On forgiveness

As someone looking to do good in the world and be a decent human being, for real, I take forgiveness seriously.

Honestly, I've always been pretty clear that all the talk about the "unforgiveable" was one long excuse for why people do not take the virtue of forgiveness seriously enough. Clearly, there are very painful and difficult traumas that people face all over the world. And forgiveness is most certainly not easy work.

But it is a central virtue in Judeo-Christian and amongst more universal moral values for a reason.

And I never understood why people who did not take such a virtue seriously thought that they should be seriously listened to on important moral matters at all.

Because the truth is that they shouldn't.

This is such a great story, in that vein, on so many different levels.

Acts of Reconciliation

"A couple of weeks ago, the 29-year-old won the top documentary prize at the Student Academy Awards in Los Angeles for "As We Forgive," her film about reconciliation in Rwanda between survivors of the 1994 genocide and its perpetrators. Previous Student Oscar winners include Trey Parker, Bob Saget and Spike Lee.

Hinson's film, begun as an MFA thesis at American University, captures victims' meetings with their freed attackers. A decade after the extermination of one in eight Rwandans, after the Hutus turned on the Tutsis and even some of their own, the two tribes had to learn to live together. (The government has released more than 60,000 convicts connected to the genocide to ease prison overcrowding, according to the BBC.)

In the film we meet Rosaria, who pulls up the hem of her dress to reveal mounds of raised scar tissue running down her legs. Hacked and beaten during the genocide, she now lives in a house built for her by Saveri, the man who killed her sister. Another survivor, Chantale, who lost 30 family members, meets John, the stooped gangly man who killed her father. He can't face her; her eyes are embers. 'Remember all your old neighbors,' she says. Yet the next day, Chantale begins working to build a house for another ex-con who confessed his crimes.

For Hinson, it was proof that the 'transcendent filters through every aspect of life' and also that the world is really messed up...

The story ultimately appealed to Hinson for its reversal of the genre's cliches. Instead of being a tale of African ruin and our reluctance to help, it was a 'tremendously hopeful' picture of people learning to forgive in circumstances, she says, in which we never could. Hinson liked to believe she herself had learned something.

Two weeks after leaving Rwanda, in August 2006, the belief was tested. Her ex-fiance called, 4 1/2 years after their breakup. 'I feel kinda crazy,' she recalls him saying. 'And I still love you.'

Tom is the guy's name. Today he says of the breakup: 'I was just terrified of that level of commitment. I had come from a family that had kind of a bad marriage.'

He reconsiders.

'Ninety percent of it was me just being a very lame guy. A child in a man's body. Just a guy with a lot to learn.'

He visited her a month later. He had gone to a nondenominational seminary in those silent intervening years, studied to become a priest and all the while 'worked with a lot of trauma victims, a lot of people who were recovering from some pretty hard stuff, rape victims.'

'I dealt a lot in the language of forgiveness,' he adds.

Tom had kept the first ring all that time. 'I couldn't get rid of it. It was that weird kind of remote possibility sense that maybe if I ever get my act together...'

He gave it to her, and a second one. He bent down on one knee in the old-fashioned way and asked the question. Not of nuptials, not at first. There was a more pressing matter.

'I said, 'Laura, do you forgive me?' And she said, 'Yes.' And getting married was almost the denouement, the anticlimax.'

Today Tom Hinson and Laura Waters Hinson live in the District, where several documentary companies are based and where he pastors at two Anglican churches. Laura graduated from American last year, and the Student Oscar got her thinking about moving to Los Angeles. 'It depends on what Laura wants to do in her career,' says the man who gave and took away and gave again.

'Our marriage,' she says, 'is built on forgiveness.'"

Desmond Tutu is actually the person who helped me see this more clearly. His work on truth and reconciliation has been so critical in his home country of South Africa, but also all over the world in places as diverse as East Timor and Iraq, to recover, as peoples and as individuals, from the most traumatic circumstances that life has to offer. In fact, such reconciliation efforts are critical to a political resolution of the most serious conflict that America faces today, our war in Iraq.

Recognizing this very important part of the political landscape is one of the many things that persuaded me of the importance of the arguments, coverage, and understanding of the situation by the military historian I regard as the most significant during this Iraq War, Frederick Kagan. Kagan, better than other military historians and those covering the war, understands the politics of the situation in Iraq and the United States and the role that our military efforts play in creating a more sustainable political situation and the way that the politics, in Iraq, America, and around the world, shapes the success or failure of our military efforts in that war.

To not understand the role of reconciliation after major hostilities, especially genocide and ethnic, religious, and other warfare, is to misunderstand the whole enterprise in a very serious way. Kagan's understanding of the role of this process in the situation in Iraq, in substantial ways, not just giving it lip service, was an important reason, among many, convincing me that he was one of the wisest of those offering coverage and advice of the war.

If you have not read Frederick Kagan's exceptional analysis of the situation in Iraq, I highly recommend any of his work on the Weekly Standard website.

Including his most recent piece, which affirms for me my continued commitment to John McCain in the next Presidential election, despite the doubts that have been raised in my mind by some conservatives pressing for an attack on or invasion of Iran.

Voting for Commander in Chief

Much of the problem over the course of this war that President Bush, despite many of his and his apologists' defenses to the contrary, that he misled - which I believe he did - the American people about the reasons for going to war, genuine confidence that he had and that was warranted in those reasons being evidenced and valid, and the degree of seriousness that he gave to legitimate concerns about engaging this war. The President and his apologists can play games with this matter all they might wish. It will not make these matters go away.

And the truth is that what is different about my own thinking on this matter and a substantial number of the Presidents' many detractors- 70% of the American people, by the most recent poll I saw; I really don't give two shits how you try to spin that vis a vis Congress or any or any other evidence of the lack of trust that Americans have in their President, right now, people have got to face up - is that I have forgiven the President his and his Administrations' many, many transgressions. I have not forgotten them. I have no intentions of holding them over his head or trying to nail him for them in any way, at all. In fact, I very much admire the President's commitment to seeing us through to a decent resolution of the situation in Iraq, despite his many mistakes. And I very much care substantially more about what is happening on the ground than I do in grinding any axes whatsoever.

But pretending like this has not seriously undermined our efforts to keep Americans alive, to secure Iraqis, and to promote democracy in this country, makes it more difficult to make the case to the American people that sticking with this war is the right thing to do rather than making it easier.

The President is forgiveable for his mistakes. The 70% of the American people who supported this war, up front, without debating or engaging one another, enough, about how to do it in a way that accounted for the challenges that we have faced in ways that could very well have avoided the thousands of unnecessary deaths of Americans, Iraqis, and others killed in this conflict, each one of them a tragedy, are forgiveable. And, tragically, even these butchers in Rwanda and all over the world are forgiveable for their crimes, (though justice and safety of the Rwandan people, must clearly be served, as well).

They, we, are all forgiveable, because it is the only way to see more clearly our way to a more honest understanding of this conflict and its eventual resolution and of the world and ourselves amidst the emotional clutter that bitterness and petty and even not-so-petty grudges bring. Unresolved feelings, in this vein, do not just plague us with misery until they are resolved. They also blind our vision, as we try to see past the pain in our own hearts that we refuse to acknowledge and make peace with.

The failure to forgive and let go of such pain has been, along with the repressive and brutal activities and policies of those who hang onto such bitterness, the bane of humanity's long history. All of the most remarkable ugliness and evil in the world has been rationalized on this premise. And our way forward, in this war, in policy matters, generally, and in the world at large is and always has been premised on the emotional and intellectual freedom that genuine and honest forgiveness and observations of the world, at large, offers.

The denial of that fact does not make the failures of understanding or choices we make out of that failure of understanding go way. It does not make the tragedies we are responsible for go away. It does not make any of the pain we experience or inflict go way. It only makes us blind to them.

And for that fact - our own blindness to the realities of an often painful and scary world; seeing shadows instead of sunlight, as Plato once wrote - we can and must, as a matter of necessity, be forgiven.

Because it is the only honest way forward.

And the honest way forward is the only direction that we, humanity, will or can ever accept.

What it looks like when everything goes right

Something to celebrate this Independence Day.



This is the way it should work. We do our best. It doesn't always work out this way.

But this is what we shoot for, when we're honest in our work.

In a world of dishonest politics, warfare, counterterrorism, and just life, here's to playing honestly and keeping people alive.

Happy Independence Day.

Jesse Helms (1921-2008)

The Wall Street Journal has the most poignant and magnanimous of the obituaries I have read for the late Jesse Helms.

Jesse Helms

"Since he had to go sometime, Jesse Helms would have liked the idea of dying on July 4. The main cause of his life was defending liberty, especially against Soviet Communism, and so we wouldn't be surprised if he held out to make it to the early hours of our national holiday before dying yesterday at age 86.

Helms was best known as the five-term North Carolina Senator who drove liberals crazy before his retirement in 2002. But his most important role in history arguably took place in 1976, when he and political ally Tom Ellis helped to resurrect Ronald Reagan's fading run for President...

As a Senator, Helms was a forceful anti-Communist, resisting Nixon's detente of the 1970s and promoting U.S. support for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain and freedom fighters in Central America. In one episode in 1985, a 22-year-old Ukrainian sailor in the Soviet merchant marine jumped ship near New Orleans and tried to defect. In a shameful moment, the Reagan Administration returned him to Soviet control days before a U.S.-Soviet summit. Helms took up Miroslav Medvid's cause, and the Ukrainian became a priest after the fall of the Soviet empire. On a visit to the Senator's office 16 years later, Father Medvid credited Helms's public agitation with saving him from KGB retribution...

Helms was a conservative populist, and his campaigns were not above demagoguery. He was a protectionist, reflecting the textile interests in his state. He sometimes abused the Senate's advice and consent power against Presidential nominees – a habit the left has now adopted. His critics have a point that he sometimes exploited racial tensions in the post-1960s South, but Helms himself was no racist and his famous TV spot opposing racial preferences in employment in 1990 barely ran in North Carolina.

Like the political shift across the South and West in the last decades of the 20th century, Helms's political rise was a reaction to the collapse of liberal governance. He sought to reassert traditional American values, and above all to defend U.S. freedom against Soviet tyranny. Like Reagan, he saw more clearly than liberals the moral dimension of the Cold War. Like Reagan, he was a hero of that war."

Wonkette remembers Jesse Helms less generously than I might.

Jesse Helms Finally Dead

"We interrupt your Fourth of July with some Breaking News: Jesse Helms was apparently still alive, and now he’s dead, hooray! He was a sour troll and a bigot, and it’s a testament to every rotten thing about this country that for a quarter century, he was one of the most powerful people in American politics."

Here's the full obituary by Wonkette editor, Ken Layne.

Jesse Helms: American Garbage

And this from the Economist:

Jesse Helms

"JESSE HELMS, the former senator from North Carolina, died today, aged 86. Many will not miss the cantankerous, obstructionist and generally racist Mr Helms. He supported segregationist policies throughout his career, worked against civil rights legislation, filibustered a bill to mark Martin Luther King day as a holiday, was a leading supporter of South Africa's apartheid regime, and ran one of the more racially divisive campaign ads in political history. Yet he claimed not to be racist.

When Bill Clinton nominated an openly homosexual woman as assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1993, Mr Helms recoiled. 'I'm not going to put a lesbian in a position like that,' he said. 'If you want to call me a bigot, fine.' He was a bigot...

It's a shame Fox News wasn't around in his prime. His opposition to communism was also of the "with us or against us variety" that has defined policy in the war on terror. In 2005, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University opened the Jesse Helms School of Government. There, at least, he will be remembered fondly."

But this?

'It's just incredible that he would die on July 4th, the same day of the Declaration of Independence and the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and he certainly is a patriot in the mold of those great men,' said former North Carolina GOP Rep. Bill Cobey."

Whatever.

What I remember most about Jesse Helms, growing up as a young liberal, was that he was a bigot, on matters of race, homosexuality, AIDS, and all things that challenged his generally narrow worldview. He talked a big talk about freedom, but delivered much bitter, petty rhetoric and policy. Hardly the stuff of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

Jesse Helms was also a committed anti-Communist, a public U.N. skeptic, and sought some level of absolution from his vile past, I think, with his laudable, later-life efforts to raise money to alleviate the plague of AIDS in Africa.

Jesse and I shared a commitment to freedom, anti-Communism, and American sovereignty.

He also was the public figure in American political life that I most despised for much of my youth. Robert Byrd is a somewhat comparable figure on the left (with more notable ties to the Ku Klux Klan). But I' not sure anyone really matches the dubious stature of Jesse Helms. The idea that a man of Richard Lugar's integrity and thoughtfulness would have to play second-fiddle to someone like Jesse Helms on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has always seemed one of life's crueler ironies to me.

Jesse Helms was also a human being. A deeply flawed, mean-spirited, bigoted, bitter, petty human being. But a human being nonetheless. And someone who made some endeavors to make some amends in the final years of his life. He never said he was sorry. But he did try to make amends.

And, in the meantime, he is a man with friends and family and a man, like every man, who will be missed by those who loved him.

I have to say that the columns I have read that laud Helms' many accomplishments have seriously endeared me to him and his worthy causes, especially his stands for freedom and against Soviet Communism. I remember, as a young liberal, being very heartened and emailing many friends and family when I read that Jesse Helms had written a Washington Post editorial advocating a tripling of the budget to combat AIDS in Africa (a skepticism of which policy I understand better, today, sharing his ultimate compassion for such folks and believing in pragmatic government efforts to deal with a serious health crisis, but also wanting more of that money to come from private sources rather than forever from necessarily limited government coffers).

I was always someone who wanted to like and respect, Jesse Helms, even as I despised him, in my youth. The bigger-hearted reflections on the life and legacy of Jesse Helms have humbled me and my one-time contempt for this bigger-than-life American politician.

Rest in peace, Jesse Helms. You will be missed, all and all. May God and all of us have mercy on your soul.

And now for something completely different

And an oldie but a goodie.



Some fine reminders that Independence Day and the Declaration of Independence were about freedom, not power.

One day, I hope, I can share with my kids that America has, largely, lived up to her reason for being.

Freedom on the Fourth of July

If you have not read the Declaration of Independence, I recommend it.

The Declaration of Independence

We've read it in class several times, now. We talk about what it means. And despite my kids' limited interest and, more often than not, limited developed reading and academic abilities, I hope they recognize, at least someday, the courage that it took for a rag-tag bunch of colonials to take on the most powerful government and military in the world, to assert their right to govern themselves and their own lives.

Freedom is a precious thing. Even as we all take it for granted and romanticize power and countries and cultures that don't have the kind of freedom we enjoy in America. It is fundamental to everything we have and are, today. Even as we behave like it is responsible for all of our bad behavior and our misery. What freedom offers us, better, is the honest opportunity for us to be responsible for ourselves and our own behavior, good and bad. Even as we, like all peoples since the beginning of time, would often prefer to shirk such responsibility.

Independence. Of thought and conscience. Of expression and action. The freedom to govern ourselves and the direction of our lives.

That is what I celebrate today. And the first nation on earth to be conceived on the principles of freedom and democracy.

Ours' is a nation nor a people conceived in perfection, or on claims to that mantle. Ours' is a nation conceived on the premise of independence and self-governance, and the ability to improve with that commitment over time.

This is a day to reflect on those principles and to reflect on the liberal democratic values that make possible everything that we cherish, even as we persistently take them and their fruits for granted.

Today should be a day to remember that freedom is not something to be afraid of or treated as an afterthought. Freedom is fundamental to virtually everything good that free peoples lay claim to.

Today is a day to embrace that.

Hypocrisy and the rationalization of power

I write something nasty about Dana Milbank, and then he goes and proves his shit.

Not So Quiet on the Third Front

"The administration, for its part, seems eager to convince Iran that President Bush is crazy enough to sanction an attack. In the Rose Garden yesterday, Brett Baier of Fox News asked Bush how confident he is that Israel won't launch a military attack on Iran before the end of the year. 'I have always said that all options are on the table, but the first option for the United States is to solve this problem diplomatically,' came Bush's mild reply.

ABC's Martha Raddatz invited Bush to 'strongly discourage Israel' from such an activity. The president declined. 'I have made it very clear to all parties that the first option ought to be to solve this problem diplomatically,' he said.

Neither did the State Department offer discouragement. Spokesman Sean McCormack, at his daily briefing, said the matter of an Israeli strike isn't 'under our control.' When it was pointed out that the U.S. controls Iraqi airspace, through which Israeli warplanes would travel to hit Iran, McCormack declined to answer a 'hypothetical question involving military planning.'

As in most things involving the Bush administration, clarity can be found in the name Cheney -- in this case the vice president's daughter Liz, speaking last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 'I think the Iranians have to believe that we will use force if necessary, and I'm concerned because you had statements for a period of time there from people like the commander in Centcom, who has since been relieved, suggesting that force was off the table,' she said.

Liz Cheney further recommended doing 'everything we can to dispel this idea that, somehow, we don't have the capacity militarily to take action,' and she said it is crucial to make Iran realize, 'despite what you may be hearing from Congress, despite what you may be hearing from others in the administration who might be saying force isn't on the table, that we're serious." As for an Israeli strike on Iran, she said: 'I certainly don't think that we should do anything but support them.'

Cheney may soon get her chance. Last month, Israel held a major military drill that was widely seen as preparation for an attack on Iran's nuclear program. Around the same time, three prominent Israeli officials made public comments about the likelihood of an attack. Then came Seymour Hersh's article in the New Yorker reporting an increase in U.S. covert activities in Iran, along with Iran's threat to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large chunk of the world's oil passes. This week, ABC News featured an unnamed senior defense official talking about 'an increasing likelihood' of an Israeli attack by the end of the year.

In front of the cameras yesterday, Mullen tried to warn about the military problems such an attack would set off. 'This is a very unstable part of the world,' the chairman said, 'and I don't need it to be more unstable.' With troops already stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, he acknowledged that 'opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful" on the U.S. military. The chief warrior therefore appealed for "other elements of national power to change Iranian behavior, including diplomatic, financial and international pressure.'

But Mullen, informed by his discussions with Israeli military officials, did not offer much reassurance that an Israeli strike could be avoided. Iran, he said, is 'still on a path to get to nuclear weapons, and I think that's something that needs to be deterred.'

Might Iran have enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb by the year's end?

'I don't want to address that,' the chairman said.

Is Israel operating on a shorter time frame than the United States?

Mullen said past discussions 'indicated that they were.'

Is there a danger that all the bluffing could cause an actual war?

'It is high stakes, there's no question, in this part of the world, and I guess I'd just leave it at that.'"

The remarkable thing about all of this bluff and bullshit is that it has clearly, by an objective measure, made it harder, not easier, to get this situation resolved. Iran wasn't pursuing nukes as ambitiously 5 years ago, when this standoff first began. We started pressuring. They got more committed.

And no matter where pressure fails, its self-righteous advocates will always claim victory anytime we see any breakthrough anywhere, because of course if you spread your bullshit broad and wide, there's got to be somewhere you can claim victory, right? Even when everything else is going to shit.

Why do they do this?

Partly because Washington runs under a pack mentality. Everyone is always right, all the time. And when they are wrong, they would rather be wrong together then step out of line. Especially when they believe their career is at stake. Even if everyone is wrong. That's the beauty of that kind of pressure.

And much of that last fact is a matter of cowardice on the part of political leaders and observers to acknowledge failure when blame-shifting to someone not you is so much easier than taking responsibility (these are the same group of folks who lecture the rest of the country and world on responsibility for their actions, remember).

When groupthink operates, as Pat Roberts warned the country in his assessment of the rush to war in Iraq, independent and thoughtful judgment is sacraficed.

And is exactly the kind of environment that this constant drumbeat of pressure, no matter how often and long it fails, creates in Washington and around the world.

Much of this, at the bottom, is about a sad and general failure of most folks to face the failure of repression and force as a governing philosophy, especially among countries and cultures proporting to be liberal and democratic, meaning free and equal, and the matters of conscience and independent judgment that are fundamental to liberal values, the value we place on freedom and democratic engagement, and fundamental to the failures of repressive governments and cultures and repressive policies in liberal and democratic countries and cultures.

We will have to face up, just as we would have to face up to a Israeli-Palestinian peace process, no matter how many strikes on Arab and Palestinian targets take place, because facing up to those realities is the only way out.

I guess the silver lining in this period is that it will be a definitive defeat for repression. There will be no real opportunity for those to advocate repression to claim victory, anymore. Because the failures will pile up so high that, eventually, if we want to get past them we will have to embrace more genuinely liberal and democratic policies, meaning policies that honestly respect freedom and self-governance.

Until we live up to those values, we will fail. Guaranteed. Because you can't guarantee freedom and democracy, when you are disrespecting them in reality while praising them rhetorically. It just doesn't work that way. No matter how many rationalizations of power we engage in.

We have engagement to do on this question of Iran and nuclear weapons. There are important issues to get resolved that nuking their facilities will just never resolve, anymore than assassinating terrorist leaders actually ends terrorist threats when the underlying issues, like Palestinian occupation, go unresolved.

And until we live up, we will never be able to honestly claim to be the guarantors of freedom and democracy. There is no way to bullshit our way around this one. Though we are a creative bunch while we desperately try, aren't we?

It is our hypocrisy, our rationalizations of power, and, most importantly, our failure to take liberal democratic values, the values of freedom and self-government, seriously enough that are responsible for our failures.

It is a tailspin that we are stuck in, right now. But it is not a tailspin we can stay stuck in forever.

Because forever is an awfully long goddamn time to fail.

Surveying the damage

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

Karl Rove is a genius. You can't pay for this kind publicity.

This is why I love Wonkette

Because they go there.

Corrections Regarding Big Beavers and the Mexican Language

And then this nugget of cheeky goodness:

Same Sex Marriage Ban Subverted by Clever Gays

"Virginia won’t let The Gays get married, so this couple just walked into a courthouse and said “We would like to get married plz” and they got a marriage license and even got married, even though they were two dudes. (One of them had really nice skin, though!) And just like that, billions of straight marriages around America went kerplunk in an explosion of existential despair."

Reason #1,234,670,837 why Dana Milbank is a fuckin' idiot.

Where the Hell is Matt's Girlfriend?

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor. yeah collegehumor!!! check out Cute College Girls!!

Note to self: take girlfriend while on international junket to dance with foreigners who also dance poorly.

The brilliance that extremism reaps

Ah, fringe politics. You gotta love the morons who treat politics as an extension of religion, warfare, or the stankest-possible gossip mill. Nothing like some weak-minded power-mongering and bullying to brighten up your day.

From Andrew Sullivan. You gotta read this shit to believe it (my italics).

O-bonics, and other lessons

"My own on-air contribution to Obonics was "Obamistan" — the new name for a United States that is forced to accept Islamic Shari'a law. If you think that is a far-fetched idea, then consider another Islamic term: taq'qiyah. That word describes the fact that, under Islam, it is entirely acceptable — even encouraged — to use any level of deception against 'unbelievers' (in Allah, who is not the same as the God of the Bible) to advance the cause of Islam. In the video linked above, note that an Islamic 'scholar' (Abu Hamza al-Masri) advocates that Muslims may commit any act — beat, kidnap, sell, or kill — upon any non-Muslim that they might encounter. Al-Masri says that all non-Muslims are 'like a cow.'

Barack Obama claims to be a Christian. But, is he? His 'church' seems to hold Nation of Islam founder Louis Farrakhan in higher esteem than they do Jesus Christ. Obama used his political clout to support a regime in Kenya that oppressed Christians and attempted to impose shari'a law on all Kenyans. Obama's grandfather renounced Christianity. (For the results of that, read Hebrews 6, especially Verse 6.) Barack Obama's childhood friends recall him as a devout Muslim, and so do his relatives. A news item from India reports that Obama also carries a miniature Hindu idol in his pocket for 'luck.' (The word 'luck' stems from the name 'Lucifer.' The word in Russian for "evil" is lukavaho. Christians should bristle whenever someone wishes them 'good luck.')...

Recently, I floated the idea that Barack Obama could become The Antichrist by three ministers. One laughed at me, and two have not returned my messages. But, if the idea is so far-fetched, then how is it that:

He was raised a Muslim, claims to be a Christian, but has never publicly renounced Islam? (In the Orthodox Church, when a convert is baptized, part of the ritual is to renounce any other god. Most other Christian denominations accept that concept, even if they do not have a written liturgical procedure for renouncing Allah.)

He claims to be a Christian, but carries a Hindu idol in his pocket?

He supported an African politician that hunted down Christians?

His followers believe whatever he says, even if it is proven to be a lie?

It has been 'revealed' that he is likely not even a United States citizen, yet he has not been disqualified from office? (Is that not an ultimate example of 'lawlessness,' to become a lawmaker illegally?)

The Holy Bible describes certain attributes of The Antichrist. He will be a man that ultimately 'sets himself above all that is called god.' (If one claims to adhere to several different gods, even though each one claims exclusive dominion, then what does that say about the man?) The Antichrist will be a persecutor of Christians. He will be a consummately skilled liar. And, his identity will be revealed only after The Tribulation has already begun.

Now, before readers make too many assumptions, consider that The Antichrist will be preceded by a False Prophet, who will give The Antichrist his political power. Recently, former president Bill Clinton endorsed candidate Barack Obama, even though Hillary Clinton has only suspended (not withdrawn) her candidacy for president. Bill Clinton cannot become president again. But, he could be appointed — by a President Barack Obama, or even by a President Hillary Clinton — to become US Ambassador to the United Nations. And, in that position, he would be eligible to become UN Secretary General. That, in effect, would make Bill Clinton 'king of the world,' if the UN seizes power. All of that handed to him by a man that rises up, 'speaking boastfully' to the world about "change we can believe in.' Hmmmmm."

And this bullshit is even better. Thanks to Politico for tipping me off to these left-wing assholes (again, my italics).

"Hero" John McCain as Phony and Collaborator: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

“War is one thing, collaborating with the enemy is another; it is a legitimate campaign issue that strikes at the heart of McCain’s character. . .or lack thereof. In occupied countries like Iraq, or France in World War II, collaboration to that extent spells an automatic death sentence.. . .The question is: What kind of collaborator was John McCain, the admitted war criminal who will hate the Vietnamese for the rest of his life?

Put it another way: how psychologically twisted is McCain? And what actually happened to him in his POW camp that twisted him? Was it abuse, as he claims, or was it the fact that he collaborated and has to cover up? Covering-up can take a lot of energy. The truth is lurking there in his subconscious, waiting to explode.

McCain had a unique POW experience. Initially, he was taken to the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp, where he was interrogated. By McCain’s own account, after three or four days he cracked. He promised his Vietnamese captors, 'I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital...'

His Vietnamese captors soon realized their POW, John Sidney McCain III, came from a well-bred line in the American military elite...The Vietnamese realized, this poor stooge has propaganda value. The admiral’s boy was used to special treatment, and his captors knew that. They were working him.

...two weeks into his stay at the Vietnamese hospital, the Hanoi press began quoting him. It was not ‘name rank and serial number, or kill me’. as specified by the military code of conduct. McCain divulged specific military information: he gave the name of the aircraft carrier on which he was based, the number of U.S. pilots that had been lost, the number of aircraft in his flight formation, as well as information about the location of rescue ships.

...McCain was held for five and half years. The first two weeks’ behavior might have been pragmatism, but McCain soon became North Vietnam’s go-to collaborator…..McCain cooperated with the North Vietnamese for a period of three years. His situation isn’t as innocuous as that of the French barber who cuts the hair of the German occupier. McCain was repaying his captors for their kindness and mercy.

This is the lesson of McCain’s experience as a POW: a true politician, a hollow man, his only allegiance is to power. The Vietnamese, like McCain’s campaign contributors today, protected and promoted him, and, in return, he danced to their tune...'"

What is really bizarre about fringe politics is their ability to play upon the really pretty foolish insecurity and pretension by folks of every ideological leaning that, since their ideology clearly has all the answers to important political, cultural, and life questions - I mean, really now, which ideology doesn't have all the right answers? Silly moderates, humility is for the weak - that only identifying with the most mindless elements of their fringe can they truly prove credentials that will never be satisfied, anyway, since the whole point is manipulation not genuine understanding.

It's like trying to prove to Hamas how much you care about the Palestinian cause. In fact, it is the exact same thing as trying to prove to Hamas how much you care about the Palestinian cause. That's what Hamas is. They are the Palestinian flank. That's what terrorism is, to anyone who is not busy rationalizing their own fucked-up political activities. It's the most extreme fringe, willing to rationalize any brutal thing to justify its cause and the power they seek.

Hamas doesn't care. They're just using you to kill Israelis and expel the Zionist enemy. They could care less how much you care about the Palestian cause. They have no doubts about the righteousness of the Palestinian cause any more than ultra-conservative nutballs in Israel have doubts about the righteousness of Israeli occupation of Palestine. At best, they care about how much you can help them advance their cause.

That's the beauty of fringe politics. It means never having to be wrong. Ever. That's the point, you see. If you hang out with a bunch of people who all agree with you and all agree that they are right all the time, then it actually makes you right all the time, for real. Strong-minded stuff, let me tell you. That's what the strong do. They get a bunch of losers like themselves huddled together in a room and tell each other how they're right, all the time, and how the people who disagree with them are the Anti-Christ or Communist collaborators.

Fuckin' brilliant, that line of reasoning. It almost makes you wish they'd start up a university and let the rest of the world in on their infinite wisdom. Which is the whole point, of course, of radical activism and it's ideological presence on college campuses: to bully peoples' consciences in the one place where reason is most valued.

One of the central commitments of my life and my policy thought is to end this brainless bullshit, in every quarter, and to center policy discussions and thought squarely in the realm of the reason. And to undercut the efforts of every shitbag who has ever tried to substitute repression and manipulation for reason and thoughtful, compassionate policy.

Fuck the revolution, as Bono might say in a younger day. Fuck the warmongers and activists who don't know the difference between muscle and liberal democratic values. Fuck the dumbasses of the world who let various groups think for them. And fuck everyone who tries to substitute power for my independent conscience.

Mindless bullying is not a virtue. But everyone seems to find a cause that rationalizes it as so. Everyone. Since the beginning of humanity.

And the only thing that gives me hope that it might be different is that we always seem to give it up the tendency just a little bit more each generation.

It'd be nice to live in a world where my kids don't have to worry about being bullied because they think for themselves. A world where they can and will fight if they need to fight. But a world where they genuinely avoid doing so as much as is reasonably possible. It'd be nice if all kids could grow up in that world.

And fuck every single last asshole who tries to force that question otherwise.

It's time, as much as possible, that we ended this bullshit.

Understanding mental health

An important part of my teaching job - I work in a special day school with kids with serious academic, behavioral, and mental health issues - is an understanding of mental health and how it impacts peoples' relationships and functioning.

In that vein, I've done and continue to do a lot of broad study of mental health issues. One isssue that came up, recently, in a conversation with my roommate, was schizophrenia.



These are some very nice videos demonstrating what schizophrenia looks like, offering a fuller, truer-to-life illustration of this condition and its serious consquences for peoples' lives.



Mental health and psychology is subject to debate, of course, like any other idea or body of knowledge. It is subject to democratic discussion and debate as much as scholarly discussion and debate.

But the reality of the impact of psychology on our functioning and perceptions of reality is much more undeniable the more you see such situations and the consequences of mental health and our understandings of psychology, our own and others', on our lives.



My job lies between the world of serious mental illness, as demonstrated in these cases, and the more mentally healthy and yet always less than ideal mental health of those of us who do not suffer from a serious mental illness.

But understanding psychology and mental illness is critical to any understanding of people and how they relate with one another, including policy thought and discussions.

These videos give just a taste of what that understanding has to offer us.

One Day in September

If you have not seen the Oscar-award winning documentary, One Day in September, an excellent account of the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics and one of the best documentaries I have ever seen in my life, it has uploaded, in toto, apparently, on Youtube.



I highly recommend this really brilliant and remarkable film. I do not agree with all of its conclusions, especially its conspiracy-minded thinking about the German government and its motivations in its handling of this tragedy and its aftermath.

But, especially given an extended interview with Jamal Al Gashey, the last remaining member of the Black September terrorist cell responsible for this crime, I highly recommend giving this a watch.

You also might check out another excellent documentary on radical Islam, Obsession, when you get a chance.



Enjoy.

The people I want ruling the world

If there is any group of folks whose votes I want ruling the world, it is definitely this group of geniuses.



The idea that we would have our major policy debates about who can emulate or pander best to this bullshit rather than an engaged and honest debate and discussion about who has the best ideas about how to tackle our problems most effectively - and how to best let people tackle problems on their own and with one another without the oversight of the equally impressive geniuses who run for office - is, well, really fuckin' brilliant, you must admit.

And the idea that force, rather than liberal and democratic engagement, would operate as some kind of substitute for more genuine liberal democratic values, is as foolish in its consequences as it is the most persistent and stubborn abuse of power.

If our history was not so replete with a long track record of steering ourselves in the right direction despite such foolishness and abuses, I would be more gloomy about the world.

But, for awhile, as Lincoln wisely opined, these dumbasses can be convinced to do just about anything. And that is the problem. Power inherently involves manipulation. And these folks are just too subject to it.

If only that could be the end of it. Except that it can't. There is only one way out. We just all have to get smarter. And more responsible for our own lives.

And that is the way, and the only way, forward.

I now understand the allure of pop culture

My roommate just rented Control, recently, the surprisingly moving biopic of Ian Curtis and his band, Joy Division, the band soon to become 80's pop icons, New Order.



I must say that, other than the elementary school fascination that I had with bands like New Order - New Order was one of the major bands of my youth - as an adult, I both enjoy pop music and have never really completely understood my friends' obsession with pop music, popular movies, popular television dramas and sitcoms, and other things that seem so completely mindless and mindnumbingly boring to me as a thinking grown-up.

But, I must say, that after spending an evening with Joy Division and New Order videos, myspace pages, audio clips, Wikipedia entries, and other lore, I think I'm finally understanding the obsessive appeal of pop culture for my friends.



There's always been the mindless escape. The wanting to be part of the crowd, to belong and do what all the kids are doing, these days. The secret wish for an opportunity to sell out, make big cash, and not care about anything else other than having a good time.

But, mostly, there's the music.



Just getting lost in it, as Ian Curtis clearly does in this video for "She's Lost Control."

There's the ambiguous melancholy and introspection of Ian's lyrics in this early Joy Division work.

For me, with New Order, there's memories of childhood in the 80's, a period that seems innocent as the morning dew compared to the blunt, crass, sexual, drug-glorifying, and commercial messages on contemporary radio and video play.

I remember watching videos for songs like True Faith



...and Bizarre Love Triangle



...songs that I was completely clueless to their meaning but loved, nonetheless, inasfar as anyone can love a pop song, and never understanding what the hell these videos or songs meant, and not really caring, particularly. As a kid, I would try to decipher lyrics of even mindless pop songs, like these, and get to the bottom of what that big, mysterious grown-up life was like.



And, tonight, I realize that their appeal, for me and I assume for others, is not just the musicality for its own sake and chance to take a break from the complexity of real life. It's not just the memories as a kid of trying to decipher what often seemed a dark and enigmatic life of grown people.

It is the ability to pull back from a world that is overwhelming, sometimes, in its mindless and endlessly complicated pressures, struggles, and conflicts with apparently no end and often for reasons that seem kind of foolish and not good for much and just enjoy some uncomplicated and minimally taxing entertainment, hoping for it all to blow over.

It's more complicated than all that, of course. Everything is, of course.

But, sometimes, it's fun to take a little time off. And, more often, it's fun just to not think about it at all and just enjoy the music.

As I kid, I did more enjoying without thinking. As a grown-up, I don't know how to enjoy anything without thinking. Even mindless entertainment.

Enjoy. Don't think about it too much. Or do.

God knows I do. I know. It's pathetic. I just can't help myself. I never have.

Time to shut my brain off, watch some mindless 80's pop videos, and fall asleep to the tunes of True Faith, New Moon of Monday, Lovergirl, and other meaningless pop songs of my childhood that I read all kinds of meaning into trying to understand a strange, uncertain world.

Maybe everything will all blow over tomorrow. Or maybe I just need some sleep and do my best to understand this still all too odd and mysterious world tomorrow as today.

Goodnight everyone.

"Fuck the revolution"

This is how you talk to Americans.



Goddamn, Bono can make a speech, can't he? I miss the days when these boys sang like this. I appreciate being a rock star and not wanting to seem so pious.

But I think it's a little late for that, don't you, boys?

And for God's sakes, fuckers, risk a little sanctimony.

In the meantime, I remember when U2 had fewer friends with power and made more of a difference.

No offense, fellas, but pressuring the President and G8 leaders to make donations they were already committed to making is hardly the stuff of political courage.

In that spirit, a clip from an excellent movie about the war this song was written to end.



After that self-righteous screed, you'll need a little dose of the indominatable Richard Cheese (the contrast between Cheese's cheese and Bono's ire could not be more brilliant or more hilarious).



Here's their more recent, shitty, garbled, acoustic version for the Clinton Presidential library dedication.



And my favorite cover by you know who.



But nothing really holds a stick to Bono's performance, back in the day, huh?



Get some testicular fortitude, boys. Risk some sanctimony.

Make music like this again.

"Caring educator"

A story, today, in my hometown paper, the Lawrence Journal World, is a nice reminder of what really matters in life.

Officer remembered as caring educator

Real men and women don't have to go around swaggering about, proving how tough they are all the time. It's the fuckin' poseurs who sit behind desks, and those too callous to the harm they inflict, who romanticize tough when better and less destructive options are available.

Meaning, it's the weak who romanticize tough when other less destructive options are available or when its really not their place, at all, to impose themselves. People like Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah, Khaled Mashaal, Osama Bin Laden, and Mohammed Omar. Plenty of people in the United States and all over the world too close to those examples to be proud of themselves.

And David Dillon is a nice reminder of that fact that compassion does not mean soft, except to the weak.

Compassion is strength. In fact, it is this strength that more solidly than any other distinguishes the efforts of the West and liberal democracies from the efforts of the more repressive forces of the world.

In a world where the weak and the insecure are always turning to tough and denigrating compassion to avoid facing themselves, it's nice to know that people like David Dillon spent some time here, if only for awhile.

That's what I want people saying at my funeral. I don't want some asshole talking about what a "tough sum bitch," I was. That will be apparent from my life, well enough.

I want people to remember what a big heart I had. And that I was someone who gave having a big heart a good name. And that I'd gladly kick the ass and anyone who said different, if need be.

Thank you, Officer Dillon. You'll be missed.

Sad, foolish, and all too human

Ironically, for all of the swagger and bluster of tough characters in the world, the source of repression and inhumanity, since the beginning of humanity, has always been weakness.

Zimbabwean leader's reality: Mugabe is Right

Emotional weakness. Pride. The cowardice, unwillingness, and failure to face oneself and one's failures and mistakes honestly and with forgiveness for ourselves and for others for the pain that we and others have inflicted and experienced.

"Robert Mugabe's mother told him when he was a child that he had been chosen by God to be a great leader. No wonder he thinks only divine power — not elections, not foreign critics, not a crumbling economy or a much younger opposition leader — can unseat him.

In the mind of Zimbabwe's leader of nearly three decades, reality is summed up by a massive banner hanging in the entrance to the presidential offices: Mugabe is Right...

Robert Mugabe's mother told him when he was a child that he had been chosen by God to be a great leader. No wonder he thinks only divine power — not elections, not foreign critics, not a crumbling economy or a much younger opposition leader — can unseat him.

In the mind of Zimbabwe's leader of nearly three decades, reality is summed up by a massive banner hanging in the entrance to the presidential offices: Mugabe is Right.

Heidi Holland, who recounts the anecdote about God's chosen one in her recently published book 'Dinner with Mugabe,' says Zimbabwe's leader is an 'emotionally weak man' who's never come to terms with some of life's earlier disappointments.

He has never forgiven the father who abandoned him when he was 10 to the women in the family — a heathen grandmother and an over-pious mother converted to Catholicism who proudly gave her son into the care of Jesuit priests at nearby Kutama mission. There, Mugabe found a surrogate father in Anglo-Irish headmaster the Rev. Jerome O'Hea.

To this day Mugabe models himself on a British gentleman — dark lounge suits, silk ties and handkerchiefs, a fondness for tea and cricket.

Holland said Mugabe was likely humiliated in the past week when Queen Elizabeth II stripped him of the honorary knighthood bestowed in 1994 when he was an anti-colonial hero.

Yet it is Britain that Mugabe has chosen to demonize, accusing the former colonizer of wanting his southern African nation back.

'When you hear Mugabe vilifying Britain, expressing hatred of Britain, underlying that is a love of Britain,"'said Holland, a Zimbabwean journalist living in South Africa who won a rare interview with Mugabe in November, meeting with him for 2 1/2 hours.

She did not think he was crazy, but 'lives in the world in a mad kind of way. But I think it's deliberate, I think he's in denial, I think he can't face what he's done in Zimbabwe because that isn't what he intended to do. He did genuinely, I think, want be the savior of his people, the liberator of an oppressed nation. What has happened is a source of deep pain to him, I think.'

Mugabe still is bitter, Holland says, that the white Rhodesian regime refused to allow him out of jail, where he was a political prisoner for 11 years, to attend the funeral of his only son with his first wife, Ghanaian fellow teacher Sally Hayfron.

Even as a child, Mugabe could not bear to be criticized, she said. He was a loner with his head constantly stuck in a book and an astute scholar who earned six degrees while he was in jail...

Chenjerai Hove, a Zimbabwean poet, novelist and essayist who fled Mugabe's regime, says whenever Mugabe is challenged 'he becomes a wounded lion and goes on the attack.'

Those who have failed to see that pattern chose 'to look the other way while the man was busy showing his dictatorial tendencies,' says Hove, a writer in resident at Brown University.

Back in 1976, when Mugabe fled Rhodesia to take control of the war for black rule from Mozambique, 'a lot of people were arrested and tortured for him to be accepted as a leader, so his cruel past started at that time, and he has always worked like that,' Hove said.

When Mugabe's leadership was challenged after independence in 1980 by disgruntled military leaders of rival liberation leader Joshua Nkomo's movement, Mugabe sent his North Korean-trained elite Fifth Brigade on a rampage against Nkomo's minority Ndebele tribe. Some 20,000 people, most innocent civilians, were killed. Thousands starved to death as Mugabe withheld international drought relief from Ndebele civilians.

'This is a man who does not forgive ... I think it's about revenge ... He now knows that his own people don't want him.'"

Sounds like a very accurate portrait of what I would expect from a man like this. It's the reason that repressive characters demean compassion, decency, forgiveness, and humanity.

Because it means facing themselves honestly. And doing that is too painful for their fragile egos.

Facing ourselves honestly is painful for everyone. Most, likely all, people in the world, since the beginning of humanity, have struggled facing themselves honestly. It is difficult and painful effort. It is made more difficult and painful by our efforts to repress and harm one another rather than contain people who are dangerous and make good faith efforts to engage and lead people to take honest responsibility for themselves and their actions.

It is this failure that has been the source for our illiberal, undemocratic, and ugly and bitter past. Repression makes facing this failure and all failures more difficult because it adds to the pain load that emotionally fragile egos already fail to come to terms with. And the legacy of repression is a legacy of weak and fragile egos failing to come to terms with that fact of life and their role in creating and prolonging much needless tragedy in the world.

It is ironic that the false heroes that humanity has forever turned to in the name of strength and courage have always, in fact, been figures of enormous emotional weakness and cowardice. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Jong Il, Ahmadinejad, Hussein, Mugabe. But also American, British, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Canadian, and other leaders the world over and since the beginning of humanity. It is more common than not, really, is the truth. As is our persistent and tragic rationalizations for their repressive behavior and our own that has led to our ugliest and most destructive legacies.

The source of humanity's repression and inhumanity has always been our weakness, our emotional weakness and cowardice to face, honestly, and take responsibility for our inhumanity and its consequences.

It is the saddest of ironies, since repression was originally meant to facilitate resposibility in the face of humanity's sinfulness and proclivity to making even the most serious mistakes.

And humanity, today, and till the end of time, faces a fundamental choice:

Will we face, honestly, our inhumanity, its consequences, and the repression that breeds it? Or will we continue to face the consequences without facing our responsibility in those consequences, and thus continue down this self-fulfilling prophecy of force, violence, tragedy, mayhem, and destruction till the end of time.

One thing is for sure.

Whether we take responsibility for this legacy and its consequences or not, we are responsible for it and its consquences. And no amount of denial, today or ever, will make that go away. It will simply put off the inevitable and tragic reflection by our peers and our progeny on what sad, destructive fools we are and have been.

How sad that we would accept that fate rather than expect better from ourselves. How sad that we would accept cowardice as our legacy rather than genuine courage.

It cannot and will not go on forever. We are not so cowardly and foolish as all that.

But how sad that we would even consider a fate so cowardly and needlessly tragic because we cannot offer up the one thing that we say that all that repression is meant to elicit: responsibility.

I am most certainly sorry for everything that I have ever or still might contribute to that legacy, in my own life. I have been responsible for plenty of harm, in my own life. We all have. And I am sorry for everything that I've contributed to that ugly legacy.

It is now up to the consciences of each and everyone in this sad, foolish, and forgivable species of humanity to bring that kind of strength and courage to the world and to their and our lives.

And then, and only then, can this sad, foolish, and all too human legacy end.

Give us strength.

Creative capitalism: a conversation

Michael Kinsley alerts me to a website he has started to help write his next book on what Bill Gates has termed "creative capitalism"

Creative capitalism: a conversation

From the website:

"Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book --a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims. Over the next couple of months we'll be posting much of that material here, in the hopes of eliciting public commentary. Some of the public commentary -- the comments posted on this blog -- will also be used in the book. (Comments to the effect of "capitalism is evil and Bill Gates is a fool" probably won't be used. But we're genuinely open to opinions of all stripes, and all of the contributors who do end up in the finished product will be paid on a per-word basis, which should work out to between one and two dollars per word.)

The same goes for economics bloggers who write about the stuff here on their own sites: If we can get permission, we'd like to use that material too.

We also invite contributions by email. You can send submissions to conorjclarke [at] gmail [dot] com. (Anything you send can be posted here, though we might edit it a bit first.) We are especially interested in contributions from economists and anyone working in development. But we welcome pretty much anything that's interesting and well-written."

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have a really interesting conversation on that pager about what Bill means by "creative capitalism."

"Warren Buffet: I would rather have Bill, if he will, give me the main points.

Bill Gates: Well it’s not completely well defined. It’s a phrase that I used in a speech at Harvard a year ago, because I totally believe in markets as such powerful forces for drawing out innovation and creating things that are sustainable. And yet, you do get trapped in this situation where the markets serve where the dollars are, so you don’t get markets meeting the needs of the poorest. And so how do you bootstrap or support the needs of the poorest so markets are reaching out to them. I mean, when I view the last hundred years as an experiment in how good markets are, the answer is very, very clear and very strong. It’s one of those things that’s so clear people won’t even discuss it with you anymore. Like in this [Edward] Teller biography: he says, Look, if he didn’t believe in innovation, he would have been a communist. If the economy is a zero-sum situation, then you ought to try some crazy sharing thing. It’s only the innovation and pie-growing activity that made Teller feel comfortable with the capitalistic approach. And I think that that’s been validated.

You often hear people saying that companies should do something besides profit maximization. And it’s amazing how strong a message is hidden in words like 'diversity' or the broad term 'corporate social responsibility.' Warren and I were just at the Microsoft CEO Summit for the last couple days and it was amazing how many of the talks were about how a company needs to have core values of who they are and what they do as the thing that makes the employees feel they have a purpose and guides their action. And how that needs to be really at the center, even more so than the short-term profit metrics. Jack Welch was very good on that and Lee Scott [CEO of Wal-Mart] was very good on that, I think in a very sincere way. I think it’s more true all the time.

Bill George [of Harvard Business School] ran the leadership panel, and he was saying how the younger generation really wants to go to work with people who have a purpose. So what I’m saying is when people write down that purpose, when they write down their values, that an element of that should be: what can we do based on our skill set, our innovators, whatever unique capacities we have as a company--what can we be doing for the poorest 2 billion? And that can either be taking more risk in terms of trying to develop markets there, which is C.K. Prahalad-type stuff, or just doing things like the Merck donation that are not profit seeking and yet not giving up huge percentage of profit.

So somebody can read the words 'creative capitalism' and say, 'Okay, Bill Gates said that you should serve the poorest 2 billion and ignore profit.' That is not what I intend to say at all, but then I am being a bit ambiguous about how far you go in being willing to give up something. Am I saying one percent? Two percent? Three percent? Nobody who sets these dual roles is very good about being clear. I mean, what do they say you’re supposed to give up for corporate social responsibility. Well, they’re not willing to be numeric because they feel like the two goals, profit and social responsibility, aren’t totally at odds over time—or diversity, or whatever the value is.

I understand it best in terms of the big companies of the world: pharma, banks, technology companies, food companies. Buying from the poor world, supplying to the poor world, having scientists and innovators who come together to think about the poor world. It’s best defined for me there, and then I think, “Okay, how concrete is this?” I go back to this thing of: Okay, if all companies did as well as the best do, then it would be pretty dramatic in terms of the rate of improvement for the poorest. And a year from now I’ll know a lot more about this, because in my new time back at the Foundation I’ll meet with heads of pharma, heads of food companies, heads of…I’ll meet a lot of these companies and try and get a sense of, do they agree that in their hiring it would help them, do they agree that in their reputation and maybe seeking long-term markets it would help them and see how concrete a response is possible.

Warren: But as Bill was talking, it just occurred to me that if you don’t trust the government to do a lot of things very well—and business will never trust them to do that; rich people will never trust them to do that—and if, on the other hand, the honor system doesn’t work particularly well in terms of how many people behave (and this idea just occurred to me ten seconds ago so it will take a lot of refining): what if you had three percent or something like that of the corporate income tax totally devoted to a fund that would be administered by some representatives of corporate America to be used in intelligent ways for the long-term benefit of society, This group—who think they can run things way better than government—could tackle education, health, etc. or other activities in which government has a large role. And it would have this forced funding of three percent of corporate profits or some sum like that. Ace Greenberg used to insist that all the managing directors of Bear Stearns give four percent to charity, and in December he went around and talked to everyone who hadn’t yet given his four percent. And he told all the Jews that they had to give any shortfall at year end to Catholic Charities, and he told the Catholics they had to give it to the United Jewish Appeal. Well this would be a variation on that. Take three percent—pick a figure—of corporate income. That would be, perhaps, $30 billion a year (you would exempt small companies). If there are things to be done in society that the market system doesn’t naturally lead to, something like this would be a supplement to the invisible hand. It would be a second hand that would come down for society—administered in a business-like manner—and it might be interesting to see what a system like that might produce...

Bill: I think there are going to be corporations where expertise builds up to solve problems that is not built up any other place. And your hypothetical is a little strange because what we’re faced with is a world with vast disparities in wealth that have to do with what country you’re born into and you wouldn’t have that if you had one person running the world and so, you know, the degree to which a little bit of innovation can make a huge, huge difference whether it’s an LED flashlight or something you can roll to move the water that you used to have to carry.

Some of these innovations--when you see them you say, 'Oh, well, obviously that rationally should have happened,' but it only happened because somebody cared. Now you could say in the grand sweep of time capitalistic economics would have come up with that. Well, there’s a lot of suffering between now and eventually that this thing can deal with.

The brilliance in innovations inside universities--we haven’t talked about universities here because I haven’t thought about that as much, although even some of them are starting to get involved. Getting them to take their innovation power, thinking power, awareness raising power, into these things is another part thing that I think is important and I hit a tiny bit on that in the Harvard speech, but we have all this expertise. You need to apply it. Drugs are just such a clear, clear case. The government doesn’t know how to make drugs. They don’t know how to trial drugs. There’s no government in the world that’s in the business of doing that. So you’ve gotta send the signals…now I admit that you could do it if you had a single world government. You could do it just by giving money to the poor and then letting the market speak out. I think you could design a utopian system that would do it that way and then you wouldn’t have to rely on--you could have robots working at the company. Whereas here I’m actually explaining the fact you have people who care about humans working at the company.

Warren: But I think the most realistic model actually can be the Gates Foundation. If you’re really looking for ways to take huge amounts of resources over time, and they are going to be huge aggregations of resources, and you show the world that something is a better system than government and will work better and can attack things that government can’t and so on; and that will use resources efficiently. I think people will look for that--not 100 percent of the people, not maybe 50 percent of the people, but a lot of people will. But I think it could be a demonstration project like nothing else the world has ever seen.

Michael: The retiring CEO of the Gates Foundation--she’s very excited about the idea of a middle institution that’s not non-profit and it’s not for-profit. It’s a low-profit, and I think [Grameen Bank founder] Muhammad Yunus has suggested this and basically it runs like a corporation except all the money is put back in.

Bill: Well, there are such things, you know, there are mutual operations that are like that, you know, the recreational co-op, which is pretty sizeable now a days…What percentage of the hospitals in the U.S. are under that type of structure--50 percent, 60 percent?

Warren: If I owned 100 percent of Berkshire I could have set it up that way. But I think the model of intelligent, private philanthropy will look superior to governmental spending in many areas. I don’t think there will be a shortage of funds over time and I think there will be a lot of people who will make a lot of money who don’t now have the faintest damn idea about how to best funnel that money back to society, but will, nevertheless, feel like they want to funnel that money back to society. I think intelligent private philanthropy has a huge potential.

Bill: Yeah. I would say two things about that. One is there will be an effort with more to spread the word about how much fun it is to do philanthropy--either the way I’m doing it, where you get deeply involved, or the way Warren’s doing it, where you look and you pick somebody who you’re excited about their approach and you back them to go do it. So I’m going to meet some percentage of the very rich people in a quiet way and encourage them. It will be all their credit if they choose to do it, but I’ll say that (a) philanthropy is good, and (b) the hardest part of philanthropy, which is getting to poor countries because learning how to do that, knowing it’s effective, dealing with some of the challenges there, you know, showing them where that works and in a few cases maybe they will want to partner with us. I think upping that goes along with upping the corporate part, which is the creative capitalism, and goes along with upping the academic attention to the problems of the poorest.

Things like grand challenges are another kind of innovative thing here where we might dial a grand challenge in micronutrition and it might be some guy at Nestle in that food lab who sees that thing and says he can solve it and he needs a little bit of forbearance from his managers to take, you know, five or 10 people and write it up and come to us and say they’ll transfer that technology or something. It doesn’t take some big diversion of a profit.

Also, to the degree The Gates Foundation works, we are engaged in these things where companies like GlaxoSmithKline--even though we’re funding a lot of the work--they’re putting some of their top innovators on the malaria vaccine. You’ll never figure out the numbers, but there are some opportunity costs where those people could have worked on something else. Now if one or two of them were people who said they would have retired if they couldn’t work on this or figuring out how fungible that resource really would have been for them and what it would have done. It would be pretty hard to beat America on that, but they are really giving up opportunity costs to do these things. If we work it will be partly because people like GSK are going along with us or [India’s] ICICI Bank are going, or Nestle are going along. And that list, you know, a year from now will be a lot longer.

Warren: Over the years, by his letter, Bill will be talking to more rich philanthropists or potential philanthropists, you know, than anybody ever has in the world. I mean Carnegie is still talking 100 years later or whatever it may be since writing The Gospel of Wealth. Bill’s model can have a huge potential and it can have a huge potential with smart people who may think of variations on it. He’s in a unique position to talk to the world on it and the world wants to hear what he has to say. It’s a great opportunity.

Bill: Just to be clear what Warren’s referring to: I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m going to do something that in the world of philanthropy that is much like what Warren’s annual letter is in the world of business. And the target is that the first one of those will come out this January.

I do think talking with rich people globally, they will be interested. Not necessarily that they will do anything, but for me to say, 'Oh, wow, this went well, this went poorly. Damn these governments who can’t do this and that.'

Mike: You get the letter if you could give away money and you don’t actually have to be giving it away yet?

Bill: The letter will be on the Internet. We’ll promote it as, 'Hey, maybe you’d be interested in reading this thing.' And there will be a number of constituencies, but potential givers are a big part of it. Somebody who works at a UN agency I bet, you know, some of them will read it. Some people in poor world governments will read it. Some people in the drug industry, who knows.

Warren: They will all read it every time.

Bill: I’m going to get the jokes from Warren and so that is--

Melinda: The clean ones.

Bill: No Mae West.

Warren: It’s got huge potential, because you’re actually doing it. I mean it has so much more impact than some academic writing about it or something. Everything goes through your mind and they love it. They want to know that. They get a chance to sit down with Bill Gates and talk about philanthropy or listen about it anyway. They can see what you’ve done and they can say all kinds of things. Really, look at Carnegie’s thing. I mean it isn’t that amazing what he wrote or anything like that, but it influences people a century later. I mean this has got 100 times the potential."

For policy folks, it's got to be kind of funny to read Bill say something naive like this:

"...now I admit that you could do it if you had a single world government. You could do it just by giving money to the poor and then letting the market speak out. I think you could design a utopian system that would do it that way and then you wouldn’t have to rely on--you could have robots working at the company."

...and then read Warren say this...

"I mean it has so much more impact than some academic writing about it or something."

I always love when people talk about serious thinking and writing like it isn't doing something. As if all those wise things just get thought up and written all on their lonesome. I'd be curious to see what kind of world we would have where people were always doin' stuff without studying it, seriously, or if people didn't write about the important stuff. Warren's got to be curious about what his world would look like without Ben Graham - the man whose work he credits all his wealth to - doing all that there them book learnin' and writin'. And we all need to reflect, seriously, about what the world would look like without the writing of people like John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Karl Popper, Mary Wolstonecraft, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Benjamin Graham, and the writers of the Bible. Not all of those folks are academics, of course. But they do go to the point. Thinking and writing are doing something. And, often, they are the most powerful things to be done, when we're not bullshitting ourselves.

But I also agree with Buffet's larger point. Most people are more convinced by what they see than what they read (even when they're wrong). It's a curious, reasonable, if often foolish tendency we have. But it also often one of the most powerful final words on many matters and makes enough sense to be true.

I do happen to seriously believe in what Gates is arguing. It is an important reason why I believe in the capacity of for-profit and non-profit markets to handle most areas of public service and commitment that are not ones government uniquely or ideally performs or performs well. And I think this is a better focus, generally, than either a strictly for-profit focus in the market or a focus on government responsibility for society's needs or a non-profit focus that is not focussed on results and accomplishment.

This is a nice opening play on this concept. The rest is up to us. Actually, no matter happens, the rest is up to us.

Here's to using our opportunities wisely.

I still haven't found what I'm looking for.

My favorite U2 song, by far.



Though the better version is still, and always, backed with the New Voices of Freedom gospel choir on the Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum tours.



Theme song for life. And that's how it should be.

The case for sensible universal acess to health care

Politics is often so shrill and mindless, that I've often felt that many policy questions are a matter of just sitting down dispassionately with evidence, rather than the self-righteous fits that people are often so given to.

Single-payer health insurance as a route to a commitment to universal access to health care is one such issue, I believe.

It is encouraging that the architect of the Quebec single-payer system has arrived at the same conclusion.

Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies in Ruins, It's Architect Admits

"Back in the 1960s, Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: 'the father of Quebec medicare.' Even this title seems modest; Castonguay's work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in 'crisis.'

'We thought we could resolve the system's problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,' says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: 'We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.'

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In America, these ideas may not sound shocking. But in Canada, where the private sector has been shunned for decades, these are extraordinary views, especially coming from Castonguay. It's as if John Maynard Keynes, resting on his British death bed in 1946, had declared that his faith in government interventionism was misplaced.

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

Sick with ovarian cancer, Sylvia de Vires, an Ontario woman afflicted with a 13-inch, fluid-filled tumor weighing 40 pounds, was unable to get timely care in Canada. She crossed the American border to Pontiac, Mich., where a surgeon removed the tumor, estimating she could not have lived longer than a few weeks more.

The Canadian government pays for U.S. medical care in some circumstances, but it declined to do so in de Vires' case for a bureaucratically perfect, but inhumane, reason: She hadn't properly filled out a form. At death's door, de Vires should have done her paperwork better.

De Vires is far from unusual in seeking medical treatment in the U.S. Even Canadian government officials send patients across the border, increasingly looking to American medicine to deal with their overload of patients and chronic shortage of care.

Since the spring of 2006, Ontario's government has sent at least 164 patients to New York and Michigan for neurosurgery emergencies — defined by the Globe and Mail newspaper as 'broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain.' Other provinces have followed Ontario's example.

Canada isn't the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain's system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.

The problem is that government bureaucrats simply can't centrally plan their way to better health care.

A typical example: The Ministry of Health declared that British patients should get ER care within four hours. The result? At some hospitals, seriously ill patients are kept in ambulances for hours so as not to run afoul of the regulation; at other hospitals, patients are admitted to inappropriate wards.

Declarations can't solve staffing shortages and the other rationing of care that occurs in government-run systems.

Polls show Americans are desperately unhappy with their system and a government solution grows in popularity. Neither Sen. Obama nor Sen. McCain is explicitly pushing for single-payer health care, as the Canadian system is known in America...

However the candidates choose to proceed, Americans should know that one of the founding fathers of Canada's government-run health care system has turned against his own creation. If Claude Castonguay is abandoning ship, why should Americans bother climbing on board?"

I favor a commitment to universal access to health care, actually. I just think a single-payer system or any system driven by government is far from ideal and trades off with the advantages of a private market unnecessarily.

A voluntary, decentralized for-profit and non-profit commitment to universal access to health care is a better model. It offers more diversity, more choice, better care and better opportunities for care for everyone, it threatens the advantages of our private health care market not one iota (in fact, it very much supports those advantages since it alleviates pressure to curb the all-too-taken-for-granted advantages of our health care market, with all of its research and development, specialties, technology, pharmaceuticals and drug research, and all of the plethora of advantages of a robust health care market), it offers patients the ability to more readily navigate a robust and forever imperfect marketplace of ideas, relationships, options, etc., in a way that a socialist system could never match, and it could, as Castonguay suggests, be easily transitioned to from single-payer systems, by simply decentralizing control of existing hospitals, doctors' offices, drug manufacturers, and the like from the top-down model currently in place in Canada and giving them autonomy and responsibility for patient issues and results.

Public education, the field I work in currently, is the last bastion of socialism in the United States, and it should be plenty evidence of the failure of that route to anyone not dead-set on defending its every failure. Like health care, the freedom of choice and the freedom to develop institutions that care for peoples' most basic needs is critical to strong institutions and strong services.

What maintains socialists commitments is not their success. What maintains them is persistent defense of the part of their apologists, the fear that abandoning socialist projects equates with abandoning people and serious needs, much agnosticism and ambivalence on the part of a lot of citizens, and the lack of adequately argued and understood alternatives.

Decentralized for-profit and non-profit markets, the kinds that are advocated by school choice advocates in the United States, is the strongest general idea to address institutions where citizens have commitments to universal access to fundamental needs in modern societies, like education and health care.

Properly conceived, it is the only reasonable way to offer the highest quality care and services to the most number of people possible. And it is the only way to most adequately and constructively address inequities in those services, with a given understanding that such inequities will never fully be addressed, no matter what system is now or ever adopted. We can reduce the inequities, we cannot eliminate them, ever. And decentralized for-profit and non-profit markets offer us the best opportunity to do that in a way that single-payer and socialized care and services could never, in their wildest dreams, accomplish.

Here's to one more important voice to contribute to that chorus.

Where the Hell is Matt?

This guy's gets it.



And fuck the assholes who can't get it figured out. Sorry you're such a prick.

I'm with Matt.

This is why pressure will not work in Zimbabwe

Because that's the problem. Or, at least, it is the consistent excuse that Mugabe has to offer.

Zimbabwe official: Mandela bowed to West

What Robert Mugabe is consistently able to use as propaganda to rally people of Zimbabwe to his utterly ugly, failed, and ridiculously dysfunctional leadership is Zimbabwe's past colonial relationship to Great Britain, and, by extension, the West, and the manipulation of internal Zimbabwean affairs by foreign forces.

We've already poisoned the well with imperial activity. Manipulating them further only strengthens Mugabe's hand. The abuse of power does have consequences, whether we want to face those consequences or not. And, in this case, our abuses of power have kept a murderous, repressive thug in power.

Morgan Tsvangirai's suggestion for United Nations peacekeepers to guarantee a free and fair election is the best proposal I have heard thusfar.

He is now disavowing it, I think likely in response to pressure from Mugabe and his government mouthpiece, the Herald, referring to Tsvangirai's talk of United Nations troops as calling "for military intervention in Zimbabwe disguised as peacekeepers," which prompted Mugabe to rally Zimbabweans to "vote for the ruling party to show the world their resolve to defend the country's sovereignty and independence." And that is the heart of the problem.

I agree with Tsvangirai that United Nations peacekeepers guaranteeing a free and fair election is the most ideal way out of this mess. The people of Zimbabwe need to remove this despot, if despotism is not to become a habit in Zimbabwe and if liberal and democratic principles are to take root. The troops should be made up by as many African nations as possible, and some from Zimbabwe, if some independent Zimbabweans might be able to volunteer for such a force (Zimbabwean government forces should either be excluded or only included if it is absolutely clear that they can act independently, a likelihood I doubt), and as few European and American forces, as possible. We need a competent and credible professional troop presence. If African nations can do the trick, that would be ideal. But if they cannot, as many non-European and non-American troops as possible would be best to ward off fears of foreign invasion or occupation by Zimbabwe's most recent imperial masters or those they associate with them.

We want these elections to be free and fair. We also want Mugabe booted, is the truth. But we neither want to determine that outcome for the Zimbabwean people, nor do we want them to keep him in power as a bulwark against British and Western imperialism. Zimbabweans should bring Mugabe to justice, ideally, which can best happen with a self-determined democratic election that ousts him from power and brings him to justice for his horrific crimes against Zimbabwe and humanity.

We will find this in most places around the world, today. It is our abuses of power that undermine our ability to use our power wisely. This is a valuable situation to learn that lesson. Because learning it will make all the difference in the success or not of our efforts.