31 August 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on August 31st, 2009 @ 06:21:24 pm, using 336 words, 128 views
Most of us are trying to make sense of the current economic disaster with historical analogies, primarily of how we compare with the Great Depression. One problem (among many) with that is simply that we aren’t now who we were then. Back then, the world power and economic center was Britain and we were the export nation with massive resources to exploit. Fast forward 80 years, and we’re now in the Britain role, whether we recognize it or want it. Who’s the us now that we were then? (Huh?) Well, most observers think China fills that role, at least to some degree, if imperfectly. So where can you go to find out as well as you can about that opaque nation what they’re doing, where they’re going, what’s likely to happen?
One place is Naked Capitalism, where she has up a book review essay on Asia in general and on China in particular. Here’s one brief excerpt to whet you, but go read the whole thing and feel qualified to speak intelligently. Or at least as intelligently as practically anyone can about China right now.
Midler identifies the process by which buyer demand for cheap products and the Chinese manufacturers willingness to meet the requirements lead to what he characterises in the chilling anodyne term – ‘quality fade’. This is the process by which manufacturers take increasing liberties with quality to eke out profits from unprofitable contracts. This entails cheaper components, altering chemicals, lower hygiene standards and, in general, lower everything.
Midler describes the process whereby manufacturers compete to gain unprofitable contracts to make sought after products. The sole reason is that access enables Chinese manufacturers to gain access to intellectual property allowing the manufacture of lucrative ‘knock-offs’ in places where patents and trademarks cannot be enforced.
Midler acutely records the tensions between buyer and manufacturers and the entire flawed system where ultimately the only true product control and testing is by the final consumer, sometimes, as in the case of the melamine contaminated milk, with tragic consequences.
30 August 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on August 30th, 2009 @ 05:24:37 pm, using 367 words, 64 views
Put aside for the moment all the jokes that came to mind when you read the title. This isn’t a book about libertarians. No, this is a serious book about a serious subject. Alison Gopnik wrote her book, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life, to talk about another myth that we human geniuses have held for millenia, that babies’ brains aren’t really very complex places. On the contrary, growing an adult brain looks to be a simplifying process, taking a complex vastness and whittling it down to what we think of erroneously as complexity. Here are a couple of excerpts of an interview over at Neuronarrative that should show what she’s found and why you should read the whole post and maybe even find the book:
You discuss the different sorts of intelligence that babies and adults possess. Briefly, what characterizes each and how do they differ?
The idea is that babies explore, and adults exploit. I argue that the very purpose of childhood is to give us a long protected period in which we can explore the world without having to act on it. Babies are designed to learn as much as they can about the world. Adults are designed to take what they’ve learned and act on it swiftly and efficiently.
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What’s your impression of the vast “make your baby smarter” industry that’s sprung up in the last couple of decades? Can we make our babies smarter, or are we just making the creators of these products richer?
I understand where it comes from. It’s probably the first time in history when most people who have children haven’t had much experience with children before – and they’re understandably anxious. But I do think it’s a sad irony that we spend billions on these basically useless products, and very little to support the caregivers – parents and preschool teachers and babysitters who actually make a real difference to how children grow up.
Gee, who would have thought that this highly advanced civilization [sic] could get things so bassackwards? Good thing we don’t have that problem in anything else. Go read.
29 August 2009
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Published on August 29th, 2009 @ 07:11:57 am, using 560 words, 59 views
One of the big buzzword phrases for the last few years has been “evidence-based practice” in services, public and private, such as health care, education, criminal justice, and such. Which should immediately make you ask, “well, what have we been basing practice on before????” Which is actually a very good and telling point. Most of what we do today is the leftover of practices, habit, and inertia begun decades and centuries before. Still, better late than never, we can decide.
The problem is that, as in most things, the talk is still better than the walk in practically every area where EBP has become the mantra, including even its starting home, medicine, where handwashing remains a big concern after a couple of centuries of evidence. Here’s a nice review of Healing the Broken Mind by Timothy Kelly, a book dealing with proposals to make EBP and improved outcome measurement a bigger part of improving our mental health care systems in this country. As you likely know, we managed to empty most of our mental health facilities a few decades back and turn a very large part of our jails and prisons into the new facilities. The expense was transferred to a great degree, not eliminated, and the need for mental health care has exploded, not faded. You get the feel for all that in this review, which should make you even more on the lookout for the book, shouldn’t it? Here’s a bit to get you going and understand why evidence still plays such a small role in what we do:
A recurring theme in Kelly’s road map toward change involves measurement. All levels of the mental health care system, he says, need improved assessment so decisions can be made based on data rather than tradition or conjecture. Right now, that rarely happens. When a person shows signs of major depression, a psychiatrist or psychologist might treat the patient using Freudian psychoanalysis — not because of anything that research says about the usefulness of the approach, but because that’s what the doctor learned during graduate school in the 1970s. Despite a growing body of literature devoted to the testing of mental health care methods, less than 15 percent of mental health consumers receive care based on evidence.
If Kelly had his way, every consumer (the politically correct term for “mental health patient") entering a therapist’s office would fill out a lengthy questionnaire, with follow-up information added on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on care received. Therapists would use that patient feedback — which would range from customer-service responses about treatment received to descriptions of the patient’s mental state — to deliver better services. Insurers could make certain the fees they pay are put to more cost-effective use. State mental health agencies might use outcomes reported during the questionnaire updates to decide where to deploy or cut back funding. Experts and professors could aggregate the data and use them to make better recommendations in training providers.
Kelly admits that outcome-oriented mental health care is far from reality: When he became Virginia commissioner, his staff couldn’t even estimate the number of patients using the state system, let alone provide him with figures on outcomes. His ideas on data-collection aren’t very popular now either: Patient advocates and doctors criticize the increased documentation as a burdensome, expensive administrative headache, and insurers fear consumers will game the system.
27 August 2009
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Published on August 27th, 2009 @ 06:57:57 pm, using 429 words, 55 views
Fun review here at one of the Science Blogs blogs, featuring Lee Kirkpatrick’s Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion. It’s usually fair to challenge reviewers for inserting their personal temperament and style (rather than relevant factual info) into critiques, such as anything that basically says “I would have done it differently but who the hell am I???” But this review doesn’t take the “holier” approach and explains her reactions upon discovering the book, then spelling out the central points, then gives you why she liked it. Here are a couple of excerpts to show what I’m talking about and to get you interested in the book, too:
I actually wish there had been more explanation of evolutionary psychology, maybe more examples of its successful application to psychological phenomena and religion in particular. There was a chapter dedicated to it in the book, but really you could write several books on this idea. I realize that the book was not meant to be a list of different religious phenomena (prayer, gods, feeling better about death, etc), but rather a description of the kind of psychological endeavor that would allow for such descriptors, and more importantly, break them down in a manner which might promote further theorizing. While I appreciate this approach, I think some descriptive examples would have been illustrative of the main points.
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So…yeah…a review. Sci liked it! I found it well-written and pretty understandable for someone who doesn’t read a lot of psych. I found some of the stuff on attachment theory quite fascinating. But I have to say: he wrote the book backward. And he knows it. In fact, Kirkpatrick mentions it in the beginning. Rather than give a summary introduction of the overarching theory and then delving into the parts, he delves into the parts and gives the overarching theory last. I understand that this is probably close to how he himself came through the thought process, but I personally got a little lost, until I got to the last chapter.
So here’s my suggestion: buy this book. Or borrow it. Or whatever. Flip to the last chapter. Read it. Then flip to the front and read it all the way through. MUCH better. Hey, in mysteries you always have to resist the urge to do that, so be happy that you do it with psych!.
And how could you not like a book by a writer who signs this at book signings:
This is the best book you will ever read, on any topic. No, really. Seriously, not kidding. Enjoy! -Lee Kirkpatrick
25 August 2009
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Published on August 25th, 2009 @ 05:59:53 pm, using 371 words, 57 views
Lately I’ve pretty much sworn off the old blogs, A-list to X-list, primarily because of reasons Billmon predicted years ago, but I’ve been reading many more of the top finance blogs in order to get a clearer picture than the usual blogs and impotent media provide, just as I read foreign news sites to get the picture of what was really going on with Iraq. One of the best finance blogs is The Big Picture, and the main man there has a book out called Bailout Nation which is credited as being one of the very best descriptions of the immediate causes of this hellhole we’ve fallen into. The main man is not what you’d call shy, and that includes even linking you to recent reviews of Bailout. Here’s a bit from one of those links to show you what the fuss is about (the whole review is good), but go to The Big Picture to learn why it’s one of the blogs you should have with you if you’re ever stranded on a deserted island.
MANY people were outraged when Goldman Sachs returned $10 billion in federal bailout money just in time to report its biggest quarterly profit ever, along with a plan to pay $11 billion in employee bonuses. Barry Ritholtz, who writes The Big Picture, a popular financial blog, wasn’t heartened by the news, either.
Mr. Ritholtz, however, tried to keep his sense of humor. He posted a satirical story on his Web site by the comedian Andy Borowitz, titled “Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department: Sister Entities to Share Employees, Money.”
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THE book sometimes reads like a lengthy blog post, and occasionally drives home its arguments with rude trading-floor jokes. There are moments when it almost chokes on its own bile. “Adam Smith would not know whether to weep or retch were he alive to see this today,” Mr. Ritholtz says as he nears the conclusion.
Yet there is much to be said for the book’s irreverence. Mr. Ritholtz has written an important book about a complicated subject, and yet you could still read it at the beach. Here’s hoping that some policy makers in Washington take it with them on vacation this month.
22 August 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on August 22nd, 2009 @ 07:41:20 am, using 658 words, 60 views
Right now it looks fundamentally hopeless that anything less than fundamental crashing and then picking up the pieces will make us start moving back in the direction of the American Legacy, if we ever do. Federal and state governments and the political parties that operate them are, for the most part, bought and paid for subsidiaries of the same corporate/finance ownership that has oligopolized the media through which we might plot a better way. We’ve already started seeing gun-wielders showing up at political events; the mobs, probably riding around conspicuously, are the next step before the shooting starts. In that context, we may be hoping for someone to come forward to mobilize the forces that could successfully push back through some new instruments of organization. But really, what are the odds of that?
Well, according to Marshall Ganz’s Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement, maybe not as bad as we would think. (Yes, that was said on this blog. Pick up your mouth.) It doesn’t happen much, but history is filled with examples of combos coming together of events, resources, and key people at just the right time to produce at least some needed change (rarely as much as is hoped for, but change in the right direction nonetheless). This review will give you a well done account of the work of the remarkable Cesar Chavez and how that work came together despite the kind of reality that has repeated itself today and has us wondering how we will survive it in tact. Here’s a bit to show you why the review and the book are worth your time:
Ganz’s view of leadership is based on the idea that the main function of leaders is to set strategy, a combination of targeting, tactics, and timing. Unlike much of the strategy literature in organizational research (in which strategy has become equated with performance outcomes), Ganz is really interested in how leaders formulate strategy and adapt their strategies to fit the new challenges that face an organization. . . .
Leadership is about developing “strategic capacity” or the collective knowledge and abilities that allow one to effectively adapt strategy to changing circumstances. While certainly slippery as a causal mechanism, I see “strategic capacity” as a nice orienting concept that tells you what aspects of leadership are going to be most important for developing effective strategies. In the introduction he talks about various biographical sources (identity, social networks, and tactical repertoires) and organizational sources (deliberation, resources, and accountability structures) that shape strategic capacity. Ganz spends the rest of the book developing this concept through an historical analysis of the farm worker movement. The farm worker movement provides an interesting case because it was a movement created and sustained by a group of extremely disadvantaged people and yet it managed to survive and prosper for many years in spite of these disadvantages. The movement, which organized as the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), culminated in the success of several consumer boycotts and the establishment of collective bargaining agreements. The natural comparison that Ganz makes is to the Teamsters and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), both of which relied on highly centralized union structures. The Teamsters union was a direct competitor with the NFWA for some of their history, which makes its success even more intriguing.
The review is especially good not just for the thoroughness and intelligent writing. It also details how the book can surprise and expand thought beyond the overall topic area and thus appeal to more than the supposed target audience. I once had a student tell me she enjoyed my classes because she always learned something she didn’t expect to learn. It was probably the best compliment I ever got when I was a teacher. The reviewer basically says the same to Ganz. Which is enough to make the book one worth reading.
And to hope for the next Chavez.
20 August 2009
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Published on August 20th, 2009 @ 05:58:50 pm, using 256 words, 81 views
Interesting little review here that gives you a quick but common look at the actual thought processes behind what criminals do and why they give it up (hint: it’s rarely just the idea of going to prison):
In June of 1996, Wally Long was in federal custody on an indictment for mail fraud when his father passed away. “That was my epiphany,” recalls Long, “my moment of clarity. I was a three time loser, facing seven more years in prison, my son was three years old, his mother and I were not getting along, I had no education, no money, no future. . . And then something interesting happened. In the days following my dad’s death, I began to stop and think: my father’s last memory of me was that I was in prison again. Looking back, I realized how pathetic I must have looked in his eyes.”
At that point, Long decided it was time to start searching for an answer. He took solace in three books that would soon change his life: Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey, You Can Work Your Own Miracles, by Napoleon Hill, and Real Magic, by Wayne Dyer. “The lesson I took from these books was that we’re all completely responsible for our own actions. I had spent my entire young life blaming the judges and the prosecutors and all these other people, and never taking responsibility for my own actions.”
Check out the link for more and for a link to the entire story.
19 August 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on August 19th, 2009 @ 05:47:12 pm, using 232 words, 28 views
Mediocre but readable review of what sounds like mediocre but readable book on how/why atheists and religion folks really should kumbaya. Goes off the rails at the end, though, with this:
Unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, Sinnott-Armstrong doesn’t abhor religion. He faults atheist writers for their intemperate views of believers (the title of Dawkins’s last book, “The God Delusion, was hardly a compliment, he notes), and he pleads for mutual respect and civil dialogue between both sides. “Can’t we all just get along?’’ should be as unnecessary a request by now as respect for atheists. Alas, it, too, bears endless repeating.
Yes, yes, after early noting the detesting of atheists in this country, fed by the hordes who have created that world with their religion [sic], the atheists are told, “why can’t we all just get along?” And, alas, alas, alas, that “bears endless repeating.” Wanna bet the reviewer and the author both voted for Obama and other spineless? It’s clear they have no clue that “get along?” is meaningless on a planet where some people ACTIVELY DON’T WANT TO GET ALONG AND KNOW THEY CAN ALWAYS BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF THE “GET ALONG?” CROWD. Please, both of you gentlemen, grow up. Then grow some brain cells and carefully get them connected. Then grow some testicles and STOP TAKING THE REST OF US WITH YOU.
That is all.
16 August 2009
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mdconnelly (
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Published on August 16th, 2009 @ 06:57:36 pm, using 1159 words, 30 views
Okay. A sizable number of people [sic] believe that policymakers would propose and pass legislation basically recreating Soylent Green. First, let’s admit that some of the health care protesters’ beliefs do have some grounding in varying degrees of rationality. You really want to bet Medicare/Medicaid benefits won’t be touched now or in the near future to pay for the reforms [sic] now or later? I’ll put a decent-sized chunk of that bet, 3 to 4 dollars. You really think camel’s nose under the tent is irrational when the Obamaites have acknowledged their plans to go after “reform” Social Security next? Obama’s people [sic] are throwing out nonsense now about how government medical assistance can’t be a viable option for our health care (because, you know, VA and Medicare have been such giant failures) because privatization is always better (Google “CCA” and “lawsuits") and it’s competition we’re after, not providing every American reliable care. Those people [sic] have legit grounds to be suspicious. However, the test of any belief about present or future reality is never “yes/no” but the amount and kind of evidence/experience you bring to the probabilities that you’re assigning.
So. The people [sic] who claim our government will create death panels assign far higher probabilitites on far less evidence/experience than the standard for determining, oh, if fire is hot. No one assigning traditional standards believes these people [sic] are anything but crazy. (Of course, as we’ve noted before, as long as your beliefs don’t get you killed or keep food off the table, you can generally believe (assign probabilities) whatever you want, like your sweetie’s really been too busy at work, yeah, that’s it, at work, to call you the last week . . . and his cell phone battery has been acting up, too.) So why aren’t the crazy folks buying the higher probability belief? Because belief, as any religious person knows, is based on faith and faith is based on trust. And, if there’s anything this country founders on right now, it’s trust.
Which is the point of Sheila Suess Kennedy’s Distrust American Style: Diversity and the Crisis of Public Confidence. Kennedy (not one of those Kennedys . . . but how do we know???) a policy professor in Indiana, goes right to the heart of it all. She’s not the first to note the importance of trust and self-conscious self-government as the keys to free, democratic societies. She does a nice job going through the social capital literature and the criticisms and addendums that have come in recent years and linking the difficulties of a diverse and diversifying country (which applies the same probabilities to the dangers of that as it does to death panels). She also notes how debilitating things like the privatization of government programs and citizen service have been for pulling communities and diverse people together. She especially catalogues the ream after ream of official mal- and misfeasance that not only have made us distrust our leaders [sic] but also scare off the good people who might otherwise make themselves available for service. She does manage to add some constructive proposals at the end to ward off the inevitable “well, you bitch about it but do you have any bright ideas yourself?” They emphasize restoring trust in government with some recommendations unlikely to catch on, but most of all, irony on irony, the importance of a solid national health care plan that could provide foundation against the insecurities that drive so much of the fears and improbabilities being assigned. I would love to hear what she thinks about where we are right now . . . “cooperatives” that the insurance companies support. Somehow, I don’t think the trust quotient she’s hoping for is going to be higher when this is all done.
If I had to rip on Kennedy for her points in this short but useful book, I’d probably focus on these: One, she apparently also once wrote a book reconciling being a Republican and in the ACLU (obviously long ago and on a planet far, far away). Which likely means she has libertarian (aka two-year-olds with better vocabularies) tendencies. What probability am I assigning to this and on what evidence? Well, based on her definition of libertarianism, Hillary Clinton and her Village are all libertarians. That may be but wouldn’t you love to see a Randian read that sentence and watch the hair stand up? It’s too distracting to anyone who pays attention to libertarians in the world and doesn’t help her make her point.
And her treatment of the devastation done to our Constitution is too Bush-II-centric, perhaps the result of a need to keep the book short. But maybe she really doesn’t fully see how the lush garden of unitary president and authoritarian federalism Bush II cultivated has always been with us, planted by Scot-Irish colonials and, in modern form, including as gardeners the Palmers and Hoovers and Dulles (both of them) and McCarthyites who prepped the field for the seedings by Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes. The Democrats, including Carter, have never done anything better than prune back some excess at best, and Obama is actually watering and fertilizing (see “cooperatives” above). Reid and Pelosi? It is to laugh. Just wait and see how lush and full and poisonous the next Republican president can make that garden grow. (Aided and abetted by a fully complicit and corroded news media which doesn’t receive nearly enough of her ire for their part in everything she describes.)
Another point, minor but telling again for consistencies: she acknowledges everything Bush II, Cheney, Rove, and their minions did to subvert our Legacy and Constitution, but then refers to concerns about the 2004 results, which led to the current federal prosecutor hearings, for example, as “paranoia.” Wha . . . ????
But these, really, are little things in an important book detailing important things. It’s not long, it’s well-written, and it hits from angles that even those unsurprised by what she has to say will nevertheless appreciate. The problem is that the Republicans aren’t hurt by bad government and a distrustful public; those are actually pluses for their demonstrated purposes of pillage and corruption. The active encouragement of distrust is too useful to too many people who profit from it(figuratively and literally) for easy answers, and we have no countervailing institutions that aren’t largely complicit, if to slightly lesser degrees, in what has happened. Stewart and Colbert aren’t enough, bless their brave little hearts. Third parties that push the other two are one alternative, but the obstacles to their formation are mighty. But at least they are a less disruptive alternative to either of the more likely outcomes–the pent-up public explosion that might change things or the external breakdowns of economy and international relations that have historically brought down nations and empires as far off course as we have become.
I wish we were still at a place where her recommendations were possible. But my level of trust is much too low.
15 August 2009
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Published on August 15th, 2009 @ 10:45:40 am, using 267 words, 95 views
Periodically we do some reviews of reviewers doing criminal justice books, and we’ve noted the importance of understanding the folks in that field if we are going to have a just and free society, for which they are both responsible and to which they can be our biggest threat. Over at The Monkey Cage, a blog that can combine “poli sci blog” and “good to read” in one sentence, they have a review up of Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood, his detailing of his research as a real cop (in Baltimore!! “Homicide"-land!!!) and his analysis of crime and the people who fight it. Definitely worth your time, especially if you never read anything about the real work of cops, and it will give you an insider’s view of things like the War on Some Drugs and how decriminalization works in practice. But here’s a takeaway we’ll share now, as a way to get you over to the review. It explains so much of the headlines we’re unfortunately seeing with regularity, the tasering and false convictions, and why we need to fear a future of instability which will require even more police intervention:
Every police/public confrontation ends up in one of three ways: the suspect must 1) defer to police authority, 2) leave the scene, or 3) get locked up. Right or wrong, there really is no other choice. Not that I can think of.
…As a cop, I didn’t want to be loved. I didn’t mind being feared. I did want to be respected. But all that really mattered to me was to be obeyed.
12 August 2009
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Published on August 12th, 2009 @ 04:21:48 pm, using 429 words, 20 views
John Rawls’s state of nature starting point–if you had to start from scratch and couldn’t be sure you’d be the winner, what rules would you set up for your brand new society–is one of those philosophical ballbusters that always work better with a bottle of jaeger close at hand. It’s a worthy brain-teaser, but let’s face it. We’re not starting over and we’re left with the justice that’s possible in the world as it is. So maybe we should look to someone else.
Like an economist. Please, don’t run away. Yes, yes, I know. This blog tries to maintain contact with Planet Reality as much as we can and whacking economists around for their fantasies has been one of our favorite pastimes. But, in the spirit of the good economists like Heilbroner and Lindblom and Galbraith (the old one), we do admit on Planet Reality that occasionally an economist pops up who takes a broad enough view of history and society (verboten for good econometrics, you know) to see Planet R him/herself. One such economist is Amartya Sen, who has a new book out demonstrating why he gets included in this group.
This review (in The Economist!!!) of Sen’s new book will give you the basics of his argument that maybe we should get back to what Adam Smith really advocated as his operating principles (hint: it wasn’t the free market–that was a secondary mechanism) and devote some time to ethics and justice, social concerns that clearly don’t drive the folks graduating from the top MBA programs these days. Here’s a little to get you to test out the rest:
In the courtliest of tones, Mr Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention.
“The Idea of Justice” serves also as a commanding summation of Mr Sen’s own work on economic reasoning and on the elements and measurement of human well-being. It is often intricate but never worthy. Conceptual subtleties flank blunt accounts of famine’s causes or physical handicap’s economic effects. A conviction that economists and philosophers are in business to improve the world burns on almost every page.
Would that many an economist or philosopher be so burned. Or burned in other ways if not.
10 August 2009
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Published on August 10th, 2009 @ 08:17:57 am, using 1261 words, 36 views
Nothing that has happened since the killing of JFK—the government lying and coverups, the media falling for and spreading the bullsh*t spin they were fed, the Villagers who existed in the 60s just as today, the “sophisticates” who make fun of “conspiracists” and then get surprised by Watergate, Iran-Contra, anything Bush II did, the geniuses who told us Kerry was most “electable” and now that single-payer isn’t “do-able,” none of the rot and determined ignorance that make up our ruling class and their actions in the decades since—has come as a surprise to those of us who saw even at 10 years old what a heaping pile of crap the Warren Report and its defenses were at the time. We’ve watched all the carcinogenic cells from the self-serving government and media coverups go metastastic and now have us set for the rolling disaster of the coming years.
As we’ve said here before, none of this has anything with believing that the formal government had Kennedy killed and covered it up. It has everything to do with having leaders [sic] who felt they knew best (those Villagers already at their best), as proven by their killing and destroying of governments around the world and by their lies about those things and others such as U-2 flights over the USSR, deciding that Castro and Russia were behind the killing and they were going to keep us from having a nuke-out by selling us Oswald as a lone, crazy killer. It has everything to do with normal bureaucratic ass-covering when you’ve committed the ultimate mistake, getting a president killed and needing to get rid of all the evidence of your knowledge of the accused killer and diverting any investigations that would raise all kinds of demented questions. And it has everything to do with a “royal” family, especially its remaining “head,” RFK, participating in a massive obstruction of justice to preserve the “Camelot” crap and to bury the evidence of RFK’s own actions that likely led to his brother’s killing (which explains the long “funk” that historians say he fell into afterward). You don’t need government approval or participation in the killing to come up with a massive distortion of the investigation of the most important murder in our history, just CYA, hubris, and pure-d dumb, with full complicity of the media and academe, including the now holy Cronkite, the still goofy Rather, and the cult of Hofstadter.
If a murder like this had happened in any other country then or now, to be followed by the massive spin and fairy tales that ended with a nobody who did it for glory but then denied doing it definitively proven as the only killer, we would have immediately rolled our eyes and gotten knowing grins on our faces. But a country that killed presidents and overthrew governments in other countries would never do that, or be tainted with people who did, regardless of formal government wishes, if it was the US. Even after Garry Powers, Tonkin, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Enron and California, US attorneys and governors and voting machines, the Unitary Executive of Bush II and Obama, the triumph of the oligarchy with the Enron/Limbaugh/Dobson Bolsheviks methodically prepping and chewing up the Goldman/Harvard/Baldwin Mensheviks, we have people who say, oh, the government would never hide and warp the evidence in the JFK killing. You’re a paranoid conspiracist to say they did. You must wear a tin foil hat. Haw, haw, haw.
Where we are today didn’t technically start with the assassination. It was just a dramatic spike on the path downward we started when we let our fear of a nation that couldn’t make it even a century overrule intelligence and our historical heritage. The historians who write in the future of how the US got so far away from its Legacy and off its course in history will look not just at the murder but the separation of the government and media from reality as well as their people as part of the larger whole of loss and unnecessary stupidity. Instead of dealing effectively and maturely with the death, we chose dumb, just as we would in 1980 when given the same choice of paths with the election that year. Those historians won’t be blaming Nixon or Bush II, the Demopubicans, or any organized group—just the failure of Americans to live up to what they had been left. The JFK assassination will be an important marker, but not the only one.
Why the diatribe? Just to get you to read the best most recent work on the assassination, Michael L. Kurtz’s The JFK Assassination Debates: Lone Gunman Versus Conspiracy. Kurtz has been through all the evidence and arguments, including the more recent stuff, and does a very good job laying both sides out, despite believing in the conspiracy side of it. As proof this isn’t “craaazzzzyyyyyyy” talk, the book has ringing endorsements from the Library Journal and the noted historian Douglas Brinkley so don’t worry about seeming gooooffffffyyyyyyy yourself to be seen with it. Kurtz does such a good job, you may come away leaning more against his position than toward it. He buys the “Castro and Mafia” argument, which I don’t see him coming close to proving, for instance. My personal favorite is the rogue Cold Warriors and Mafia angle, but now we’re getting close to the point. The government and the media so botched the investigation and told such nonsense about the killing that, barring some miracle, we’ll never really know who killed our president, which is Kurtz’s essential thesis.
One example: The Warren Report insisted that Jack Ruby had no ties to the Mafia, which ranks with Derek Jeter has no ties to the Yankees in brains, as Kurtz makes abundantly clear. But to admit the Mafia ties would obviously have raised questions and pointed in directions no one, even the Kennedy family, wanted to go. So we got the bullsh*t about Ruby and his love for JFK and Jackie making him go kill Oswald, who had similar ties to a lot of people no one in government wanted to be blamed for not stopping and no one in the media wanted to step on. Look, all you need to know about the investigation of JFK’s killing is that the acting Attorney General issued a memo within days of the shooting to all Justice Department staff that the American people had to be reassured that Oswald was the sole killer (so we wouldn’t demand a war with the USSR) and that the Warren Report refused to investigate Ruby thoroughly or give him safe passage out of Dallas as he requested in order to speak more truthfully about what had happened. All the “evidence” that “no conspiracy” proponents use came in between those two events and should be judged accordingly.
The fact is, as Kurtz basically concludes, anyone who tells you they know what happened that day in Dallas and why is blowing out their as**s. If someone rolls his eyes when you comment like this, punch him out. I’ll pay the fine. No one knows this evidence, pro and con, better than Kurtz does, and he admits his conjectures are just that and that the truth will never come out. But that’s important in itself. So go read the book and become ignorant. It will explain so much of what’s happened since.
07 August 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on August 7th, 2009 @ 06:44:14 pm, using 506 words, 14 views
Despite the genius that is Justice Scalia (just ask him) and his proclamations of a new professionalism among law enforcers that makes the traditional protections against government intrusions and detentions unnecessary now, we see practically every day a story or YouTube that would hold that opinion a bit premature ("don’t tase me, bro!!"). But this is the Mr. Genius (just ask him) who said Bush II would be hurt was enough reason for the Supreme Court to overrule the Constitution’s procedures for deciding disputed elections . . . but just don’t ever use it for a precedent.
Okay. I feel better now. The facts are that, for all their bravery and public service, law enforcement–cops, prosecutors, corrections–make mistakes all the time, some unintended, some simply human nature dealing with power that most of us never have in daily life. The best book on cops out there is still William Ker Muir’s Police: Streetcorner Politicians, which argues that the only good cops are the ones who don’t forget what it’s like to be a human and have that awful quality, empathy, if not always sympathy (if you don’t know the difference, you’re a Republican). Bad cops make the lives of good cops hell through what they do to the public’s view of cops and willingness to give them support and legitimacy. Good cops know that, bad ones don’t. Good cops will understand and even accept Ogletree and Sarat’s When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice.
I have to admit up front that I know a couple of the writers who contributed articles to this book of malfeasances and injustices, so keep that in mind as I recommend the review here. It’s the review that’s good and worthy of your attention. You’ll learn some unpleasant histories and why it matters to you even if you aren’t the subjects of any of those histories . . . yet. Here’s a bit to get you going, but don’t stop:
In essence, law fails often enough to become a tool of injustice. Errors accumulate around the issues of quality of counsel, race and prejudice, and DNA and evidentiary problems such as informant testimony. These errors are more than mistakes. They are embedded flaws, organic in our system of justice. The essays here illustrate that the problem is not isolated to a time period or region of the country.
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WHEN LAW FAILS is a thoughtful consideration of the criminal justice system and the embedded failures that lie within. The book illustrates both the drama and daily consequences of miscarriages of justice. The authors bring the reader to ask, does the system of dispensing justice need to be revamped and if so, how? Do we need to re-theorize miscarriages of justice and consider not only when law fails but how and why? The scope of the problem both in terms of its breadth and depth, are revealed, requiring oversight and diligence. What all Americans should realize is that the system is a continual work in progress. The pursuit of true justice is a constant one.
04 August 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on August 4th, 2009 @ 05:40:35 pm, using 566 words, 53 views
No, not the media, higher ed, either political party, Birthers or Blue Dogs, or the “A-listers” who can’t get “optimistic” about single payer but can get optimistic about health insurance pabulum that will inevitably lead to good stuff some time in the future because . . . Teddy “federal sentencing guidelines, no child left behind” Kennedy says that’s the smart thing to do, although, well, you know. No, this is, of course, about our financial meltdown and the geniuses behind that. Naked Capitalism has been hosting weekend book reviews, and that’s the title of last Sunday’s book.
It’s a very thorough review of what is a thoroughly misleading book. Not that the stories in the book aren’t interesting, but, as the reviewer deftly notes, it’s a diversion from the real story. Here are a couple of examples, but you really, reeaaallllly need to read the whole review:
Mr. McDonald’s tale, as told by Mr. Robinson, is a thriller. However you may disagree with his premise (that Lehman was a firm filled with heroes and geniuses, lain low by the treachery of a handful of stubborn fools), it is impossible not to get caught up in the narrative. McDonald has a somewhat unorthodox rise, from community college to pork chop sales to retail stock brokerage to, finally, a coveted place on a Wall Street trading floor. And the Lehman Brothers he finds is everything he hoped it would be: razor-sharp analysts teaming with gutsy traders, taking million dollar risks and earning multi-million dollar paydays. We are, predictably, regaled with tales of wildly extravagant spending on meals and toys, huge casino wins and huger losses, all absorbed with aplomb.
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Ultimately, Mr. McDonald’s view is that Lehman’s collapse was an unfortunate and totally preventable disaster caused by a failure of leadership. Mr. Fuld, a trader from a different era, used the wrong playbook for the 21st century, and his personality defects (jealousy, arrogance, hubris) prevented him from taking counsel from those who could have helped steer him clear of trouble. He chose to listen to those who flattered him and those who delivered the largest short-term gains, and blinded himself to the risks of leverage.
This is clearly what Mr. McDonald and his colleagues believe happened to Lehman, but is it the truth?
In a narrow sense, yes, since it was Fuld’s specific decisions regarding the real estate and mortgage businesses that led the firm to fail.
But in a broader sense, Fuld is irrelevant. Given the combination of the credit bubble and the availability of cheap, plentiful leverage, along with an asymmetric reward structure (which paid out huge bonuses to managers from profits generated from that leverage but had no mechanism to punish those managers for taking risks that led to bad outcomes), wasn’t Lehman’s outcome inevitable? Doesn’t the fact that all of Lehman’s close peers–Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Bank of America—either collapsed along with it or were saved through quasi-nationalization argue that there is something a little fishy about making Fuld, obnoxious as he was, into the lone gunman in the Lehman homicide?
It’s all like that, not childish “I would have written it this way” or “you didn’t cite so-and-so” stuff, but knowledgeable insight about a complex topic, adding onto the summary and making the book’s weaknesses known without undercutting its strengths. Good work. Go judge for yourself.
01 August 2009
Written by
mdconnelly (
)
Published on August 1st, 2009 @ 07:41:37 am, using 216 words, 24 views
Yet one more of a mountain of Beltway-MSM bullsh*t of conventional “wisdom” that proclaims that the president who foresaw all the crap we’re in now and staked out a course to keep us out of it was a loser because we didn’t follow him. This reviewer in particular is a notable of the new generation poised to take over the bullsh*t role and the review is a nice example for your collection of the media’s inability even now to accept that the failure to deal effectively with what faced us, even then, was a major, major result of their braindead foolishness and self-absorption, 30 years ago and growing. Who maligned the speech over and over as “malaise” talk? Who failed to take Carter’s revamping of his cabinet shortly after as the needed housecleaning it was if we were to take the step he outlined instead of siding with all the Beltway insiders who got fired? Who made Reagan’s mirror-obsessed philosophies more than the encephalytic bromides than they were? Who has to this day not understood that the failure of that key moment in our history was not Jimmy Carter’s, it was ours?
The people who cloned this reviewer. And what book review [sic] is running more of this autistic silliness?
The NY Times, of course.
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