Battlestar Galactigeek

If back very early on March 19, at about 2:12 AM Eastern Time, in fact, you happened to be outside looking at the night sky, and if you happened to have very good viewing conditions, and if you happened to be looking toward the constellation Boötes, perhaps looking for Arcturus (remember to "arc to Arcturus"), and if you didn't close your eyes at the wrong moment, you might have seen a brief flash of light.

You likely would have been surprised. You likely would have wondered what it was. You likely would not have guessed.

What you would have seen was a gamma ray burst from the most distant object ever to be seen with the naked eye: Some 7.5 billion light years away, more than halfway across the visible universe.

"It was a whopper," says [NASA] Swift [satellite] principal investigator Neil Gehrels of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "This blows away every gamma ray burst we've seen so far." ...

Most gamma ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. Their cores collapse to form black holes or neutron stars, releasing an intense burst of high-energy gamma rays and ejecting particle jets that rip through space at nearly the speed of light. When the jets plow into surrounding interstellar clouds, they heat the gas to incandescent visibility. It is this gaseous "afterglow" which was visible to the human eye on March 19th.

GRB 080319B's afterglow was 2.5 million times more luminous than the most luminous supernova ever recorded, making it the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The most distant previous object that could have been seen by the naked eye is the nearby galaxy M33, a relatively short 2.9 million light-years from Earth.

So this was over two and a-half times further away. Scientists aren't sure why this particular event was so bright; it could have been intrinsically brighter or perhaps its energy release was in a narrow stream pointed directly at Earth.

You can see an animated .gif of the flash (from which the picture here, showing the flash as the dot of light in the center, is taken) at the story link and more info about the burst itself (and a larger animated .gif) at this link.

Oh, if you wonder about the name it was given, it's simple:
GRB = gamma ray burst
080319 = March 19, 2008
B = second (of four) gamma ray bursts detected that day

A quick hit on something that irritated me

Several folks have commented on an exchange between Cokie Roberts and Katrina Vanden Heuvel on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, during which Roberts avowed that "Americans would prefer to win" in Iraq. D-day at Hullabaloo slapped Roberts for

blather[ing] on about what Americans would prefer. Not that she's likely to have talked to anyone who's had to serve in this war or felt the burdens of this war, of course, but she just feels it in her very sensible and serious gut.

In a similar vein, Glenn Greenwald described Roberts as being in line with

the bulk of establishment pundits [who] regularly deploy the same method - simultaneously holding themselves out as Spokesmen for the Regular People while showing complete contempt for what they actually think by lying about their views.

He punctuated the last point being by referring to polls showing in one case that 60% of the public supports sticking to a timetable for withdrawal regardless of what is going on in Iraq at the time and in another case that 61% say that the next president should withdraw most US troops from Iraq within a few months of entering office.

Which is all good and to the - or at least a - point, but neither of them address what I think is a more basic point about Roberts' assertion: It is a fundamentally idiotic argument. Not because it's wrong (which it is) and not because it's presumptuous (which it is) but because it tells us absolutely nothing.

"Do you want to win or do you want to lose?" Who the hell is going to say they want to lose? Hey, you're taking a vacation in Las Vegas! Play some slots! Do you want to win or do you want to lose? Your favorite team is playing today! Do you want them to win or do you want them to lose? Do you want your preferred candidate to win or to lose? Any question phrased that way about anything, including Iraq, is going to get a heck of a lot of support for "winning."

But particularly in the case of Iraq, unless the question is followed up by asking you what you think constitutes "winning" (which Vanden Heuvel raised, to her credit), what you think are the chances of that happening, what you think it will cost to achieve that end, and if you think the price in blood, treasure, and disruption is worth it, any statement about a "preference" for "winning" is utterly vacuous, devoid of both meaning and useful content. Not that much of what people like Roberts have to say has either, but this one just ticked me off and I wish that instead of replying by asking "What is winning?" Vanden Heuvel had said "Don't be stupid."

Comment post #3

In response to a post at Lean Left citing a report about new research dismissing the claim that increased solar activity is the cause of global warming, a commenter brought up the speculation that Mars and Pluto have also warmed, which supposedly shows that people aren't involved in global warming because, of course, there are no people on Mars and Pluto. Someone else linked to a story positively refuting that contention, but that of course was not the end of it. The first person came back with:

We also don’t know why the oceans stopped warming this past 4-5 years even though CO₂ output continued to increase.

He also linked to a story published in The Australian citing a radio interview with a woman from a think tank arguing that the Earth is actually cooling "if you take 1998 as your point of reference." (Which is a ridiculous argument; of course the Earth is cooling if you take as your stating point the hottest year on record. It's interesting how conservatives always want to get to choose when the clock of history both starts and stops.) The commenter insisted "we really don’t understand how climate works very much at all. It casts doubt on the idea that CO₂ causes warming." That's where I came in.

I did just a few minutes of digging to come up with this regarding that linked bit in The Australian, now to be filed under the heading “consider the source.” Working from the inside out:

- The Institute of Public Affairs, where interviewee Jennifer Marohasy (who is a biologist, not a climatologist) works, describes itself as Australia’s “Leading Free Market Think Tank.” It’s a right-wing, corporate funded think tank that is known as a climate change denier.

- Marohasy’s interviewer, Michael Duffy, is a right-winger hired for Counterpoint[, the Australian radio show which broadcast the interview,] specifically for that reason.

- The Australian, where the column [to which the commenter linked] appeared, is part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. empire.

- Column author Christopher Pearson calls himself a “radical libertarian.”

- His column is cited here by one of our resident deniers.

Kind of a perfect storm of mutually-reinforcing ideology.

As for the other link, about how “the oceans stopped warming,” the article mentions a variety of possibilities, including a “hiatus” in warming, loss of heat to the atmosphere as part of the El Nino cycle, the ocean still warming but at a different depth than being measured, even misinterpretation of the data. None of the possibilities mentioned questions either the overall warming trend or the role of CO₂ and it is at best disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Indeed, that last bit - misinterpretation - calls to mind another time the deniers harped on a supposed anomaly to claim climate change was bogus: when one layer of the atmosphere appeared to be cooling when the models said it should be warming. It turned out it was warming; the initial results has failed to make a correction required by changes in the measuring satellites’ orbits. So may it yet prove to be here. We’ll have to see.

In any event, as the article does make clear to anyone who reads it without “Gotcha!” in mind, even if it turns out that the oceans have not warmed over the last few years, it provides no evidence at all against climate change because, contrary to what seems to be the notion, there is no straight-line relationship between CO₂ concentrations and global warming in general, much less one aspect (ocean warming) in particular. It is a connection, a pattern, but not one that operates on a precise schedule such that a rise in CO₂ levels in a given period must give rise to equivalent warming in that same period.

(Which, I note in passing, makes it amusing how the nanny-nanny naysayers, who not long ago were saying that 100 years of weather records was “not enough” to argue for climate change are now trying to make flat declarations based on spans of five or ten years.)

Finally, it is true that there is much still to be understood about the incredibly complex fluid dynamics of the Earth’s climate. But some is known - and what is known points in one direction: The planet is warming and if we do not take steps necessary to slow or stop that warming, the consequences will be disastrous for human society.

Which, not surprisingly for anyone who has been through one of these "debates," just generated another, different, set of stale claims, all of them referenced in my next reply. (By the way, I should mention that my quotes of the commenter are only very slightly edited, they are pretty much everything he said.)

It would help if you could obtain a basic grasp of science and scientific method before continuing this conversation.

If we can’t predict things with this scientific theory then how how can it be science? If you can’t make a prediction and test for it you can’t conduct an experiment.

First, stop confusing experiment - which is a scientific method - with the whole of science. Controlled experiment is a way of learning about life, the universe, and everything, but it is not the only way. (If it was, then much of, for example, astronomy, cosmology, and relativity physics would not be science.) Another way is to observe, establish hypotheses, make predictions about what will be seen or found through further observation, then see if you’re right. (Which is why astronomy, etc., are science.)

Second, climatology does make predictions about global climate change and it is another example of disingenuousness to suggest I said anything to the contrary. If you know anything about scientific method, then you are familiar with “error bars” and “confidence levels.” Global warming theory does predict with a very high level of confidence (which is about as certain as scientists ever get about something not already observed under controlled laboratory conditions) that increasing CO₂ concentrations will lead to further warming. But there is a range of uncertainty about how much of an increase in the one will lead to how much of an increase in the other and over what time span. In fact, because CO₂ is not the only forcing (factor tending to push effects in a certain direction) on global warming, it’s clear that there is, as I already said, no straight-line relationship between the two.

That does not mean there is no connection, it does not mean that there is no general pattern, it does mean that you can’t say that “this much of an increase in CO₂ this year will lead to this much warming next year.” Which is why both “the oceans haven’t warmed in a few years” argument and the “we’re not setting records every year” argument are both bogus.

Haven’t ice core samples shown that CO₂ increases have followed periods of warming rather than preceded them?

Apparently so, but it’s irrelevant because it has nothing to do with CO₂ being a climate forcing. The most it would show is that CO₂ concentrations did not initiate those cycles. But they did contribute to them and the facts remain that over the course of history, temperature and CO₂ levels have risen and fallen pretty much in tandem and there is a well-established mechanism for CO₂ to add to the greenhouse effect and so enhance warming. Higher CO₂ levels lead to warming. Period.

[W]hat caused those global warming and cooling periods millions of years ago, certainly not burning fossil fuels?

Again with the ignorance. Large-scale cycles of warming and cooling (with smaller cycles of cooling and warming within them) are old stuff to scientists. Don’t come off like you think you’ve come up with something no one else has noticed; you only make yourself look lame.

The issue here is simple: The Earth has its natural cycles. By pouring unprecedented amounts of CO₂ into the environment, we are screwing around with those cycles. Yes, the Earth no doubt could take everything we throw at it and re-establish its own climate equilibrium - but that could easily take millennia. Suppose it took 10,000 years, no, suppose it took just 1000 years. That’s almost nothing to the Earth, the rough equivalent of 15 minutes to someone who’s lived 100 years. But to us, a thousand years of climate disruption could easily be devastating.

Which brings me to this:

How do we know the consequences of warming will be disastrous for human society?

The IPCC has laid it out in necessarily brutal language. Increased droughts. Crop failures. Hunger. Inundated coastlines - which is where most of the human population lives, leading to a dramatic increase in refugees. Disrupted economies. Resource wars. A greater number of more severe storms, as weather events become concentrated - i.e., you may, for example, get the same amount of rain but get it in a small number of destructive, raging storms rather than a large number of ordinary rainstorms. The spread of disease and crop blights as areas previously too cold for certain pests become warmer. The list goes on.

The IPCC does say that certain areas will actually benefit in the short term but even those areas in the longer term will suffer. The idea that some people advance, that all the “bad stuff” will happen “over there” somewhere leaving “us” unaffected, is not only grossly immoral it is shamefully short-sighted and ultimate delusional.

Will all that necessarily happen? Of course not and no scientist worthy of the name will guarantee that all hell will break loose. But is it, based on best current knowledge, best current understanding, a reasonable forecast of what will happen if we don’t act, even more, one that can be made with a high level of confidence? Absolutely. Period.

Final point:

The Global Climate is always changing.

Don’t be childish.

That lead to the denier grousing that I was "belittling" and "insulting" him and suggesting that as a result he was unable to consider to my arguments. Others chided him for being oversensitive but also noted that it is frustrating to hear the same arguments every single time the issue comes up. My own response on that line:

Perhaps my language was somewhat intemperate, but the truth is, your comments made it clear to me that you are criticizing a scientific result without understanding the process by which it was achieved, something like criticizing the route I drove from Redruth to Mousehole without knowing where they both are - which for for the sake of the illustration I’m assuming you don’t.

Note that this was not a matter of understanding the science - you don’t have to be a climatologist to have a sufficient understanding of global warming - but the process. It certainly appeared, that is, that you were simply reciting arguments made by others without understanding either those arguments or their refutations.

And yes, that made me impatient, as did the arguments based on the frankly banal observations that there was climate change before there were humans and that climate is not static. (Parenthetical note on the latter: I continue to assume you’re not confusing climate with weather.)

As others have said, you’re making arguments we have heard over and over again. It’s hard to stay calm and dispassionate when faced yet one more time with the same arguments that have been positively refuted long ago. How would you feel if every time you mentioned, say, space travel someone responded with arguments about crystalline spheres and how the moon landings were faked?

The bottom line here is that the science of global warming is, in an overall, general, sense, settled. Global warming is real, it is happening, it is related to CO₂ levels, CO₂ is a forcing, we are screwing with the climate. The remaining questions - and there are questions here - revolve around exactly what the effects will be, exactly how bad they will be, exactly when the impacts of various effects will be felt, and exactly how dramatic our response has to be to head off the worst. (That last point bears repeating: It is not if dramatic action is needed, but just how dramatic it needs to be.)

I’ll also second [another commenter's] contention that he and I can both be harsh. In fact, there is one topic I will no longer discuss here because every time we tried we wound up having to apologize to each other a couple of days later. In comparison to some of what we’ve thrown at each other, hell, here I was damned polite.

Finally, a footnote related to your remark about land and growing seasons: A one-meter rise in ocean levels, which is within the range projected for the next 100 years, would inundate one-third of the world’s arable land.

One final argument was raised, a refinement of the "how do we know the warming will be catastrophic" argument. However, it, too was based on incorrect information and a misunderstanding.

Why is it wrong to look at the warming from 1000-1300 and see increased prosperity of human civilization and the population of Europe double in that time period, and then turn around and say, we know that this warming will destroy us?

The so-called “Medieval Warming Period” c. 1000-1300 did not exist.

It was at most a time of some slightly warmer periods in an overall millenium-long (or longer) cooling trend. (Remember how I mentioned small reverse cycles within larger ones?) In particular, what data exists simply does not support the contention made by some of the naysayers that temperatures were as warm or warmer than now; in fact they ranged up to about 1 degree C. (1.8 degrees F.) colder and none were as warm. And even those periods of moderation appear to have been a regional event, unlike the worldwide changes being seen now.

There were various reasons for European growth during the period you mention, including greater political and social stability, improved technology, and the breakdown of the feudal system. A period of global warming such as we’re seeing now was not among them.

And there is one more reason why we shouldn’t use 1000-1300 C.E. for sociological predictions of climate impact: It was, as sometimes it’s necessary to point out these sorts of things, 700-1000 years ago. Politically, socially, culturally, environmentally, scientifically, technologically, we simply do not live in that world. History can be a good teacher - but its wisdom is not limitless and the past remains, as L. P. Hartley famously called it, “a foreign country” with which we must first share a language to obtain what wisdom there is.

Footnote: If you like, you can read the original post and all comments at this link. Most of the links included here were not in my comments at the site and I have corrected a couple of grammatical errors.

Footnote Two: Subsequent to this exchange, I had to retract the assertion that a one-meter rise in sea level would inundate one-third of the world's arable land because while I had seen the figure in more than one place, I could not find any "official" source, that is, one that could cite actual scientific data. I did find figures for certain countries showing a 15% to 20% loss of arable land via inundation, but nothing saying 33% worldwide.

I would, however, note that the actual loss of arable land from sea level rise is more than just what is flooded; salinization of lands, deltas, and water supplies will spread the effects further. Additionally, including all effects of global warming (including such as increased drought) will lead to the loss of far more arable land than sea level rise alone; it could, for example, be a contributing factor to the loss of as much as 75% of Africa's rain-fed cropland.

Comment post #2

Over at The Core 4, a post linked to an article in Salon about the trial of a woman supposed to be an "eco-terrorist." The article focused on how the definition of what constitutes "terrorism" has been expanded since 9/11, in some ways specifically to include environmental and animal rights activists, and raised questions about the government's conduct in the particular case, suggesting other defendants may have been pressured into naming a possibly innocent person.

In response, a commenter, after saying "I know I run the risk of having my moderate-liberal membership card revoked here," wrote:

Why is calling the destruction of property in the name of eco-protest NOT a terrorist act? ... Aren’t the real scumbags in this case ... the other eco-protesters who appear to have randomly chosen Ms. [Briana] Waters[, the woman the article discussed,] to throw under the bus as a way to “cooperate”?

[A]sserting that just because the justice department is using the new terrorism provisions to hunt down destructive protesters it will lead to persecution of non-violent protesters ... is paranoid sophistry. ...

I am all for stiff penalties for anyone engaged in the destruction of life or property, or putting life or property at risk, for the sake of their cause. If this frightens the environmentalists, good! They should keep better track of who they are associating or collaborating with....

Seeing concern with government coercion and threats to civil liberties labeled "paranoid sophistry" certainly didn't sit well with me, so I replied.

Okay, your card can get revoked right along with mine in the “courteous discourse” society.

You are wrong on just about every single count.

You don’t see the connection? How about that the definition of “terrorism” has been changed and expanded dramatically so that things there were previously property crimes are now tossed into the “Terrorism! Terrorism! Be afraid! They’re everywhere!” pot? As the article noted, “terrorism” used to require “violence perpetrated against non-combatants.” Now all that’s required is for a crime to be “calculated to influence ... government.” By that definition, during Vietnam anyone who burned a draft card was a terrorist.

Or how about the fact that “intentionally damag[ing] or cause[ing] the loss of any real or personal property used by an animal enterprise” is now defined in federal law as “terrorism?” Or the fact that three states now say that, in the words of the article, “any act of destruction aimed at protecting animal rights or punishing ecological despoilers” is terrorism? Some radical members of the Humane Society break into a puppy mill one night, photographing and taping the horrible conditions there, which they publicize to advocate for stricter laws. They have broken the law to influence government, they have damaged personal property of the puppy mill, and they have done so to protect animal rights. They are terrorists three times over!

Which makes your sneer about “paranoid sophistry” as bogus as it’s possible to be. Not only because the designation of “terrorist” is already being applied to people who would not have qualified as such previously but also because it is hideously bad public policy to give increased power to government under the assumption that it will never be used. Or are you prepared to assume that only “the bad guys” will be the target of warrantless wiretaps and NSL searches?

As for the “scumbags,” the FBI’s own records say that [cooperating defendant] Jennifer Kolar named four people as accomplices - but it wasn’t until some weeks later, during the fifth or sixth “interview,” that Kolar was able to secure a plea bargain by “remembering” that Waters had been there. Note, too, that the feds had shown pictures of Waters to Kolar and that cooperating defendant Stanislas Meyerhoff was also asked about Waters by name. That reads to me that the feds were for whatever reason determined to get Waters and told Kolar, in effect, “you want the deal? You name Waters.” If Kolar threw Waters under the bus, then it damn well was the feds that dragged her to the curb and damn well the feds that drove the bus.

Finally, you’re glad that environmentalists are frightened that potentially, even nonviolent protests could be regarded as “terrorism?” You’re happy that people can be intimidated from expressing their views (which is exactly what “chilling effect” means) not because of what they say or do but because of what some people or groups they are “associating with” say or do? I find that appalling.

And a footnote, a separate point, a purely philosophical question not related to the above but prompted by your comment: You say “I am all for stiff penalties for anyone engaged in the destruction of life or property, or putting life or property at risk, for the sake of their cause.” What penalty, then, for soldiers in combat, who are most assuredly doing precisely that? Do they get a pass? On what basis? Or is it that what is done by governments gets a pass? On what basis?

I really would have liked to have gotten a discussion going on that last, independent point, but there was no response to it.

Footnote: Again, if you want to see the orignal post, the linked article, and all comments, this is the link.

Comment post #1

Okay, my first case of post-cheating by putting up comments I made at another site. Maybe there's not a real good point to this, but I find, especially when I'm in a funk, that I do much better at responding to statements than originating one. Maybe because what someone else has said gives me something to focus on, I don't know. Doesn't matter.

Anyway, poster child for dipshits Jonah Goldberg had a column in the Los Angeles Times recently, noted at Orcinus, in which he declared the little car attachments displaying fish with feet and saying "Darwin" to be an "offensive" display by people who think they're better than Christians. It was typically petulant and whiny, punctuated by the bizarre assertion that he could take the people with Darwin symbols more seriously if they would attack Muslims. My comment:

I grew up Roman Catholic and while I was aware of the fish symbolism, I do not recall a single occasion when I heard it referred to as, what did Goldberg call it, "a cherished symbol" of Christianity. The only truly "cherished symbol," at least in my upbringing, was the cross.

(Sidebar: According to what I've been given to understand, Goldberg has the origin wrong. It did not arise from the loaves and fishes miracle but from Jesus' saying that the first apostles - who were fishermen - would henceforth be "fishers of men." Thus, as a Christian you were among those who had been "gathered up" into the faith. And, of course, there was been religious symbolism using fish long before Christianity.)

Which means, as would be obvious to anyone less insecure in their socio-political beliefs than Goldberg apparently is, the Darwin symbol is in no way a "mockery" of the fish symbol, although it is in some ways a response to it.

A critical point which Goldberg - naturally - leaves out is that the popularity of the fish symbol as bumper sticker and car magnet arose in conjunction with the increased assertion of right wing Christianity; it's meaning, in that context, was not simply "I am a Christian" but "I am a fundamentalist Christian" with its associated belief in Biblical inerrancy.

The Darwin symbol was a way of answering "I believe in the Bible" with "I believe in science." That is a positive assertion of belief and can be considered a negative attack only in the very narrow sense that any expression of a different conviction can be regarded as such.

Just who is attacking who is illustrated by the "truth" pin [illustrated at the original post]. "Darwin" - shorthand for evolution (and thus most all of modern biology) - is to be swallowed by capital-T "Truth," such "truth" being something that no scientist (or anyone who understands science) - distinctly unlike the fundamentalists - would ever claim to know.

By the way, in the course of checking on my memory re: fish symbolism, I can across a fun site about "the fish wars." This is the link.

Doesn't it seem that for people who act like they have "Get Over It" tattooed on their foreheads for all others to see, right-wingers are awfully quick to gripe and sniffle about some imagined offense? I've called them whining crybabies; someone in comments at the Orcinus post used another phrase I like: drama queens of the right wing. I think I'll be using that.

Footnote: You can read David Neiwert's post and all other comments at this link.

My version of the dream

Now I'm embarrassed. I posted something here only to discover shortly thereafter that I had posted almost exactly the same thing, drawn from the same source, just three months ago. So instead of just saying the same thing over again, I have dumped the post and instead will just link you to that earlier one, where I said that

quoting yet another thing I wrote a long time ago and quoting as accurately as I can from memory, "our strongest, surest beliefs are those we don't even know we have until we find them within us." That is, our deepest, most abiding beliefs and commitments are not born consciously of careful philosophical argumentation and reasoned analysis but grow naturally from our root moral and ethical convictions. That argumentation, those analyses, can give form to those convictions, they can provide them with substance and weight, but they do not drive them - rather, they are driven by them.

So despite my tendency to intellectualization, to try to argue my points rationally with facts and figures and references, still it's important - for me if not for my listeners - to drop away on occasion from "here's the data, here's the logic, here's the conclusion" to the fundamental, baseline, radical place where I can say, simply, I believe.

I believe that life is our highest good and advancing life is our highest ideal. I believe....

You can read the rest there.

Going back to "I believe" is a way for me to center, to, if you will, rediscover my moral roots, something I need to do right now. In that same linked post I made mention of a speech I gave some years ago in which I pledged to never give up on the dream of true justice. Truth be told, I have come close to breaking that pledge a couple of times. But as MLK said,

Keep moving! If you can't fly, run! If you can't run, walk! If you can't walk, crawl! But by all means, keep moving.

I can only promise to do my best. As little as that is and it is surely not above a crawl. But as I said myself, and as I know on my better days, little may be little, but it is not nothing.

Forty years

The video is via Dday at Hullabaloo.

Even at this distance, even at 40 years, I can't watch this without choking up at the fact that this was the last speech he ever gave, coming less than 24 hours before his murder. That the very last, the very last, public words he spoke were:

And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

I remember hearing - I don't know how true this is, but I did hear it - that at that particular time he was physically exhausted and emotionally spent and so either he wasn't supposed to speak that night or that he hadn't prepared a speech. Either way, if so it means the whole speech was extemporaneous, making it all the more remarkable.

Watching the video - and I believe this is without the benefit of hindsight, but of course I can't prove that - you can see the weariness in his face. This is a tired man, a man who needs some time away from the arena but who knows he is unlikely to allowed it. And you can hear the resignation in his tone and in his words, the magnificent resignation of his namesake, who, not knowing what the future would hold and even possibly doubting he would have one, still stood before the assembled power of the Catholic Church at the Diet of Worms and said "it is neither safe nor honorable to act against conscience" and added, at least according to tradition, "Here I stand. I can do no other."

Martin Luther King, Jr. stood in the halls of conscience and could do no other. Unlike his namesake, his resignation, sadly, proved well-founded and we are the lesser for it. But what we are called on to do, still called on to do these decades later, is in the words of a different sort of martyr, "Don't mourn. Organize." To uphold the message, respect the messenger, and deny both to the bigots, buffoons, bozos, and bastards of the rabid right who are trying to reinvent Martin Luther King as Alan Keyes.

Footnote: August J. Pollak of Some Guy With a Website has the text of the speech Robert F. Kennedy gave that night in response to the news. He also provided this link to where you can hear the speech. Knowing as we do what happened just two months later, June 5, 1968, it has its own special poignancy.

Footnote to the Footnote: Listening to the speech, hearing RFK's soft Hyannis accent, noting that he quoted Aeschylus and referred to the ancient Greeks, I found myself wondering what the present-day right-wing smear merchants would have done to this "effeminate, poetry-quoting, elitist New England liberal." How far we have fallen.

The days pass by

Late the other night - or, more exactly, early the other morning - as I was lying in bed wondering why I wasn’t asleep, the line “The days pass by, too quickly it seems” popped into my head. It seemed like it had to be something I’d heard somewhere, a line from a poem or a song or something. I couldn’t figure out where.

I did an online search and found a few examples of others who had used the phrase or something similar (most substituted “time passes” for “the days pass”) but nothing to indicate the source. I still think there must be one because the structure “too quickly it seems” just doesn’t sound like the way someone would ordinarily talk. The closest I’ve come has been a line from Tom Paxton’s “The Marvelous Toy,” which goes “the years have gone by too quickly, it seems.” I suppose that could be where I got it from, but I don’t know - the feel is wrong. In the song, the words are at most a little nostalgic and really not even that. But the way the line played in my head, it was genuinely melancholy with a real sense of loss. So I’m still not sure.

That keeps running through my thoughts as I contemplate the fact that I haven’t written anything here for over a week and a half. Time lost, words lost. It’s hard to explain exactly why. It’s not that I’ve been away somewhere or that I’ve just been completely out of it - I’ve been right here and I’ve kept on reading some of my usual blogs. I’ve even posted comments on some. (I’m actually considering putting some of them up here as a cheap way of getting some posts done. We’ll see if that happens.)

Part of the reason, I have to say, is found in another phrase - but the source of this one I know, because it’s mine. (Well, sort of. I’ve heard others use it but I know I used it before I heard it from anyone else, so even if I didn’t originate it, I still made it up for myself.)

“The world is too much with me.”

The world is too much with me. It describes those times when I become aware. Truly aware. Aware of the level of pain in the world around me, aware of the suffering, the loss, the despair, the desperation, the bloodshed, the mindless hatreds persisting for generations over differences that in the long run of history don’t even rise to the level of petty. Aware that somewhere in the world, right at this very moment, an agent of the United States is torturing a prisoner, a woman in Peru is covered with bruises from a beating by her husband, a child is dying from hunger in Eritrea, a man is being denied medical care and imprisoned in China for advocating human rights, an Afghan family is sitting in a refugee camp in Pakistan, wondering where they will go when the camp closes in two weeks, a Bedouin family in a ramshackle shanty town in the Negev with neither running water nor electricity is fearing their home will be demolished by the same Israeli authorities that forced them off their land in the first place - and everywhere, everywhere, the tears of mourners except where there are no tears left to cry.

Most of the time I intellectualize. I know the numbers, the policies, and the politics; I rant and rave and denounce and decry. But I intellectualize. The ranting is moral, the denunciations are logical, but still there is an emotional distance and both the anger and the hope that lies behind it are driven less by passion than by principle.

Hope? Yes, hope. As I wrote some years ago,

[e]ven many professional grouches (like me) are actually unregenerate romantics whose sharp words are honed on the inexplicable, indefensible, yet utterly unshakable conviction that things not only can be but must be better than they are.

But sometimes, just sometimes, I am aware and that "unshakable" conviction gets shaken. The experience is something like the almost-cliché one of looking at a clear night sky and feeling how small you are compared to the universe. Except without the panache and without the awe. Just with the overwhelming. The feeling is not inspiring. It’s debilitating.

I hope I offend no one by relating it to a description of autism. I have heard it suggested that autism can be understood as a breakdown of the brain’s ability to filter sensory input, so the child is overwhelmed with information, unable to determine what information reaching the brain is more worthy of attention than any another information.

We filter all the time, we couldn’t get by if we didn’t. For example, what is your left little toe feeling right now? If you pay attention, you can sense it, feel it in your sock or your slipper or against the rug or whatever- but until you paid attention to it, you were unaware of it. But that sensory input, those nerve impulses, were reaching your brain the whole time. Your brain just knew they were unimportant and so you ignored them at the level of awareness. It's the same as the experience I imagine almost every one of us has had of being startled by a noise - only to realize that it was actually because the furnace or the refrigerator turned off, had stopped making a noise. The sound had reached our ears which alerted our brain to it the entire time but we dismissed it from conscious awareness until a sudden change indicated something that might require our attention.

How would you, how would any of us, function if we were trying to consciously deal with every bit of sensory input our brain is receiving at any given moment - everything seen, everything heard, everything felt, smelled, tasted? We couldn’t. We'd be overwhelmed. And we well might, as autistic children often do, focus almost obsessively on some object or some simple activity in a desperate attempt to establish some order, some sense of control.

It’s something - a little something - like that for me. And I withdraw to and focus on computer games, Sci-fi channel, and books on some aspect of science. To things that don’t involve dealing with the “real,” present, on-going, events-unfolding, world.

Understand, this is not a feeling that there is only suffering, pain, and death in this life. It is not some sort of hip existential angst about the dark hand of fate. Even at such times I know there is beauty, happiness, even joy; that people fall in love, make love, are loved; that children play and laugh; that friends embrace; that there is learning, growth, discovery; that at this very instant, someone, somewhere, is being amazed by a leaf or a star or the antics of an animal or what they see through a microscope.

So it is not exactly despair in the usually understood sense of the term, although it’s somewhat akin to it. It is, rather and again, an overwhelming, a debilitating, sense, a sense of the sheer enormity of the task before us. The sheer weight of so much needs to be done. It just doesn’t seem possible to do it. That is, it’s not despair in the sense that it seems there is nothing good but it is a sort of hopelessness in the sense of it seeming impossible to have an adequate response to what there is that is bad. And from that bad emerge the cries for help, the calls for justice, the demands to do something, and every cry, every call, every demand, seems as worthy of respect and response as every other. The result is that I feel paralyzed, exhausted, and doing things like writing this blog seem so idiotically pointless that I just don’t have the energy to do it.

Thus my silence.

Which is doubly unfortunate because in a reinforcing cycle it undermines my ability to do here what I want to do.

During another low period, just about three years ago, I quoted something from the very first issue of the print version of Lotus, which came out for a couple of years in the early 1990s.

Some [folks] are good at petitioning. I'm not. Some are good at fundraising. I'm not. I lack both the focused concentration necessary for large-scale organizing and the patience for phone-banking. The list of my inadequacies is embarrassingly long.

My strength happens to be words. Advocacy. Writing. Giving speeches. And like that. So doing this is, simply, something I think I can contribute. My dream for Lotus is that it can be a voice of conscience and a tool in an on-going movement, something of use to the many who keep on keepin' on, something of value to those whose skills in other areas so greatly exceeds mine. Something that helps.

That also was and is the idea of this. To be something that helps. But to do that it has to be read and to be read it has to have some content to read. And when I hit a low period I don’t post so people don’t read so fewer people come by which is discouraging so it’s even harder to find the energy to post, so.... I have to admit that I’m enough of an egoist that it would have made a real difference if over these last, what, 12 days? if someone had emailed me or left a comment along the lines of “Hey, where ya been?” That my absence had been noted, even regretted.

Now I’m starting to whine, which I despise, so I’ll stop except to say that something I am not at all good at is promoting myself. If anyone has any suggestions (beyond reciprocal links and commenting on other blogs), I’d love to hear some.

Oh, and to say just one more thing: What got me going to write this was the realization that today, today, today, today of all days, this day, how dare I on this day say that I am “too tired” to write a damn blog?

Closure

Just to wrap up my string of March 19-related posts, this is a list of places were there were actions about which I found a news report, with estimated attendance where given.

Arizona: Glendale, 10; Phoenix
California: San Francisco, 200 at a main march plus numerous small actions at various sites, 150 were arrested for civil disobedience; Sonoma, 160, 1 cd arrest; Benicia, 40; San Rafael, "several hundred"; Sacramento, nearly 100; San Luis Obsipo, 200; Pasadena, two separate vigils, attend by 20 and 80, respectively
Colorado: Greeley, 15-20
Connecticut: Hartford, 100, 5 cd arrests; Norwich, 45
Florida: Doral, 8 dressed in black; Miami, 6 dressed in black; Sarasota County, several groups along US 41, there were 20 at one site
Georgia: Augusta, two dozen
Idaho: Idaho falls, 145
Illinois: Chicago, 2200; Chicago (Loyola U. campus), 6 with guerrilla theater
Indiana: Bloomington, 70; South Bend (Notre Dame campus); Fort Wayne
Iowa: Des Moines, 11, 2 cd arrests
Kansas: Lawrence, 40
Kentucky: Louisville, about 12 people who laid out boots and shoes representing both US and Iraqi dead
Massachusetts: Cambridge (Harvard campus), 50; Boston, five separate vigils plus 100 at a rally plus 5 arrests for cd; Chickopee, 8 arrests for civil disobedience; Northampton
Michigan: East Lansing (Michigan State campus)
Mississippi: Biloxi
Nebraska: Lincoln, 250; Omaha
Nevada: Reno, over 200
New Jersey: Trenton, 70
New York: NYC, 10,000; Binghamton, 70, 10 arrested; Syracuse, 150 with 22 arrests; Syracuse (Syracuse U. campus), 20; Rochester, 150; Brooklyn, 200; Albany, 1000
North Carolina: Greensboro, 35; Asheville, 75-100
North Dakota: Grand Forks (U. of North Dakota campus), 40
Ohio: More than 20 actions across the state including Cincinnati, 4000 t-shirts laid out to represent US dead
Oregon: Corvallis; Portland, "at least" 400, 4 arrests
Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh; Philadelphia, guerrila theater and cd with members of the Granny Peace Brigage trying to enlist; Harrisburg, 200
South Carolina: Charleston, 12-24; Greenville; Columbia, 70 (a group "larger than expected")
Texas: San Antonio, 30; Seguin, 6; Austin, over 100; San Marcos; Bryan-College Station; Amarillo; San Angelo, 50; Waco
Tennessee: Memphis; Chattanooga, nearly 100; Nashville; Mufreesboro, 25 plus an evening vigil
Vermont: Rutland, 100; Burlington, 30
Washington: Ferndale, nearly 100
Washington, DC: more than 100 at the IRS, with 32 arrested for cd; American Petroleum Institute, dozens; various others totaling 1000
West Virginia: Lewisburg, 50; Shepherdstown, 60
Wisconsin: Wisconsin Rapids; Madison, 100; Appleton; Elm Grove; Evansville; Kenosha; Manitowoc; Mazomanie; Minocqua; Milwaukee

And internationally,
Belgium: Brussels, 700 at NATO headquarters, 150 cd arrests, 450 more "held briefly"
Greece: Athens, 1000

I know for certain these aren't all the actions, these are just the ones I found in a scan of Yahoo! News. United for Peace and Justice says there were 700 events around the country. The group's website has 131 reports from actions, including a fair number not in the above list - which is how I can be certain my list isn't complete.

The things struck me about that list and those reports - well, yes, I did notice the generally-smaller turnouts at the "main," i.e., big city, events, but everyone noticed that - were first the geographical diversity of the actions and how many of them occurred in smaller cities and towns; and second that by the reports, despite being in places like Amarillo, Texas, Biloxi, Mississippi, and Lincoln, Nebraska, there was surprisingly little hostility. Of course, it was not one big love fest and there were those who shouted the odd obscenity (and, in one eerie what-decade-are-you-stuck-in moment, "Get a job!") but it seemed at least to me to show that if it's getting harder to turn people out to vocally oppose the war, it's gotten even harder than that to find anyone who actually supports the war and even those who do, do it more in a "we're stuck there" way ("It'd be worse if we left") than actual approval.

(Sidebar for a passing thought: Have you come across anyone opposed to withdrawal whose arguments are not slight parapharases of George Bushisms? And sometimes they're not even paraphrased?)

And one other thing struck me: How many of the actions tried for drama rather than numbers (like the folks dressed in black in Florida), involved guerrila theater (and I mean more than just funny costumes or giant paper-maché heads, I mean like the group that staged a mock waterboarding in DC), and/or included nonviolent civil disobedience, the latter of which lead to something like 250 (or more) arrests across the US. The Iraq war may not be the burning issue in people's minds that it once was, especially in light of the souring economy, and for that reason if no other the antiwar movement may have trouble producing the hundreds of thousands on the streets that it once did, but for that same reason the movement may be both penetrating to areas it hadn't reached before and gaining a harder, sharper, more aggressive edge in the areas it had reached.

Neither of those is a bad thing because, as Tom Engelhardt pointed out recently, barring some astounding, body-meets-floor-wth-a-thud-generating change among Congressional Dimcrats, there is going to be a sixth anniversary of the war no matter who wins the presidency.

Take Hillary Clinton, she's said that she'll task the Joint Chiefs, the new Secretary of Defense, and her National Security Council with having a plan for (partial) withdrawal in place within 60 days of coming into office. Since inauguration day is January 20th, that means… March 21st or two days after the sixth anniversary; by which time, of course, nothing would have changed substantially.

Barack Obama has promised to remove U.S. "combat" troops at a one-to-two-brigades-a-month pace over a 16 month period. So it's possible that troop levels could drop marginally before March 19, 2009 in an Obama presidency, but again there is no reason to believe that anything essential would have happened to change that "anniversary."

So yeah, there will be a sixth anniversary. And unless we make it politically unpalatable, there may well be a seventh. And an eighth.

[T]he stated plans of both Democratic candidates, vague and limited as they may be, might not turn out to be their actual plans. Note the recent comments of Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Powers ... [who before she resigned did] an interview with the BBC on her candidate's Iraq withdrawal policy. "He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator," Powers said and then she referred to Obama's plan as nothing more than a - you guessed it - "best-case scenario."

Similarly, a Clinton sometime-advisor on military matters, retired General Jack Keane, also one of the authors of President Bush's surge strategy, told the New York Sun that, in the Oval Office, "he is convinced [Hillary Clinton] would hold off on authorizing a large-scale immediate withdrawal of American soldiers from Iraq." And Clinton herself, though less directly, has certainly hinted at a similar willingness to reconsider her policy promises in the light of an Oval Office morning.

So I think it would be wise to start thinking about next year already. If it were up to me, I'd call for a two-part program: First, nationwide vigils during the holiday season. Low-key but widespread, looking not so much for large numbers of people as a large number of places. This March, there were about 700 locations. I'd push for a thousand. The message: If Clinton or Obama wins, "We will remember your promises to stop the war." If McCain wins, "We will not be silent or silenced. On this, we are the majority and we will plague your every step." Second, mass regional actions on the weekend closest to the anniversary (March 21-22, 2009) including nonviolent civil disobedience. By regional I mean maybe five or six sites spread across the country with people encouraged to go to the one closest. Maybe, for example, New York, DC, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Instead of one place getting 100,000, maybe five places getting an average of 20-25,000 each.

I suppose that's something of a pipe dream, especially if Clinbama wins because I strongly suspect that in that event, in much of what passes for the left these days, the primary reaction will be relief and the primary urge will be to "give them a chance." Much as we were urged to "give Congress a chance" in 2007. Let's not forget that during the last presidential campaign, one prominent "progressive" blogger

asked, in all seriousness, "why are there going to be protests at the Democratic Convention?" That was followed up by suggesting only "the usual loonies" and "the crazies" would do such a thing.

After Bush won, another such blogger attacked the proposal for a counter-inaugural on the grounds that it would make "us" look like "sore losers, and worse, hopeless partisans."

So I have no faith that an argument of "keeping their feet to the fire" will impress such voices, which I fully expect in the wake of a Democrat taking the White House to immediately transmogrify from attack dogs into lap dogs. So maybe that shift toward smaller but more dramatic and more aggressive (in the sense of defiant and challenging) demonstrations is just what we need. What we surely don't need are more Democrat sycophants.

Footnote: Just in case you missed this:

A conference to reconcile Iraq's rival political parties fell apart almost as soon as it began on Tuesday, with influential Sunni and Shi'ite blocs pulling out in protest.

Only half of the 700 invitees even showed up.

On Tuesday, Accordance Front spokesman Salim al-Jubouri complained that the bloc had not been properly invited to conference. He also said the Front decided not to attend because resolutions from other past conferences had not been acted upon. ...

The Accordance Front pulled out of Maliki's Shi'ite-led government in August. Other blocs, including Sadr's political movement, followed suit, leaving Maliki with a government of national unity in name only.

So - what are your plans for March 21, 2009?

Another footnote

Dusty at The Sirens Chronicles created a nicely-done video for the blogswarm. You can see it at this link. I'm not going to embed it here because I want to make you go there to give them the traffic. :-)

It's worth the trip.

Footnote to the preceding

Something else that one day of the Iraq war could finance: maintaining US food donations to hungry nations around the world.

Aid groups are asking Congress for a 70 percent increase in supplemental funding this year to ensure that historically high commodity prices don't truncate U.S. food aid donations.

The groups say at least $600 million is needed this year to avoid gaps in food donations and help those hardest hit by skyrocketing prices for staples like bread and milk.

Food aid is too often an afterthought, done as emergency aid in a crisis with attendant risks of higher costs (and thus lower volume of food) and delayed shipments (and thus more deaths), rather than up-front donations which can be used both to relieve hunger and to help fund long-term development that can reduce the need for future aid.

This year appears no different from that "afterthought" norm: Bush has only asked for $350 million in supplemental funding, less than 60% of what aid groups say is immediately needed - and Congress has failed to act on the request, even though it was submitted months ago.

March 19 Blogswarm, Part Four

[This and the previous post were supposed to go up yesterday as part of my contribution to the March 19 Blogswarm. I got interrupted and they didn't make it. So consider today March 19 B-Day + 1.]

To wrap up this quadrilogy, beyond the political cost and the human cost, there is still the cost cost.

In the fall of 2002, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay said the Iraq war could cost as much as $200 billion.

He was fired.

That figure was outlandish, we were assured. In fact, the invasion would almost pay for itself. Defense Secretary Donald Rumplestiltskin insisted the cost would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. Andrew Natsios, head of USAID, said reconstruction costs would run to just, oh, $1.7 billion.

Oh my.

The most conservative estimate of the war’s cost comes from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, whose remit limits its analysis to US government spending. Up to September 30, the end of the 2007 fiscal year, it says $413bn was spent on Iraq. From then until the end of 2017, it calculates overall spending on Iraq and Afghanistan at $570bn-$1,055bn, depending on how quickly troop numbers are reduced. If three-quarters of the budget is spent on Iraq, the ratio of recent years, future direct budgetary costs would be a further $428bn to $788bn.

Include interest on the debt accumulated because of war spending, and the total cost by 2017 could reach $2 trillion.

The JEC [Joint Economic Committee], chaired by Democratic senator Charles Schumer of New York, attempts to add economic costs to the US, including the displacement of productive investment, interest paid to foreigners, and oil price increases, which add a further $700bn so far. Until 2017, assuming US troop numbers in Iraq fall to 55,000 by 2013 and stay at that level, the cost grows to $2,800bn in 2007 dollars.

That's three trillion dollars - and even that estimate may not be high enough.

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize winning economist, and Linda Bilmes, authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War", argue that the Iraq war will cost the US at least $3 trillion, possibly as much as $5 trillion.

Bilmes, a budget and public finance expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, told Al Jazeera that "both in a long term sense and a short term sense the United States is worse off economically speaking because of the war.

"In a long term sense, we have added already about $800 billion to our national debt as a result of the borrowing and the war," she says.

"In the short term sense we are spending $12 billion a month in Iraq alone and that clearly limits the amount of money that we have to provide things like economic stimuli to improve the economy." ...

Bilmes says her study looked at the total cost of the war - including the total cost of the money that has been spent to date, the cost of taking care of veterans when they return, providing disability compensation to veterans, replenishing military equipment and the cost of borrowing

as well as the economic impact of quality of life impairments, the loss of the productive capacity of those killed or wounded, and higher oil prices.

Even so, despite the enormous costs,

it is virtually certain that the Democrats will provide tens of billions more when they vote next month on a military spending bill whose approval is a foregone conclusion. Many Democratic lawmakers now even say that the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, should not try to attach conditions, like a deadline for withdrawal, because the tactic is certain to fail as it has in the past.

I'd like to know which "Democratic lawmakers" are saying that because the deserve a good smack upside the head. Not try because you failed before? What kind of idiocy is that? "If at first you don't succeed, try, try - oh the hell with it?" I said a long time ago that one thing the left could learn from the right is sheer stubbornness. The right wing has an idea shot down, what do they do? Propose it again! If it gets rejected again with the complaint "we already dealt with that," they bring it up a third time! And a fourth and a fifth and however many damn times it takes.

So if I could tell Nancy Pelosi what to do, I'd tell her to make sure there are votes on conditions, votes on timetables, votes on withdrawals, votes to cut off funds. Even if you know they're going to fail, schedule them anyway. And if someone asks you why since you know they're going to lose, you say "I know they are. But we're going to make you go on record. We're going to make you state on the record that you're against ending the war, that you want US troops to stay in Iraq indefinitely, that you want to keep throwing money and lives down that pit. Poll after poll after poll reveal that anywhere from three-fifths to two-thirds of Americans are against the war, think it was a mistake to get in, that it's not worth the cost, and that troops should be withdrawn within a few months of a new administration and in any event in no more than two years from now. If you want to stand against that at the beginning of your re-election campaign, you can - but you're going to do it on the record."

All that, of course, is assuming Pelosi really does want to end the war like she says she does.

Footnote Once: Shrub, of course, drops another happy pill and gins up his smirk.

President Bush argues that war critics are rounding on the cost of the war because of the very success of the "surge."

"War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq - so now they argue the war costs too much. In recent months we have heard exaggerated estimates of the costs of this war."

Actually, it's very easy to argue we're losing in Iraq. And I hardly think anyone in the Bush gang is in a position to criticize anyone else's cost estimates.

Footnote Twice: Just to illustrate how seriously everyone involved is taking the drmatic costs of the war in their actions rather than in just their words, consider that both houses of Congress are working on their budget outlines for Fiscal 2009.

While both bills, as well as Bush's February budget request, claim to balance the budget by 2012, none provide the long-term funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that likely will be needed.

So it will continue to be funded with budget-busting "emergency supplementals" and we'll continue to pretend there is no economic impact. As the war drags on.

March 19 Blogswarm, Part Three

Updated [This and the next post were supposed to go up yesterday as part of my contribution to the March 19 Blogswarm. I got interrupted and they didn't make it. So consider today March 19 B-Day + 1.]

The costs of a war can be measured in any number of ways beyond the obvious deaths and dollars. The deaths can be expanded beyond those killed in the fighting to deaths from illnesses and accidents and then to those who died indirectly from the fighting, died because of the loss of health care or food supplies or safe drinking water. The costs can include reconstruction (or perhaps reparations), costs of care for the wounded, the maimed, the disabled, and beyond that to intangibles like lost economic productivity.

Yet there is still another kind of cost, one not measured in dollars, another kind of wound, one that draws no blood and leaves no visible scar. A cost, a wound, that those who have experienced war, even those who appear healthy, can carry inside themselves.

Garry Naipo, a grandfather of three, went to Iraq - boomeranging from cul-de-sac to combat and back in 15 months, a journey that would change his life - and that of his family - in subtle, corrosive ways.

Naipo, 51, is one of thousands of National Guard citizen soldiers who have left established jobs and families to answer a call and come back altered men and women. On the outside, they look fine, the same even. They blend in at work, in the grocery line, at their children's soccer games. People tell them they're lucky. They're not dead.

They don't bear the grim signatures of combat.... Their wounds, though, are as insidious as they are invisible. Many return with brains and psyches damaged by chronic exposure to the hammering of blast waves and the afterimages left by bodies blown apart.

They come home, but not back to themselves.

Garry Naipo suffers ringing in his ears. He is going deaf, has memory lapses, difficulty retrieving words, and problems concentrating. He suffers anxiety attacks from things as small as a soda can rolling out of his garage or by going under a bridge. He has become prone to angry, profanity-laden outbursts at small annoyances like a car slowing traffic. Walking in a mall, he keeps one shoulder to the wall and even at home sits with his back to the wall.

Veterans Affairs doctors estimate 60 percent to 65 percent of soldiers have experienced a significant explosion, or multiple detonations, by the time they leave the service. ...

That, in turn, has likely left many with undiagnosed mild to moderate brain injuries, a prognosis that some fear is setting a long fuse that could eventually swamp the system with disabilities as they emerge in the months and years to come.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is not new, but the extent of traumatic brain injury from chronic exposure to explosions in this war is, said psychiatrist Evan Kanter, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who is also a PTSD expert with the VA Puget Sound.

Naipo is getting some treatment for PTSD but has yet to be medically evaluated for concussive brain injury. Whatever the cause, the one thing his family knows for sure is that the man who left for Iraq is not the same man who returned.

The evidence for hidden damage, suppressed where not ignored, denied where not dodged, has even so built beyond the point where it can be dismissed: Among the wounds of war are the kind that can't be left on the battlefield, repaired in a hospital, or cured by physical therapy and which will not heal themselves. The psychic wounds. And the rate of psychic wounds among US veterans of our latest wars of choice are shocking. A summary of a report from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America says that

[a]s early as the Civil War, terms like “soldier’s heart” and “nostalgia” were used to describe the psychological injuries incurred by combat veterans. In later wars, “shell shock” and “battle fatigue” described a similar array of symptoms. It was only in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, however, that veterans’ mental health injuries were examined scientifically. ...

Rates of mental health problems among new veterans are high and rising. The best evidence to date suggests that about one in three Iraq veterans will face a serious psychological injury, such as depression, anxiety, or PTSD. About 1.5 million people have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, so approximately half a million troops are returning with combat-related psychological wounds. And problems are likely to worsen. Multiple tours and inadequate time between deployments increase rates of combat stress by 50 percent.

The cost can be high: divorce, drug and alcohol abuse - and suicide.

[A] five-month CBS News investigation discovered data that shows a startling rate of suicide [among those who have served in the military], what some call a hidden epidemic....

[L]ittle information exists about how widespread suicides are among these who have served in the military. There have been some studies, but no one has ever counted the numbers nationwide. ...

CBS News’ investigative unit wanted the numbers, so it submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense asking for the numbers of suicides among all service members for the past 12 years.

Four months later, they sent CBS News a document, showing that between 1995 and 2007, there were almost 2,200 suicides. That’s 188 last year alone. But these numbers included only “active duty” soldiers. ...

So CBS News did an investigation - asking all 50 states for their suicide data, based on death records, for veterans and non-veterans, dating back to 1995. Forty-five states sent what turned out to be a mountain of information.

And what it revealed was stunning. ...

Dr. Steve Rathbun is the acting head of the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. CBS News asked him to run a detailed analysis of the raw numbers that we obtained from state authorities for 2004 and 2005.

It found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 than non-vets. ...

One age group stood out. Veterans aged 20 through 24, those who have served during the war on terror. They had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, estimated between two and four times higher than civilians the same age.

Paul Sullivan, a former VA analyst now with Veterans For Common Sense, called the figures "devastating."

And where that violence is not turned inward, it can be turned outward.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment - along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems - appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction. ...

This reporting most likely uncovered only the minimum number of such cases, given that not all killings, especially in big cities and on military bases, are reported publicly or in detail. Also, it was often not possible to determine the deployment history of other service members arrested on homicide charges.

The Times used the same methods to research homicides involving all active-duty military personnel and new veterans for the six years before and after the present wartime period began with the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

This showed an 89 percent increase during the present wartime period, to 349 cases from 184, about three-quarters of which involved Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. The increase occurred even though there have been fewer troops stationed in the United States in the last six years and the American homicide rate has been, on average, lower. ...

What is clear is that experiences on the streets of Baghdad and Falluja shadowed these men back to places like Longview, Tex., and Edwardsville, Ill.

“He came back different” is the shared refrain of the defendants’ family members, who mention irritability, detachment, volatility, sleeplessness, excessive drinking or drug use, and keeping a gun at hand. ...

[M]ilitary health care officials are seeing a spectrum of psychological issues, with an estimated half of the returning National Guard members, 38 percent of soldiers and 31 percent of marines reporting mental health problems, according to a Pentagon task force.

Decades of studies on the problems of Vietnam veterans have established links between combat trauma and higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, gun ownership, child abuse, domestic violence, substance abuse - and criminality. ...

The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study, considered the most thorough analysis of this population, found that 15 percent of the male veterans still suffered from full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder more than a decade after the war ended. Half of the veterans with active PTSD had been arrested or in jail at least once, and 34.2 percent more than once. ... In the mid-1980s, with so many Vietnam veterans behind bars that Vietnam Veterans of America created chapters in prisons, veterans made up a fifth of the nation’s inmate population.

We, we as a society, as a culture, have done this to them. In our militarism, our "hero" worship, our wars, our glorification of masculinity defined by machismo and strength defined by stoicism; we send young (and not so young) men and women into a soul-shredding world that tears psychically as well as physically and hold them up as icons rather then individuals, as symbols rather than someones, when they return; we deliberately, consciously, purposefully, seek to train their consciences out of existence and undermine their moral authority - and then pretend that none of this carries over when the shooting stops and the roads they travel are no longer lined with IEDs and even within the left we excoriate those who "smear the troops" by daring to suggest we may be creating our own ticking time bombs.

I have said before that I do not "support the troops." And I don't. "The troops" are the invaders, the occupiers; the ones who smash down doors of innocent homes in the night;



the ones who shoot the wounded; the ones who get off on tormenting prisoners; the ones who enjoy tomenting animals. But I do support, embrace, celebrate, the human being inside the uniform, the one existing apart from the role of "troop." That human being deserves all the concern, compassion, and care they need to be whole.

Foonote: I tried to follow old links I had to videos on YouTube showing some of the wrongs mentioned in the preceding paragraph only to find they have been removed for "terms of service violations." I find the removal of videos that make troops look bad while soaring scenes of sun-glinted fighter-bombers remain unintentionally revealing.

Updated with more information about the situation of Garry Naipo.

March 19 Blogswarm, Part Two

It seems at times that no matter how many lies the WHS* tell about the war and how many times those lies have been proven to be just that, every time they come up with a new one, the media swallow and regurgitate it as readily as they did all the ones before.

Undoubtedly the most successful of the lies was the one that got us into the war in the first place, that of the fabled "weapons of mass destruction." But there is one now that rivals it: "The surge is working."

No, it's not. It never did.

Why? Well, say there’s this car dealership with stagnant sales. Company execs come up with a plan to offer entertainment as a way to draw more people to the site with the idea that the more people, the more sales.

So they do this and when they check the figures six months later, they see that yes, in fact, more people have come to the showroom than during the preceding six months. However, sales remain flat.

“Hooray!” they cry. “More people! Our plan is working!”

No, it’s not. The idea was to generate sales, not visits.

The Iraq plan is not working. The idea of the escalation of the war, excuse me, “surge” (Or is it “enhanced intervention techniques?") was avowedly to provide an “opening” for political progress in Iraq. Last June, Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker

said the ultimate purpose of the surge is to buy time to build up Iraq's security forces and political process.

"[T]he process of reconciliation is key," he said. [Brackets in original.]

Such political progress is something that even the escalation's biggest cheerleader, David Petraeus, is unable to bring itself to claim is happening.

Yes, there have been some military gains - which I suppose was to be expected when you pour a bunch more soldiers into a relatively small area, i.e., Baghdad. But the purpose was to promote a political settlement. And there is zippo progress on that front.

No, the “surge” is not working. But the claims about it, the claims of "success" and "progress," are.

Those claims are based on a handful of cherry-picked statistics, the power of which is drawn from the inability or unwillingness of the US media to remember that Iraq consists of more than Baghdad and Anbar province and that there are more sources of information that the Iraqi government and the US military. Thus we hear, over and over again as if it was the only relevant metric, that sectarian violence against civilians has gone down. Which is has - but according to Iraq Body Count, the number of civilians killed by the war in 2007 was only slightly below that of 2006, the bloodiest year so far. We have, by dint of much labor and effort and an additional 30,000 or more troops, managed to get the monthly death toll of civilians "down" to where it was in 2005. If military brass want to claim that as a "success," I'd say both that they set a very low standard of success and that they first must declare the previous two years utter failures. And I don't mean any mealy-mouthed platitudes about how "well, of course no one was satisfied with the degree of progress shown" but a direct "we were fucking losers."

But more importantly, are there reasons beyond the escalation for the apparent drop in sectarian violence, which is what we call it because we don't want to admit it's a civil war? Yes, of course there are and you knew that was coming, else why would I ask the question? Here are three:

- The ceasefire declared by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army.
- The fact that ethnic cleansing has been quite "efficient" to the point where there are few mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad and few mixed areas anywhere in the country. There is less sectarian violence because the two sides have a good deal less contact.
- The US has in effect temporarily bought the loyalty of a fair number of former Sunni insurgents, providing them arms and paying them $300 a month, twice the national average income, to be, supposedly, some kind of lethal community watch program.

That last point may be the one with the greatest potential to blow up in our faces. Already the strains are showing. A couple of weeks ago, Brian Katulis at the Center for American Progress wrote that

[t]he disaffected Sunni groups that turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq are now demanding their due - political power for these “Awakening” groups commensurate with their newfound military clout and their belief that Sunnis should once again be the dominant power in Iraq as they were under Saddam Hussein.

But of course the Shi'a-dominated central government is loath to accept that idea and the Sunnis are "losing patience" with both the US and the Baghdad government. That, Katulis says, could lead to civil war returning "in full force" because

it is increasingly clear that the surge did little more than temporarily mask these divisions by offering support to different factions - support that today further undermines the Iraqi state

and could lead to US forces being caught amid warring factions and possibly a target of each. It's hard to imagine that the US military is unaware of that possibility, which I strongly suspect is a good part of the reason for the increasing reluctance to commit to even modest troop withdrawals despite all the public "victory is just around the corner" optimism.

Thus, in January, the White House was already sending "strong signals" that withdrawals would slow if not stop completely by the summer. By the end of February it was clear that come July there would still be about 140,000 US troops in Iraq - about 8,000 more than there were when the escalation began. That is to be followed by what Petraeus called a "period of assessment" extending into the fall with no promise of further reductions before then - or even after.

Or even ever.

Since last year, the administration has been working towards a long-term security agreement with Iraq, an "enduring relationship," as they had it. The basic outlines were clear: a long-term American troop presence in Iraq and preferential treatment for American investments in return for a guarantee of security for the Iraqis.

To give you an idea of the outline, the Iraqis said that it would be silly to expect that Iraq would be able to defend itself alone until at least 2018. Forever seems a fair conservative estimate.

But there was a problem. There was a strong case to be made that for the administration to strike such a deal without the consent of the Senate was unconstitutional. ...

So, abruptly, the administration's position changed. The administration would be striking a long-term pact along the same lines, but there would be no security guarantee. None at all. According to the letter of the agreement, if Iraq were attacked, we'd just let it burn.

For some reason, some cynics think this is just a workaround. Without the actual security guarantee, the administration can hammer out the treaty without any hassle from Congress.

When Rep. Gary Ackerman asked David Satterfield, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, if he was "stating uncategorically" that in the event Iraq is attacked "that the administration will take no action ... until an appropriate course of action is decided, in consultation with the Congress," Satterfield replied

Mr. Chairman, the administration will act as any administration would act in defense of U.S. interests.

Oh my yes, absolutely. And with that handy-dandy War Powers Act just waiting to be invoked - there are, after all, all those US troops not to mention private contractors in harm's way - what's a president to do? No security guarantee? No problem!

(Actually, it'd be a refreshing change for this administration to act "as any administration would," but I think was can assume that's not what Satterfield meant.)

Meanwhile, in another of the increasing number of echoes of Vietnam, the US is creating a hidden war. When John McCain talks about being in Iraq 100 years, he attaches the caveat that "as long as Americans aren't dying," people here won't care. Even though we condemn him for such callousness, the fact is he's very likely right and we know it: That's why in our protests we keep focusing on the number of Americans killed, even though by some accounts nearly 300 Iraqis have died as a result of the war for every American killed and even by the most conservative tabulations limited to Iraqi non-combatant deaths by violence, they still outnumber US deaths more than 20 to 1. We know that despite the horrendous cost to Iraqis, the American public that we are hoping to rouse will be moved much more by the (by comparison only) small cost to Americans. In the same way, the Pentagon knows that at long as US casualties can be kept down, so can public outrage. And while the current wack jobs occupying the White House may not give a damn what the public thinks, the brass can't be sure about the next crew.

So how do you pursue a war while minimizing the risks to the soldiers on the ground, a war that then can be rendered largely invisible to the public? Simple. You fight the war from where the enemy can't effectively reach: the sky.

The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006....

The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006. ...

The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population. The military assures that the precision attacks are designed to minimize civilian casualties ... but rights groups say bombings carry an especially high risk. ...

The strategy was evident last week, as U.S. forces launched airstrikes across Iraq as part of Operation Phantom Phoenix. On Thursday morning in Arab Jabour, southeast of Baghdad, the U.S. military dropped 38 bombs with 40,000 pounds of explosives in 10 minutes, one of the largest strikes since the 2003 invasion. U.S. forces north of Baghdad employed bombs totaling more than 16,500 pounds over just a few days last week, according to officers there.

The number of bombings for 2007 is understated because the Marines keeps their own statistics for bombings in western Iraq "but could not provide 2007 data."

Colin Kahl, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, said that as US ground forces decline "you may see even more airstrikes." Personally, I'd bet on it.

And we'll be told it's a sign of progress. And the media will believe it.

First Footnote: The air war is also picking up in Afghanistan. (Afghanistan. You remember.) US and NATO bombings totaled nearly 3,600 in 2007 - more than twice as many as 2006 and more than 20 times the number in 2005.

Second Footnote: I need to correct myself. It's not "bombing." According to Air Force Lt. Gen. Gary North, who bears the lengthy title of US Central Air Forces and Combined Forces Air Component commander in Iraq, it's "kinetic strikes." Please make the correction on your copies of your papers.

*WHS = White House Sociopaths