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Silently longing

Monday, May 14, 2007

The Catholic Church, at least today, has a fairly good record on science. Having been burned by Galileo (figuratively that is, almost literally for him), the Church has kept a rather low profile on scientific issues. Officially, for instance, it has reluctantly accepted the scientific validity of evolution. However, that doesn’t stop it from adopting faith based approaches to other disciplines. Philosophy is a given, and almost excusable. Also ripe for the truthiness approach is History, and Pope Ratzinger hasn’t disappointed. Like Colbert, he has no use for what’s in books if his gut tells him different. He gave his listeners in South America a history lesson recently:

…[I}n comment likely to generate controversy in Latin America, the pope said indigenous peoples, “silently longing” for Christianity, had welcomed the arrival of European priests who “purified” them. Many indigenous rights groups believe the conquest ushered in a period of disease, mass murder, enslavement and the shattering of their cultures.

There’s a twofer for you: A Pope spreading lies and a news organization playing the “on the one hand, on the other hand” card. Who knows, after all, where the truth lies. Are you going to believe massive amounts of historical evidence, or the Pope. Take your pick.

Okay, I admit it, we’ll never know if those folks were silently longing for the white man to come and convert them. Maybe they were. One thing we do know is that they weren’t silent after Columbus got to them-they were too busy screaming. A quick Google search for “columbus native peoples extermination” reveals this little gem, among many others:

All told, it is likely that between 60 million and 80 million people from the Indies to the Amazon had perished as a result of the European invasion even before the dawning of the seventeenth century. Although much of that ghastly population collapse was caused by the spread of european diseases to which the native peoples had no immunity, an enormous amount of it was the result of mass murder. A good deal, as well, derived from simply working the enslaved native laborers to death.

I’ll spare you some of the grisly details and the more inventive methods of killing that the Christians used to save souls. But I can’t resist this quote from Bertrand Russell:

“The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out; by this means they secured that these infants went to heaven. No orthodox Christian can find any logical reason for condemning their action, although all nowadays do so”.

Well, not all. Obviously Bertrand Russell never met Ratzi. Those kids had their silent longings fulfilled, were “purified”, and now are happy with God forever and ever in heaven, as are the pious murderers who sent them there. Those grumblers in South America are just ungrateful swine.

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The few, the proud, the convicted

Sunday, May 13, 2007

We have a problem, as everyone knows, finding people to serve in the Armed Forces. A columnist in today’s Courant has the answer.

Before the answer is revealed, however, he finds it necessary to libel every high school student and, by extension, every high school teacher in America:

Military recruiters are wasting time and energy trolling high school halls for manpower. Take a look at so many high school classrooms: You’ll see rooms strewn with abused books, crumpled bags of chips, emptied cans of soda; you’ll see dissipation and contempt.

The writer should know, one assumes, though he provides no evidence and he doesn’t teach high school.

Things must have changed radically in the past few years. My kids were in high school not that long ago, and I seem to recall that they, along with many of their contemporaries, were hard working, serious kids. The universal dissipation and contempt must be a recent phenomenon.

But not to worry, we have another institution just chock full of people with the seriousness of purpose, and most importantly, the need for structure so inherent in military life: our prisons. In fact, many of our time serving felons yearn for the chance to enter the Armed Forces. Indeed, their prison experience admirably suits them for a military career:

Inmates live by regimens, [one inmate] said, which should be viewed as a qualification.

I’m as ready as the next person to believe that almost anyone (sorry, Karl, George, Abu, etc., not everyone) can be redeemed. Still, I can’t help thinking that those prisoners, or most of them, went to high school, and there’s a better than even chance that they were highly ranked in the dissipation and contempt scale. In fact, to a great extent, it was their very leadership on that score that landed them in prison. Maybe it’s a good idea to stock our armed forces with convicted felons, but, given the problems we already have with torture and civilian killings, perhaps we ought to think twice about focusing our recruitment efforts in our prisons.

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They shovel horseshit, don’t they?

Sunday, May 13, 2007

In today’s Times, an article on the new French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, begins with an extended, and ultimately baffling metaphor, in which the reporter riffs on the fact that Sarkozy rode a horse. As near as I can figure, the point is that while Sarkozy rode a horse-indeed, a white horse- he is not the Lone Ranger or Gary Cooper at High Noon. He is not, in short, the man of destiny single handedly imposing order on a fractious frontier. A sidebar (print edition only) apparently helps those of us too dim to get the point:

Bush on a horse sends one signal. Sarkozy on a horse sends another.

Translation: Sarkozy’s no Lone Ranger, Bush is.

The reporter who wrote the piece no doubt did not write the sidebar, so he can’t be blamed. But someone at the Times wrote it, and an editor let it in. The sidebar itself sends a signal, in fact a shout, of its own, about the American media and its insistence on attributing masculine “strength” to Bush in particular, and Republican politicians in general.

The Times apparently believes that our brush cutting president, owner of a bought for photo-op ranch in Crawford, must be a John Wayne in the saddle, because – well, just because. After all, Reagan was, wasn’t he, and aren’t all Republicans man’s men?

The truth, something the media prefers not to tell (or discover) is that Bush’s cowboy image is a disguise for a moral and physical coward, metaphorically revealed in the real life relationship between our cowboy president and horses.

I submit the following facts to a candid world:

The only relevant result at Google Images for the term “bush horse” is the following:

hs376-a.jpg

Maybe the Times can clarify exactly what signal it believes this image sends. You will not find another.

Rest assured if Bush rode horses, Rove would make sure he issued his cowboy announcements, steely eyed and hand on his holster, from the back of his steed. If you have any doubt, do a straight Google of the term “bush afraid of horses” and peruse the links. Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire, in some cases at least. Lord knows if Karl could get George on a horse he’d have done it by now.

Now, I don’t particularly care that our cowboy president is afraid of horses. It’s not even surprising. What sets me off is the reflexive assumption by our paper of record that, despite the fact that he hasn’t been seen on horseback in six years, our chickenshit president is the Lone Ranger, horse and all. Why do they rush to swallow, and even embellish, the Rovian Bush fantasy?

I always thought that at least one function of the press was to get through to the reality behind the images politicians seek to project. The Times, after all, worked hard to get behind the images of Democrats, by, in those cases, pushing Republican lines of attack (e.g., Gore the liar (Bush gets a pass), Kerry and his “butler”, (Bush gets a pass), and Edwards and his haircut (all Republicans get a pass)) that bore less resemblance to reality than the images they supplanted. In the Wonderland world of our media, when Republicans are the subject, the myth is all we hear.

Bush hardly needs Fox when the alleged non-partisan media is so willing to spread this type of propaganda.

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Priorities

Saturday, May 12, 2007

It has been remarked elsewhere that the American media has taken a decidedly low key approach to reporting the fact that over half the members of the Iraqi Parliament want a timetable for U.S. withdrawal.

The story leaked out several days ago, but it took the New York Times until this morning to mention it in its print edition. It really is odd that the paper that trumpeted bogus WMD claims on page 1 sees fit to relegate this story to page 6.

I’m only being half sarcastic. At this point it really is odd. With the Bush pre-war justification now exposed as a fraud, and the issue of timetables so much a part of our domestic discourse, isn’t this story critically important? At this point, is it really in the Times interest to keep covering for the Boy King? Isn’t it front page news that the Iraqi Parliament, for whatever reason, agrees with the Democrats? How can we expect to “succeed”, however success is defined at the moment, if the people we are supposedly seeking to help want to see the back of us?

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A general speaks out

Friday, May 11, 2007

General John Batiste

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMPIi03wSfY[/youtube]

After this ad was released CBS fired him as a military consultant, while retaining Bush supporting “consultants“.

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Supporting the troops

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Joe Courtney votes to withdraw all troops within 9 months.

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Octopus meets shark

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Fascinating but not for the squeamish. My wife discovered this video on a blog written by a friend of my older son’s. Nothing political about it, but certainly shows how surprising nature can be.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7004909622962894202&hl=en[/googlevideo]

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Liars, Liars

Thursday, May 10, 2007

This story is all over the internets, but I can’t resist linking to it to. Read this great article by Murray Wass from the National Journal. It’s impossible to cherry pick a quote, there’s just too much there, but this gives a flavor of it:

The Bush administration has withheld a series of e-mails from Congress showing that senior White House and Justice Department officials worked together to conceal the role of Karl Rove in installing Timothy Griffin, a protégé of Rove’s, as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.

The withheld records show that D. Kyle Sampson, who was then-chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, consulted with White House officials in drafting two letters to Congress that appear to have misrepresented the circumstances of Griffin’s appointment as U.S. attorney and of Rove’s role in supporting Griffin.

It’s a complex story, but it boils down to this. At every possible opportunity the White House and the Justice Department have lied about every facet of this scandal. It’s almost as if they can’t help themselves.

More surprising that that is the fact that there may actually be someone within the executive branch who has some integrity:

Several of the e-mails that the Bush administration is withholding from Congress, as well as papers from the White House counsel’s office describing other withheld documents, were made available to National Journal by a senior executive branch official, who said that the administration has inappropriately kept many of them from Congress.

The senior official said that Gonzales, in preparing for testimony before Congress, has personally reviewed the withheld records and has a responsibility to make public any information he has about efforts by his former chief of staff, other department aides, and White House officials to conceal Rove’s role.

“If [Gonzales] didn’t know everything that was going on when it went down, that is one thing,” this official said. “But he knows and understands chapter and verse. If there was an effort within Justice and the White House to mislead Congress, it is his duty to disclose that to Congress. As the country’s chief law enforcement official, he has a higher duty to disclose than to protect himself or the administration.”

But before we jump to the crazy conclusion that someone in the executive branch has scruples, we must pause to consider that this might just be some sort of guerrilla warfare within the executive, or between the White House and Justice. If so, maybe that’s even better. Nothing beats watching your opponents devour each other.

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The Ferrets have their say

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Ferrets for Freedom (via Oliver Willis)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9S7o9Bju4k[/youtube]

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Kickbacks for doctors

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Some time ago I was involved in a horrible case in which our client was accused of paying kickbacks to the representative of a firm that bought products from him. In essence, the buyer got a hidden percentage of each payment that the firm made to our client. I hated the case with a passion, for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that there was, shall we say, substantial evidence that the claims were true. That case is long over, and good riddance, but I thought about it today when I read this article (Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia Drugs) in Today’s Times:

Two of the world’s largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia medicines, which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses.

The payments are legal, but very few people outside of the doctors who receive them are aware of their size…

Industry analysts estimate that such payments — to cancer doctors and the other big users of the drugs, kidney dialysis centers — total hundreds of millions of dollars a year and are an important source of profit for doctors and the centers….

Neither Amgen nor Johnson & Johnson has disclosed the total amount of the payments. But documents given to The New York Times show that at just one practice in the Pacific Northwest, a group of six cancer doctors received $2.7 million from Amgen for prescribing $9 million worth of its drugs last year.

It’s hard for me to understand how this sort of kickback scheme can be legal, though I’ll take the reporter’s word that it is. How is it any different than the kickback scheme in which my client was (allegedly) involved? The patients are equivalent to the firm that was being ripped off, the drug companies are the equivalent of my client, and the doctors are the equivalent of the guy getting the kickbacks, supposedly acting in the best interests of the patients, but secretly pocketing almost one third of their drug costs.

There’s no moral distinction, and it’s hard to see the legal distinction. Morally, there’s no question that the doctors have a duty to their patients that they are breaching by taking these payments, and, most likely, prescribing drugs that are inappropriate for the patient because there’s money in it for them if they do so.

There ought to be a law, and maybe there is. Were I an Attorney General of a small New England State, I would consider using the Unfair Trade Practices Act. The behavior certainly seems to meet the immoral, unethical, oppressive or unscrupulous standard.

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