Kirby Mountain

Hillary Clinton and masculine anxiety

2008-05-13T08:43:00.002-04:00

Good essay by Stephen Ducat at Huffington Post (click on title of this post):

In applying the GOP approach to feminizing male opponents, and directing class resentment away from the real elites, Hillary Clinton has gone beyond her more familiar adoption of the ruthless, sociopathic say-anything, dirty tricks politics of her erstwhile Rovian right wing enemies. She is reinforcing the conservative attempt to equate manhood with belligerence and predation. In addition, she is trotting out the well worn but still effective propaganda technique employed by this country's actual ruling oligarchy of wealth -- reducing class to personal style, taste, or the specific products people consume (brie versus Velveeta). Those who actually own or wield control over our shared resources are rendered invisible in this rhetorical sleight of hand.

Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Clinton campaign. His guiding political ethos has always been one of bridging but not overlooking divisions, while privileging dialogue, debate, and negotiation over conquest. This is not only a new politics. It is a new masculinity, one that is inclusive of those panhuman qualities previously disowned and projected onto women. It remains to be seen if Hillary Clinton, with her Hobbesian hard-on, will succeed in turning the Denver convention into a war of all against all. If so, the life span of the Democratic Party may be nasty, brutish, and short.

tags: human rights

Today's lesson

2008-05-09T15:06:00.003-04:00

When you insist that the ends justify the means, you will discover that the ends in fact are defined by the means, that you have made the means the end in themselves.

Hillary Clinton, George Wallace

2008-05-08T19:16:00.001-04:00

Hillary Clinton, in an interview yesterday with USA Today, referred to her appeal among "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans". She cited this as proof of her "much broader base to build a winning coalition on". Yet she has lost, after a long consistent record of losing in this presidential primary.

She sounds like George Wallace, who broke with the Democratic party to make an independent run for President in 1968 to exploit anti-desegregation sentiment. There's always someone who will take advantage of the worst parts of our character instead of acting to strengthen the better parts.

The phrase "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" clarifies her meaning at each comma-demarcated step, to assert that white Americans are the only hard-working Americans, indeed the only Americans who do any real work.

During the knickers-twisting over Jeremiah Wright, Pat Buchanan, who regularly says much more "anti-American" things than Wright did, was similarly seething mostly because Wright did not show sufficient appreciation to everything "we" (Americans, i.e., whites) have given "them" (blacks, i.e., Americans only by the magnanimous indulgence of whites).

And so here is Hillary Clinton, "appealing" to the same bigotry, to "white" America as the "real" America, working from the notion that it's "whites" who do all the real work so everyone else can enjoy their freedom and prosperity, which they only abuse by actually thinking that they, too, are Americans and have some right to speak out and even to lead.

American Independent Party: here she comes!

Obama helping to bring peace to Niger delta

2008-05-07T13:19:00.003-04:00

In between campaign appearances, Barack Obama has laid out a plan for a cease-fire and negotiations between the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) and the government of Nigeria.

Although you wouldn't know it from coverage by most of the U.S. media. The Obama campaign is apparently playing it down as well, although violence in the Niger delta, which supplies around one-tenth of U.S. oil imports, has contributed to the recent price rises.

MEND announced over the past weekend that it was eager to work with Obama's plan, saying how much they respect him. They also looked forward to former President Jimmy Carter acting as mediator. The Carter Center confirmed last night that Carter has accepted the task, which seems to confirm that MEND is not making it all up.

tags: human rights

It's not all about race, it's fascism vs. dissent

2008-05-04T13:01:00.004-04:00

John Hagee and Jerry Falwell have said much worse things than Jeremiah Wright, hateful twisted things. But they direct their wrath towards the disenfanchised and oppressed, not on their behalf, as Jeremiah Wright (like Martin Luther King) has. The right-wing religious do not threaten the powerful. They help to consolidate a paranoiac and retrograde vision of power that is represented in authoritarianism and totalitarianism, empire and military might, and an absence of meaningful debate. They reinforce the majority mob with racism, sexism, xenophobia, and even speciesism. They represent the reactionary forces that recoil from positive change, from real democracy and a nation of freedom and justice.

Jeremiah Wright is doubly cursed for defining himself in terms of the unique history of Africans in this country and thus for reminding Americans of that shameful history, noting that it is not an aberration but a pattern, and that we reap what we sow.

Wright places the blame with the powerful, not with those who have no power. That is unacceptable.

tags: human rights

Which means it is all about race ...

2008-05-03T11:53:00.002-04:00

Bill Moyers Journal, May 2 (click the title of this post for the complete commentary):

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon white house in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".

tags: human rights

A Time to Break Silence

2008-04-28T11:10:00.001-04:00

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. ...

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land. ...

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers. ...

Strange Liberators

The only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged.

They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force -- the unified Buddhist church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators?

Now there is little left to build on -- save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these? Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These too are our brothers. ...

When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered. ...

We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor. ...

This Madness Must Cease

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. ...

Protesting The War

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. ...

During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. ...

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. ...

The People Are Important

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light." We in the West must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. ...

--Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York

tags: human rights

A call to humility and acknowledgement of reality

2008-04-26T18:07:00.002-04:00

Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strikes law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!

--Jeremiah Wright

tags: human rights

When America's chickens came home to roost

2008-04-26T17:53:00.002-04:00

The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies. "Blessed are they who dash your baby's brains against a rock." And that my beloved is a dangerous place to be. Yet, that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks and we don't care who gets hurt in the process.

I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox news. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox news commentators to no end. He pointed out - an Ambassador! - he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true. America's chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers. We bombed Gadafi's home and killed his child. "Blessed are they who bash your children's heads against a rock!" We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hard-working people; mothers and fathers who left home to go work that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon. And we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians - not soldiers - people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A White Ambassador said that, y'all, not a Black Militant. Not a Reverend who preaches about racism. An Ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who's trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised ...

--Jeremiah Wright, Sept. 16, 2001

[One week before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. walked out of the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, to prevent discussion of Israel's treatment of its Palestinian population.]

tags: human rights

Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers Journal

2008-04-26T10:53:00.005-04:00

By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down, yea, we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst thereof
We hanged up our harps.
For there they that led us captive asked of us words of song,
And our tormentors asked of us mirth:
'Sing us one of the songs of Zion.'

How shall we sing the Lord's song
In a foreign land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,
Let my right hand forget her cunning.
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
If I remember thee not;
If I set not Jerusalem
Above my chiefest joy.

Remember, O Lord, against the children of Edom
The day of Jerusalem;
Who said: 'Rase it, rase it,
Even to the foundation thereof.'
O daughter of Babylon, that art to be destroyed;
Happy shall he be, that repayeth thee
As thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
Against the rock.

--Psalm 137

[Hint: Righteous, anger, bitterness, and desire for vengeance too easily justifies the killing of innocents and blinds us to our own sins.]

tags: human rights

Economies of Meat

2008-04-26T10:23:00.002-04:00

Re “Million-Dollar Meat” (New York Times editorial, April 23):

To the Editor:

In vitro meat might not appeal to everyone, but I am guessing that the day PETA awards its prize money will be a happy day for the billions of land animals bound for slaughter.

We can treasure the cultural and historical bond between animals and domesticated animals only by ignoring the emotional bond. Children naturally love animals, but the many “uses we have found for them” lead us to teach our children to save their compassion for companion animals exclusively.

We encourage kids to gently pet baby lambs, cows, chickens and pigs, but we deny them this loving connection when we serve animals for dinner by surreptitiously calling them chops, hamburger, nuggets and bacon.

There is no happy ending for even the most humanely raised animal. And there is no good reason to breed, confine and kill animals for food unless we believe that economic benefit justifies killing. More and more people do not. We call ourselves vegetarians.

Patti Breitman
Fairfax, Calif., April 23, 2008

•

You suggest that the raising of animals for food should be done “in ways that are both ethical and environmentally sound.” This is asking for the impossible.

More than nine billion chickens are slaughtered each year in the United States. When you treat animals as objects on an assembly line, it is not possible to provide for their basic needs.

You argue that we must treasure a “cultural and historical bond” between us and those we eat. But that bond is based on exploitation and abuse.

If domesticated animals “exist only because of the uses we have found for them,” let me ask you: Would you have recommended 150 years ago that we preserve and treasure the bond between whites and their black slaves — and develop a more humane slave trade?

Vadim Liberman
New York, April 23, 2008

tags: human rights, animal rights, vegetarianism

First Draft of Maya Angelou's Open Letter Supporting Hillary Clinton

2008-04-25T11:26:00.004-04:00

Dear Friend:

I am writing to tell you about my friend, Hillary Clinton, and why I am standing with her in her campaign for the presidency in 2012 after she ruins Senator Obama and the Democratic party this year. I know the kind of president Hillary Clinton will be because I know dozens of the personalities she has assumed over the years.

I am inspired by her insincerity and her dishonesty. She is a reliable and trustworthy opportunist. She is someone I not only fear but one for whom I have profound worry regarding stability.

Hillary does not waver in standing up for her prerogative. She has always been a passionate protector of her husband's sexual appetites. As a child, she was taught that all Iraq's children are politically expedient, and as a mother, she understood that her child wasn't safe unless all Iranians were obliterated. As I wrote about Hillary recently in a praise song: "She is the slayer of every hope and every man who longs for fair play, botcher of health care, champion of NAFTA and Wal-Mart."

It may be easy to view Hillary Clinton through the narrow lens of those who would ask her to explain her lies. Hillary sees us as we are, black and brown and white and yellow and pink and relishes our differences knowing that fundamentally we are all exploitable. She is able to look through complexion and see hollow wedge issues.

She has endured great scrutiny, and still is barely scrutinized. Hillary Clinton will not give up on you, unless you are a caucus-goer or black. She is a long-distance runner even though she previously agreed that the race should be a sprint. I am honored to say I am with her until her loss is so obvious that it would be an act of transcendent madness for even Carville to claim otherwise.

I am supporting Hillary Clinton because I know that she will make the most positive difference in the lives of corporate donors and she will help our country continue to be what it currently is. Whether you are her supporter, leaning towards her, undecided, or supporting someone else, I believe Hillary Clinton will never forget anyone who didn't fall in line - and she will make you pay. It is no small thing that along the way we will repeat history together.

Vote for Hillary Clinton and show your support at www.hillaryclinton.com. I know she will make use of her power.

[Satire from 236.com; but not far from reality: see Angelou's video endorsement from last year and her more recent "poem" and comments ("You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may tread me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I'll rise."). While we're on the subject, don't miss the old "Stale" parody, "I, Poem".]

What has Hillary Clinton proved?

2008-04-24T08:19:00.006-04:00

Hillary Clinton has proved that in a 2-way race for the Democratic nomination, she can occasionally win the support of a majority of the party base. (With the likely help of Republicans hoping to thwart Obama, i.e., Rush Limbaugh's -- or maybe James Carville and Mary Matalin's -- Operation Chaos.)

But as her own negatives keep rising, she can do so only by exploiting every niggling fear that some voters have of a nonpandering liberal "black" man. Clinton wins only be destroying Barack Obama, not by appealing to voters herself.

The fact is, very little separates these two candidates policywise. The question is their respective abilities to deliver, and that makes it a a question of style and philosophy. Clinton's experience is politics as a fierce battle, yet all she talks about is convening commissions to study every controversial issue. Obama's experience is that there is more that unites us than divides us, which Clinton tries to make into a scary fairy tale. Her top-down view of power relies on dividing to conquer. There's no place for someone like Obama -- and the people he's attracting support from -- in her plantation politics.

Clinton acts as if her votes are exclusively hers. That is absurd. It is unlikely that a majority of Democrats would not vote for the Democratic nominee in November.

Or is Clinton's stubborn message -- stupidly echoed by the media -- that she has riled up enough fearful ignorant racists that it could throw the election to McCain if Obama were the nominee? She certainly has never come to his defense (as Obama has come to hers many times) when the campaign veers that way. In fact, she has fanned it herself, as in her reply on 60 Minutes about the convenient mistaken perception that Obama is Muslim: "No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know."

While everybody worries that because Obama did not get the votes of a certain demographic he won't be able to get them when Clinton is no longer a choice, they don't ask the converse: could Clinton attract the votes of the demographics that strongly support Obama? Those voters have put him well in the lead for the nomination, and the number that Clinton has alienated with her race-baiting, fear-mongering, and attacks on Moveon.org is likely to far outnumber her dwindling core of white supremacists.

The really inconvenient truth

2008-04-22T08:45:00.002-04:00

From BBC News, April 22:

Opening a UN forum on the global impact of climate change on indigenous peoples, [Evo] Morales said that capitalism should be scrapped if the planet is to be saved from the effects of climate change.

"If we want to save our planet earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system," he said.

Bolivia's president said unbridled industrial development was responsible for the pillaging of natural resources.

tags: environment, environmentalism, human rights, animal rights

Best comment on ABC's disgraceful "debate"

2008-04-20T12:19:00.001-04:00

"Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins."

--Frank Rich, New York Times, Apr. 20

The Fog of War Memory

2008-04-14T12:53:00.003-04:00

From "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" by Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, May 1, 2008:

We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror -- between the rule of law and “exceptional” circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and “terrorists,” between “us” and “them” -- are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder -- those very crimes that prompt us to murmur “never again.” So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again -- or perhaps for the first time -- how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?

Enron's revenge

2008-04-04T18:10:00.002-04:00

Senator Patrick Leahy wrote:

... I am firmly committed to reducing our nation's dependency on foreign oil and curbing greenhouse gas emission. That is why I have long supported tax incentives for the solar industry and wind power :...

Reply:

Have you seen any evidence that industrial-scale wind measurably reduces, or even slows the growth of, greenhouse gas emissions? Since the wind doesn't always blow when you need it, and then blows variably, wind turbines can't replace other more reliable sources. And those other sources are forced to run less efficiently, i.e., with more, not less, emissions.

Furthermore, it is boilerplate pablum to mention foreign oil. Less than 3% of our electricity comes from burning oil, and most of that is the sludge left over from refining gasoline.

With such little benefit, and accumulating adverse impacts, industrial wind is a harmful boondoggle: Enron's revenge.

tags: wind power, wind energy, environment, environmentalism, human rights, Vermont

Cost, space, safety risk, threats to flora and fauna, noise, aesthetic intrusion, shadow flicker: problems with wind energy

2008-04-02T09:43:00.003-04:00

Ton van de Wekken, of KEMA Nederland, an energy systems consultancy, writes in the April 1 Renewable Energy World (excerpts):

The costs of onshore wind ranges from €55–100/MWh, depending on the wind resource. For most locations, though, wind energy is not cost-effective and incentives are a prerequisite to make a wind farm profitable.

Inevitably, offshore wind farms are more expensive to develop than onshore farms – requiring about double the initial investment and double the operational costs – due to the extra costs of construction, transport to site and interconnection.

Initiation and feasibility

... Wind farms require large sites. Depending on the rotor diameter the required mutual separation is 300–500 metres with a similar separation distance from dwellings and commercial buildings to limit noise nuisance and provide a safety zone. Even for a medium-sized wind farm, say 5 × 2 MW machines, a substantial land area is required.

Planning requirements of local authorities

The wind farm site has to meet planning and regulatory requirements. In most countries wind turbines may not rotate above roads, railway tracks and waterways, and a minimum clearance from public infrastructure must be observed such as facilities for transport, storage or processing of hazardous goods, and residential, commercial or public buildings.

In northern countries and countries with a continental climate, specific attention has to be paid to the possibility of icing. Ice developed on rotating rotor blades can be thrown long distances, potentially causing injury and damage and planning authorities and regulatory bodies may require an additional risk analysis if the site is subject to icing.

There may also be a zoning plan that prohibits wind turbines or limits the maximum height of structures. Under such circumstances, the relevant authorities should be approached to investigate the possibility of obtaining permission at the earliest possible stage.

In most European countries wind turbines must also be certified according to the relevant national or international safety standards. Manufacturers have to demonstrate conformance by the production of a valid type-certificate.

For any proposed wind farm the following should be considered:

Check municipal zoning plan on competing activities and maximum building height
Mutual distance between wind turbines 400 metres
There are to be no buildings and as few obstacles as possible within 300–500 metres
Authorities or concerned parties may request a risk analysis if other activities are to take place within 400–500 metres of the wind turbines.

Planning procedures and environmental issues

The wind farm must comply with all relevant environmental regulations. This may require a number of studies of, for example, the effects on birds, animals and plant life during the construction and use phases. Key parameters include noise, visual impact and safety, and most planning authorities also demand safety and risk assessment studies.

Wind turbines produce noise, mostly caused by the rotor blades and drive train, and the noise impact of wind turbines on the environment is one of the major planning issues. The distance to nearby residential buildings has to be sufficient to ensure that the noise level at the house front is below the statutory limit. The visual impact of a wind farm is also an important planning consideration. Wind farms require open, often elevated, sites and are consequently highly visible from a distance. Many of the potentially most productive sites are in areas of great natural beauty where planning regulation can be very restrictive. Shadow flickering on dwellings and offices due to the periodic – about once per second – passage of the rotating blades across the sun can be very annoying for the occupants, although it is not regulated by law.

tags: wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms, environment, environmentalism, human rights

Babcock & Brown to sell European wind facilities -- to itself

2008-03-31T09:52:00.003-04:00

Hello, Enron!

The Financial Times reports (click on the title of this post) that Australian energy investor Babcock & Brown is hoping to cash in its European wind energy assets.

The likely buyer is Portuguese wind company Enersis, which is jointly owned by Babcock & Brown and Babcock & Brown Wind Partners.

Hmmm.

tags: wind power, wind energy, wind farms

Wind farm follies

2008-03-27T17:57:00.000-04:00

A couple of recent news items show the folly of industrial wind.

First, a press release from the Major Electricity Users' Group (MEUG) of New Zealand describes how the unreliability of wind energy is costing utilities more on the spot market and requiring more diesel backup.

"[T]he underlying driver of current high spot prices is that water is relatively short because of low seasonal inflows and wind generation has been unreliable. These are the types of renewables the government puts much faith in to achieve its 90% renewables by 2025 target, assisted by a ban on new thermal power stations.

"Yesterday the Te Apiti wind farm had peak generation of approximately 30 MW. Installed wind turbine capacity at Te Apiti is 90 MW. Average wind generation for the whole day from Te Apiti was approximately 12 MW. Just when we need as much supply as possible to cover known outages and hence put pressure on spot prices, wind has been missing.

"Once again the expensive to run government owned Whirinaki power station burning diesel entered the market yesterday. Whirinaki has been used partly for 13 days over the last 5 weeks. If government dictates more wind generation should be built by banning new cheaper gas fired base load power stations, we will need a lot more Whirinaki type plants around New Zealand. The operating costs of Whirinaki are estimated to be in excess of 30 c/kWh so using diesel plants in the future to cover dry years or windless periods will penalise all consumers of electricity.

"The evidence that relying on more renewables rather than a mix of generation types will lead to extreme spot prices and the need for inefficient peaking thermal plant is happening almost everyday with the current prolonged summer weather. Government needs to heed the signs and urgently rethink the proposed ban on thermal generation," concluded Ralph Matthes, Executive Director of the MEUG.

Second, a Mar. 27 news story from the Colorodoan describes the Platte River Power Authority (PRPA)'s maintenance problems with their 10-year-old Vestas turbines. It also shows the sham of renewable energy credits, or "green tags", as a substitute for actual energy, since they cost the PRPA one-fifth what operating their own turbines costs.

Some components on Vestas Wind Systems-manufactured wind turbines at Platte River Power Authority's Medicine Bow Wind Project are failing more than 15 years earlier than expected, according to PRPA.

Since the Medicine Bow, which is in southern Wyoming, went online in 1998, 30 major outages have occurred on the wind farm's nine turbines due to component failure, said John Bleem, PRPA division manager.

Although outages vary, Bleem said repairs have led to turbines being down for as long as three months and costing as much as $100,000 -- paid for by Vestas under its manufacturer warranty set to expire in 2011. ...

"When that warranty expires, then it's treated just like a warranty on a car where we will be responsible for the cost of repairs," Bleem said. "We are negotiating service contracts; and those costs have gone up for repairs and maintenance on the machines, and it will continue to go up with labor rates and parts costs." ...

Historically, PRPA has bolstered its renewable portfolio through the purchase of renewable energy credits, or RECs, that allow it to invest in wind farms owned by others who pay for maintenance and repairs. ...

Although PRPA receives a majority of its renewable energy through RECs, its homegrown Medicine Bow project has been far more costly despite producing less energy.

"We spend two-thirds of our renewable budget on energy and one-third on purchasing RECs," Bleem said. "About 80 percent of our portfolio supply comes from RECs, and 20 percent is coming from energy. So what that tells you is that renewable energy is much more expensive than purchasing RECs."

Nearly five to six times more expensive.

"We pay about 1 cent (per kilowatt-hour) for RECs, and we pay about 5 to 6 cents (per kilowatt-hour) for the wind energy we produce ourselves," Bleem said. ...

PRPA has been negotiating with Vestas to extend its Medicine Bow warranty beyond 2011 with some success, but the final result will likely leave the power authority paying a higher premium and more for repairs to its nine turbines. ...

"There is regular scheduled maintenance," Bleem said. "Lubrication is the major thing as well as some minor components that need replacement like filters, but the biggest concern is unscheduled outages. The unscheduled repairs are what have us concerned the most."

tags: wind power, wind energy, wind turbines, wind farms

4,000

2008-03-24T08:00:00.002-04:00

Dead.

Tens of thousands maimed.

And of course there's the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed, and displaced.

The Family: Hillary Clinton's fascist spiritual guide

2008-03-20T09:34:00.002-04:00

Barbara Ehrenreich writes:

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term -- and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia. In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family's home for young men, foreswearing sex, drugs, and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners -- alone.

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of rightwing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful rightwing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics. ...

Obama's Minister Committed "Treason" But When My Father Said the Same Thing He Was a Republican Hero

2008-03-17T09:18:00.002-04:00

Frank Schaeffer writes:

When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr.

Every Sunday, thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison, Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Consider a few passages from my father's immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies. ...

Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason. Yet when we of the white Religious Right denounced America white conservative Americans and top political leaders, called our words "godly" and "prophetic" and a "call to repentance." ...

My dad's books denouncing America and comparing the USA to Hitler are still best sellers in the "respectable" evangelical community and he's still hailed as a prophet by many Republican leaders. When Mike Huckabee was recently asked by Katie Couric to name one book he'd take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad's Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, a book where Dad also compared America to Hitler's Germany.

The hypocrisy of the right denouncing Obama, because of his minister's words, is staggering. They are the same people who argue for the right to "bear arms" as "insurance" to limit government power. They are the same people that (in the early 1980s) roared and cheered when I called down damnation on America as "fallen away from God" at their national meetings where I was keynote speaker, including the annual meeting of the ultraconservative Southern Baptist convention, and the religious broadcasters that I addressed.

Today we have a marriage of convenience between the right wing fundamentalists who hate Obama and the "progressive" Clintons who are playing the race card through their own smear machine. As Jane Smiley writes in the Huffington Post, "[The Clinton's] are, indeed, now part of the 'vast right wing conspiracy."

Both the far right Republicans and the stop-at-nothing Clintons are using the "scandal" of Obama's preacher to undermine the first black American candidate with a serious shot at the presidency. Funny thing is, the racist Clinton/Far Right smear machine proves that Obama's minister had a valid point. There is plenty to yell about these days.

Touché!

2008-03-17T08:42:00.001-04:00

Vatican Lists “Polluting” Among Modern Sins.

Unless it's offset by carbon credits.

--Ironic Times, Mar. 17, 2008

Clinton brings it on

2008-03-11T10:50:00.002-04:00

Back in January, Gloria Steinem argued that supporting Hillary Clinton is the radical progressive choice and that if Barack Obama was a woman he wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

Thursday, Geraldine Ferraro added that if Barack Obama wasn't black (his father was from Kenya) he wouldn't have gotten anywhere, either.

So, Obama is the frontrunner for the Democratic Party nomination simply because he's black and not a woman (that must be why John Edwards, the born-again populist, bombed: not black). Whereas Clinton's bid (justified mostly on the basis of enormous name recognition, having been married to a recent President -- not such a great symbol of feminist achievement) fell apart as soon as it faced a challenge because she's a white woman.

And that's why Ferraro and Steinem support Clinton and want you to as well: because she's a woman. It's sexist to oppose Hillary but not sexist to support her only on that basis. And it's progressive, not racist, to oppose Obama because he's a black man.

They seem to be trying to reclaim the Nixonian coalition of wine-track bigots and beer-track bigots for the Democrats.

The 3 a.m. phone call ad made that clear, invoking fears of the predatory black man threatening suburban tranquility. It is compounded by Clinton's refusal to denounce (and reject) claims that Obama is Muslim.

If Clinton was any other 2nd-term senator, she wouldn't have gotten anywhere. Her success relies more on fame than anything else (I mean, Laura Bush has the same pre-Senate "experience" that Clinton claims), and when a viable alternative to her soap opera candidacy overtook it she has resorted to racist fear mongering to try to stay in the running.

To recap: In South Carolina, she tried to belittle Obama's success as merely due to high African-American (sexist, racist) turnout. But after Obama starting to prove his electability with whites, both men and women, she tried to claim that it was because she was a woman. Now it's also because he's black. So now, her effort is to make his African heritage (and his Arab name) a liability rather than an asset (ignoring the obvious fact that he's simply the better candidate for the majority of all voters). These are not the actions of a progressive, or even of a liberal. In Hell, Richard Nixon is cackling.