Kasztanka, Polish Marshal Józef Piłsudski's favorite combat mare, was stuffed upon her death in 1927 and after World War II was destroyed, allegedly on the orders of Piłsudski's enemy, Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
F**k fees
from Russia Today:
"Tens of thousands of students marched through London on Wednesday against plans to triple university tuition fees, and violence erupted as a minority battled police and trashed a building containing the headquarters of the governing Conservative Party. Organisers said 50-thousand students, lecturers and supporters demonstrated against plans to raise the cost of studying at a university to 9-thousand pounds a year - three times the current rate - in the largest street protest yet against the government's sweeping austerity measures."
...the bipartisan leaders of President Barack Obama's deficit commission proposed curbs in Social Security benefits, deep reductions in federal spending and higher taxes for millions of Americans Wednesday to stem a flood of red ink that they said threatens the nation's very future.
Another video from Russia Today- this time with nice crispy sound that syncs properly, but the video is somewhat washed out. C'est la vie, as Russians no doubt say.
Earlier today CNN posted a poll in which they stated that a majority(71 %) of respondents believe that Iran presently has nuclear weapons.(the poll also says that while a majority of the respondents are presently against military action, it also suggests great malleability in that opinion should the rhetoric heat up, and very little concern about adverse repercussions-- something I partly blame on a childishly jingoistic press. I wonder how many people put 2 and 2 together regarding the US de facto policy of destabilizing Pakistan, the one Islamic country that definitely does possess nuclear weapons and how people feel about that, or if they even give much thought to it.
Repercussions-- like what? Like another massive oil embargo, or the real unification of the Islamic world against the US, or a crumbling of America's capacity for international influence, when Russia and China AND even the EU finally decide that we're a nation of depraved nutballs who can't be trusted. And many thousands killed. Oh yeah, that.
Actually,I don't have a hard time accepting that a majority of Americans do in fact believe this regarding the supposed existence of Iranian nukes, even though the CIA itself apparently doesn't believe this. What I have a harder time understanding, and the poll doesn't address this, is why Americans tend to trust American elites so easily regarding the outside world. So that when a foreign country does something(or appears to do something) that American elites don't approve of and the usual American TV talking heads tell us that country X is defying us because they're irrational or crazy, they just accept this uncritically. And they just accept that country X cannot possibly have sane, legitimate reasons for those contrary policies that don't conform to US government wishes , whether said policies are hypothetical or real.
The thing is, people generally have no problem believing that our elites lie to us and screw us over in virtually all other areas, but apparently regarding foreign policy they just accept that these people who so frequently mislead and even just plain lie to us, nevertheless also know what's best and sincerely mean to protect us. I guess these are two separate questions. Exceptionalism again, at least for part of it. God gave Adam the right to give names to the animals, and to America to determine whether or not foreigners are crazy.
Michel Chossudovsky, above, says that the US has nuclear warheads in Turkey and in Europe that are aimed at Iran. Additionally, most experts agree that Israel has nuclear weapons, even if this is a mostly forbidden topic for discussion in the popular US media. My point is, although I don't think any country that doesn't presently have nukes should decide to get them, it's hardly insane or unreasonable for Iran's elites to want to have nuclear weapons. Given how actively belligerent both the US and Israel have been to various middle eastern and other Islamic countries, it strikes me as pretty understandable that the Iranians should want nukes.
I also question whether the US would in fact be threatened by the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal, assuming we left them alone. Israel might possibly be threatened-- but even that I'm skeptical of. If anything, the likely net effect of a secure Iranian nuclear weapons arsenal might well be a better behaved Israel, one that doesn't threaten her neighbors so readily and is more likely to want to make legitimate concessions towards a real peace with the Palistinians, or-- at the very least-- stops launching so many "you kill one, we kill 500" military operations against her neighbors.
The problem of course, is that it be a secure nuclear arsenal. But who is likely to subvert Iranian nuclear security, besides Israel and the US?
Again, I'm not suggesting that for Iran to acquire nukes is a preferred outcome. As I've said before in comments here and elsewhere, I have often puzzled about why Ahmedinejad has never publicly suggested a linkage between greater co-operation in allowing IAEA oversight, and negotiating to account for and reduce(or even eliminate*) Israel's nukes. Also to clarify, when I say "nukes" I am specifically referring to nuclear weapons, and not simply powerplants, which after all they, along with the Israelis, are allowed by international law.
(*The "eliminate" is probably dreaming, hence in parentheses. Still there's no question to me that for neither Israel nor Iran to have nuclear weapons would be the ideal situation, and I don't see how a US military operation against Iran can do anything but kill more people and make that contingency even less likely to ever happen.)
You will note that Rob posted part one, above. I posted this later but am marking it as after in temporal order because these videos serve as a pretty good corollary to Rob's essay-JV
Dana Nelson is a professor at Vanderbilt, and I believe Bad for democracy is her second book. Her publisher sent me a copy some time back, and unfortunately I've been busy with other matters, so I've just started on it. It does look promising, discussing the history of popular representations of the role of the president in US society, which she regards as generally anti-republican, in the classical sense, and far more often geared towards representing the president as the prime mover of government upon whose shoulders all power and responsibility lie, a phenomenon she terms presidentialism.
I saved this screenshot of Samantha Power nearly exactly one year ago, meaning to make some childishly silly yet trenchant point about her, and by extension about US foreign policy, at around the time she resigned from being an official Obama campaign advisor because of something or other. I don't remember what, but it which was covered pretty extensively at the time by Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution and Dennis Perrin.
I remember thinking, "man, if I was a bigshot blogger I could have a caption contest. Sure seems like a shame I'm not, what with me having this screenshot which doesn't belong to me, of Sam Power making some kind of point, talking to an unseen audience member." (she was talking to Henry Kissinger.*)
Why do I mention this now? Because Jon Schwarz at ATR just posted about her again(last week), wondering if she'll resign again if Obama ends up waffling regarding his previous denunciation of the Armenian Genocide. I also left a stupid comment at ATR, based on confusing two Asia theater US airbases.(I threw that "Asia Theater" thing in there to sound smart, but you guessed that.)
Anyway, if you want to treat this as a caption contest you can, and you can even specify a different audience member, like Thomas Friedman or Dennis Perrin or Chaka Khan if that helps you to respond creatively. The prize is whatever I offered last time.
I don't entirely agree with Rogers' views. For example, I think the massive US debt going forward means we do need to raise taxes on the wealthy to prevent stimulus-oriented public spending from causing inflation, and to prevent panicking foreign banks contemplating a possible collapse of the dollar.
In part two Rogers says, of the creditor-debtor relationship between China and the US, that
"it's the first time in history that an undeveloped nation financed a developed nation."
I don't know about that-- it seems to me that Europe and the US forced undeveloped nations to finance their growth, through the economic plunder of colonialism. But having said all that, there's still a lot of value to what he offers, and I think his misgivings about the bank bailouts are apt.
(Of course, as with any would-be economic sage-slash-teevee-talking head, it's useful to keep in mind how they might benefit or be hurt by different policies the government may take. This of course applies to Rogers, as well as Warren Buffet and Alan Greenspan, etc. It's very much to Rogers credit that he readily talks about his investment in Asia in this regard.)
