unreasonable.org

Just in case you thought you were caught up in the patriotic fervor around July 4th and thought you lived in a free country, this will bring you back to reality: Robert Zicari and his wife, Janet Romano, have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison on federal charges of conspiracy to distribute "obscene" material through the mail and over the Internet.

Yes, the government of the land of the free and the home of the brave is so scared that somebody might look at dirty pictures, that they are forcing people into cages at gunpoint over the issue. As U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said, "These prison sentences affirm the need to continue to protect the public from obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy material, the production of which degrades all of us." I was quite worried that next time I went to the Royal Farms store the porn was going to jump off the shelf and attack me and leave me "degraded", but I feel safer now knowing that the federal government is going to protect me from filthy material.

Juxtaposing the fact that you can get locked up for selling naughty pictures with the fact that no one has been brought up on charges for the torture of detainees in Gitmo, is left as an exercise for the depressed reader.

See where teaching kids to trust Officer Friendly ends up? Maryland Transit Administration police officer Donald Brown has been charged with kidnapping and raping a 15-year-old girl who asked him for help after she got lost on the light rail.

A recent Department of Defense anti-terrorism training document, asks readers to pick from a list of activities, "Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?" The possible answers: "Attacking the Pentagon", "IEDs", "Hate crimes against racial groups", and "Protests".

The "correct" answer, according to the DoD? Protests.

Yes, folks, according to the U.S. government, wars of aggression are fine, torture is fine, "preventative detention" is fine, but peaceably assembling to petition the government for a redress of your grievances about all this is terrorism.

The ACLU is on the case. Good reminder to send them a little donation.

Once, there was a young man who wanted a sports car.

His parents objected. "Its engine is too powerful. It will make you a danger to others and to yourself."

But the young man was clever, and knew more than a little about cars. "Mother and father, you are correct that this car's powerful engine makes it a danger. Therefore, I promise to make that engine smaller!"

So his parents assented. They watched for days as the young man removed pieces from the engine, leaving a pile of metal in the garage. They were impressed when he showed that he had reduced the weight of the engine by a sizable amount. So they granted their blessing for him to reassemble the car and drive it.

The young man installed the shrunken engine back in the car, and promptly tore off at high speed, running down six pedestrians before wrapping his car around a telephone pole.

It turned out that his idea of making the engine "smaller" had been to remove every limiter, governor, and regulator, all to make it more powerful.

---

There's a sort of so-called "libertarian capitalist" or "anarcho-capitalist" political theory that you often hear that talks about "smaller government", or even about eliminating government all together.

But you'll note that they never talk about eliminating government-issued land deeds, or government-issued corporate charters, or government-issued copyrights and patents. They're quite happy to have government force around to evict tenants who fall behind on rent, or to quell unruly laborers. They are generally property-centric, and ignore the fact that, beyond the natural use of own's own home and tools and toys, property is a product of government.

I've been re-reading Kerry Thornley's wonderful tract Zenarchy. It's about the only work on politics I've ever found that truly makes sense. Here's a great excerpt on the politics of sexuality, highly relevant to the "culture war" and to the far right's attempt to use gay marriage as a wedge issue to distract us from how the military-industrial complex and the investment class have been screwing us over for decades; and also to the sexy counter-game represented by things like the Burner community and the Pagan movement:

---

By itself, intellectual liberation that does not come to terms with human sexuality can be worse than useless. And regaining our original lusty sexual innocence requires, beyond reviving our curiosity, an entirely different approach than liberating reason. For now we are called upon to deal with that portion of the human mind called the human body, regarded in speech as a separate entity from the body. They are interconnected. That explains why erotic matters are usually imponderable even to poets. So much is sexuality part of us, closer than breathing, that trying to understand it is akin to the eye endeavoring to see itself - in a beautiful metaphor used in another context by Alan Watts - or like the hand trying to grab itself.

Possibly, sexuality is the mother of religion. Primitive mystics may have been ascribing symbols to aspects of what we call lust, both genital and the more pervasive non-genital kind of which Norman O. Brown writes so eloquently. Certainly when religion becomes organized and established it begins to regard sex jealously as a dangerous competitor, perhaps in an effort to hide its own not-so-miraculous-and-immaculate origins.

Politicians intuitively grasp the usefulness of sexuality as a sure way to divide people and distract them from the business of becoming free in other ways. Whether they choose to be for or against sexual repression, they can create such an uproar that political and economic crimes and failures will fade into the background. Jay Gould, the monopoly capitalist, once boasted that he could cure unemployment by hiring one half of the jobless to kill the other half. As long as they can keep their subjects quarreling with one another about personal affairs, they need not fear a united effort to oust them. Since organized religion is politically powerful, it usually takes the side of repression. As Aldous Huxley showed in Brave New World, they could just as easily reduce us to submission by taking the opposite approach. In contemporary culture, factions of the ruling class sometimes join forces with organized crime to create turmoil by supporting sexual freedom. Efforts like that are not sexual liberation movements; they depend as much on guilt and blackmail and puritanical legislation as drug smuggling depends on narcotics laws - without which there would not be much profit in the activity.

Once I was driving through Atlanta with my Hindu friend, Suresh, an exchange student from India. Upon noting that the largest adult book center in town was located right next door to the Baptist book store, also the largest of its kind, he commented, "Why not? They keep each other in business!"

So we're going to own the majority of GM. But Obama says that he has no interest in having the majority owner -- the U.S., i.e. you and I, though our elected officials -- run the company.

Absentee ownership is never a good idea. We own a large industrial manufacturer now, and we ought to run for our benefit.

And what is the best way to use this industrial giant to our benefit? Should we have it continue to make gas-guzzlers? Should we have our company try to compete with Japan and Korea -- and rising stars China and India -- to make affordable and fuel-efficient cars?

Here's a better idea -- let's repurpose its manufacturing capability. Already, manufacturing plants once dedicated to the automobile industry are being used for things like wind turbines. And up until 2004, GM had a large locomotive division. Why not have our company lead the way in green industry, not with a showy and over engineered attempt at an electric car, but with renewable power, and with a renaissance of the only sensible and green form of ground transport, rail?

But instead, it looks like under the moderately conservative Obama administration, we'll have what capitalism always comes down to: lots of talk about free markets, and then lots of action to intervene in the market to support the investment class, the capitalists and the corporate managers, at the expense of the people who actually do the work. We'll hand the investors a lot of money to tide them over this troubled time, then give the company back to the same people who screwed up the first time around, so they can continue to mismanage the company and to make products detrimental to planetary health.

xkcd on "school spirit". (I feel much the same way about the cheerleading that usually passes for "patriotism".)

An open letter to:

Delegate Steven J. Deboy, Sr. steven.deboy@house.state.md.us
Delegate James E. Malone, Jr. james.malone@house.state.md.us
Senator Edward J. Kasemeyer edward.kasemeyer@senate.state.md.us
Governor Martin J. O'Malley http://www.governor.maryland.gov/mail/

Dear Delegates, Senator, and Governor:

For 42 years, the Maryland Summer Centers for Gifted Students have run programs that have enriched the lives of academically talented young people.

I was one of those kids. For four summers in the early 1980s, I got to attend the "Center for Advanced Studies" program held at Western Maryland College. It was at this academic summer camp that I took my first computer programming class, setting me on the road that led to a master's degree and a successful career. (Which, I might point out, has resulted in some significant tax payments to Maryland over the years!) I got to learn about philosophy and logic and psychology; a quarter-century later I still reflect on some of the things I learned those weeks.

You may have heard about Ty making the Obama kids into Beanie Babies. (Ty, of course, claims the names are just a coincidence.)

My first reaction was amazed disgust. But Ruth Marcus makes an excellent point:

...It's impossible to read about "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia" without being reminded of the famous psychology experiment cited in Brown v. Board of Education. Offered dolls of differing skin tones, black children overwhelmingly chose to play with the white doll; they picked the white doll when asked to identify the "nice" doll and selected the brown doll when asked which was the "bad" doll.

...

When a high school student named Kiri Davis repeated Clark's experiment with 4- and 5-year-olds at a Harlem child-care center for her 2005 documentary, "A Girl Like Me," she found heartbreakingly similar results.

In the video, a little girl in a lavender sweatshirt identifies the "bad" and "nice" dolls. "Why does that look bad?" Davis asks. "Because it's black," the girl replies. "And why do you think that's a nice doll?" "Because she's white."

Then comes the real gut punch. "Can you give me the doll that looks like you?" The girl touches the white doll. Her hand lingers on it for a few seconds. Slowly, she slides the dark-skinned doll across the table.

...

Then again, if hawking "Sweet Sasha" and "Marvelous Malia" encourages children of any hue to want an African American doll, or to admire two African American girls whose father just happens to be president, maybe that's not such a bad trade-off.

After John Roberts screwed up the administration of the oath at Obama's inauguration, some people suggested - some jokingly, some seriously - that Obama wasn't legitimately president. Well, now there's no doubt (discarding wacko conspiracy theories about how Obama was really born in Kenya or on Mars or something) because they went back and did it again:

The decision to repeat the oath was taken out of an abundance of caution, an official said.

But Mr Obama joked: "We decided it was so much fun...." before adding: "We're going to do it very slowly."

...

"We believe the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately," said White House counsel Greg Craig.

"Out of the abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice John Roberts will administer the oath a second time."

Two other presidents, Calvin Coolidge and Chester Arthur, have had to repeat the oath because of similar problems.