USPS

The reported 3.8 billion dollar loss from the US Post Office has been a recent talking point of the right. Part of the problem is a lack of efficiency embedded in many bureaucracies, and I think it would behoove Democrats (or anyone in government that believes in government services) to make government programs more efficient, logical, and transparent. But the idea that the post office shouldn't operate at a loss is a bit bizarre. On its face, the factoid can be used to chastise government's inability to "get involved in business", but dig a bit deeper and simple economics shows that if you don't want the loss, the Post Office can simply charge more to send your mail. The "loss" is probably partly due to a failure on the part of management to cope with new realities, but the bulk of that nearly $4 billion is simply a subsidy from the government to make it cheaper to partake in an essential service.

I hear the same argument about Amtrak. As far as I'm concerned, Amtrak isn't supposed to turn a profit--not with the lack of high speed rail infrastructure we have in this country (They turn a profit on what passes for high speed rail from, say, DC to NYC. They lose money on nearly everything else). Affordable train travel is a service, and while at times still expensive, it's nice to know that someone can get on a train and not have their wallets gouged from their clutches just to travel city to city. It would certainly be nice if all of our government programs could break even, but they use tax revenue to operate and to fill those gaps. That's the whole idea of government anyway; to provide essential services. They don't operate on the same business model as Visa. Or, at least they shouldn't.

One lesson from all this is to use the post office. If your tax money is going there anyway, might as well (Mise well, in colloquial Jersian) use them instead of Fed Ex or UPS, or send that letter to a close friend instead of emailing it. Why not?

CBS

I love how CBS's Sunday night lineup is symbolic to the nation's priorities. Football will go on as long as it needs to, and then 60 Minutes, a weekly news program that deals with some of the more important issues of the country, can begin its musings. If it's late and people miss it, so what. Football advertisements make the money for 60 Minutes, so they better not complain! Oh education and its silly expectation of preponderance.

Cerebral II

(don't bother to watch the video)

Capitalism via humanity

I have a major block in that I find it difficult to conceptualize what an ideal societal situation is that involves a trajectory from our current situation. Maybe it's because I'm not smart enough, or because I'm still very young, emotional, and reactionary. It's probably both. But part of me can't simply write-off the idea of "capitalism" (which involves the "free market", whatever that is ;p). It seems to me that if socialism as a system of economics and governance requires people to be inherently good (Call it 51%, rounded up), then people can be inherently good within a capitalist system. Maybe not likely, arguably, but possible, especially if the accepted truth is that people have the capacity to be inherently good and to do things that benefit others--benevolence for mass consumption!

But capitalism is fine, really. It's the education, the indoctrination, and then of course the regulation--the public policy and lack thereof--that makes it what it is. After all, "money" is just a token system that allows you to make choices. Many of those choices are taken away from people through exploitation and neglect, but for people who have access to money, it really is just a token system. In a socialist economic system, things might work a bit differently and obviously; IE, maybe the average person has a choice between a nicer personal vehicle and better bracket of 2 week vacations, but it's still ideally a finite choice situation I think.

I think it would be nice if people who made businesses preferred the ideology of: Sure, our idea is to make a profit, and sure we'd like to expand, and sure I'd like to buy a nicer place, but regardless of all of that, we're going to make a product worth buying. That would be nice.

Cerebral

Often times I'm around people who are so much smarter than I am that the gap smacks me right in the face. How can I achieve true greatness when I clearly will never measure up to these minds? Other times I realize that I'm smart enough, and if I care about something that's worth caring about, and work towards something worth working towards, I can make some badass changes and lead a life not constricted by money.

But the point of this post was to suggest that people who produce thought need some cerebral time. Some self reflexion, some wild, incomplete thoughts; occasionally having no thoughts at all seems important to psychological growth. This is why I like songs like this, particularly the first 5 minutes.

Palin, unsere Furoren

What If they Don't?

by digby

Everyone seems too be applauding the "Palinization" of the GOP. Lou Dobbs may run for president. Wingnut firebrand Marco Rubio may beat moderate Charlie Christ in Florida. Tom Tancredo just threw his hat into the ring for Colorado Governor. Liberals seem very excited about this prospect as if it's self-evident that just as NY 23 laughed off that dead doorknob Hoffman, the country will always think these people are fools.

But what if they don't?

In Palin's case I think it's probably true, not because she is a bigger fool but rather because she is a woman and a different kind of right wing celebrity. But I honestly wonder if it's a good idea to not take these people a little more seriously. There are some rather stark historical examples of people assuming that a right wing demagogic movement is so ridiculous that a majority could never back them --- and that assumption being proved catastrophically wrong.

And even if they are a bunch of fools who can't possibly ever be elected by a majority, is it wise to ignore the fact that as this movement moves farther and farther to the right it leaves a vacuum that the political establishment expects the Democrats to fill? Whenever the Republicans move right, the villagers expect the Democrats to do the same. Indeed, with the Republicans taking themselves completely out of legislation, the Democrats have pretty much assigned members of their own ranks to take their place in the negotiations. They have the ability to move the right without the country even realizing it's happening.

I'm not saying that we should panic. These people are politically weak in their own right. But when I see the liberal gasbags on TV blithely dismissing this as if it''s impossible that Americans could ever fall for such lunacy, I feel a little frisson of alarm. I've read too many accounts of people who, 80 or so years ago, complacently made the same assumption. And the whole world found out that under the right circumstances even the most civilized nations can throw in with the crazies.

What the word

This is exactly how I feel. Ha!

We learned in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was trumped by Vietnam, that nation-building here at home is incompatible with the demands of war. We’ve managed to keep the worst of the carnage — and the staggering costs — of Iraq and Afghanistan well out of the sight of most Americans, so the full extent of the terrible price we are paying is not widely understood.

The ultimate financial costs will be counted in the trillions. If you were to take a walk around one of the many military medical centers, like Landstuhl in Germany or Walter Reed in Washington, your heart would break at the sight of the heroic young men and women who have lost limbs (frequently more than one) or who are blind or paralyzed or horribly burned. Hundreds of thousands have suffered psychological wounds. Many have contemplated or tried suicide, and far too many have succeeded.

Benn Lee Jordan

I'm not sure how much this guy circulates, but given that I've come to gain a lot of respect for him, it made sense to elaborate a bit.

I first experienced Benn Lee Jordan when I listened to These Open Fields by his pseudonym "Flashbulb"*. *The credit for the osmosis, I believe, goes to Leah. It has since become one of my favorite albums of all time (sans track 20, which seems a tad misplaced). Obviously the CD as a whole comes very recommended, but this track is particularly scrumptious:


The very next track, "Thump, Cry" is also quite intriguing but very different. It's a bit more clubby, and something I can only describe as swimming like a mermaid through laser beams.

But try another pseudonym. Acidwolf:

Pakistan's nuclear arsenal

The turmoil did not end with [the Pakistan] Army’s invasion [of the Swat Valley]. “Most of the people who were in the refugee camps told us that the Army was equally bad. There was so much killing,” Yusufzai said. The government had placed limits on reporters who tried to enter the Swat Valley during the attack, but afterward Yusufzai and his colleagues were able to interview officers. “They told us they hated what they were doing—‘We were trained to fight Indians.’ ” But that changed when they sustained heavy losses, especially of junior officers. “They were killing everybody after their colleagues were killed—just like the Americans with their Predator missiles,” Yusufzai said. “What the Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.” What looked like a tactical victory could turn out to be a strategic failure.

Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “I don’t think there’s any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don’t tell us what we want to hear we’ll cut off their goodies.” Gelb added, “In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were ‘access.’ I don’t know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

Pull out before busting

I intended to write about Halloween and how it was the first time I hadn't dressed up beyond a quickly abandoned attempt at Party City. Before Halloween, I intended to write something about the passion-seeding of music. And along the way I wanted to talk more about friends and relationships (former, current, estranged, limping...the upshot would have been positive and hopefully somewhat inspiring).

But time got the better of me, and now we're left with just more Afghanistan, for which Spencer Ackerman's recent article comes into play:

Which leads to the biggest question of all, and one that looks unlikely to be answered even by the new strategy review: How does Obama envision the end of this war? There is no indication that he has an answer. Obama has spoken of a long-term US relationship with both Afghanistan and Pakistan that will extend well beyond the withdrawal of American troops, but has not explained the conditions under which those forces might actually be removed. In March, after Obama announced the goal of the war was to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al Qa’eda, I asked Denis McDonough, one of his closest advisers, what that meant. “They have to be met by force,” McDonough said, and prevented from carrying out their plans, but “defeating” them ultimately meant providing “different opportunities” to Afghans and Pakistanis. If it sounded like anything, it sounded like containment, confrontation and confusion over when the United States will have ultimately won. In practice, it is a road map for open-ended war.

This is the war that's going to define a President I happen to like, and unfortunately it seems like he's surrounding himself with people that, although varied in their conclusions, all put withdrawal completely off the table. What happens now is, at best, a slow trickle of casualties from a war that really has no place existing. We don't gain anything from "winning", besides a political stamp that has unforeseen gains anyway.

I understand the political implications of leaving, and maybe that leaves it more realistically to something in 2013, but that still lets it bleed us of money that could have been spent elsewhere. It costs $500,000 to deploy a civilian to Afghanistan. I'm not sure of the figure for military personnel...I don't think it's as much, but it's not all that cheaper. But I think it'll end up, historically, similar to the stimulus issue. Barack Obama's Whitehouse went the "centrist" route, with little fan fair, and secured something that didn't make waves in the moment. But, like the stimulus, which could have plugged holes in state budgets and put so many more people to work on essential infrastructure projects, it's going to turn out to be not only a political miscalculation, but the morally and economically wrong choice that garnered enough of the right to make it feasible but too few results to make it reasonable.