Category Archives: muttering to myself

Game for Suckers

Here is a snapshot of the rules of this game for suckers.  

Put your savings in a bank, the way one was encouraged to do for generations by thrifty adults.  Your savings will nowadays earn less than 1% interest and you will get a 1099 at the end of the year with this interest ‘income’ on it.  This interest gets added to your taxable income and you will pay the same rate on it as you do on the rest of your income.

Keep your money in a diversified portfolio, as people who are more successful, or simply luckier economically, do, let a financial manager take care of the tricky details and earn an average, over time, of 7-10% annually.  Leave the money grow, it will come in handy later on.  The interest on this money will be taxed at a substantially lower rate than the rest of your income, if at all.

Game for suckers?  That’s so harsh.  As my father often reminded me, JFK famously said “life’s unfair.”  Dig it.

 

Reason vs. Rationale 2

Human beings don’t do anything without a reason.  Whether that reason is a prudent application of Reason arrived at after weighing various likely outcomes is another question.  You can see the reasons behind the actions of every villain in Shakespeare, though you may find them repellent reasons.  Nobody, even the worst people in the world, does anything for no reason.   With the possible exception of me writing this at this particular moment.

I have many other things to do, things that are pressing.  Yet I prefer to tap these keys, enjoying the clatter the keys make, a kind of kinetic music that is, at the same time, the opposite of kinetic.  I am wondering about reasons, and how they differ from mere justifications, while finding no reason to act, outside of massaging this keyboard.

A reason that is reasonable is different from a rationale, which is often giddily free of Reason.  “WTF?” texts somebody who has stumbled on unspeakable carnage.  “Freedom on the March!” bellows the rationale.

“Have you considered that you may have turned the corner, are headed resolutely toward the deep end?”

“Your request is denied,” he snaps, by way of reply.

“‘By way of reply’?” she asks.  “I am totally confused…”

“Confusion denied,” he snaps, confidently.

 

Jan. 2015

Rationales versus Reasons

Now, admittedly, I am a foolish idealist.  I don’t say this to be cute, only to underscore that living in a world with concrete, monetizable values that override fairness, and what was once quaintly thought of as common decency, it seems foolish to me, over and over, to keep dreaming of a more merciful and equitable society.  It would be different, perhaps, if I had great wealth to hire a talented team to help me market my fond ideals, but that’s a pointless thought.

In the decade before the Civil War, an unprecedented carnage not eclipsed for more than fifty years, when machine guns, aerial assault and poison gas were added to the atrocities of trench warfare, our countrymen were poised to kill each other.   We are again now.    Violence is the default setting in our violent nation and when one people holds another under their dirty boot long enough the only answer becomes murder.  Justifiable homicide, each injured party believes righteously.   

We now have a culture where each side feels, once again, as though it has been held under the other’s dirty boot for long enough.  This feeling is amplified by the mass media, which does whatever it can to get people to tune in.   Billions of dollars hang in the balance and truth, a slippery thing in any case, is reconciled only in the corporate bottom line.

So instead of serious discussions, and an honest search for the real reasons for our problems and possible solutions, we get rationales and overheated partisan rhetoric.  Talented talking head pundits make millions of dollars to pontificate, deliver talking points and push a party line, their demographic choir lustily nodding their agreement, shuddering in disgust, pumping their fists.  My foolish idealism believes, like Anne Frank, before the Nazis killed her, that all people are basically good.  If they had the facts, and a bit of honesty, just a little….

Right, Dave.

I offer just two rationales, instead of reasons, that merely state a good enough excuse to do something truly inexcusable.  In fairness, let me qualify that.   The displacement of millions of people, the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands– not necessarily inexcusable, fair enough.  But to be fair, and in the context of an unprovoked attack on a country ruled by a tyrant and massive destruction in the name of freeing them, it seems a bit hard to excuse.

Rationale for the war in Iraq: 

Why Iraq?  Because we and many others (Democrats too) thought he had WMD’s and because we could use a strong country in the Middle East that was sympathetic to us for their liberation.

This rationale leaves out the oft trumpeted connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which turned out to be as false as the WMD rationale.   That the CIA and many foreign intelligence sources knew the reports of this connection and the WMDs were false was not seen as an impediment to the invasion of a country that would be sympathetic to us even if we inadvertently destroyed its infrastructure, displaced millions, killed many thousands, subjected it to more than a decade of mayhem, explosions, assassinations and so on, in the name of freedom and democracy… well, such are the costs of war, the price of freedom, one might rationalize.

And I am tortured by torture, as I keep saying.   It makes my skin crawl that so many Americans are so nonchalant about what our government has been doing in our names.  I was proud of John McCain for this speech.  Here is a rationale for torture, you will notice how different it is from a good reason to torture, something that, outside of doing it to inflict maximum pain on someone you hate, I have never heard:

I don’t justify torture…water boarding isn’t torture…it’s used in the training of our troops.  And we only water-boarded three people.  And the times then called for enhanced interrogation methods so that 9/11 could never happen again.

A person saying this, you might think, well, you, Sir, have set up a straw man to try to prove your point.   This is an actual answer to the question “how do you justify Americans torturing people?”.  It seems unfair to suggest that if we grabbed this woman, shoved a bag over her head, rushed her, shackled and diapered, to a dark, coffin-sized cell and locked her in there for a few weeks she would say the same thing at the end of her little adventure.  Even if we did not strip her naked, kept her cell at a comfortable temperature, left her in silence and never put a gag in her mouth, tilted her upside down on a board and poured water into the gag until the doctor monitoring the procedure told us we were about to accidentally kill her.

As for me, I just wish I had something productive to keep me busy enough not to think of these things.   I sometimes envy people I know who are running at high speed all day, far too busy to ponder, more than momentarily, things so sickening, and so futile and depressing to ponder.

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photograph from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World is A Battlefield.

 

Knee Jerk

It was only a matter of time, I suppose, after the recent slaughter of two policemen by a gun wielding maniac who dashed into the subway after the murders and blew himself away, until someone on the political right would place these deaths squarely where they belong: on Hamas, angry Muslim antisemites, race-baiters and the progressives who embrace them.

Like most people, I was sickened by the news of the killings. Only in the mind of an enraged and suicidal killer could the murders of two policemen in their patrol car innocently eating lunch be justified.   Nobody with any sense of decency could relate to the senseless and brutal act as anything but a senseless and brutal act, an atrocity.  It has been denounced by everyone with a microphone, including the mother of Eric Garner, the man killed after being placed in a police choke hold on Staten Island.  

I will say this for the extreme right, they never lose an opportunity to connect the dots, to exploit every horror to show that progressives are deluded apologists responsible for every terrible thing that befalls us here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.   I had an email forwarded to me just now that sits in my craw like a hairball.  I kick myself for reading it.  It makes the point, in the right’s typically assured way, that liberals, by caving in to their abiding guilt, forced the NYPD to stop surveilling Muslims and thus lost the opportunity to know that this killer had made reference, on Facebook, to Al-Farooq, which is a Brooklyn mosque allegedly well-known to have ties to radical Islam and terrorist plots, where, if he went there, he may well have received instructions to murder those policemen directly from Hamas.

Case closed, as they say.

Drown ’em– or at least Waterboard ’em

The U.S. Postal Service, in this instance.

“Your call is very important to us.  Did you know there is a difference between Regular, Certified and Regular Certified Mail?  It’s true.  You can find this interesting information and much more at

http://www.gofuckyourselfwhileyou’reonhold.com

or please continue to hold while we experience more than usual call volume and wait times are expected to exceed one hour.  Or visit us at http://www.suckourcollectiveass.com to learn about more ways the US Post Office is working hard to make things better for you without hiring additional qualified personnel.  Please continue to hold, your business is so important to us we’ve formed a partnership with Fed Ex to serve you even better.  Did you know there is a difference between Regular, Certified and Regular Certified Mail?  It’s true!”

I wrote an email, to my landlord’s automated “helpline”, while listening to this over and over:

I am the tenant in apt. __  at __   _____.  I left a message with Marjorie earlier today and am following up with this email. I’m working on getting my December rent check, mailed weeks ago, back to you ASAP.  
 
The post office returned my December rent check to me on Saturday, in the envelope you provided, slightly crushed, with your address clearly visible and the stamp cancelled.  (see attachments)   [I sent them photos, recto and verso– ed.]  They sent it back to me, instead of to you, the Postmaster said, because “We Care”.   Aggravating to say the least.
 
I just found out that overnight UPS, via the Post Office (only way to deliver to a PO Box) is $32.  I am on hold with the Post Office now, the ones who screwed this up in the first place. So far I’ve been on hold for almost 40 minutes.  Now I’m five minutes into a third wait for a supervisor, requesting a voucher for the price of having this delivered.  So far they’ve offered to let me stand on line at my local post office at the height of the Christmas shipping season so they can correct their mistake.
 
I was fairly confident the Post Office would  offer no help in this matter, even before I was just “transferred” to a supervisor, and my 39 minute call was cut off.
 
If there is a physical office I can deliver this check to (I recall I used to send these to an address at Penn Plaza), I can deliver it to you tomorrow, Wednesday or Friday.
Please advise,
Blah Blah Woof Woof

Why torture tortures me

I should, I know, not be tormented by the arguable torture that has been done in my name.   Who am I to expect to have any say in what’s done in my name, and for my own good, anyway?  I am not on the battle field, after all.  I have not been directly hurt by the fanatics intent on cutting my throat.   Still, something just seems wrong with this picture:

It seems wrong to me, naive though it may sound, to torture a guy until he snaps and then say “see, he was just waiting to snap, faking his moderate stance but look, torture the angry fanatic just a little, not even two years locked up without charges, and the prick will go on the internet and preach jihad for no reason except that he hates our freedom, resents our ability to do whatever we want to Muslim extremists anywhere on the earth.  YOU’RE DEAD, fucker!” 
 
And then, boom, death from the sky, 500 pound Tomahawk missile, poof!  There go your fiery sermons, bitch– go deflower 72 virgins, asshole.   In two weeks we’ll wipe out your DNA in the form of your long-haired American son and the guys he’s having lunch with.   How dare you call us murderous infidels!
 
And I feel a bit insane to be thinking about this at all, but more insane to think about it and not write about it.  In the context of the latest tortured torture semi-revelations it seems timely to note that even just locking someone in a tiny cell without charges or access to anyone in the outside world is torture.  No need for the $81,000,000 in consultant’s fees and all the tortured secret legal opinions– just lock someone in the dark for nine months, that will do it.  Then, when it’s done, and they start to scream, kill ’em for screaming.   It’s perfect, yo, don’t you see?

Unsung American Heroes

There are so many unsung American heroes out there, but let us sing of just two today: James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.  Selflessly these two psychologists, awarded a government grant of $180 million dollars to help the nation in the desperate times after 9/11, charged only $81,000,000. These two men were the brains behind the coercive interrogation program that some, including them, claim kept us safe in the years after the hellacious attacks of September 11, 2001.  

Mitchell and Jessen, given pseudonyms in the Congressional report, reverse engineered the SERE program, a grueling series of tortures used to train our own special forces to resist enemy torture.  Mitchell and Jessen’s work allowed enemy prisoners to be interrogated in ways that would otherwise have been regarded as torture, wink, wink.   Having psychologists and doctors in the room when prisoners are being subjected to things that can cause death makes all the difference between brutality and civilization, some argue.  Mitchell and Jessen’s key roles as designers of “enhanced interrogation” are detailed in the recently completed five year, $40,000,000,  6,700 page, almost 8% public, report on America’s use of torture in the decade after 9/11.

I will let Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban take the wheel:

As the report makes clear, some of the worst corrosion occurred in the ranks of America’s psychologists, who, like many medical professionals, are charged with doing no harm. It was two C.I.A. contract psychologists with no experience with real-life interrogations. Instead, as described in the report, they promoted the tactics to the C.I.A., employed them indiscriminately, earned money to do so, and lied about their effectiveness.

I was the first reporter to enumerate the roles of the two key psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as architects of the coercive interrogation tactics, in a 2007 story inVanity Fair. The pair had previously been Air Force trainers in a program called SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), which subjected military members to mock interrogations—interrogations that ironically had been used by the Communist Chinese against American servicemen during the Korean war in order to produce false confessions.

Historically, the C.I.A. knew the tactics would not be useful. In 1989, the C.I.A. informed Congress that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” In the desperate months after 9/11, the C.I.A. willfully ignored its own findings.

source

As the president recently admitted, to the horror of those who support rough treatment of possibly evil bastards, “we tortured some folks.”  Although unsung American heroes James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, now very wealthy men, might beg to differ with Mr. Obama’s characterization of what was done to those folks.

Bankrupt Democracy

The air is toxic in this sweaty mine shaft where we scratch for the ore democracy used to be made of, my fine feathered friends.  The federal government, once a defender of human rights (as when, a century belatedly, it battled the Klan) and keeper of many valuable public institutions (schools high on that list) and much of the nation’s infrastructure, keeps begging these days to be drowned in a bathtub.  The Free Market, the private sector, is constantly held up (by those with the money to know best) as the best arbiter of what is important and what is worth drowning in a bathtub.  After all, mustn’t we all admit that it’s the extremely wealthy and successful who have the expertise and proven success to tell the rest of us the best thing to do in every sector of  life?

A few days before Christmas, when lines in the post office can be an hour or more long, I got a nice symbol, in my mailbox, of our tax dollars at work.  A large envelope from the post office, with a clear plastic window on one side, showing me the partially mangled envelope I’d sent to my landlord with my rent check for December a week or two earlier.  My landlord’s printed address clearly visible through the window, as is my return address.  The stamp has been cancelled.   The reason my landlord did not cash my rent check this month is that the U.S. Post Office was keeping it, after it was partially ruffled in a government machine, to considerately return to me with this important message on the back:

postal

So, this citizen will spend perhaps $15 on Monday to let Fed Ex do, overnight, the work a 45 cent stamp, and the full faith and credit of our U.S. Postal Service, could not accomplish in two weeks.  And resist the foolish, if understandable, urge to do anything whatsoever to respond to the moronic government robot that signs itself, with sincere regret, after an appropriately Newspeak arbeit macht frei taken directly from the Free Market best practices book,  my postmaster.

 

The truth would make them REALLY hate us

There’s a debate now, as there always is, when it comes to telling the truth– how much to tell and which version of the truth will be the last word on the subject.  In our bleeding America, this debate, when churned enough, often leads to veins popping out on necks, sprays of spittle and physical violence.

The present kerfuffle (a word VP Cheney dusted off to describe the brouhaha over his accidentally shooting an acquaintance in the face with buckshot while trying to kill tiny birds) is over how much to reveal about our recent torture policy.   An official government report is finally about to come out, a decade after the most extreme forms of ‘dark side’ interrogation techniques were systematically used against thousands of captured Muslims.  

The report concludes, from what we hear, that torture was routinely committed, even if deniability was maintained for the actual architects and engineers of the program.  It was more widespread, and even worse, than the designers of the program intended, the report concludes.  This conclusion is excessively fair, one suspects, to those who commissioned, mandated and legally justified the specific policies and techniques while urging their unsupervised use.  

The report is also said to conclude what every credible expert on interrogation always says:  no reliable intelligence was extracted through the use of torture, in spite of the muscular claims of ‘enhanced interrogation’s (torture’s)’ forceful public defenders.

Our president has already made things bad enough by admitting, with awkward candor, that, after 9/11, good Americans, with the best of intentions, and in genuine fear, well, “we tortured some folks.”  Just another example, his enemies will say, of the illegitimate tone deaf idiot making life harder for the lovers and protectors of the American way of life.

Here is the concern:  if murderous fanatics who already hate us intensely learn the actual details of the cruel tactics we routinely used against many, many Muslims who had nothing to do with fighting America, as well as some who did, they will have good reason to seek revenge.  Think of the incendiary propaganda too many actual details would provide the terrorists!   

America invaded Muslim countries under sometimes false pretenses, admittedly, ousted a few bad leaders (a good thing) and then humiliated, terrified and tortured many people, innocent and guilty, suspected of hating America and plotting to kill our citizens.  Fair enough, fair-minded defenders of the torture program will say, but why should any of that really be a problem now, so many years later? Mistakes were made, passive voices used, folks were tortured.  Nothing to see here, move on, folks.

The audacity of hope is one thing.  The audacity of “fuck you, asshole, what are you going to fucking do about it?” is another thing.  Then there is all that grey area in between, where the devil resides, in unspeakable luxury.

 

NY Times version of last paragraph:

The audacity of hope is one thing.  The audacity of “nuts to you, fool, are you going to do something about it?” is another thing.  Then there is all that grey area in between, where the devil resides, in unspeakable luxury.

 

A Ridiculous Fear

“What exactly are you afraid of?” she asked with mostly hidden exasperation.

“They’ll turn me down for the study,” he said.  

“But you don’t want to be in the study.  Don’t you keep sending people copies of that great review of the books exposing the lucrative hoax of psycho-pharmacology?”  

He nodded.  “I do, and I believe, as the cited studies show, that the placebo is 84% as effective as the patent drugs they prescribe, to maximize ease and profits instead of the difficult probing for solutions to the person’s problems.”  

“And you have already been taking a placebo for months, and noticing it makes you feel slightly better once you down it every day.”  

“I have, yes,” he said.  

“So what exactly is your fear?” she asked.  

“I’m afraid I will not present as depressed enough to qualify for the medication study, and I’ll be stuck in this semi-depressive state forever,” he said.  

“You realize how ridiculous that is, I trust?  You are against the medications, but afraid you’re not depressed enough to qualify for the medications…”  She looked at him and he shrugged, noncommittal.   “I can tell you one thing– you are depressing enough to qualify me for the study.”

“What a mean thing to say to a depressed person,” he said.

“Well, gee,” she said, “I’m no psychiatrist or anything, but, scary as this will no doubt be to you, you seem to present just fine, making jokes, watching movies, following the news, showering every day, your weight staying the same– you could lose 15 pounds, you know, it wouldn’t hurt you– you’re not sleeping 3 hours a night, or ten.   You’re just…. how do I put this gently?”  

“This should be good,” he said.   

But he never got to hear it, the phone rang and she leaped nimbly off the hook to talk to a friend for an hour as he tapped the screen of his iPad, spelling words against the clock, losing badly, and playing again, badly, then again.

 

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