speakers shared their concerns about racism in society, gentrification, stop and frisk, and defunding of schools. There were songs like ‘From Ferguson to New York, I’m gonna let it shine.’

And there was a 4.5 minute ‘Noise-In’, where everyone raised their tambourines and kazoos for justice for Black Lives Matter, followed by a moment of silence for Trayvon Martin, for Michael Brown, and all victims of racist police brutality.



Then it was time to put on coats, get umbrellas ready, hold up colorful signs, and funnel out the door to take over Baltimore Ave, to sing and chant for justice and for conscience, as community and as family.

Exodus

Pretty good! Exodus reminds me of Noah, earlier this year. Generally, both movies stick close to their source, diverging now and then to have the story make more sense. Naturally, the Ten Commandments by Cecil B.DeMille, starring Charlton Heston (1956), didn't have Moses engaging in any sort of romantic subplots, so I thought the part of Exodus where Moses marries a woman from Midian (Zipporah was played by Maria Valverde) was an attempt to jazz up the movie for today's audiences. Nope, I went to one of my bookshelves after getting back from the movie, checked my Revised Standard version of the Bible (1952) and, sure enough, Moses escaped Egypt, went to Midian, got married and they had a son. Then he returned to Egypt and started pressuring the Pharaoh to release his Hebrew brothers and sisters. I liked that the movie made Moses the adopted brother of the Pharaoh and an honored aristocrat in the beginning of the movie before he ran off to Midian. Makes sense and makes the whole conflict between hm and the Pharaoh more direct and personal.

And no, it's true that Moses was not historically a white person but he's played here by a white actor (Christian Bale). The director says he needed investment money to start with and needed viewers later, so he needed a “bankable” star. I decided to take the ethnicity of Moses as one of those ”suspension of disbelief” things, y'know, where Superman chats with Green Lantern on the surface of Mars, and where you accept the premise so that you can then concentrate on the human drama, the relationships between the characters, the cool special effects, etc. And I agree that any time is a good time, any time is a bad time, to start introducing diversity into movie casting. There's no reason why 2014 is any better than 2024 or any worse that 2004 or vice-versa.

Saw The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 last week. Recommend seeing parts 1 and 2 in a reasonably close-together fashion. Mockngjay part 1 will probably come out on DVD or on one of the cable channels when Part 2 is about to show, so it shouldn't be difficult to do that. .

The torture report

The torture report, well, the redacted summary of the 6,000 page full report anyway, makes clear that the second, subsidiary, justification for torture made during the G.W. Bush Administration is complete poppycock. The first justification concerns morality and is premised on the “ticking time bomb” scenario where a single person can suffer torture now or a lot of people can suffer an exploded bomb within a short time period.

The second justification is one of effectiveness, that torture can quickly and effectively elicit truthful answers in time to prevent terrible things from happening. It's the second justification that's squashed utterly by the report. Even people in the CIA, at the time, could see that the US wasn't obtaining any worthwhile information that couldn't have been obtained just as quickly by using a gentler approach. The Intelligence Committee reviewed 20 claims of torture having prevented a “ticking time bomb” scenario and found them all to be without foundation.

The report demonstrates that the CIA's torture program was out of control and that the CIA frequently lied to superiors and failed to even conduct any sort of internal assessment of whether torture was effective or not. Claims that the program was effective rested on lies and wishful thinking, not on any sort of factual basis.

What does it all mean? A society that tries to become a better society has no use for torture. Torture has a corrupting effect on its practitioners as the report documents. Torture has no benefits to balance or to justify its evil effects, not even if we agree that war in general is justified.

Interstellar

An okay flick. If I were having a big party and wanted to keep something showing on the TV so that guests could wander by, watch a bit and then wander off, it'd be good for that. The FX and scenery are certainly good and the plot sufficiently long and drawn-out that no one would miss much if they were to get distracted. Certainly an attractive cast, with Matthew McConaughey as the hero, Anne Hathaway as the lone female among all the males in most of it and Jessica Chastain as the hero's grown-up daughter, certainly makes for plenty of eye candy.

My initial idea was to see Ouija as that has Bianca Santos in it, who is the star of Happyland, a series on MTV. But Ouija is only showing once per evening, after 10:00, so I figured I wouldn't see the horror flick after all. No biggie, I saw a few horror movies as a teenager but haven't seen any for many, many years. So I saw no need to break the pattern. Happyland is pretty cool though, a behind-the-scenes look at a Disney-ish amusement park.

Rosewater.

Quite good. The Jon Stewart movie reminds me of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in the way that it examines what our hero, Maziar Bahari (Played by Gael Garcia Bernal) has to go through. The Iranians who imprison Bahari knew that the brutal methods of SAVAK were worthless in obtaining credible confessions. The somewhat surprising twist is that Bahari doesn't hold out 'til the bitter end, never telling his captors what they want to hear. He does, but the world accurately identifies his confession as worthless because it's so obviously obtained under duress.

Very good look at current Iranian society and the relationship between captor and captive and the limits of what societies can do to oppress individuals.

Daily Show interviews on Rosewater. 
Update: Good review from Salon.  

A community responds to police abuses

The St. Louis Symphony was interrupted right after intermission with about 50 people dropping banners and singing “Justice for Mike Brown.” The woman pictured above was caught on camera, apparently wondering why her previously-pleasant evening was being so brazenly disrupted. The fellow beside her, looking up at the balcony, was filmed moments previously, smiling broadly. The St. Louis American piece reports that “Some onlookers were outraged and start spewing expletives. Others stood up and started clapping. Most seemed stunned and simply watched.“

The singing was a response to the Michael Brown killing and its tense and sometimes chaotic aftermath. “On Saturday afternoon, Brown was shot to death by a police officer while apparently walking, unarmed, from a convenience store to his grandmother's apartment in Ferguson, a working-class suburb north of St Louis, the main hub of this midwestern state.” Ferguson police later introduced a videotape of Brown exchanging angry words with a convenience store clerk. It initially appeared that Brown stole some cigars, but a look at the whole tape showed he did no such thing and Darren Wilson, the policeman who shot Brown, wasn't aware of what had happened in the convenience store in any event. 

 

  

Cartoons of course, routinely present situations in exaggerated and hyperbolic ways, as the one pictured here does. But the line between hyperbole and real life becomes blurred when other police officers in the same geographical region demonstrated a similar police response to another citizen. “Cops say [Vonderrit Myers Jr.] fired a gun.” Problem is, non-police eyewitnesses, who saw Myers beforehand, maintain that all he had in his possession was a sandwich. There has been no independent confirmation that Myers ever had a gun. Police Chief Sam Dotson, of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, claims that a 9mm Ruger handgun was retrieved from the scene and ballistics tests are being run on it, but Myers was already wearing an ankle bracelet for a charge of gun possession and both the mother and pastor of Myers say he absolutely did not possess a gun. 

A piece from Popular Resistance adds details that cast even more doubt on the charge that Vonderrit Myers Jr. posed any sort of threat to the off-duty police officer who shot him. The piece also goes into the question of why our police seem to be getting out of control lately and apparently now pose a greater threat to unarmed citizens than to criminals. Privatization seems to be a real driver of this new unaccountability. Privatization changes the mission of police forces so that what the public needs is no longer important. What the private interests who pay the salaries of police need becomes the new priority. A very disturbing case was that of San Francisco 49er Ray McDonald and his pregnant girlfriend. She called for police assistance as he was beating her, public policemen showed up, but a private policeman was already on the scene. “In the case the first officer on the scene worked for the 49ers and represented the interests of Ray McDonald.. What was said? Not said? Was the victim intimidated? Was evidence hidden, destroyed? Was McDonald prepped by his employee as to what he should say or not say?”

Another problem was pointed out by The American Prospect. Exactly how are brutal, out-of-control police punished for bad behavior? The answer isn't comforting and goes a long way to explain why police feel invulnerable. If cases are won and civil penalties are assessed (Hard to do as the public is very supportive of police departments generally), then steep payments are made. But payments generally come out of city funds, and by extension, they come from city taxpayers, not by the particular police department that behaved badly. As police operating budgets are rarely affected, there's no reason for police to avoid bad behavior. 

So how do we judge the response of the St. Louis region's black community to police abuses? The US Social Forum (Coming to Philadelphia in June 2015) takes an “all-of-the-above” approach to resolving social issues, or a “full-court press” as basketball players would say. It's good to use street demonstrations and a peaceful demonstration is always better than a violent one, but getting involved in voting and long-term organizing is a critically necessary element to achieving long-term success. That's just what the black community of the St. Louis region is doing. “...3,000 Ferguson residents (total population is 21,000) have registered to vote. And that’s good. Certainly some of the problems that led to Brown’s killing have to do with a political system that is not representative of the citizens it is charged with governing. In a town that is two-thirds black, only one of its six city council members is also black. If more than 6 percent of the black residents had voted, there would likely be a different mayor, and perhaps a different police chief.”

Actions like the singing at the St. Louis Symphony and more routine, less photogenic actions like registering new voters, are both necessary elements in making progress towards a more fair and inclusive society.


_______________

The St. Louis Symphony was interrupted right after intermission with about 50 people dropping banners and singing “Justice for Mike Brown.” When the office who shot Brown was identified, the Ferguson police muddied up the issue by introducing a tape of Brown exchanging angry words with a convenience store clerk. The full tape showed that Brown did not commit a crime. Is the cartoon here an exaggeration of police-citizen relations in the area? Unfortunately, not by much. The later shooting of Vonderrit Myers Jr. appears to be even less defensible than the Michael Brown shooting was. Why are these shooting happening? Privatization of police and the lack of any direct connection between penalties and the misbehaving police departments both appear to be factors. What to do? Well, the US Social Forum (Coming to Philadelphia in June 2015) takes an “all-of-the-above” approach to resolving social issues and the black community of Ferguson appears to be taking that approach as it's getting lots of voters registered.

Tech support companies

I was getting very frustrated with my Windows computer ( My Linux one was working fine) as the browser (Chrome) kept opening up new tabs and windows and giving me a "warning" about websites that I knew weren't problems. It kept urging me to call a particular number (Which I had absolutely no intention of ever doing) and finally got to the point where it interfered with the operation of the browser that the whole thing was becoming useless.

I took the computer to a tech support service and they fixed it up some. They improved the speed and reduced some of the clutter that I had been experiencing. I used Internet Explorer as my browser for awhile as that's the Windows default browser, bu eventually opened up Chrome again. %$^#@!! The problem that I brought it in for was still being a problem!!! As the problem hadn't occurred in Explorer, I decided to go to the tech support site for Chrome.

Boo-yah! With three exchanges, the problem had been identified and solved! My experience with the tech support company was not a waste, but it brought back to me how many times I and the data tech people in the Navy and I disagreed. Yeah, they were smart and informed, but I often knew just as much about certain aspects of computers as they did.

The Equalizer

The Equalizer reminds me of Machete in that the hero appears very physically formidable and can take and dish out lots and lots of physical abuse. Liked the relationship between our hero and the sweet young woman he sets out to avenge. He also relates well to the ordinary folks he works with during his day job.   

Double Indemnity

Finished watching the 1944 movie “Double Indemnity” today. Quite good! Barbara Stanwyck has two big challenges, both of which I believe she passes with flying colors. The first is that she has to make us believe that she's so incredibly sexually desirable that Fred MacMurray (Yup, the dad in My Three Sons) loses all sense of reason and proportion and is actually willing to kill for her. Not only that, she does so while staying within the highly restrictive Hays Code, a code that states: “Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown” and demanded, among other things, that couples couldn't share a double bed, but had to sleep in two singles.

Second, her step-daughter Lola (Jean Heather) describes how Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) carried out a cold and cruel act and then stood there without showing any sign of remorse. Stanwyck does a good enough job building the character of Phyllis that Lola's description of Phyllis comes across as entirely believable.

The description given by Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) of always listening to his “little man” is a hilarious side-note. I also understood why films after the Hays Code felt the need to allow at least a few sympathetic characters to get away with it all and to make their way to sunny resorts.

New York City People's Climate March Sep 21

How big is the upcoming march going to be? The Green Party of Philadelphia has a number of buses going from several points in town. Normally, buses leaving from the city for out-of-town marches and rallies leave from just one central point. Now the Greens are confident they can fill buses from all over. I was on a conference call last month where we discussed people using the floors of churches to put their sleeping bags on. Even back then, all such space was already booked. 350.org has a section on the march which is our go-to, central point of information. Why is the organization named 350? In order for human beings to be safe, the CO₂ in our atmosphere should be at or below 350 parts per million (pre-industrial civilization had around 275 ppm) and we're now above 400 ppm. 

But this issue has been around for awhile. Why is this march now gathering so much enthusiasm and attention? My own thought is that global warming has previously had a direct, observable effect on far-off places, Pacific islands, the Arctic and the Antarctic, etc. Now, Venice, Italy and Norfolk, VA are affected. Both land masses are heavy and weighted down by cities and are thus sinking very slowly into the sea, but that doesn't account for all of the gains that the sea has made on both cities. In both cases, sea levels from global warming are clearly having an effect. Parts of Norfolk, the main US Navy base, are regularly flooding with salt water, so the Navy is very intimately aware of the effect that global warming is having as they can see the sea rising right in their front yard. 

There are many other effects that global warming is having, “Glaciers everywhere are melting and disappearing fast, threatening the primary source of clean water for millions of people. Mosquitoes, who like a warmer world, are spreading into lots of new places, and bringing malaria and dengue fever with them. Drought is becoming much more common, making food harder to grow in many places.” 

Is global warming implicated in violent world events like the Arab Spring? Evidence indicates that warming is a “stressor.” It's not a cause of violence and revolution, but it adds to the volatile mix that causes social upheavals. 

A person prominently featured as a speaker for the march is the reporter Naomi Klein (Author of The Shock Doctrine), who argues that our economic model may not be compatible with human survival.

Calling “Taps” on PhillyIMC

"Taps, taps, lights out. All hands turn into your bunks. Maintain silence about the decks. The smoking lamp is out in all designated spaces. Now taps."

Navy shipboard announcement sounded each night at 2200 hours (10:00 pm)

Well, PhillyIMC had a really good run from mid-2000 to mid-2014. But we've now been threatened by lawyers to pay for an image that was taken from them without their permission back in 2010. We're busy fighting this off and are hopeful that we might get away with either a reduced payment, or better yet, no payment at all.

Can PhillyIMC be revived someday? Sure, but we're using Drupal 5 as our Content Management System (CMS) and Drupal 7 is available. Certainly, our CMS can be upgraded, but we've published almost 50,000 articles and I went through nearly 700 of them. About one-quarter of those articles aren't worth keeping as they no longer have photos or sound-files or movie files attached. There's a larger proportion of good pieces later, but clearly, there's a lot of stuff that we may as well delete before upgrading the CMS.

Also, in order to fend off the trolling lawyers, we need to make sure that all of the images in use on the site are either photos that were taken by the authors or are otherwise copyright-free images. I believe the site is pretty much free of spam or unsolicited advertising, but I can't guarantee that until a careful, detailed examination of all of the articles is made. Going through the 700 articles, I found about 10 that were just copied and pasted from other sources and contained no reference to their original source. Stories like these should all be footnoted.

In other words, there's lots and lots of work to be done before the site can be re-opened. So yeah, we're announcing “Taps” on PhillyIMC. Will we ever re-open it? Will we ever be able to sound “Reveille” on it? That's an excellent question.

Gaza 2014

I truly hate the issue of Gaza versus Israel as I have good friends on both sides. It's about the only issue that currently splits liberals from each other.

The fellow here makes a good case for the Israeli side. Essentially, Israel is under siege by a foe that will settle for nothing less than their complete destruction. Hamas doesn't want to simply co-exist with Israel, they want to annihilate the state and all its people.

The case that Hamas makes to the people of Gaza is also pretty straightforward. The people of Gaza are locked into an “open-air prison” that even Pope Francis condemns. They have no seaport of their own, no airport, their border is sealed on all sides, their access to fishing on the sea is very restricted. I haven't heard much lately about residents of Gaza being hungry or having their food supplies restricted, but that certainly did happen in the past, until Egypt had its revolution and partially opened their border with Gaza.

“So, all right, Mr. Smarty-pants, what would you do? How would you square the circle?”

Back during the late 80s, I did a lot of reading on guerrilla war, including several books on the Vietnam conflict from left-wing, middle-of-the-road and right-wing perspectives. My following of the Iraq War has very largely confirmed the conclusions I reached back then.

In every guerrilla movement, there are two components, the hard-core fighters, the ones who run things and compose the propaganda and who promise to take over when the fighting is done. Then there are the people at large. The people are the ones constantly just trying to live their lives, to get out of the line of fire, to raise crops and children as best they can amid all the gunfire. It is quite impossible for the hard-core fighters to succeed without at least the tacit cooperation of the people.

Thousands of South Vietnamese, appalled by Diem’s corruption and brutality against Buddhists and suspected communists, rushed to fight with the NLF. Those unwilling or unable to fight – including women, children and the elderly – gave support in other ways, such as providing food, safety and information about enemy troop movements.

So how does an occupier win a guerrilla war? By allying oneself with the people and thus robbing the fighters of the support without which they can't survive. As Mao Zedong had put it: “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea,” (There's a more comprehensive quote here, on a page where Mao emphasizes that guerrillas must treat the people well, so as to gain their enthusiastic support) so if one “drains the sea” by addressing and solving or at least mitigating the grievances of the people, the hard-core fighters will be left high and dry and will not gain power.

It is of course possible that the Palestinian people in Gaza will still be motivated to annihilate the Israelis after their conditions are softened and mitigated and their existence is rendered to be less than a concentration camp, but people in general tend not be fanatics and if they find they can live their lives, stay out of the line of gunfire and raise crops and children in a relatively unmolested fashion, fanaticism tends to die in those circumstances.

The people of the Middle East have demonstrated this through their attitude towards America over the past decade and a half. They have shown that “The publics in every nation polled in both 2008 and 2009 showed an increase in confidence in Obama compared to Bush--on average 37 points.” Obama was, and remains, much less aggressively in-your-face than Bush was and so maintains a much higher degree of popularity than his predecessor did.

I believe that Israel would do far better to try and separate the Palestinian people from the hard-core fighters of Hamas via policies that lessen the harshness of their lives than through the current policy of collective punishment.

Glenn Davis and the 190th District

Glenn Davis is the Chair of the Philadelphia Green Party and is running to be the Representative for the strongly Democratic 190^th Pennsylvania House of Representative district. His campaign is currently in the process of getting signatures and the real campaign will commence once that's done. Is there any chance he'll be a spoiler and that splitting the liberal vote will result in a Republican Representative? Happily, there are no Republicans running for that district, so a vote for Davis and the Green Party is a free vote.

If he's successful, will Davis be a good Representative or is he just interested in the symbolism of the Green Party winning a seat? Davis has three children, Shyenn (11), Nathenn (8) and Shanenn (7) and he's heavily invested in seeing to it that his children receive the best education possible. He is very interested in reversing the damage that has been done to Pennsylvania schools via Governor Corbett's mindless and destructive cuts.

The 190^th Legislative District is largely a one-party district. Just as in the Senatorial race in Mississippi was pretty much done and over with when Thad Cochran prevailed against Chris McDaniel (There are very few votes to be had for Democrats in MS), so Vanessa L. Brown thought she had the had the race for Representative safely locked up as soon as she had prevailed in the Democratic primary. With the Green Party in the ring, Davis can, if nothing else, press Brown to take better positions prior to her winning November's election.
Davis is a veteran of the Gulf War of 1991 (He was an Army Specialist (E4 68J) from 1989 to 1993) and currently makes his living by working at McDonalds. His house is currently, along with those of many thousands of fellow Philadelphia citizens, in foreclosure. He is energized by that issue as pay for a fast-food worker is inadequate to solve that problem. He is also the Vice President at the Shepard Recreation Center and is involved with the Women's Community Revitalization Project and DecarceratePA.

 
Mayor Nutter recently tried to address Philadelphia citizens whose minor legal problems were making their job searches unnecessarily difficult. Davis sought to get a 2009 misdemeanor charge pardoned and found that he was in a group of roughly 3000 fellow citizens who were all seeking pardons for similarly minor offenses. Nutter appears to have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who needed relief, so this is yet another issue that is energizing Davis. He and the Green Party are both trying to see to it that the average citizen gets a break.

The Philadelphia Green Party website is at GPOP.org.