The Weak In Rock

I wasn’t surprised that Barrack Obama distanced himself from Rev. Wright’s comments at the Washington Press Club, but I was still disappointed. On the one hand Wright is absolutely full of shit - claiming that the US government invented HIV to decimate the minority community. While on the other he’s dead on in such a way that anyone who calls him out on it is just in massive denial - that the 9/11/01 attacks shouldn’t have surprised anyone and were a logical outgrowth of the foreign policy practiced by the US for generations.

That Obama should distance himself from obvious conspiracy theorizing idiocy (the HIV comment) makes perfect sense, and he’s correct in wanting to keep his distance from such moronitude. Of course it could also be argued that comments so stupid shouldn’t even be acknowledged. Sitting Senators can and do support asinine social and political views, but those that do rarely become front runner for their party’s nomination to run for the White House.

What disappoints me is that Obama doesn’t have the courage to acknowledge that the obviously exploitative US foreign policies in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Central and South America are what fueled the anger that provided the opportunity for an organization like Al Qaeda to recruit volunteers to fly planes into US landmarks and kill thousands of people. This is not an extremist view. It’s a view held by many mainstream political thinkers (heck, I read Blowback by Chalmers Johnson, a sort of uber mainstream political scientist, former cold warrior and professor emeritus at UC San Diego, in 2000 when it came out - a book that flat out says the actions of the CIA and the US military in the third world were inevitably going to result in pissed off victims of those actions striking back at the US in the only way available to them - terrorist attacks.). But the official party line of the US government on 9/11/01 is that “the terrorists” attacked the US because they hate our democracy, our freedom of expression and Christianity, so Obama can’t deviate from that script lest he be thrown under the bus by his own party, also too cowardly to call bullshit where it’s so obvious the smell would curl your nose hair from 100 miles out.

I think most of all though I’m disappointed in my fellow Americans who continue to fantasize that our government somehow bears no responsibility at all for what happened on 9/11/01. I guess it’s just too difficult to think about for most people. They’d rather believe that we were all just hapless victims of sociopathic mass murderers, and while I’ll admit that there seem to be quite a lot of that sort involved in fundamentalist Islam (and fundamentalist Christianity, for that matter) it just doesn’t work for me to explain away 9/11/01 or Al Qaeda by saying “oh, they’re all just crazy with no genuine motives for the crimes they commit.” It’s sort of like the whole business about smaller scale sociopaths having been abused as children. It doesn’t excuse their actions. It does give them a logical explanation, however, and points out that looking the other way at domestic violence isn’t just bad for the immediate victim, it may lead to collateral damaged down the road.

Technorati Tags: Barrack Obama, Rev. Wright

This is the sort of thing that discredits folks on the left…

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/er.html

Some people are too dumb to be let out of the house.

If the story that ESPN ran today in which John Rocker claimed that not only MLB and the MLBPA knew about his performance enhancing drug use in 2000, but actually gave him advice on how to do it effectively then MLB can kiss their anti-trust exemption bye-bye.

I have no doubt in my mind that Congress will subpoena Rocker to testify before them, and come down on Bud Selig and the league like a proverbial ton of bricks.

As I’ve said many times, I don’t care about drug use in sports.  I find the subject tedious and overblown by lazy reporters who can’t think of anything else to write about, but considering the sheer amount of bald-faced lying that the league has done to the US government about the subject and the lack of patience for such things among legislators it won’t surprise me at all if Congress makes good on their threat from several years back to revoke the anti-trust exemption from baseball.

While I’d love to see Bud Selig and Donald Fehr twist in the wind, the economics of professional baseball make it very unlikely that MLB minus its anti-trust exemption would be a viable business in many of the cities that now have MLB teams (including Oakland).  So, this development is not a good one for fans.

On the other hand, John Rocker has been demonstrably full of shit for a long time, and this may just be his way of trying to make himself into a poor man’s Jose Canseco.

Technorati Tags: John Rocker, MLB, MLBPA, anti-trust exemption, Congress, Bud Selig, Donald Fehr, Oakland, Jose Canseco

I’ve been saying for a long time that the British have had a much more enlightened conception of Al Qaeda than the US. Well, now it’s official.

“The words ‘war on terror’ will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

“Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless ‘death cult.’”

The story goes on to say, in reference to the most recent terrorist activity in the UK:

“’The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,’ Macdonald said. ‘They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.’”

Yup. That’s it. The folks who flew planes into the World Trade Center in NY on 9/11/01 were criminals, not soldiers. You cannot fight criminals with an army. You fight them with law enforcement - investigation, evidence gathering, arrests, prosecution and incarceration. And by calling these people what they are - fanatics, narcissists, murderers and criminals - you give them their proper status. By referring to them in any sort of context of warfare you elevate their importance in the world and dignify what they’re doing.

Maybe someone in the Democrats’ camp will pick this one up and run with it. We can only hope.

Technorati Tags: the British, Al Qaeda

Here’s one skill that seems to have slipped out of the grasp of most folks these days – telling the difference from something that is a big deal and something that is not a big deal.

On the whole you could probably wrap this one up under the heading of a general loss of the art of critical thinking. Whether you realize it or not, they did used to teach this in school, and not just universities. Nope, they snuck it into all the basics in junior high and high school. While I’m willing to believe that this is no longer being done, and that would account for the inability of younger adults to think critically, I’m at a bit of a loss to explain why people of my own generation and older seem to no longer be able to tell their proverbial asses from proverbial holes in the ground.

Let’s take today’s big news story for example – Oil prices hit $100 a barrel. In my office they’ve got flat screen TV’s up all over the place, all of them tuned to one cable news channel or another. Walking down the hallways today you’d have thought the sky had literally fallen. The pundits weren’t punditing about anything other than this historic oil price milestone. I’ve got one word – bullshit.

In 1978 oil hit $84 a barrel. Adjusting that price for inflation to today’s dollar and that means 1978 oil cost around $270 per barrel in 2008 money. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about the growing demand for oil that coincides with the continued dwindling of oil reserves worldwide. But it does mean that all this wringing of hands and panic is based entirely on thoughtless, emotional behavior. Think, people, think. Numbers too big? Ok, try this set instead – regular gas at my local station costs about $3.45 per gallon. If you adjust that for inflation back to a 1978 price then we’re effectively paying $1.07 per gallon for gas at my local station. Pardon me and my poor memory, but that seems to be pretty much the same price we were paying in 1978. Gas prices haven’t gone up, friends and neighbors. The value has dropped out of your dollars. And honestly, you should be much, much more concerned about that in the overall big picture.

Technorati Tags: critical thinking, 1978, 2008, Gas prices