Month: November 2015

by William Skink

Things may be getting even more complicated in Syria after Turkey shot down a Russian plane. How will Russia respond?

When it comes to foreign policy, we know how Neoliberal hawks like Hillary respond to provocation: more violence, more intervention, more investment in sewing chaos. The problem for American interventionists in Syria is they are so focused on ousting Assad they seem to forget the pesky presence of the Russians and their vastly more effective offensive against the terrorists America has been pretending to fight.

While Democrats are safely corralled in the moral superiority of the refugee debate, a confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia is brewing.

I hope things don’t go hot and ruin America’s tradition of celebrating genocide with overeating, because that would be a real bummer.

by William Skink

I graduated from the University of Montana in 2003 with an English degree. 12 years later, the humanities at UM are being directly threatened by the steady enrollment decline. It turns out that attacking humanities is not just a local problem, it’s a trend that’s been going on for years. From the link:

As rising tuition and student debt make prospective income a bigger part of choosing a major, humanities disciplines such as philosophy and history are under attack in favor of such fields as engineering and business, which students, parents and policymakers like because they offer jobs and salaries that justify the cost of university tuition.

“Higher education has really pressed this idea that if you have a college education, you’ll make more,” says Ray, who is an economist by training. That strategy has backfired, he says. “Shame on us. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the next step is, which major pays the most.”

That question is now driving a debate over the very purpose of higher education—whether colleges and universities exist to teach people general knowledge, or to train them for specific jobs.
It’s not just an academic conversation. Only 8 percent of students now major in the humanities, according to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, down from a peak of more than 17 percent in 1967.

Worried that enrollment in these subjects will continue to slip, university officials say entire departments could disappear. And they contend that what would be lost is not just general literacy, but exactly what employers say they really need: the kind of educations that teach students how to think, innovate, communicate, work in teams and solve problems.

I’ve been thinking about the value of my education recently. Did I develop useful critical thinking skills to help me work in teams and solve problems, or am I just a useful idiot prone to irrational anger? Arguing the latter, here’s the opinion of an English teacher:

There are moments when I really wish that my brilliant Political Science professor from my days at Carroll were still alive, so I could have his insight about what seems to be the increasing irrationality of American politics. Parties like the Know Nothings made sense in an era before universal literacy and public education, and Americans from the times of the witch trials, if not before, have shown a penchant for accepting irrational conspiratorial ideas, but it seems like many Americans are even more prone to accepting the most absurd ideas as fact and embracing increasingly irrational explanations for events on the world stage. We’re all familiar with the TEA Party crowd who believe that the president is a Muslim, and that the government is poisoning us with chemtrails, but it’s a phenomenon not limited to the right.

Just as those conservatives are bizarrely more likely to be wrong and believe they are right, there seems to be a resurgence of people who present themselves as the “enlightened left,” who use the Internet to disseminate increasingly shrill and irrational claims about the nature of the world. You can usually spot them in the wild by their reliance on entirely absurd sources, their credulous acceptance of the most juvenile conspiracy theory, their use of words like “sheeple,” and their fondness for pseudonyms, no doubt chosen to protect them from the police state that is watching their 60 hit a day WordPress.com site. And just like the members of the ill-informed reactionary right, they respond to criticism with anger and accusations that are typically the hallmark of people whose defensiveness hides the knowledge that they probably know less than they think they do.

I find it ironic that an English teacher is so invested in depicting my opinions as shrill and irrational. I appreciate the effort, though, because it got me thinking about a short story by Charlotte Perkins, titled The Yellow Wallpaper. Written over a century ago, this story depicts how women’s physical and emotional complaints were treated by the male-dominated medical world. Here is a quick quote from a teacher about the story:

I just taught Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to my College students, informing them that hysteria was a nervous condition that rendered women incapacitated and fragile during the Victorian Era. The entire medical industry, comprised of men, took women’s physical and emotional complaints and told them it was all in their soft and feminine heads. When Gilman wrote this short story, she had been suffering from postpartum depression; she wrote it to attack the medical industry and the specific physician that prescribed a rest-cure for her illness, which almost drove her to insanity.

Defining hysteria (an illness that was only attributed to women because it was believed to have been caused by the uterus) and society’s willingness to prescribe illnesses and diseases upon women’s minds and bodies as a means of controlling them, I gave my students the following assignment:

Think about some of the mental/physical illnesses attributed to men. What do these illnesses imply about the nature of men?

Think about the illnesses attributed to women. What do these illnesses imply about the nature of women?

How are the differences in male illnesses and female illnesses used to define or label each gender? Do you think that these illnesses are legitimate, or imposed upon us to define and limit us?

Obviously, I am not a woman. I am a privileged white male with opinions that clearly some people vehemently disagree with. But it’s worth thinking about, especially as the humanities disappear and methods of thought control accelerate.

By JC

(This originally started off as just a comment to Skink’s last post, but in my usual rambling way progressed way beyond comment material, so I thought I’d just pot it up here, as it goes way off his topic.)

I think that most people in this country are unwilling to make the connection between our foreign policy and the refugee crisis. I come to that conclusion through observation far and wide, and through conversations locally and through social media. And it is exceedingly difficult to get people to look beyond the domestic propaganda mill and look at the evidence in a more objective fashion — leading a horse to water and all…

Given that these people believe that the refugee problem is a foreign and organic problem — that is to say, something that has happened “over there” — it makes sense to want to be supportive of refugees. Now, I’m a feeling person, and have as much empathy for refugees as I do, say the homeless on the streets here in Montana. Both groups equally a victim of the powers that be. And equally deserving of our help.  Continue reading “Furthering the Deep State”

by William Skink

As pathetic partisans exploit the refugee crisis to score political points against their political opponents, Obama’s State Department approved a 1.29 billion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia. That’s right, just three days after the Paris attack, the Obama administration is resupplying the brutal regime in Saudi Arabia which acts as one of the main conduits of weapons flowing to extremists and jihadists in Syria. It’s a good thing the focus here, domestically, is on the refugees, otherwise partisans may have to deal with the awkward reality that their party is a big part of the problem, and we can’t have that, now can we.

A few days ago, on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Barbara Lee, the one politicians who voted against the Iraq war. Goodman asks Lee about this arms sale and her response is telling:

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. has just sealed, the Obama administration, yet another arms deal with Saudi Arabia, in the last year signed the biggest arms deals in the history of the world with Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia behind a lot of the militant activism from al-Qaeda to ISIS. Do you condemn these sales?

REP. BARBARA LEE: Well, first, we need to reduce the sale of arms throughout the world. Also, I think when you look at the—for example, trying to rid Iran of the ability to develop nuclear weapons, we engaged in a strong, robust diplomatic effort. Many years ago, I introduced the first resolution calling for the end of no contact policy, for a special envoy and for us to begin to negotiate with Iran the elimination of their program of developing nuclear weapons. So far, those negotiations and that Iranian deal has worked. And so I think that we need to move in that direction in terms of diplomacy, in terms of trying to seek global peace and security without selling arms to all countries, because what you will have is an arms buildup throughout the world, and then weapons will be pointed at—each country will have weapons—of course, a nuclear weapon is the ultimate weapon—pointed in all directions. And so, we need to determine ways, as the president has done with regard to Iran, ways in which to engage to reduce the threats and to reduce the sale and the use of force and armaments and military weapons, because these can only make the world more dangerous.

See how Barbara Lee deftly wiggles out of actually answering the question then shifts to talking about Iran? Pathetic. But that’s what we get with Democrats. It’s more important to score political points than to acknowledge the reality of what’s actually happening in the world with America’s continued role spreading death and misery.

Calling out Republicans for being mean and cowardly is easy. Calling out the leading Democrat candidate for the office of the president, less so.

If Democrats truly want to change the dynamics fueling this refugee crisis, they need to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton’s plan to “smash ISIS” is only going to make things much, much worse. Here is a portion of Clinton’s speech from last Thursday:

Let me start with the campaign to defeat ISIS across the region. The United States and our international coalition has been conducting this fight for more than a year. It’s time to begin a new phase and intensify and broaden our efforts to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria. That starts with a more effective coalition air campaign, with more allied planes, more strikes and a broader target set.

A key obstacle standing in the way is a shortage of good intelligence about ISIS and its operations, so we need an immediate intelligence surge in the region, including technical assets, Arabic speakers with deep expertise in the Middle East and even closer partnership with regional intelligence services. Our goal should be to achieve the kind of penetration we accomplished with Al Qaida in the past. This would help us identify and eliminate ISIS’ command and control and its economic lifelines.

A more effective coalition air campaign is necessary, but not sufficient, and we should be honest about the fact that to be successful, airstrikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS. Like President Obama, I do not believe that we should again have 100,000 American troops in combat in the Middle East. That is just not the smart move to make here. If we have learned anything from 15 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that local people and nations have to secure their own communities. We can help them, and we should, but we cannot substitute for them. But we can and should support local and regional ground forces in carrying out this mission.

What worthless drivel. More airstrikes, more death, more misery. This is precisely what the extremists want, and they are going to get what they want.

The refugee crisis will worsen because there is absolutely no political will from Democrats to stand up to the insanity of the neoliberal hawks who are promoting a foreign policy indistinguishable from what the psychotic neocons have proscribed for the region.

What does cowardice look like? Look in the mirror, Democrats.

by William Skink

We live in a security state, that’s not debatable. We know we are being spied on. As Greenwald pointed out yesterday on Democracy Now, no restrictions have actually been put into effect after the disclosures made by Edward Snowden. The NSA and dozen or so other intelligence tentacles keep scooping up data about us.

Now, coming just in time for Christmas, “Hello Barbie” has taken the potential for spying to a whole new level. Check this out:

In an attempt to revitalize its Barbie brand, Mattel will soon launch Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi-connected doll with artificial intelligence. The doll “talks” to children by recording what they say and responding accordingly. All of the children’s interactions with the doll are recorded using a microphone and are sent to a remote server through Wi-Fi. The recorded voices are then interpreted by an algorithm in order to generate an appropriate response. While some might find this innovation fun and interesting, others see in this toy a big-brotherish nightmare: It is programmed to ask personal questions to little girls, record their answers (and everything else the mic picks up) and then transmits the information to a remote location.

Even the promotional video found on the Hello Barbie website (which is meant to sell the doll) cannot help but going into creepy territory as it enumerates the numerous steps required to activate the doll : Downloading an app on a smartphone, creating an account using an e-mail address, connecting the doll to the home’s Wi-Fi network, etc. In short, well-meaning parents are actually taken through the steps required to turn this toy into a highly effective spy device that can pinpoint, with exact accuracy, who said what, at what time and where to then store all of that information on remote databases.

I found out recently our kid on the way is a girl. When I think about any of my kids playing with a toy like this, I think hell no, Barbie.