Carnegie Mellon should be worried about DARPA funding

Speaking at Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Center last Friday, Obama said:

I just met with folks from some cutting-edge companies and saw some of their inventions here in your National Robotics Engineering Center. But that’s not the only reason I’m here. You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as Commander-in-Chief is to keep an eye on robots. (Laughter.) And I’m pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful -- (laughter) -- at least for now.

Wasn’t there a folk song called “When will the Robots turn their Guns Around”?

CBS News and American optimism

Watch CBS News Videos Online

Happy new year. this story, ''Concerns About U.S. Future'', was on Monday night's CBS News broadcast, and if you watch it through to the end it suggests that Americans have a mostly sunny view of the future. I won't pretend I know otherwise, because obviously I don't. All the same the report seems a bit glib and I wonder, as I have before, about the editorial aspect of the particular selections of 'man on the street' clips.

dry hump days

First, before I lose focus, let me mention the wonderful Arthur Silber, who is again raising funds, and sounds like he's in a tight spot. He's not the only one of course, but if you value his work and are in a position to help him, or even if you just want to help him and can, please consider doing so.


2.I would like to flatter myself(ourselves?) and pretend that Joe Bageant is name-checking Dead Horse here, but it's unlikely:

"Raising Up Dead Horses":

...Somewhere in the smoking wreckage lie the solutions. The solutions we aren't allowed to discuss: adoption of a Wall Street securities speculation tax; repeal of the Taft-Hartley anti-union laws; ending corporate personhood; cutting the bloated vampire bleeding the economy, the military budget; full single payer health care insurance, not some "public option" that is neither fish nor fowl; taxation instead of credits for carbon pollution; reversal of inflammatory U.S. policy in the Middle East (as in, get the hell out, begin kicking the oil addiction and quit backing the spoiled murderous brat that is Israel.

Meanwhile we may all feel free to row ourselves to hell in the same hand basket. Except of course the elites, the top five percent or so among us. But 95 percent is close enough to be called democratic, so what the hell. The trivialized media, having internalized the system's values, will continue to act as rowing captain calling out the strokes. News gathering in America is its own special hell, and reduces its practitioners to banality and elite sycophancy...

the rest is here.

3. I'm sure Michael Lind is a nice enough person, but somehow his essays at Salon often grate on me, even when he observes something that strikes me as true. In "That sound you hear is the social fabric about to snap " he observes that the real unemployment is probably closer to 20 per cent, and I suspect he's right. But his essay makes him seem tone-deaf, as if he's simply talking about a puzzle that needs to be solved, and needs to be discussed in such a way as to demonstrate the cleverness of the writer, but completely disassociated from the human misery involved, and blithely ignoring the corruption that will prevent any of his dainty solutions from materializing.


4. Avedon Carol, "Waiting for Grandma to die"

It's worth remembering that a lot of the people who voted for Republicans because they are twitchy on social issues - still basically racist, still homophobic, still disgusted by hippies and wimmin's libbers - also still love their Social Security and Medicare and think they pay taxes so government can do things for them. They think businesses should not be able to break the law and poison, trick, or rob their customers. They think people who work hard and play by the rules should be able to retire in reasonable comfort and not be treated like dirt because they didn't happen to get immorally rich. They just don't realize that those are the real liberal policies that conservatives hate the most and are trying the hardest to get rid of.

But there's a younger generation out there that, as BDBlue points out, grew up in the Reagan era and doesn't even appreciate what Social Security has accomplished. Young, healthy kids who are now seeing Democrats who were put in power by liberals openly transferring taxpayers' wealth to criminal banksters, and who are about to force them to buy overpriced crappy insurance from the same criminals who've been denying them health care all along.

And the only people who are suggesting in public that these Democrats might be doing them wrong are...right-wingers whose stock-in-trade is bashing the left. And there's no one on TV telling them that it's not "blacks" and "liberals" and "gays" and "illegal aliens" who are responsible for this.

the passage above is of course only an excerpt. Please go read all of it.

Even though I wouldn't say I know her well, I've known Avedon and her writing a lot longer than Arthur Silber or Joe Bageant or any of my co-writers here at DH. In 2005 she discouraged me from going to Iraq as I announced that I planned to in 2007, and I didn't, although it was not because of her advice but the poverty I've experienced for most of the past 4 years. My point, however, is that Avedon has had a strong influence on my thinking about politics and our increasingly messed-up world, going back to when I first discovered the world of political blogs in 2002, and I'd even say she's helped me grow as a writer.

By that same token, her influence on my thought may help you to have a better perspective on my arguments, such as they are. For example, although I agree with Rob about the need to end the US imperial project, I really don't see how it's possible without shoring up the welfare state, and healthcare, and the economy. To me they're tied together, as our whole society seems to be predicated more and more on brutishness, on "looking out for number one," and to me this isn't simply random or culturally driven, but also driven by the structure of government, including the rotten fruits of Reaganism and the deliberate, decades-long project of tearing apart of the New Deal.

(And ironically Bill Clinton did a lot of this, even if he was also more sensible than his successor about paying the bills.)

How are you going to get ordinary people to care about Afghans getting blown up when 800 people show up to apply for just one crummy job as a meter reader? And the lucky schmoes who actually have half-way decent jobs, how do you get them to care about dismantling the empire when they're worried their health coverage may become similarly dismantled, and the press and President Smoke-and-Mirrors tell them the most they may hope for from the current healthcare 'reform' push is a government plan to sell people health insurance, when every other civilized country just provides healthcare-- i.e., allows you to pursue happiness without the fear or need for such insurance? I don't think you can.


Thursday, 22 October, some additional thoughts: I realize as I look at the above words that this argument is significantly incomplete. I don't want to suggest that arresting the US's economic slide and bolstering the social safety-net will suddenly make us a nation of Howard Zinns and Eleanor Roosevelts, but I do think it's a necessary condition for putting us on the right path. There's a lot more that needs to be addressed, from the infantilizing mission of corporate mass media to the amply demonstrated fact that US elites know they can largely ignore the more progressive impulses that popular majorities occasionally have, with no consequences. I was hoping some interesting commenters might leave some interesting comments and further the discussion, but maybe my rude title put them off, or something else... Anyway, I will return to this topic in a few days.

Doomed?

via
http://www.pollingreport.com/budget.htm


CBS News/New York Times Poll. July 24-28, 2009. N=1,050 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3. (Double-click on image for larger view.)

the politics of lyme disease

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has an exceptional essay on Lyme disease and the politics of restricting treatment, apropos of a recent shooting at a Baptist church in Illinois. It's a lengthy article, well worth reading in full. Here's an excerpt:

The shooter, Terry Sedlacek, had struggled for years with long-term, chronic Lyme disease, contracted after being bitten by a tick some years ago. Though this description of his symptoms seems extreme even among Lyme patients, his struggle to get treatment is an infuriatingly common one. The media debate over the role this disease may have played in the shooting has tapped into one of the most furious and tragic medical debates in modern medicine. On one hand: there are doctors on TV claiming that it's entirely possible that Lyme can create the kind of psychiatric problems that would lead to this kind of catastrophe. On the other are doctors saying that it's impossible -- Lyme is a relatively benign bacterial infection that's easily treated with a few weeks of antibiotics.

Infectious disease specialists-- represented by the Infectious Disease Society of American (ISDA) -- have for decades held to the firm position that Lyme is a spirochete that can be killed with a 28-day course of doxycycline. If you're still sick when the month is over, whatever you have isn't Lyme (and, in practice, is generally assumed to be psychosomatic). And this is true, as far as it goes: if you're lucky enough to catch the disease in the first few months after you're bit -- or you've got one of the many strains that's amenable to this treatment -- a short course of doxy usually does do the trick.


However, once some strains of Lyme get dispersed and embedded in the body's tissues, the standard treatment won't touch them. Worse: the standard Lyme tests won't, either, so the results will likely come back negative. The shady politics of how the approved Lyme tests were developed would take a whole separate post to explain; but suffice to say that they're only 70% accurate on their best day, which would make them patently unacceptable as a diagnostic tool were it any other disease. Far more accurate and sensitive tests are available, but insurance companies won't cover the $400 fee.

That's because the IDSA panel doesn't approve of these tests (even though the "controversial" proteins it tests for -- the only ones common to all Lyme strains -- are the same proteins some of these same doctors once tried to build a Lyme vaccine on). It also doesn't accept Lyme's shapeshifting nature; the existence of a chronic form of resistant Lyme that requires long-term treatment; the importance of seeking out and treating co-infections; or the neurological and cognitive issues it can cause. All of these facts are well-documented by the peer-reviewed science; but IDSA's Lyme panel has actually purged new members who brought these studies up for consideration.

All this is part of the background for the dueling doctor interviews we're seeing on TV this week.

The Great Divide
Why would ostensibly caring doctors be so resistant to accepting new and better data? As always, follow the money. The IDSA's minimalist view of Lyme is greatly favored by insurance companies, who really don't want to be on the hook for expensive testing or more than a month of treatment. On a broader note: they're absolutely terrified (with good reason) that Lyme could turn out to be another huge budget-busting epidemic like AIDS, and want to do everything they can to make sure they're not stuck with the bills for it. To that end, they've made sure that the ISDA's Lyme experts have been richly rewarded with grants, consulting fees, and so on for aggressively defending the narrowest possible case definition and the most limited treatment standards. For their part, IDSA's Lyme group has held up their end of the deal so reliably that last May, they became the first medical standards board in the history of American medicine to be successfully sued (by the attorney general of Connecticut, no less) for corruption.

I don't normally make a habit of quoting so extensively, but I want to encourage you to go read her essay in its entirety, here.

Cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

Joe Bageant, Obama, and the days and years ahead

I hadn't visited Joe Bageant's digs in a while, and I was curious to see if he had any thoughts about the Obama inauguration. Joe's new essay is here:
"North Toward Home: from here in Central America, you can't see America's "shining city on the hill," but you can smell the dead in Gaza."

Also, I chanced upon an earlier, really exceptional, essay I hadn't seen before, from April of 2008, "The Audacity of Depression." Written in the midst of the HRC-Obama scrap, in which Joe makes it pretty clear that he sees Obama's appeals to hope for what they are, without therefore suggesting Hillary is a better alternative. I've saved it to my del.icio.us account under "the fall", which is the name I give for this category of writings, not quite a genre, which I see more and more of, discussing forebodings of US decline. From the 2008 essay:

Lately though, I don't hear so much outrage. In fact, the readers seem to be suffering from what someone aptly called "rage fatigue." Which is another way of saying the bastards have simply worn us out. And it's true.

I am not kidding when I say rage fatigue victims have fallen into an ongoing mid-level depression. (Looks to me like the whole country has, but then I'm no mental health expert.) The less depressed victims can be found lurking near the edges of the Obama cult, consoling themselves that a soothing and/or charismatic orator is better than nothing.
[...]
like whoever else wins the presidency, Obama can never acknowledge any significant truth, such as that the nation is waaaaay beyond being just broke, and is even a net debtor nation to Mexico, or that the greatest touch-me-not in the U.S. political flower garden, the "American lifestyle," is toast. But then, we really do not expect political truth, but rather entertainment in a system where, as Frank Zappa said, politics is merely "the entertainment branch of industry."

Still, millions of Americans do grasp at The Audacity of Hope, a meaningless marketing slogan of the publishing industry if ever there was one. At least it has the word Audacity in it, something millions of folks are having trouble conjuring up the least shred of these days. And there is good old fashioned "Hope" of course -- that murky, undefined belief that some unknown force or magical unseen power will reverse the national condition -- will deliver us from what every bit of evidence indicates is irreversible, if not politically, then economically and ecologically: Collapse.

cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.

In medias res: welcome young 2009

The year is barely 24 hours old as I write this, and 3 notable persons have already passed on:

• Claiborne Pell, 90, American politician, Senator from Rhode Island (1961-1997)
  
• Nizar Rayyan, 49, Palestinian military commander for Hamas, air strike.
  
• Helen Suzman, 91, South African anti-apartheid activist, MP (1953–1989)

For some time me brain been percolating a post about American decline, and given this background preoccupation, inevitably I find myself thinking about how these three person's lives illustrate various perspectives on that topic.

Nizar Rayyan was by no means a choir boy, but he was the closest thing Gaza had to a secretary of defense, and in some ways his death and the stolid, "nothing-to-see-here" way the US press has dealt with it helps illustrate one aspect of US decline, as we juxtapose the IDF airstrikes against Hamas with the EU's condemnation and the US's official impassivity, as Bush, jnr insists he won't break off his last Christmas vacation as president to address the Israeli violence. and our new talk-show-culture president elect insists on framing the conflict in terms of how he thinks he would react if he was an Israeli parent, discussing hypothetical danger to his daughters whom we should see as people, unlike, say, your average no-good Palistinian kid. Americans have traditionally flattered themselves that their government leads the world, but the EU shows leadership while the US establishment, the Congress having voted to supply the bombs that destroy Gazan lives, hide behind the moral indolence of their shrub-clearing lame-duck president.


Claiborne Pell's death reminds me of how forward-thinking the US welfare state once was with respect to financing higher education, as we juxtapose the 1960s and the era of the Pell Grant, still around but endangered , with the current state of financial aid and higher education, as state and federal budgets put the squeeze on working-class and lower-middle class aspirants to a better life.

Helen Suzman was a civil rights pioneer-- from South Africa. She was one of Nelson Mandela's few white friends who visited him in jail and agitated for his release, years before hip Western kids identified him as a signifier of coolness, like the Dalai Lama or Coldplay or yes, Barack Obama. Her life, and those (several) dark chapters in South Africa's history remind me of how, here in the US, we once had a functioning left, one that successfully shamed many American institutions into divesting themselves of their South African holdings, something that might be impossible today, when so many people seemingly settle for voting as absolution in which a vaguely religious political leader forgives you for your civic laziness because you voted for him. And don't forget to help him pay off Hillary Clinton's debt to pollster Mark Penn. I hear he doesn't really need the money, but hey, a contract is a contract. Yes you can.


photos: Reuters


cross-posted at Hugo Zoom

Columbus day 2008

library of congress

Undoubtedly you've heard people say, "I don't know much about [thing x], but I know what I like." Well, I like art, and I know essentially nothing about it. Why was Jackson Pollock's splattering valuable, and your two year old cousin Jeff's splattering a thing to be outgrown and simply lamentable? I dunno.

All the same, I suspect, in my untutored way, that this lithograph is visual doggerel. I think it might be famous, and of course I could be dead wrong, at least about the critical rep of the original. Nevertheless, I felt sufficiently bold to draw a nice little yellow arrow on the middle-right side of the panel to show you a Pre-Columbian Native, so you'd notice him, lurking behind the fern.

Why is he there? Does the artist want us to see the Native Indian Indigenous guy as ominous, representing a threat to Columbus?

Or maybe we're supposed to see the Indigenous Guy as fearful, knowing his place and conveniently staying out of the picture.

I'm tempted to say that a psychoanalytical view would say that the artist wants to banish all thought of Indigenous Guy's presence, but nevertheless feels a compulsion, perhaps out of unresolved guilt, to represent our friend Indigenous Guy. (Such a view might also note in passing my childishness in drawing the arrow.) But then, psychoanalysis is yet another field I know nothing about, so I really shouldn't say this...

[here's a larger view.]

cross-posted at "Hugo Zoom"

Dead Horse pt 2: or, are you a domesticated goat?

From wikisource, "The Goatherd and the wild goats"

A Goatherd, driving his flock from their pasture at eventide, found some Wild Goats mingled among them, and shut them up together with his own for the night. The next day it snowed very hard, so that he could not take the herd to their usual feeding places, but was obliged to keep them in the fold. He gave his own goats just sufficient food to keep them alive, but fed the strangers more abundantly in the hope of enticing them to stay with him and of making them his own. When the thaw set in, he led them all out to feed, and the Wild Goats scampered away as fast as they could to the mountains. The Goatherd scolded them for their ingratitude in leaving him, when during the storm he had taken more care of them than of his own herd. One of them, turning about, said to him: "That is the very reason why we are so cautious; for if you yesterday treated us better than the Goats you have had so long, it is plain also that if others came after us, you would in the same manner prefer them to ourselves."

Given that I've decided to call this "Dead Horse", I probably should be careful about mixing my animal metaphors. Nevertheless I come back, time and again, to this story whenever I listen to practically anything that comes out of Obama's mouth, he of the silver tongue that makes lefty swooners swoon. I'm not so impressed with Obama myself, and I'm inclined to think his reluctance to define his politics will ultimately hurt him, even if he has more charisma than Kerry or Gore. (Of course most warm-blooded organisms have more charisma than Kerry or Gore, but that's another matter.)

All the same, even if Obama doesn't do anything for me, I recognize that millions of people do respond to him. And yet, he seems doggedly determined to squander his opportunity to help remake American politics at a time when we, the otherwise very conservative public, are more ready for meaningful liberalism and activist government, and yes, change, than we have been in a very long time. The economy appears to be teetering, government corruption and scandal, mostly republican, has soured people on incumbents and the "establishment" and we are mired in (at least one) costly and highly questionable war.

But we have Nancy Pelosi, the supposedly far left-wing democratic speaker of the house, loudly telling everybody who'll listen about her table, the one that will not allow impeachment of the most blatantly crooked president since Richard Nixon(who was pardoned 34 years ago tomorrow, on September 8th, 1974), and Obama and his running mate Joe Biden eagerly praising their opponents on Fox News and assuring anybody who'll still listen that they needn't be concerned about criminal charges being leveled against George Bush, jr.

What's wrong with this picture? Where do you even start?

This is why I'm starting "Dead Horse", which is meant to be a conversation about

1.the dysfunctional democratic party, and whether or not it can (or should) be saved.

2. our post 9-11, post-constitutional republic, a screwed up simulacrum where things are rarely as they seem, at least as far as I can see-- because

2b. It's not just the democrats "suddenly" having become dysfunctional, but a process of unraveling which seems to have been going on for a long time.

Or maybe I'm wrong(not 2b. Sorry, I can't resist...) That's why I want, from the get-go, for DH to be a group blog, for which I'm sending several invitations, both to bloggers who I feel are in approximately the same "camp" as I am, as well as a couple of others who might feel somewhat sunnier about the prospects for our future. I want to try to create the conditions and a venue for a useful conversation, not just an echo chamber. More soon, and hopefully not just from me.


cross-posted at "Hugo Zoom"

Dead Horse: September 1st(Part 1 of 2)

Sometimes it's difficult for me to write according to the perceived dictates of blogging, by which each post is supposed to be about a discrete topic, ostensibly separate from the topics that precede and follow. For example, when I look at the miasma of events in recent weeks I try to give them a context, at least within my own noggin. South Ossetia, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, the "pre-emptive" Minneapolis police raid(also here (via), hurricane Gustav, the forced resignation of Pakistan's corrupt strongman(and the continued non-resignation of our own president), they're all connected, at least in my mind.

Yesterday I called my father, whom I hadn't talked to in a couple of months, and I expressed my disappointment with Obama. My pop is intelligent enough not to fall for the "historical opportunity" song-and-dance, and he's not the sort to be reactively aghast at the thought that somebody might think that the meaningful differences between the two parties is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Nevertheless, he said that he felt the differences that do exist do matter, and that you don't have to be crazy about the nominee to vote for him, because at least he's not McCain, etc. You know, the lesser-of-two-evils argument.

The cartoonishly earnest change-fetish segment of Obama's supporters get a lot of media(and blogosphere) attention, but, win or lose, it's unlikely they make up that big a segment of the voting populace, or even of the people who will end up voting for him. I suspect that the number of voters who choose Obama in November who take a more sober approach like my father are far larger. In a recent comment thread at Jonathan Schwarz's ATR, Nell of A Lovely Promise argued that turning away from the Democratic ticket because you're hoping to hasten the decline of the US empire was a form of "armchair Leninism", and noted that it's pollyannish to expect that a more enlightened state would inevitably emerge from the rubble-- and I suspect she's right.


(cross-posted at Hugo Zoom.)