History of Evil

In case you missed this in school, kids.

This is why I don't trust chattering class liberals

Remember the War on Drugs?

This is how desperate they have gotten.

"The good news is that Mexico and the United States finally recognize that they are on the same side in this battle. It is a vast improvement over Washington’s perennial finger-wagging. Mexico’s resolve to take on drug trafficking, rather than dismissing it as an unsolvable problem, is also welcome. But it is only a start."

The New York Times editorial page is arguing for an emboldened drug war.

You know that people are kind of fucked in the head with power obsession when they make this kind of argument when the writing is so clearly on the wall.

I will paste this editorial in my scrapbook for when this ugly, bullshit drug war is finally behind us and to remind my children why conscience and independent judgment should always trump ideology, party politics, or other forms of groupthink.

I knew there was a reason I didn't read the New York Times anymore.

Courage

We are so cowardly. The whole lot of us. Our one saving grace is that cowardice maintains all the bullshit and the ugliness that we want so badly to escape.

The sad, cynical facts of modern life

The saddest part of my job and just life, generally, I think, is not just having to listen to all the self-fulfilling cynicism that animates too much of life. It is watching people deal with the ugly consequences of that cynicism.

Today, I read one such story.

The Bride of Wildenstein

In a world that is as cynical about love and the role we take for granted that it plays in our lives as it is about liberty and a similar and comparable value it offers us, this story is one of the saddest miniature tragedies of the consequences of that sad, deluded cynicism.

I've never understood why people were so cynical about love. And then wondered why they didn't find the kind of love they wanted in their lives. I've also never understood the cynicism that people have about freedom and then wonder why their aspirations and their willingness to do the work to live their dreams fell through.

It's all so clearly self-fulfilling prophecy to someone who has experienced a lot of love and achieved a lot of the things I have cared about in life and still aspires for more of both.

Most people are both sad and foolish on this count and so many counts, I think, where it matters. Most people want love, but don't really take it seriously enough to offer it and thus receive it. So they start to rationalize more cynical motives for marriage. Like money. Or power. Or sex and beauty. Whatever stupid, foolish flavor of cynicism appeals to them.

It is the most difficult part of teaching the kids I teach.

It is not the kids, though they are quite the handful. It's not the pay, which of course we always wish was more.

It's the cynicism. It's everyone betting against what they know they should be betting for, no matter how clever you may feel each time that you might be right.

Children, no matter how shitty they are, need people to love them and be in their corner. Love, no matter how much we want to give up hope on it, needs people to nurture it and take it more seriously than our cowardice to face ourselves and how we sabotage it. And freedom is the only context in which we will ever be able to take responsibility for the fact that the reason that love does not always work out and the reason why our children don't always turn out the way we want them to turn out is, generally, our own fault, no matter how many which ways we want to spin it. And the most hopeful fact of our existence is our ability to face up to that fact, to take responsibility, and to build a life on something more real and honest.

Cynicism is our cover for why we never took our most serious responsibilities in life seriously. It is our cowardice to face ourselves and our own failures, especially our failure to own up and do what we need to do to turn things around.

And the face of Jocelyn Wildenstein is what it looks like to live that cynicism and cowardice without reconsideration.

She, like the rest of humanity that daily affirms her cynicism, deserves our compassion.

Because how tragically and needlessly people suffer when they just can't find the courage to love and live a life they love, for real, and settle for cynicism and cowardice instead.

"Aggressive and desperate"

Which nominee is the Economist describing? You make the call.

Barack Obama Rolls On

"Mr Obama has confirmed his status as the front-runner whereas Mrs Clinton, to have any chance, must somehow engineer sizeable victories in Ohio and Texas on March 4th. They once looked very favourable to her and she still leads in opinion polls. But Mr Obama’s big win in Wisconsin bodes well for him in nearby Ohio, which shares a big white working class. Texas’s unusual hybrid primary-and-caucus vote makes it hard to win a big delegate advantage even with a hefty win among voters. And Mr Obama, carrying the aura of a winner, has narrowed Mrs Clinton's lead in both states and has two weeks to focus his campaign on them.

Mrs Clinton has two strategies left to her. One is to sharpen her attacks on her rival. Before Wisconsin her campaign staff had pushed a story that Mr Obama used speech lines lifted from Deval Patrick, his friend and the governor of Massachusetts. Mr Obama and Mr Patrick shrugged this off, voters were unbothered. Instead Mrs Clinton is likely to stress her theme of greater experience, while ramping up her economic populism. She did both in a speech after polls closed on Tuesday. She said she would lead “without on-the-job training”. She also argued, more substantively, about his health-care proposal. Hers would require every American to have insurance. His would lack such a mandate, which, she said, would leave 15m people uninsured. Expect this number to crop up repeatedly in the next few weeks.

The other path for Mrs Clinton is the inside politics of getting the delegate count more favourable to her. She and her husband are leaning hard on Democratic bigwigs and politicians known as superdelegates, who may vote for anyone they wish at the nominating convention. Having closer connections with the party leaders, they hope superdelegates might help her pull out a win even if she loses to Mr Obama in “pledged” delegates chosen by the primaries.

And she continues her fight to seat the delegations from Michigan and Florida. Both states had their delegates stripped for holding contests earlier than Democratic rules allowed. And all campaigns agreed not to run there. But Mrs Clinton’s name alone remained on the Michigan ballot, meaning she won it by a big margin. And as no one campaigned in Florida she won handily, mainly on the strength of her greater name recognition.

The risk for Mrs Clinton is that she gets stuck with a reputation for being willing to do anything to get the nomination, even if that were to mean stealing away Mr Obama’s electoral victory. With the fight against Mr McCain looming, she runs the risk of looking both aggressive and desperate, hardly the person the Democrats would want taking on the Republicans’ genial and confident war hero."

Will Americans ever learn?

I am becoming increasingly clear that the contemporary efforts to leverage for political change will be studied as a pervasive failure of power in the coming generations.

The case of U.S. sanctions to leverage for democratic change in Cuba is perhaps one of the best examples of that failure.

Our Failed, Punitive Policy

Many strong proposals in this article. The final passage is a nice collection of these proposals:

"Dialogue on these security issues could yield direct results and also build contacts and confidence that might put the next U.S. administration in a position to more effectively advance other pressing interests. These include political, labor and human rights in Cuba, settlement of U.S. claims there, and, eventually, negotiation of trade and regulatory regimes that will put American business interests in Cuba back on an equal footing with foreign competitors.

U.S. restrictions on travel to the island have failed to tangibly weaken the Cuban government, even as they have contributed to the increased isolation of the Cuban people. Contact between our societies ought to be encouraged. At a minimum, the next president should permit the kind of people-to-people exchanges -- involving artists, musicians, academics, students, religious groups and others -- that President Ronald Reagan embraced with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Programs of this kind flourished with Cuba until 2003, allowing Cubans from all walks of life to exchange ideas and information with American counterparts.

The Bush administration's 2004 sanctions targeting visits and remittances by Cuban Americans should also be reversed. The contacts and the financial help are important lifelines to Cubans, many of whom are struggling to make ends meet.

The next U.S. administration should also consider talks on loosening the restrictions that keep U.S. and Cuban diplomats confined, for the most part, to the capitals in which they are posted. An agreement in this area would allow our diplomats to gain the insights and influence in Cuba that current policy denies them.

America's next president should harbor no illusions that modest policy adjustments will lead directly to the political and economic outcomes we seek in Cuba. But they would serve American interests and, if pragmatism eventually prevails in Cuba, help advance the interests of the Cuban people as well."

I don't know if I share the author's priorities of stopping drug runners and illegal immigration, both which seem like kind of petty priorities in the big scheme of things, and perhaps counterproductive to the larger purposes of helping to facilitate democracy, freedom, and prosperity for Americans and Cubans rather than narrower concerns about drugs and stopping illegals from crossing the American border.

But the benefits of lifting the embargo on Cuba and dialogue generated around a whole host of common concerns seem undeniable to me. Robert Kagan suggests using the embargo as leverage for democratic reform in the same Washington Post, apparently oblivious to the fact that what Cubans resent most about America, and hence our limited influence inside of Cuba as much as with its government, is its tendency to want to tell Cubans how to run their own affairs. American imperialism and all of that. Very much like the problem we're having in Iraq.

Americans will never learn.

Or will they?