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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) sophiaserpentia | |
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An avatar generator for a virtual environment reflects a physiological characteristic of the user, injecting a degree of reality into the capabilities or appearance. Thereby, many of the incentives of the real world are replicated in a virtual environment. Physiological data that reflect a degree of health of the real person can be linked to rewards of capabilities of a gaming avatar, an amount of time budgeted to play, or a visible indication. Thereby, people are encouraged to exercise. Physiological data that reflect the health and perhaps also mood also improve social interaction in virtual environments. People seeking to meet and become acquainted with particular types of people are not thwarted by the artificiality of avatars. The physiological data can be gleaned from a third party health data collection repository, a healthcare smart card, a real-time physiological sensor (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose, peak flow, pedometer, etc.)
from Patent Application: Avatar Individualized by Physical Characteristic Yes Microsoft, because no one who's fat has ever been told to work out before. Because no one anywhere has any physical limitation preventing them from working out. Because it's your place to build an application that does this. Because all of us need Daddy Microsoft's approval before we can have any fun. Because online relationships are inherently inferior to real life ones. Yeah, you know what, Microsoft? Fuck you.
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) daily_kos | |
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/5v_7GfUqpKE/-Open-Thread-and-Diary-Rescue Tonight's Rescue Rangers are grog, jlms qkw, sunspark says, dopper0189, srkp23, Louisiana 1976 and, back after a long hiatus, claude, in the editor's seat. The Rescue Rangers read every diary posted between 3pm yesterday and 3pm today (PST) looking for good writing that has been over-looked by the community, whatever the point of view. Show these writers some love for their efforts. The Rescued diaries: jotter has Week's High Impact Diaries: December 12-18, 2009 AND High Impact Diaries: December 19, 2009. bronte17 has tonight's TOP COMMENTS (12-20-09): Teach Your Children Well. This is an Open Thread. Remember, we're all on the same side here, so play nice.
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daily_kos | |
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/EVy8peqeCZI/-An-Overview-of-the-New-Senate-Health-Bill What's good? - They banned pre-existing conditions for children starting in 2010.
- That annual cap on benefits that was supposed to have been out of the bill but we found out was slipped back in? The one that the blogs raised hell about? It's out, mostly.
The very first provision of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Manager's Amendment would explicitly prohibit insurers from imposing either annual or lifetime limits. A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage may not establish—(A) lifetime limits on the dollar value of benefits for any participant or beneficiary; or (B) except as provided in paragraph (2), annual limits on the dollar value of benefits for any participant or beneficiary. The regulation goes into effect in 2014 and prior to that they can still impose them on "non-essential benefits" and "the dollar value of essential benefits only as the secretary shall determine." So there will be government oversight from 2010 until 2014, and up to the Secretary of HHS to determine the outlines of what's allowed. (As an aside, here's an interesting catch by Jon Walker. When Reid's office said the CBO demanded this loophole because premiums would go through the roof without it, well, that's not what the CBO says now.) - Bernie Sanders' amendment to increase funding for Community Health Centers is pretty much an unequivocal good for extending actual care--not just coverage, but care--to people.
- The not quite unequivocal good but improvement is the medical loss ratio, the amount insurers spend out of every premium dollar that doesn't go to care. Rockefeller wanted it set at 90%, it's set at 80% for individual plans, 85% for group plans. Insurers who exceed the limits would have to pay rebates to policyholders. Except, there's this problem as identified by Jon Walker. On page 12 of the bill [pdf]:
(d) ADJUSTMENTS.—The Secretary may adjust the rates described in subsection (b) if the Secretary determines appropriate on account of the volatility of the individual market due to the establishment of State Exchanges. So the Secretary of HHS can gut this requirement at will. But it's better than not having it at all. - One of the better additions, as identified by Ezra, is better reporting by plans on their practices, claims denials, cost-sharing for out of network practitioners, etc. At least we'll be better informed about the plans we're being forced to pay for.
- There is a critical fix to what was a big hole regarding national plans. Originally the bill national plans in which insurers could sell policies in any of the states in the compact. The insurer would only be subject to the laws and regulations in the state where it was based, and wouldn't have to comply with stricter regs in other states. That's been replaced by the OPM provision.
- One entertaining note, the cosmetic surgery tax has been replaced by taxing indoor tanning salons, which some Twitter wits are calling the Boehner tax. On a more serious, and progressive note, it also increases the Medicare payroll tax by 0.9 points for individuals making more than $200,000 per year and married couples earning above $250,000, a much better financing choice than the excise tax (which is still there).
Many of these issues are ones that the blogosphere, particularly Jon Walker at FDL, have been hammering on for weeks, which is instructive for future efforts. Sometimes when you're being exhorted to get on the "pass the bill" bandwagon, it makes sense to counter with "fix the bill." What's still very problematic: Then there's what's still murky, and that gets back to the insurance reforms and just how effective they will be: California recently dropped an attempt to enforce its anti-rescission law against a major insurer, saying that it was financially outgunned by the insurer's legal team. The rescission law, according to the legislation, "shall not apply to a covered individual who has performed an act or practice that constitutes fraud or makes an intentional misrepresentation of material fact as prohibited by the terms of the plan or coverage." Insurers today routinely claim that patients engaged in "fraud" or "intentional misrepresentation" when dropping them from coverage. Much depends on who defines the terms in the bill. It won't be the federal government. There will be no federal agency tasked with overseeing the enforcement of the bill's rules. Rather, a Senate leadership aide told reporters in a briefing Saturday, individual states will police the new system. That's a task the California Department of Managed Health Care was unable to perform when battling Anthem Blue Cross, which has rescinded 1,770 policies since 2004. "In each and every one of those rescissions, [Blue Cross has] the right to contest each, and that could tie us up in court forever," the department's director, Cindy Ehnes, told The Associated Press. A million-dollar fine was announced in March 2007, but has not been enforced. If the enforcement for these regulations falls on the individual states, and the individual states will have to litigate them, which could take a very long time in each case. The regulations are unlikely to be uniformly enforced state to state--some of them have extremely proactive insurance commissioners and strong regulatory structures in place, others don't. And in the states that don't, don't expect insurers to end some of these practices out of the goodness of their hearts. Bottom line, Americans are still going to be forced to buy insurance that for too many people will be unaffordable. As long as that's the case, and until there's a true alternative public option that provides people real choice, the insurance companies shouldn't get that one thing in the legislation they want: the mandate.
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daily_kos | |
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/BeBBkBA8rEA/-Phantom-Hope:-The-Afghan-Army Sometimes you have to wonder if irony, like satire, can actually survive another decade like the one now coming to an end. Last week, the chief of NATO asked the Russians to contribute helicopters as its part of the escalation to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. The image of Russian helicopters used in another fight against Afghan rebels has got to be one of the major propaganda coups of our time. A fitting end to the Zero Decade. If Moscow says yes, the choppers will become part of the expanding effort that we have been told will stabilize that nebulous entity called Afghanistan, weaken the Taliban, shatter al-Qaeda, and turn over control for national security to the Afghan National Army and national police. There’s just one problem. Building an Afghan army and national police force has been tried before. And it’s never, ever worked. Starting in the 18th Century, the British tried it four times. Declan Walsh reported a couple of years ago: 
Each has failed, frustrated by war, invasions or the stubborn ways of conservative tribesmen. Now the west is making the fifth try, and the task is no less urgent, or complicated, than in the past. The British say their most pressing problem is absenteeism. Afghan men value family life and find barracks life strange. Many overstay their leave by weeks, facing no punishment on their return, or never come back. The Helmand battalion is 30% under strength as a result. "We end up sitting here with bated breath hoping they will turn up," said Capt Noel Claydon-Swales. But the historical omens are ominous. It took most European countries between 50 and 100 years to form their national armies, said [the highly respected Afghan scholar] Dr [Antonio] Giustozzi. The Soviet Union tried to fast-track the process in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but failed. "You can keep pumping in money but in the long term it is not sustainable," he said. But surely the situation has changed in two-and-a-half years? The details, yes. But the prognosis? Hardly. Many of the soldiers who have been trained and haven’t deserted or defected are poorly motivated, poorly trained, sympathetic to the Taliban, unreliable in combat, AWOL much of the time, and often brutal, intimidating and criminal in their dealings with the local population. Antonio Giustozzi’s latest assessment appears at the Royal United Services Institute (subscription only), and is titled The Afghan National Army: Unwarranted Hope? He could just as well have left off the question mark. The latest effort to train the Afghan Army began more than seven years ago and was announced to reporters by Gen. Tommy Franks, then commander of U.S. Central Command, "I am pleased that our forces have begun training the Afghan National Army." That was then, and this is now. Nobody needs to be reminded of how the Cheney-Bush administration dropped the ball in Afghanistan and went on into Iraq, which, for years before September 11 "changed everything," was the real first target of the neoconservatives’ Project for a New American Century.  For the moment, focus on the practicality of the mission and forget about whether current U.S. Afghan policy is a righteous project, an unfortunate but necessary evil or just another round in the saga of American empire dating back to the first pronouncement of Manifest Destiny. Because even the most avid foe of the escalation – I count myself on that side – knows in her heart (and experience with Iraq) that not enough opposition will be built in the streets or, ha-ha, in Congress to soon stop the flow of troops to Afghanistan that began last March and will run at least until next November, according to the generals. That being so, the essential question about the policy is: Will it work? Can the Afghan National Army (and national police force) be enlarged and improved enough to take care of the nation’s security on its own in, say, the four or five years that President Hamid Karzai says is needed?
Ample evidence speaks loudly against it. There’s no need to scour left-wing or other objectionist Web sites to come to this conclusion. For starters, one can read the 66-page unclassified version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategic assessment of the situation. Let me interject another caveat. Afghans can fight. The British, the Soviets and others throughout history have learned this the hard way. Cowardice is not the problem. As ranger995, someone who was embedded with Afghan troops, has pointed out, there are Afghans in the ANA, especially younger ones, who have plenty of courage, will and integrity to fight. The problem is, there aren’t enough. And there won’t be enough in the fuzzy time-frame that has been set out for beginning to turn security over to them. That’s the case even though the 4000 U.S. trainers now in Afghanistan will soon be joined by an estimated 4000 more, plus 150 new NATO training teams. The Pentagon has not released any information about whether those 4000 trainers have the special skills needed to do their job effectively. Here’s one reason why, as noted a couple of months ago by Martin Fletcher: Rushed training 'risks turning Afghan troops into cannon fodder': Recruits to the Afghan Army are being rushed into combat with a barely acceptable level of training, according to senior British officers closely involved in the programme. ... "We are close to the wire in the balancing act between quality and quantity," Brigadier Simon Levey, the chief coalition adviser to the Afghan Army’s training command, conceded. The present standard of training was "acceptable, but we must not fall below it". Lieutenant-Colonel Nick Ilic, the head of the British team that is training Afghan officers and non-commissioned officers, told The Times: "We are walking a tightrope and we could easily fall off." Another official, who declined to be named, said: "You could argue that the recruits are being made cannon fodder. Every time we lower the bar it’s the minimum we can get away with until someone says we need to lower it more to speed things up." Speed-up is in the works again as the United States seeks to get 134,000 Afghans into the ANA by next fall. An ambitious goal given what’s happening every day. A month ago, AFP reported: [T]he picture painted by NATO commanders shows that, while international troops suffer increasing casualties, training too is an uphill battle in this country wracked by more than 30 years of war. Out of the some 94,000 Afghan soldiers trained so far, 10,000 have defected, General Egon Ramms, commander of the operational headquarters in charge of the NATO-led International Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF), told reporters this week. He also estimated that 15 per cent of the armed forces are drug addicts. If the reporter didn’t mistake "deserted" for "defected," that means Western forces are giving large numbers of the enemy better fighting skills. If Gen Ramms really meant "deserted," he’s low-balled the actual number. From September 2008 to September 2009, the Pentagon and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan put the desertion rate at about one in four. More Afghans were recruited than ever before, 35,000. Digging deeper into the numbers, however, as Gareth Porter has done, puts the number of keepers at 19,000. The old 70 square-mile Soviet base that now serves as the Kabul Military Training Center eight miles from the downtown of the capital has put tens of thousands of Afghans through its 10-week training program. But how many of these actually serve on active-duty is unanswerable. So when stories like this appear in The New York Times saying that vast new numbers of Afghans are signing up, readers can hardly be blamed for remaining skeptical at the outcome of this enlistment surge. As Chris Hedges has pointed out, instead of body counts of enemy dead the way "progress" was often measured in Vietnam, the "good news" now is the allegedly swelling numbers of ANA soldiers. Tossing aside for the moment the numbers, there is also the quality of both the trainees and the trainers. It’s not American troops’ fault. They haven’t been prepared for their task. And there is no evidence that the new trainers soon to be on the way to Afghanistan will have any more background in how to train than those troops already on the ground. As Hedges writes: Afghan soldiers are sent from the Kabul Military Training Center directly to active-duty ANA units. The units always have American trainers, know as a "mentoring team," attached to them. The rapid increase in ANA soldiers has outstripped the ability of the American military to provide trained mentoring teams. The teams, normally comprised of members of the Army Special Forces, are now formed by plucking American soldiers, more or less at random, from units all over Afghanistan. "This is how my entire team was selected during the middle of my tour: a random group of people from all over Kabul—Air Force, Navy, Army, active-duty and National Guard—pulled from their previous assignments, thrown together and expected to do a job that none of us were trained in any meaningful way to do," the officer said. "We are expected, by virtue of time-in-grade and membership in the U.S. military, to be able to train a foreign force in military operations, an extremely irresponsible policy that is ethnocentric at its core and which assumes some sort of natural superiority in which an untrained American soldier has everything to teach the Afghans, but nothing to learn." "You’re lucky enough if you had any mentorship training at all, something the Army provides in a limited capacity at pre-mobilization training at Fort Riley, but having none is the norm," he said. "Soldiers who receive their pre-mobilization training at Fort Bragg learn absolutely nothing about mentoring foreign forces aside from being given a booklet on the subject, and yet soldiers who go through Bragg before being shipped to Afghanistan are just as likely to be assigned to mentoring teams as anyone else." While there is a relative handful of men like ranger995 directly involved with training soldiers in the field, most, as Brian Coughley noted in September, are far from that level of skill: In Afghanistan the training course is ten weeks, and 90 percent of recruits are illiterate and language-incompatible with their peers, let alone the foreigners. Afghan instructors are keen but barely effective and the logistics system is a tattered joke. Some foreign instructors may be good, but most are depressingly ignorant of language, culture and customs. It’s hard to know whether the drug problem Gen. Ramms spoke of is truly addiction or just the widespread smoking of hashish among Afghans. Recreational drug use is one thing when you’re sitting at home or around the campfire. It’s something else when you’re expected to be on patrol against people armed with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. This was made amply clear more than a year ago in this widely seen video:
Then there’s the problem of trying to create a national army out of a mix of ethnicities. Porter writes: The latest report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued Oct. 30, shows that Tajiks, which represent 25 percent of the population, now account for 41 percent of all ANA troops who have been trained, and that only 30 percent of the ANA trainees are now Pashtuns. The new figures are less promising than older ones that had suggested that Pashtuns were 40% of troops (about their proportion in the population). Now it seems they are just a third of the troops. To have a Tajik army patrolling and searching Pashtuns could be a bad scene. So too would be a Pashtun denial of the legitimacy of the Afghan National Army. And this is all before there's any discussion about warlords, opium-funded Taliban, the anger of the populace toward foreign occupation (whoever the occupier is), and the deeply corrupt Karzai regime that even the most pollyanna assessment of Afghanistan's future cannot be sanguine about. In the Pentagon and other parts of the Obama administration can be found plenty of people who recognize all these problems. Still, magical thinking has not disappeared. The idea that the United States can somehow overcome all these obstacles and do it on a rapid timetable - obstacles that were there for the British in the 1880s and the Soviets in the 1980s - is just another sad foray into the myth of American exceptionalism.
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daily_kos | |
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/iVd6hAGtfqQ/-Looking-for-a-New-START Last week, in the midst of the tense Copenhagen climate conference negotiations, brief news stories began to surface regarding an impending meeting between Presidents Obama and Medvedev. It wasn't to be just any meeting: after nearly a year of complicated negotiations in Geneva between Russian and American diplomats, as well as several well-publicized meetings between Obama and Medvedev, the two world leaders are now dealing with the fact that they failed to reach an agreement on a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) by the December 5 expiration date. Regardless of the rumors that flew ahead of their Copenhagen meeting, Obama and Medvedev did not sign a new treaty; they issued a rather generic statement basically saying that negotiations are down to the wire, that they are "quite close to an agreement," and that "there are certain technical details... which require further work...".
Progress, Difficulties with New START I wanted to get a better idea of what might be holding things up, and what we'll be facing in the future with regards to Senate ratification of the New START treaty. With respect to the latter, it appears that the Senate Republicans might be laying the groundwork to make treaty ratification more complicated that it should be. With these questions in mind, I contacted Kingston Reif, the Deputy Director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. Regarding when there will actually be a treaty, Reif and I discussed how the news reports made it hard to predict. He said: I've seen a lot of different reports, saying different things, in both the Russian press and the US press, to the point where I'm hesitant to predict anything on this anymore. It's become pretty difficult to do that. It’s not going to be this year anymore. It might extend well into January or even February. The U.S. and Russian negotiating teams are heading home for the holidays. They’re not going to start up again until January. When I asked him what he thought the main hold-up was (specifically, regarding verification), he emphasized that he thought verification was the main issue, as well as the "issue of mobile missiles". Specifically: My understanding is that we have agreed to shut down our monitoring at Votkinsk, and that's not going to be in the new treaty. Perhaps the US is still trying to convince the Russians otherwise. The Russians may also be trying to convince the US that since the US doesn’t have mobile ICBMS -- all our ICBMS are at three bases in the western portion of the country, they don't move, they're silo-based missiles, whereas the Russians still have mobile missiles that they might want some means of verification for those that is simpler than the provisions were for mobile missiles in START I, so they may be trying to push the US on that. I think another issue that's a point of contention is the issue of telemetry. START I requires that neither side encrypt telemetry information about their ballistic missile tests. The Russians are claiming "you guys are not building new missiles, whereas we are, so it's one-sided that we have to reveal information from those launches, whereas you don't, because you're not building new missiles. And then finally, I think both Obama and Medvedev have stated that this new treaty is going to limit both delivery vehicles and warheads. The US preference, obviously, is to not follow the START rule of "attributing" a specific number of warheads to delivery vehicles, no matter how many warheads those delivery vehicles actually carry. The US just wants to be able to count the actual number of warheads that it has on its delivery systems, because we've downloaded a lot of warheads from our specific missiles and bombers, such that they don't carry the maximum number of warheads they could carry. We’ve also converted some subs and bombers to conventional-only missions. So, trying to work through how, exactly, you verify the actual number of warheads, if you don't have an attribution rule could potentially be difficult. I think those are some issues that could be holding things up. And it’s interesting to note that the Russians seem to be saying some of the same things about verification that the Bush administration was saying back in 2002 and 2003. The Bush administration kept telling the Russians that we don’t care how you structure your forces, we don’t care about Votkinsk, we don’t care if you build new missiles, if we’re going to have verification provisions at all, they should be much simpler, etc. So the Russians seem to be still clinging to that view. One thing that I hope the lay person can see at this point is why it isn't surprising that Obama and Medvedev couldn't just whip out their pens and sign a treaty in Copehagen. It can't be emphasized enough how complex the negotiations have been. Yes, it's a disappointment that they missed the deadline, but it's also not unexpected; part of the problem is that the George W. Bush administration was not interested in negotiating a treaty to replace START I, as I've explained in a previous post.
Looking To The Future: Senate Ratification Now, the big question is: once we have a new START treaty, what hurdles will it face when it comes to ratification by the US Senate? Last week, we got a hint of what's to come, from a Washington Times article: All 40 Republican senators and one independent wrote to President Obama on Wednesday reminding him that the current defense authorization law links modernization of the aging U.S. nuclear arsenal to further U.S.-Russian arms reductions. The law applies to the not-yet-finished successor to the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which expired on Dec. 16. The 41 senators - enough to block formal ratification of a new treaty, which requires 67 votes - stated in the letter that they agree with the defense legislation's language that says modernizing the aging U.S. nuclear stockpile is critical to further U.S.-Russian arms cuts. "In fact, we don't believe further reductions can be in the national security interest of the U.S. in the absence of a significant program to modernize our nuclear deterrent," the senators stated. I've seen a copy of the letter; not surprisingly, Joe Lieberman is the Independent to whom the article refers. "We need new warheads" has been a recurring theme from the GOP side of the fence, especially from Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona. I asked Kingston Reif about the letter sent to Obama, specifically if its reference to the defense bill was accurate. Reif told me: First, as you alluded to, Kyl is misconstruing what the Defense Authorization language actually says. Now, the section of the Defense Authorization bill that deals with this so-called linkage, it does require a plan to "modernize" the nuclear weapons complex, but it does not say anything about modernization in the context of the nuclear arsenal, or the nuclear deterrent, which is what this letter does. So, as you hinted, it's important to note that there's no requirement in the bill that the president must deliver a plan to design and build new nuclear warheads, period. It's just not in there. The relevant section of the Defense Authorization Act is here. Note that there's nothing about a new plutonium pit facility, either. Reif explained this very clearly: The bill specifically calls for "a description of the plan to modernize the nuclear weapons complex, including improving the safety of facilities, modernizing the infrastructure, and maintaining the key capabilities and competencies of the nuclear weapons workforce, including designers and technicians." That's what it says. So according to the language, modernization here -- they're talking about making our facilities and weapons safer, more secure, they talk about giving the labs the resources they need to work on various issues, which could include such things as safeguards and dismantlement. But there's nothing specific in there about a new plutonium pit facility. There may be something specific in the Nuclear Posture Review, and the President's FY11 budget request, but there's no specific language on that, to my knowledge, in the Defense Authorization bill. ... [T]he letter, I think, greatly overstates the link between the modest reductions that are likely going to be called for in the new START treaty, whenever it's signed, and on the other hand, maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile and modernizing the infrastructure. I mean, if you buy Senator Kyl's logic that we need to modernize the deterrent, then he should want to do so with or without a new arms control treaty. The Obama administration is going to address the issues raised in the Defense Authorization bill when it releases its Nuclear Posture Review [reference to that? website maybe?] and presents its fiscal year 2011 budget requests. In my view, given the modest first step that New START represents, it's going to have no impact on the health of our stockpile and its supporting infrastructure. Finally -- and this is very, very important -- we talked about how the Washington Times article neglected to mention a recent study by an independent group of defense scientists, the JASON Defense Advisory Panel. The study basically said that what we've been doing to maintain our nuclear arsenal (the Life Extension Program) means the weapons will be good for decades to come. Reif had this to say: The final point to make, too, is that we are, in fact, modernizing our weapons. Now, Kyl and others seem to think that because we're not building new missiles and warheads like the Russians and Chinese, we're falling way behind. That's simply not true... Our arsenal remains second to none. In fact, it's even more capable now than it was during the Cold War. We simply do not need to build new missiles and warheads. I think that sentiment, particularly on the warhead issue, was confirmed by the recent JASON report, which said that the lifetime of today's nuclear warhead can be extended for decades, via the current life extension approach, with no anticipated loss of confidence. Reif recently wrote a fabulous piece on this subject; please click here to read it. We are actually spending $6 billion a year on weapon modernization. However, it doesn't seem to be the kind of modernization that Kyl et al. have in mind. Next year will be a nuclear minefield when it comes to battles in the Senate. It's important to point out that everyone wants a new START treaty; it's just that how the GOP Senators (and Lieberman) have defined "modernization", and what's actually in the Defense Authorization act, that are different. It's my prediction that Senator Kyl will use ratification of the new START treaty to set up his arguments for killing any possible ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which he has vowed to do. I'll leave you with a graph I've posted several times before. This is to give you the big picture about how far we've come with nuclear treaties, and why it's so important that we ratify the new START treaty with a minimum amount of grandstanding and politicization.
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seraphimsigrist | |
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Friends, Well the big snow storm turned out at least in the Hudson Valley to be not much at all, a few inches of fluffy snow on the ground. Long Island had two feet in places but I would guess it will be under control by tomorrow... One good thing that came from my excursion yesterday though was finding in a book store the book of interviews by Steve T Georgiou with poet Robert Lax titled The Way of the
Dreamcatcher, which seems to be out of print but I was able to buy for cover price. Geoorgiou , a young Greek-American academic, came to Patmos in 1993 looking for peace, and he found Lax whom he had not heard of before. over the following six years he returned again and again recording interviews. His questions are, as an amazon reviewer notes, simple and fairly one dimensional, and are relentless in their leading to a sense of the holiness and wisdom of Robert Lax as a saint and sage. And Lax in some measure ,liking his young friend and perhaps indulging him, goes along...And yet...and yet one feels also that in a deep way Lax was that, a poet , a sage, called by his friend, and fellow Catholic, Jack Kerouac "a laughing Buddha"...it seems Kerouac visited Lax on Patmos. I would be happy to learn more of that. Merton of course was his friend from Columbia days. Well there is something special about this man, something different from what one feels with most other writers or even other religious figures...let me give a few quotes which you may like, I think, and just a couple of pictures from the book if you will click to the right here. ( Read more... )And you see I have added two poems, one of a relentlessly minimalist sort and another (finding them on the internet and so not needing to copy out) I see that Kerouac said of Lax that he was " a Pilgrim in search of beautiful innocence.
writing lovingly, finding it, simply, in his own way."I find it inspiring to see what one feels as a fulfilled quest, a simplicity... Yeats wrote... "And then he laughed to think that what seemed hard
Should be so simple—a bat rose from the hazels
And circled round him with its squeaky cry,
The light in the tower window was put out."Something like that... hope you may have found also something of interest here and I am ,welcoming all response, yours +Seraphim  . Robert Lax 1915-2000
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cbpotts | |
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It's been an amazingly busy weekend: I've just spent six hours putting together a 20 page e-book for marketing purposes (well, writing the text, after TPTB put their stamp on it, it should be closer to 50) and that's been about it for the day. Yesterday, however, I cleaned the play room, did 9 or 10 loads of laundry, wrote a column, crocheted half a scarf for my MIL's handmade gift (Can we say Thank you, oh inventors of Tunisian stitch? Oh yes, we can. We also can thank my yarn stash o' doom, and even if I do actually get my house organized, I'm going to keep on acting like I'm byrne and hoard yarn like a mad yarn hoarding thing, as sometimes you need to make people presents and it might be a while before you leave the house to go after fixings) swept the kitchen, swept the living room and cursed out the vacuum cleaner for not spontaneously growing a replacement belt (It knows it needs one. Starfish grow limbs, for christ's sake, and they have to flail around and crack oysters and shit. I just need the belt to go around and around and around...) and watched Bacall on Bogart, which is beautiful and breaks my heart, and did the dishes, and read with Nadia, and helped Harmony research Lil Wayne's impending stint inside (and the discussion about why she cares about this took more time than one might hope) I can't decide if all this activity makes me feel better or just keeps me moving. But I figure that Thursday and Friday will be spent not working and not house-wifing, so might as well make hay while the sun's not shining. Did you know how they cut horns off of cows? If you don't, don't research it. The farmer I was talking to about it said, "Of course it hurts 'em. How'd you like it if your dick got cut off?" Then he cocked his head, and said, "Well, if you had a dick. And they don't, neither, causen they're heifers, but you know what I mean." Then he assured me that horns were much like fingernails, and you only bleed a little bit, and it took every ounce of my self-control not to ask how that compared with self-castration, but I managed. And now my poor Harmony, who has been woefully deprived of computer time whilst I was working, is now dancing around like a deprived child staring up into the FAO Schwartz window (well, actually, not, since they're closed, but you get the point) so I'll go.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/nlFi4Pdnggg/-Water-World Astronomers have now detected so many exosolar planets that it's reasonable to assume there are more of them than stars in our galaxy. We can infer they come in just about every flavor conceivable, little ice balls, floating slugs of metal, super earths, hot Jupiters, or so strange they transcend our wildest imagination. One in particular was announced this week: Only 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.6 times as massive, the new planet takes 38 hours to circle a dim red star, GJ 1214, in the constellation Ophiuchus — about 40 light-years from here. It is one of the lightest and smallest so-called extrasolar planets yet found, part of a growing class that are less than 10 times the mass of the Earth. Even though the star, GJ1214, is much dimmer than our sun, don't expect to find earth-like organisms, unless they're an extreme alien version of the enigmatic thermophiles that cluster around terrestrial thermal vents. At a distance of 1.3 million miles it's so close to its primary that the planet's temperature is estimated to be over 300 degrees Fahrenheit. What makes this planet even more fascinating is it may be the first known water world. In planetary astronomy a water world is a theoretical planet made up mostly of water. On such a world the global ocean would be thousands of miles deep. It would end not in rock or mud. Under immense pressure the water is transformed into a sort of global, red-hot glacier. A hot water world would be like nothing in our solar system. The nearest thing in gross physical appearance would probably be something like a gas giant. To create an illustration, Karen Wehrstein and I assume Cauldron (Our working name, nothing official) is tide locked and thus rotating every 38 hours, about six times the mass of the earth and three times the radius, and that it is indeed composed mostly of H2O, i.e., water. A big, fat planet-sized spinning drop of dirty boiling water thousands of miles deep over a small rocky-metal core the size of our moon. That brings up some interesting physics and lends us one hell of an artistic license built on images of thunderstorms and cyclones, pics of gas giants and solar flares, and flavored with imagination. 
From a vantage point perched high in the atmosphere, the red dwarf star glowers on the cloud drenched horizon. Under intense solar radiation, hydrogen and oxygen split up and react with trace elements like nitrogen or carbon forming pastel reds, yellows, and browns. Titanic convection and the planet's rotation produce fierce cyclones, streams and bands, the differential between permanent night and day sides fuel supersonic jet streams. Shown right a mountain of swirling stained water vapor -- perhaps better compared to under water black-smokers than garden variety thunderstorm cells -- the size of Iceland blasts hundreds of miles above twisted puffy ribbons of low laying crimson cloud. Far below and unseen, in the perfect pitch black lower atmosphere, water vapor is heated and pressurized until the phase differential between liquid and solid disappears. No clear surface, just an increasingly dense superheated fluid, until the water is crushed by sheer brute force into a dozen different kinds of exotic 'ice' hotter than burning coals. But wait, there's more alien weirdness! Cauldron is so perilously close to its star that we speculate it plows through the outer corona and local magnetic field of GJ1214, generating huge electromagnetic fireworks around the planet that are visible even in daylight and dazzling at night. Effects that could conceivably tear the planet's equivalent of the thermosphere into ionized filaments and magnetic loops, produce sprites and jets, all sandwiched between layered curtains of delicate aurora far above and almost continuous cloud to cloud lightning way below. This is all speculation of course. That's what makes exo-astronomy so much fun; there are more worlds to imagine out there than people on this one! And we hope it makes for a nice interlude from the often dreary realities of terrestrial politics.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/W6U1U3W2D8Y/-Peter-Watts-at-US-Border Dr. Peter Watts is a marine biologist by education, a Canadian citizen, and a friend of mine. He's also a rapidly rising star as the author of several brilliant sci-fi novels like his Rifter's Series and the latest Blindsight (One of the best sci-fi novels I've ever read). But Peter had a terrifying experience at the hands of US border guards last week while he and a friend were returning to Canada. He describes being "punched, pepper sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half naked" into a holding cell: [F]or three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation ... dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I had a chance to ask Peter about it. Understandably, his lawyer has advised him not to get into a blow-by-blow description beyond what is posted and linked above. But Peter was able to answer a few questions for Daily Kos. DarkSyde: You were flagged down/pulled over returning to Canada from the US, what was the reason given? Peter Watts: I asked. They wouldn't tell me. DS: Not that it would excuse being brutalized, but people will ask: did you mouth of, say anything smart-ass or flippant? PW: I got out of the car. I said repeatedly that I just wanted to see what was going on. A number of commentators have opined that that was, in and of itself, a smart-ass and even aggressive act. DS: How did you get out of jail? PW: I was granted release on bail around 1pm. I was released sometime after seven. In between, I was told by one of the prison staff that even though I'd made bail, border guards would be waiting to rearrest me the moment I stepped outside, on some other grounds that weren't entirely clear to me. This did not in fact happen; or rather, while I was met and cuffed by border guards, they only drove me across the border and dropped me at Canada Customs. They kept my rental car and the stuff inside it (including my coat, which was a bit problematic given the whole mid-December-in-Ontario thing). DS: Have you ever heard of anything similar happening to other Canadians? PW: Especially in the wake of this incident, I've heard no end to the first-hand accounts of contemptuous and belligerent treatment at the border. Nobody likes it. Most folks just bite their tongues and keep their eyes down. More importantly, though, is that the only reason you heard about anything happening to this Canadian is because I had friends I didn't know I had. If folks hadn't mobilized so massively and unexpectedly, I suspect I might still be in jail (I'm told ICE has all sorts of leeway in detaining aliens). I'm not an especially prominent guy, but it turns out I have allies with a lot of clout in the online community; when Cory Doctorow raises his voice, half the web pricks up its ears. But what about all the other poor bastards who go through what I did, or worse, and don't have such folks in their corner? What about my passenger, who was also handcuffed and detained for hours (although not pepper-sprayed or physically struck, thankfully), then spat out into Canada a few hundred kilometers from home? DS: How has this affected your view of the US, or of US-Canada relations? PW: It hasn't, much. The US border isn't known for its hospitality, and I've been told that Port Huron has an especially bad rep. (The only reason we even took that route is because we were trying to get home ahead of an approaching snowstorm.) It's ironic, though, that the same day I was arrested one Mary Callahan, chief privacy officer for Homeland Security, was up here in Canada reassuring us that the border isn't so bad a place after all, and the US doesn't just arbitrarily grab people's personal data willy-nilly. Almost as ironic as the fact that I still haven't got my laptop computer, flash drive, or notebook back.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/cAdizFCANnc/-Aliens,-Elves,-and-the-Politics-of-Utopia Every year in Babylonia, the gods came out to play. On feast days, people lined the streets as the statues of the gods, festooned in gold and jewels, were paraded through Ur and Kish and Eridu. In Babylon, priests ascended the seven tiers of the massive ziggurat and stood next to the golden bull horns at each corner. There they recounted the story of the Enûma Elish, explaining how Marduk came to rule over the other gods. In the time before time, Lord Marduk had slain the vast dragon-goddess of chaos, Tiamat. Seas were forced back from land. The order of day and night was fixed. The borders of the great city were set and the stones of the ziggurat stacked by the god's divine hand. In some cities, the festivities ended when the decorated statues of the gods were carried to the river and placed on rafts. There they were sent on journeys elsewhere in the kingdom, where they could be carried up from the riverbanks to recreate famous meetings with other gods. They would return soon and the next year, when the feast days rolled around again, the cycle would be repeated. Babylonian religion was a fantasy. By that I don't mean that it didn't exist, or that Gandolph and Gimli featured in the pantheon (though that would be cool). I mean that the religion of that great kingdom looked backwards. It celebrated a time not like the humdrum time of human existence. Their texts were all about a mythic period in which the important events had occurred. Human beings were incidental to these events. They showed up only in the final act of the story, the product of clumsy creation from the broken remains of a second string god (Tiamat's dunce of a husband, Kingu). Everything important had already come to pass before people reached the stage. The best that humans could do was to remember the acts of these gods, to emulate them, and — through ceremony — to participate in the time that never had been and had never ceased to be. Meanwhile, just down the street from these celebrations, captive Israelites were writing science fiction. Again, this isn't meant as a remark on the value of either the religion of the ancient Hebrew tribes or any of its modern offshoots. It's simply a statement of direction. The Israelite religion had its creation myth (two of them, actually, recorded neatly back to back in the first two chapters of Genesis), but the structure of the holy texts was very different from the tablets set down in Bablyon and many other areas of the Middle East. While other peoples were focused on creating tales of the gods in which people made a late, insignificant appearance, the Israelite scribes were building a religion in which people are on the page by the time thirty lines have passed. From then on, the story always focused on people. There are promises delivered, and difficulties to overcome. Yahweh, who would become the central god of the Israelites only after a considerable period of flux, certainly makes numerous appearances in the text, but he wasn't the focus of the text. People were at the heart of the story. People formed the heroes and the villains (and sometimes served both roles within the space of a few pages). To the extent that the Hebrew scriptures were about Yahweh, they were about his relationship with people. And because the Israelite text was a text about people, with the hopes and dreams of people, it was a forward-looking text, one that speculated over crops and offspring, bitter warfare and fragile peace, bloody vengeance and hard-won reconciliation, sorrow and hope. It's a story that looks forward to a better day. A story that speculates over future governments and events that are decades or centuries away. That's what makes it science fiction. As Thomas Cahill pointed out in The Gift of the Jews the reason that the Hebrew religion became so much more important than that of other Middle Eastern tribes wasn't because Noah is a better character than Gilgamesh, it's because the Hebrew religion wasn't caught in endless lesser repetition of the good old days. It wasn't locked into the past. It was linear. It looked, in the words of the venerable prophet Buzz Lightyear, "to infinity, and beyond!" Science fiction and fantasy often share shelf space at the book store. They don't even get separate tags on iTunes. Some very fine science fiction writers often dabble in fantasy, and vice versa. More than one has noted that it's sometimes difficult to determine if that pointy-eared character lurking at the edge of the story is an elf or an alien since both often serve the same role (that of a dispassionate outsider available to comment on the human condition). But there is a difference between the two genres. Fantasy looks for its answers in the past. That's when civilization was at its peak, when there was more magic and mystery in the world, when great deeds were done and heros lived. Science fiction looks to the future, when new knowledge and shifts in both technology and society will create fresh wonders. In many ways, this break between science fiction and fantasy also defines our political parties. Clearly conservatives have created a fantasy not only when it comes to how they define their take on religion, but when it comes to the foundations of America. They look backward to a mythic time when people's behavior was defined equally by Leave it to Beaver and Stagecoach, one in which markets were free, women were passive, and all the colorful elves knew their place. It's not hard to imagine them sitting off down rivers flanked by giant stone statues of a grinning Reagan on one side and a scowling Joe McCarthy on the other, past temples to Ayn Rand. Like the ancient Babylonians, conservative utopia only existed in some mythic period outside of normal time, but they are determined to endlessly circle that stagnant goal. Progressives tend to have more of a science fiction outlook. Sure, we may want our Star Trek uniforms made from organically grown fibers, but who doesn't long for the time when we can discard old prejudices and break the stale roles that confine our lives? An end to war. An end to hunger. A world where the condition of your parents doesn't restrict the possibility of your life. There's a reason that the word "progress" is bound up in progressive (and no, it's not meant to be ironic). Progressives are about making changes, moving forward, creating a world that's unlike the one we see around us with — hopefully — fewer of the flaws we face today. When you look at it that way, it's no wonder that progressives always seem to have the harder path. After all, inertia is against us. Conservatives are content to put their feet down and preserve the status quo. They have both the weight of the world and the fear of change on their side. Progressives have to persuade the unpersuaded to break into new territory, to pack away the past and face a world unlike what's come before. Worse, we are often put in the position — on everything form social issues to the environment — of being the ones that have to say, "what you are doing now is wrong." I don't have to tell you, that's a position that leads to some bruised feelings and bloody noses (or worse). This isn't to say that the fantasists are unmoving in their beliefs. Back in Babylon, Marduk started out as a smaller part of the pantheon, but over time his role was rewritten to include powers and stories that had once belonged to other mythic figures. He even got the credit for founding Babylon and building the ziggurat -- something that had been done through the very human sweat and toil of the Bablylonians' ancestors. Similarly, modern fantasists have rewritten the history of the United States, creating founders in their own image and forgetting the reality. They've created a country that was founded on the free market out of one that was founded in opposition to the free market, a country dedicated to a rigid and limited government out of one where government was always a flexible ongoing experiment, and a country dedicated to a subset of Christianity out of a nation where that view of Christianity did not even exist. Just because conservatives look backwards, it doesn't mean they're not creative. And just because progressives look forward, it doesn't mean we're always hopeful. Sometimes we're the ones who get fixated on certain goals, even when those goals are no longer realistic. The results of bumping against the stubborn mass of the world as it is can be frustrating. It's not hard for progressives to find failure. We can find them even in our successes. But a low batting average is the price of science fiction. Predicting the future, even in the broadest terms, has never been an easy game and setting the path for the future is even tougher. We should not be bright-sided into an overly-rosy view of the future, but neither should be be constantly in a funk over the latest set back. It's all too easy, especially on issues like the environment, to see every future as a dystopia. The trick of being sci fi is to keep focused on the future we want, but to understand that getting there is going to be difficult. You want it easy? Hop in the conservative canoe and paddle down the polluted waters of the River Limbaugh, or go hide in the woods with all the terrified trolls of the Kingdom of Beck. Join the Bablylonians in their circle around the city. Building that neat, clean Federation with all those oh-so-unflattering uniforms… it's hard work. And it always will be. Conservatism is like gravity, it drags all things down into the muck, and fighting against it every moment of the day Is exhausting. Sometimes we all want to just relax and sink. I know I do. That's especially true when something bright, good, and worthy seems just within our grasp, only to be snatched away by those who are nominally on our side. But that's the way it's always been. Just because we're looking forward, doesn't mean we can afford to ignore the past, and the past of the progressive movement is full of far more days of struggle than success. And yet, the world does move. With the slenderest of cords, by fits and by starts, we drag it forward. Maybe we pulled it forward an inch this week. Maybe we didn't. There's not much we can do now but keep tugging. And hoping. So we get up this morning and put one foot in front of another. We give a better future another go, and try again to "make it so." But really, I am never going to fit into one of those uniforms.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/RQ5BypLiuJ8/-Your-Abbreviated-Pundit-Round-up What to read while you're waiting for Meet the Press (Markos will be on this morning): NY Times: After weeks of frustrating delays and falling poll numbers, Mr. Obama decided to take what he could get, declare victory and claim momentum on some of the administration’s biggest priorities, even if the details did not always match the lofty vision that underlined them. NY Times: "Thirty million people without health insurance stand to gain coverage under a deal announced on Saturday by Senate Democrats." WaPo: Senate Democrats said Saturday that they had closed ranks in support of legislation to overhaul the nation's health-care system, ending months of internal division and clearing a path for quick Senate passage of President Obama's top domestic policy priority. Tom Friedman: I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change — the "Earth Day" strategy and the "Earth Race" strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need. If I keep getting it right on climate change, will you forgive me for Iraq? Maybe in six months? Frank Rich: As we say farewell to a dreadful year and decade, this much we can agree upon: The person of the year is not Ben Bernanke, no matter how insistently Time magazine tries to hype him into its pantheon. The Fed chairman was just as big a schnook as every other magical thinker in Washington and on Wall Street who believed that housing prices would go up in perpetuity to support an economy leveraged past the hilt. Unlike most of the others, it was Bernanke’s job to be ahead of the curve. Yet as recently as June of last year he could be found minimizing the possibility of a substantial economic downturn. And now we’re supposed to applaud him for putting his finger in the dike after disaster struck? This is defining American leadership down... If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far. That’s why the obvious person of the year is Tiger Woods. Maureen Dowd: Flying over the waves of snow-covered mountains that make Afghanistan a natural fortress and a sinkhole for empires, it’s impossible not to think of Osama’s escaping from Tora Bora as one of the greatest bungled opportunities in history. Kathleen Parker: Perhaps it is the spirit of the season, but my empathy receptors are in overdrive for poor Barack Obama. All he wanted for Christmas was a health-care reform bill -- and all he got was a lousy insurance industry bailout that few can love.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/o34LLM30U1s/-Today-in-Congress  The House is not in session today.
In the Senate, courtesy of the Office of the Majority Leader: 1:00pm Sunday, December 20. Following the prayer and pledge, the time until 1:30pm will be equally divided and controlled between the two Leaders or their designees. Beginning at 1:30pm and until 11:30pm, there will be alternating blocks of time, with the Republicans controlling the first hour and the Majority controlling the next hour. At 11:30pm (Sunday), the Senate will recess until 12:01am Monday, December 21. Following the prayer and pledge, the time until 1:00am will be equally divided and controlled between the two leaders or their designees, with the Majority Leader controlling the final 10 minutes and the Republican Leader controlling the 10 minutes immediately prior. At 1:00AM Monday, December 21, the Senate will proceed to a cloture vote on the Reid-Baucus-Dodd-Harkin amendment #2376. That Reid-Baucus-Dodd-Harkin amendment is the so-called "manager's amendment" that rolls up all the agreements hashed out on the side up to this point, and that's supposed to be the package that gets us to 60. We'll find out at 1:00 AM on Monday. So stay up late tonight.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/pI6wFgIAl3g/-Open-Thread-and-Diary-Rescue This evening's Rescue Rangers are mem from somerville, jlms qkw (pitching both ends of a double-header yet again), mtperson, and dadanation, with watercarrier4diogenes atop the Tor, holding on for dear life. Tonight's diaries take us from prehistoric bones to Overton Windows, with a couple of stops at your 'local?' bank along the way. We hope you'll enjoy this bounty of excellent reading. - Username4242 returns with a new critter in Prehistoric Weekly--Spinosaur Feeding. (jlms qkw)
- As the holiday season approaches its tension-filled shopping exhaustion peak, techno puts on his professorial cap and teaches Surviving Christmas 101. Who KNEW there were 6 kinds of herring? (watercarrier4diogenes)
- With boots on the ground, Richard Myers updates us in Colorado Grocery Workers' Split Vote Examined. (jlms qkw)
- The map is not the territory, but having a map that considers the dimensions of intellect, will, instinct, and emotion can help navigate through life’s territory, as Spencer Troxell charts out in You've Got A Map. (mtperson)
- Always an eagle-eye on powers of the executive branch, danps tells us of a recent example of how well his subordinates are following Obama's declarations on transparency and FOIA requests in Defining Transparency Down. (watercarrier4diogenes)
- AvengingAngel highlights an issue in the finance industry in Community Organizers Fighting "Big Banks Swallowing Community Banks" Trend. (jlms qkw)
- LSmith offers an informative local perspective on Why Ben Nelson does what he does. (mem from somerville)
- The Dean of Cincinnati exposes this Cabinet member in SALF-gate? 49,000 questions for Arne Duncan. (jlms qkw)
- plf515 explains why Why nothing makes me disgusted about Daily Kos University, by bringing us another issue of this terrific series. Get acquainted with it, you'll be glad you did. (watercarrier4diogenes)
- GreyHawk advises us how to push the edge in The Overton Window And Changing In An Age of Decay. (jlms qkw)
jotter brings us High Impact Diaries: December 18, 2009. carolita has Top Comments 12-19-09 -- Cognitive Dissonance Edition. Enjoy and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread (even if you're the author! Here's where that's actually appreciated). And, of course, since it's an open thread, PLAY NICE, OK? 8^)
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/NqTDtueIkYk/-Reinstate-Glass-Steagall,-save-the-planet So my old boss, Maria Cantwell, is joining forces with John McCain on legislation that would reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act which required banks to choose between operating as a commercial bank or as an investment bank before it was repealed in the late 90s. Jason Linkins was following the news about the Cantwell-McCain effort and noticed that some random Treasury official was trying to push back on it. Linkins' counter-pushback was priceless: The most cutting remark against McCain and Cantwell's efforts comes courtesy of Unnamed Treasury Official, who, as you might imagine, is some kind of awesome prick: I think going back to Glass-Steagall would be like going back to the Walkman. But hey, you'd go back to your Walkman too, if everytime you put your iPod on shuffle, it blew up the goddamned planet. Moral of the story: Reinstate Glass-Steagall, save the planet. Of course, as Meteor Blades points out, given the way Congress deals with this kind of stuff, fat chance of it actually happening.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/o-rbbenecso/-One-process-note-on-the-days-events So the deal's out, and word is that they've got the necessary 60 votes for cloture on the health insurance reform bill. But if you caught this morning's story on the President's Saturday radio address, you'd have seen this forceful call for action: The question is whether the minority that opposes these reforms will continue to use parliamentary maneuvers to try and stop the Senate from voting on them. Whatever their position on health insurance reform, Senators ought to allow an up or down vote. Let’s bring this long and vigorous debate to an end. Let’s deliver on the promise of health insurance reforms that will make our people healthier, our economy stronger, and our future more secure. And as this difficult year comes to a close, let’s show the American people that we are equal to the task of meeting our great challenges. An up-or-down vote. Senators ought to allow an up-or-down vote. It's something we all hoped the President would call for, of course. But it lets some of the air out of the tires when the call comes on the day the Senate announces that they've finally found the right combination of concessions to get Democrats to agree to break a filibuster. When people call for the Senate to allow an up-or-down vote, they're calling for opponents to get out of the way and stop filibustering, so that it doesn't require 60 votes (for cloture) just to get to a final vote on passage. We'll be getting that up-or-down vote, all right. But not because the President's demands have broken through the logjam of Republican obstructionism. Rather, it'll happen despite its continuance, and even then only at the cost of a laundry list of concessions made to Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson. That by itself is not to say that the bill is or isn't worth the effort. We've had and will continue to have debate on that. But are we answering the President's call for an up-or-down vote here? No, we are not. Not in the sense in which everyone else in the world uses the term "up-or-down vote." A straight up-or-down vote would have gotten us to a vote on a bill that didn't need to make these concessions to Lieberman. Didn't need to make these concessions to Nelson. Didn't need to be courting Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. So we'll get a vote. And the bill will pass. But today's call for an up-or-down vote just doesn't mean much now that there's a deal in place that obviates the need for the up-or-down vote that most people think of when they hear that phrase. Though maybe that's just it. Do most people think of breaking the filibuster when they hear the words "up-or-down vote?" Not likely. They hear "vote." And a vote we will have. And by the middle of next week, it'll look for all intents and purposes like it was exactly the vote the President wanted. Make what you will of that, but it's an interesting lesson in the way the public perceptions game of politics is played. And therefore worth pointing out.
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http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/DRQxhrXdxyk/-A-New-Approach-to-US-Nuclear-Policy:-Deterring-Nuclear-Terrorism Back in August of this year, the Pentagon released two fact sheets on the Nuclear Posture Review, or NPR. As it states quite simply, the objective of the NPR is: To establish U.S. nuclear policy, strategy, capabilities and force posture for the next 5 - 10 years. At the time, a number of experts expressed concern about whether or not the Obama administration was going to take a fresh, new direction with the NPR, or simply continue Bush administration policies. Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, told me in an interview: The Nuclear Posture Review... will determine our policies and weapons systems certainly at least for the next five to ten years, and that's the scope of it. If it's done right, it can allow Obama to transform US nuclear policy to less reliance on nuclear weapons, greater focus on preventing nuclear terrorism, and new [nuclear weapons] states. If it's done wrong, it sandbags the President. It makes it much more difficult for him to cut weapons and nuclear budgets, much more difficult for him to negotiate and ratify the kinds of treaties that he's talking about. [snip] So we could very easily end up with... "Bush light": the Bush nuclear policies and posture tweaked just a bit, and given an Obama gloss. If the Pentagon has its way, that's what's going to happen. Well, there's finally some news about the NPR, and it looks like it will include a rather significant -- and welcome -- shift from the status quo. The New York Times has the story: The Obama administration’s classified review of nuclear weapons policy will for the first time make thwarting nuclear-armed terrorists a central aim of American strategic nuclear planning, according to senior Pentagon officials. When completed next year, the Nuclear Posture Review will order the entire government to focus on countering nuclear terrorists — whether armed with rudimentary bombs, stolen warheads or devices surreptitiously supplied by a hostile state — as a task equal to the traditional mission of deterring a strike by major powers or emerging nuclear adversaries. The nuclear review will affect how warheads are developed by the Department of Energy, deployed by the Department of Defense and limited through negotiations by the Department of State, as well as how the intelligence community and the military do their jobs and spend money. That could mean, for example, devoting less money to modernizing bombers, missiles and submarines, and more to surveillance satellites, reconnaissance planes and undercover agents. The article quotes "a senior Defense Department official", who emphasizes that the model of nuclear deterrence that we've all gotten used to (i.e. having an overwhelming nuclear arsenal in order to deter other countries from attacking the US or its allies) is far less relevant in the current global security environment: "The first — and in many ways the most urgent for where we are today — is the threat posed by nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism," said the official, who was granted anonymity to describe the current draft of the review. At the core of this threat, which officials say has been growing steadily since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is "the possible transfer of nuclear weapons or materials to a terrorist or substate actor," he said. The review will probably be completed by February. The issues that remain to be resolved include exactly what "stockpile maintenance and modernization" means, as well as whether or not the United States will conclusively state whether or not we will maintain a "first strike" nuclear stance. All in all, shifting the focus of the NPR from producing more nuclear weapons, and targeting potential nuclear weapons states (as the Bush administration did), to actual, realistic threats, would be a welcome change. If you don't believe that nuclear terrorism is a potential threat, I suggest you read Graham Allison's stellar book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. You can read more about it at his website, but I'll leave you with a quote from his book: The United States and its allies have the power to define and enforce global constraints on nuclear weapons. By doing so they can preserve all nations from the nightmare of a world in which nuclear terrorists destroy civilization as we know it. To make this order acceptable, however, they must marginalize the role of nuclear weapons and nuclear threats in international affairs.
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