Ziporyn on Xunzi III

Scott Bradley

In my view, the satisfaction of human desires is the only justification of any position developed by any early Chinese thinker.
(Ziporyn; Ironies of Oneness and Difference, p. 200)

If this is the case, then early Chinese philosophy was profoundly humanistic. Human happiness is the overwhelming concern of the human enterprise. Taken in the context of the understanding that this happiness is predicated on its harmonious interface with Nature and society generally, as well as with one's own self, we see how the pursuit of happiness meets all the requirements for universal benefit.

Humanism, at least as it arose in the West, is curiously in contrast to theism. The Creator creates for 'his' own purposes, and it is 'his' purposes that matter; the created are of secondary and derivative significance. Chief among the Creator's purposes are that 'he' be worshiped, "glorified", and obeyed. (Let's call it The Great Ego — “I AM that I AM".) Things exist for God, not for themselves. Human desires are thus subordinate to those of God; they can be rightfully realized only when they conform to 'his' purposes, and quite often even innocent desires do not meet this criterion.

The satisfaction of human desires is necessarily an enterprise; it does not just happen. As individuals we are required to create the conditions necessary to our own happiness. This requires that we exercise self-restraint, lest the satisfaction of our desires negatively impact the conditions necessary to our happiness. As social beings who live collectively, we are also required to create institutions which facilitate the realization of happiness for the greatest number of its participants, and this requires societal-restraints lest a few deprive the many. As members of a vast ecological community (Earth), animate and inanimate, we are required to restrain our individual and collective desires when they negatively impact the harmony of the whole. A collapsed ecosystem is not conducive to happiness.

All of this "restraint" is a non-restraint when taken in the context of the understanding of happiness as living in harmony. Harmony is not only a condition of happiness; it is happiness.

Thus, we have various philosophies and political theories that suggest the best way to deliver the goods, some more effectively than others. Seeing them all from this perspective, perhaps we are better able to choose between them. What need not apply are the concepts of good and bad.

As an American, I feel compelled to question how harmonious the core value of the pursuit of happiness as an individualistic, capitalistic endeavor really is. Given the present disparities of wealth and, more importantly, the impact of the consequent poverty, one must ask if this ideology is in fact the most conducive to happiness for any of us, including the wealthy. One must also wonder if this ideology most cherished by the dedicated theists among us is not a consequence of worshiping The Great Ego.

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Frozen Out

Trey Smith

Joe White was this close to making it.

A 50-year-old California man described by relatives as a “loving father and a doting grandfather,” White had been living on the streets of Hayward for years. He wanted to work and was able to find odd jobs here and there, but it was never much or consistent enough to afford a place to live. Hayward has no emergency shelter with beds for single men, so White slept outside.

But things were looking up. Last Saturday, White was second on a long list to get permanent supportive housing in Hayward. He had been waiting in line for months and it seemed as though he might finally catch a break.

White died on Sunday.

Temperatures in the Bay Area plummeted to near-freezing on December 10, an uncommon occurrence in a region generally known for its lack of inclement weather. White’s body was found in the old Hayward City Hall courtyard. He’d been beaten up and robbed by multiple men, who took the new winter coat White’s sister had given him on Friday. He was wearing just a hoodie and shorts. His cause of death is still being determined, but police speculated that his death was weather-related.

White is now the seventh homeless person in the Bay Area to die in the cold since November 28. The others were Daniel Brillhart, 52; Enrique Rubio, 56; Andrew Greenleaf, 48; Daniel Moore, 53; and two men in the East Bay and Peninsula whose names have not been released.
~ from 7 Homeless People Freeze to Death in Wealthiest Area of the Country by Scott Keyes ~

Seven doesn't sound like that large of a number. For those who live in colder climes, the figure probably is much higher. But that's not the point.

We live in a nation in which corporate profits are soaring to record heights and those who are reaping these rewards concurrently are pushing to lower their responsibility to the community -- via taxes -- by even more than they already are. The deaths of these 7 individuals represent blood on the hands of the elite, but they don't give a damn.

Their sole focus is on the welfare of themselves and their kind. They don't care about the rest of us. Any way one looks at it, that is sad. Tragically sad.

One Federal Jurist Finally Gets It

Trey Smith

A federal judge on Monday concluded that a National Security Agency program that collects massive amounts of telephone data “likely” violates the Constitution, propelling a high-stakes fight right toward the Supreme Court.

In an extraordinary 68-page decision, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon of Washington ordered the NSA to stop snooping on two specific individuals who had challenged the so-called “bulk telephony metadata” collection program. While Leon then put a stay on his own order, pending a government appeal, his skepticism about the program’s constitutional validity came through loud and clear.

“I believe that bulk telephony metadata collection almost certainly does violate a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Leon wrote, taking note of the “almost Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States.”

Appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2002, Leon further cautioned that the 21st century surveillance technologies may have outstripped the decades-old legal precedents being used to justify them. The only way to resolve the dilemma spelled out in Leon’s decision is for the Supreme Court to revisit the issues once the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit takes a crack at it.
~ from NSA Telephone Spying "Likely" Illegal, Judge Says by Michael Doyle and Ali Watkins ~

In this day and age, it almost is surprising to see that a federal judge finally gets it. This bulk collection of almost ALL phone data on the potentially guilty and innocent alike is obviously far over the legal line. It treats those suspected of no wrongdoing like criminals which is something the founding fathers sought to thwart. I mean, why enumerate specific rights of citizens that government is supposed to not breach?

It's even more amazing that the judge who finally got it was appointed by a Republican President, not a Democratic one. If a conservative jurist is alarmed, this only shows that this program has crossed far, far over the line...or maybe Judge Leon is just some crackpot. Maybe the rest of our vaunted judicial system will give the Obama administration what they want: the ability to abrogate the US Constitution whenever they feel like it!

Wouldn't that be a glorious day!

Look No Further Than the End of Your Nose

Trey Smith

The United States needs protection from the people protecting it, always has, and always will. The character of the president isn't the issue. Neither are the individuals running the FBI, CIA, NSA, JSOC, or the Department of Homeland Security. It wouldn't matter if the national-security state was staffed from top to bottom with people I could hand select based on my esteem for their character.

Letting them operate in secret would still be dangerous.

That conclusion isn't something I've derived in the abstract from political philosophy. The best reason to mistrust the national-security state is its track record. Abuses at the FBI, CIA, and NSA go back a long way, as any student of the J. Edgar Hoover era or the Church Committee report can attest in shocking detail. There's no reason to think that generation was more prone to misbehave than ours. But one needn't look to past generations to find good reasons for mistrust.

The War on Terrorism is full of them.
~ from Why Does Anyone Trust the National-Security State? by Conor Friedersdorf ~

There is another reason not to trust the national-security state and each of us can ascertain this reason by looking no further than the end of our nose. When we ourselves operate in secret, are we paragons of virtue?

The answer is almost always NO, not even close.

It is a human penchant to try to get away with as much as we think we can get away with. A person, group or entity can get away with a heck of a lot when operating in secret. When nobody knows what we're up to, it's like a green light to be up to more things than you can shake a stick at. So, it is illogical to think that government leaders and their minions would behave any differently.

This is why many of our laws (mores too) involve varying degrees of constraint or outright prohibition. Left to our own devices, most humans would run roughshod over everyone else. In order to live together in relative peace and harmony, we have created [imperfect] rules to constrain each other from non-harmonious behavior. Those who operate outside of the rules in secret are the most dangerous. History attests to this fact over and over and over again.

Virtual Target Practice

Trey Smith

In a recently released report about the Sandy Hook school shooting of last December, one of the revelations is that the shooter (Adam Lanza) possessed a video game called School Shooting. As reported by the Guardian, the game features "a character controlled by the player who enters a school and shoots students."

I am sure that some people will point to this particular game as being a cause of the tragedy. Other people will broaden the scope to say that all violent video games are part of the problem and, consequently, should be banned. Still others will point out that millions of people play violent video games and yet they don't commit heinous acts, so the problem obviously isn't the games themselves.

Where do I stand on the issue? Sort of in the middle.

I do think violent video games are part of the problem, but that doesn't mean that I believe they should be singled out. Violence permeates our society. Our federal government has a "shoot first, ask questions later" mentality. This perspective has trickled down to local police forces. Even ordinary citizens -- like George Zimmerman -- wrap themselves in the shoot first mantra.

Most of the top box office draws in the film industry employ varying degrees of violence to sell tickets. The same is true for television programs. Heck, a good deal of the most popular music these days is filled with violent themes. When you add in the amount of violence showcased in a great deal of the "hallowed" religious tracts from the Abrahamic religions, the whole thing ends up tied neatly with a bow!

Yes, a video game entitled School Shooting is vulgar, but so too are the violent themes that seem to worm their way into every nook, cranny and crevice of our lives. Banning one tiny element won't make that much difference at all.

"An Alternative World"

Trey Smith

When I read a rundown of military assets being sent to rescue survivors and deliver supplies, I feel grateful for the logistics officers marshaling their expertise, but also struck by the fact that the tools we're using were designed to fight wars and are being temporarily repurposed. I wonder what a fleet as well-funded as the U.S. military's would look like if it were optimized for natural disaster response.

How many victims would have been reached already?

The stories about inaccessible areas of the Philippines, where authorities haven't yet seen the damage — let alone helped the survivors — makes me reflect on the global drone fleet, and imagine an alternative world where it was optimized and expanded to spot victims rather than insurgents, delivering drinking water rather than Hellfire missiles.

I don't mean to go all John Lennon on you. This isn't a naive call to eliminate the U.S. military and spend its entire budget augmenting the International Red Cross.

But given how predictable it is that there will be deadly storms, catastrophic earthquakes, and other natural disasters besides, you'd think we'd spend more on preemptive measures that would help lower the death toll and speed help to survivors. Alas, our psychology as individuals and nations is to dig into our pockets only after the fact, when the descriptions of mass graves and hunger reach us.

It is good to act then. It would be better to act sooner.
~ from Is This the Best Humanity Can Do for the Philippines? by Conor Friedersdorf ~

If asked to sum up in brief the primary reason I started this blog in January 2005, it would be because of my desire to imagine "an alternative world", one aptly expressed through the eyes of Laozi and Zhuangzi. As far back as when they (or others) wrote their famous tracts, humanity has wrestled with cultures fixated on satisfying the egoic desires of the elite. In "an alternative world", ALL of this planet's creatures and life forms would be valued and war would have no purpose.

A report is out that survivors in typhoon-ravaged central Philippines stormed a government owned rice warehouse because...they were starving. It is a sad commentary that there are people in this world who starve everyday despite the fact that enough food is produced to feed everyone. Though there is enough fresh water, there are folks who die of thirst. There are people who are born into grinding poverty and, when death comes (sooner than it should), have never had the opportunity to escape its grip.

I don't understand how ANYONE could be satisfied with the kind of world we have created. It is a world of a few mega winners and a wide swath of mega losers. To sit by silently is, to me, the greatest sin of all.

Sometimes You Can't Go Home Again

Trey Smith

When Mount St. Helens blew her top in 1980, the nearby landscape looked like it had been leveled by an atomic bomb. Some people thought that any form of life would not return before several generations had passed. And yet, within 5 years or so, life did return. It seems that nature has a way of repairing herself.

Climactic events can be fierce and lead to overwhelming destruction. Most communities that find themselves in the path of a major hurricane, tornado or flood take years to rebuild, but they DO rebuild. There is one event -- a human-caused one -- in which this is not always the case: a nuclear accident. When a nuclear plant melts down, it can render the surrounding area uninhabitable for, maybe, forever.

This is what the citizens of the towns surrounding Fukushima have just learned. Up until now, the government has issued assurances that people would be allowed to return home at some point. But in the last few days government officials have admitted the obvious: the communities near the Fukushima plant have been rendered uninhabitable for the foreseeable future. Residents who had pinned their hopes on going home are now coming to the realization that "home" will have to be somewhere else!

You see, this is THE issue with nuclear energy. As long as things are humming along, nuclear energy seems like a good thing. But when a problem arises and things aren't humming along, it's not a good thing at all. This so-called wonderful energy source has the capacity to end human civilization all by itself. So, while many will argue that it has many upsides, this one downside cancels out all the supposed benefits.

It is bad enough that residents near Chernobyl or Fukushima have been permanently displaced, but what happens when a nuclear catastrophe renders the planet unlivable? If the entire population of earth is displaced, we have nowhere else to go!

With a Friend Like This...

Trey Smith

Remember a week or so ago when staunch NSA defender Sen. Dianne Feinstein became all "upset" that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been spied on? Feinstein announced that this was going too far and it had motivated her to introduce legislation to "reform" the nasty NSA. As it turns out, Feinstein has an odd way of defining the word, reform.

The legislation would make clear in no uncertain terms that communication records like phone, email, and internet data can be collected without even an ounce of suspicion, pursuant to the so-called privacy rules already in place. Being silent on other types of data like location information or financial records, it passively condones their collection too, but without even the benefit of the paltry protections in place now. For the first time in history, Congress would explicitly and intentionally authorize dragnet domestic spying programs targeting every day Americans.

The Feinstein bill also makes the current situation even worse. It gives the government a 72-hour grace period to warrantlessly spy on foreigners who enter the US, without even the attorney general approval that is currently required in emergency situations. It explicitly states that none of its provisions should be read to prevent law enforcement from digging through massive NSA databases for evidence of criminal activity. By doing so, it authorizes that specific practice in a roundabout way. Finally, it sets up the prospect of all members of Congress accessing important court orders and other information, but then undercuts this requirement by endorsing current rules and practices that have been used to prevent members of the House from reading foundational documents that could inform the votes they must make on whether to continue these programs.

I think we can call this doubling down! Not only does she not really want to reform anything, she wants to make a bad situation worse. She wants to provide the NSA with the legal permission to do whatever they want to. She wants to grant the NSA the ability to ignore the US Constitution outright.

It also should be remembered that Dianne Feinstein is a D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T, not some rabid conservative who doesn't trust the rabble. She supposedly is a leading member of a political party that historically stood up for the unwashed masses. Sadly, that Democratic Party is dead as a doornail. What we are left with is two parties that represent the same constituency -- the elite. No one is left to represent the rest of us.

Still Ashamed

Scott Bradley

I wrote a post some time ago in which I said I was ashamed to be an American; I still am.

Yesterday (11/8) I heard (and thankfully did not see) a video (released by "Rolling Stone") on Democracy Now! in which a detainee in Afghanistan was being tortured while American soldiers — trainers — looked on. His cries were horrific. (I admit to having an incredible dread of torture.)

This was done in my name. This is now, even as I write, being done in my name. My country is an evil empire, and its citizens by virtue of their complacency are responsible. Got stuff? What else matters?

But this was an aberration we will be told, the work of a few bad apples. No it is not. This is America at work around the world — sending out its mercenaries to bring death and terror to keep the world safe for the multinational corporations and the ruling elite.

But why should I be ashamed? I denounce this evil; I write this post. Yet still I profit (at least for the moment) from this despicable system. And I know of no way to change it.

But mostly I am ashamed because I am not myself sufficiently transformed as to be able to transform others. My engagement would just be more of the same.

I once was a Christian, and as a Christian went to protest at a Christian sponsored "God Bless America" rally and held up a sign saying, "America's God is the Devil". I say it again now: America's God is the Devil.

Where are the prophets? Where are the religious, Jewish, Christian and Muslim, who stand up in sackcloth and ashes and scream the idolatry of nationalism, "exceptionalism", empire, and divine mandate? Let me, at least, say together with Rev. Wright, Obama's (our beloved Judas who sold us out for a few pieces of silver) abandoned preacher, "God damn America!"

You can check out Scott's other miscellaneous writings here.

Like the Lawless Wild West

Trey Smith

What a week! Shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that maybe our government had gone "too far" in its surveillance programs, the Washington Post dropped another Edward Snowden bombshell demonstrating that it is going a whole lot farther than we knew.

If Kerry's ersatz admission -- couched in a defense of National Security Agency surveillance -- provoked a collective yawn from many who follow these developments, the latest Snowden stuff snapped us to attention. The Post published an article detailing the NSA's interception of information coming in and out of Google and Yahoo servers over non-public, internal network fibre optic lines. In December, 2012 alone, the program (revealingly called "MUSCULAR") processed 181,280,466 Google and Yahoo records that included email, searches, videos and photos.

Up to now, the NSA has defended its actions by telling us it is combating terrorism through the capture of data in a public space, the Internet, after obtaining court orders. This shows they were lying. MUSCULAR is the theft of about 25 percent of all Internet data from two of the most popular data handling companies with no court orders or advisories in complete defiance of the law and our rights. It is, quite simply, government gangsterism.

And it brings into focus the most important question: why? Because this isn't about counter-terrorism, not with that many records and their surreptitious capture. This is about surveillance and analysis of the daily communications of an entire country and much of the world.

The technology of MUSCULAR, a program jointly carried on by the NSA and its British counterpart, isn't hard to explain. Essentially, technologists at the spy agency have figured out a way to intercept data being exchanged among servers that store everything you do on Google and Yahoo.

Here's the difference between this and other previously revealed spying programs. Your data travels over the Internet to get to those servers and be stored there. For others to see what data you've stored, it must travel out, again over the Internet. That's legally protected data and the NSA (at least theoretically) needs a court order to remove it from those servers. The FISA court (the NSA's blessing source) almost always rubber stamps NSA requests so it's pretty easy to conduct that kind of data extraction but at least there is still a record of what the NSA is looking for and why and some grounds for taking legal action against it.

Muscular doesn't go near the data as it's traveling on the Internet or while it's on those servers. Instead it intercepts data that's already been stored and is traveling through non-public connections between each company's many servers as the companies synchronize stored data or transfer it internally. Internet giants like Google transfer data among their servers constantly in networks of servers known as (you've heard it before) "clouds". This constant transfer helps distribute server activity so that a sudden spike in requests for data on a particular server doesn't crash it (called "load management") or for maintenance, security and other reasons. To do this they use special fibre-optic wires that connect their various servers and are not publicly available.

The data transferred among these servers is typically encoded so nobody can read it without having the decoding keys. That's a security measure. According to these reports, the NSA has figured out a way to decode those formats, then captures the data being transferred by tapping into these internal connections and then, without anyone outside the NSA knowing it, decodes the stuff and analyses it to decide what, if anything, they want to do with it.
~ from NSA Intercepted Data from Google and Yahoo Servers; Monitors Nearly Everyone's Internet Use by Alfredo Lopez ~

What does all this mean? Well, it means that all you folks out there who believe that the Congress, judiciary or President have any sort of power or influence over the NSA have been put on notice that such assumptions are wrong. As the continued revelations point out, the NSA doesn't seem to answer to anyone but itself! (It doesn't answer to itself all that much either.)

This is why I have suggested that it may be impossible to put this genie back into the bottle. Sure, the President can issue directives, Congress can pass legislation and the courts can render decisions, but not one of these branches knows the full extent to what the NSA is up to and capable of. We have to go either on what they tell us -- and lying is their stock-and-trade -- or from revelations disclosed by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. For all Snowden has disclosed, we can only guess that this represents the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The NSA is behaving like a lawman in the lawless wild west. Back in the day, it was often hard to determine the good guys from the bad guys because each side employed what we might call shady practices. Some of the lawmen -- like Wyatt Earp -- spent much of their adult lives bumping back and forth between lawman and outlaw!

Hmm. That might be an apt description for the NSA as well.

What About Wall Street?

Trey Smith

The N.S.A. documents taken by Mr. Snowden and shared with The Times, numbering in the thousands and mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, are part of a collection of about 50,000 items that focus mainly on its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters or G.C.H.Q.

While far from comprehensive, the documents give a sense of the agency’s reach and abilities, from the Navy ships snapping up radio transmissions as they cruise off the coast of China, to the satellite dishes at Fort Meade in Maryland ingesting worldwide banking transactions, to the rooftops of 80 American embassies and consulates around the world from which the agency’s Special Collection Service aims its antennas. (emphasis added)
~ from No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A. by Scott Shane ~

Every time you or I use a debit or credit card, chances are great that this information is scooped up by the NSA and stored in a database somewhere. Write a check, make a deposit or transfer money and the same thing happens. If the NSA has its hands on all these types of transactions, then this should include all the similar types of transaction made by the titans of Wall Street.

So how is it that the US government was caught flat-footed about foreclosuregate? How is it that the UK government was caught off guard by the London Whale and Libor Rate-Rigging scandal? How is it that ANY of the financial shenanigans of the past decade took place and yet there have been few, if any, prosecutions?

This situation offers yet another telltale sign that these ubiquitous spying schemes really have little to do with protection and security. In 2007-08, Wall Street committed what could be termed financial terrorism against the world economy. The NSA and GCHQ could have thwarted these attacks or, at least, brought to justice those responsible for it. But they did neither. They allowed the attacks to commence and those responsible have, by and large, not been held responsible in any meaningful way.

Think about this long and hard. Wall Street is in the business OF banking transactions. They leave digital tracks and trails all along the way. The NSA is vacuuming up these financial transactions and yet no one in the US government shows much of any interest in following the tracks or trails laid out. They could easily nail these suckers by producing secretly gathered ironclad evidence in black and white, but they have chosen not to.

That fact -- in and of itself -- should tell the discerning individual all you need to know about what is REALLY going on here.

It Always Trickles Down

Trey Smith

When Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, sat down with President Obama at the White House in April to discuss Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change, it was a cordial, routine exchange.

The National Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted Mr. Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to imagine what edge this could have given Mr. Obama in a friendly chat, if he even saw the N.S.A.’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)

But it was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable interest — now or in the future — should be done. After all, American intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?

From thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies routinely on friends as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over Japan and Brazil, among other countries.
~ from No Morsel Too Miniscule for All-Consuming NSA by Scott Shane ~

For weeks now, we've listened to the heads of America's chief spy agency justify their activities based on the assertion that "everybody does it." As a child, that excuse didn't fly, so why should it for adults? Just because others are acting recklessly or unethically is no excuse for you and I to act the same way! It is particularly egregious for a nation that always claims the moral high ground. How can we claim to be "better" than others if we behave the same way to the max AND in secret?

I have and will continue to focus a lot of my writing on the scandals involving the NSA. I see the recent revelations as so critically important because the way in which our federal government is behaving is bound to trickle down to infect the whole of society. For me, it is like a cancer that threatens the fabric of American culture.

We can already see the trickle down effect in the manner in which many domestic police forces act toward the citizens they are sworn to protect. Rather than viewing us as the taxpayers who pay their salaries, more and more we are viewed and treated as enemy combatants. Try to video tape an officer making an arrest or screaming at somebody -- an act ostensibly protected by the US Constitution -- and the police turn their wrath on the citizen taking the pictures!

Why? Because the officers of our local police departments view themselves as on the same sort of level as the NSA. What we do is subject to all-encompassing surveillance -- what they do is none of our damn business!

A democratic society cannot exist where mass surveillance by the authorities becomes too pervasive. Yes, there will always be some level of secrecy, but when that secrecy becomes too institutionalized, freedom dies. Even worse, high level secrecy trickles down to the point in which it permeates everything. It becomes an accepted way to act and, before you know it, all members of society will try to mimic it in their relationships with others.

Dianne Feinstein Finally Stands Up For Somebody

Trey Smith

Not you or me, mind you!

The Democratic Senator from California had spent the entire summer and early fall badmouthing anyone with the temerity to suggest that the pervasive spying programs of the NSA may have gone too far. Every time someone complained about the violation of the rights of American citizens, Feinstein shouted, "Terrorism! We must defeat terrorism!" Suggest that it is unethical to target innocent citizens of the world and Feinstein offered the same refrain.

But it now appears that Feinstein does care about one person: Angela Merkel. Though Merkel is not one of Dianne Feinstein's many constituents -- she's the leader of Germany -- the senator is outraged that the NSA has been spying on her!! And so, Ms. F is ready to spring into action.

As I have noted before, it is not altogether shocking that elites only become alarmed when programs, laws, regulations or behavior impact their own kind. Government and Corporate America are free to harass and abuse the general public, but NOT the power brokers themselves. We have seen this same kind of reaction with the financial crisis. The big Wall Street banks were allowed to foreclose on the common people at will and face next to no indignation OR punishment. But when those same firms targeted the pocketbooks of the wealthy, that's when the sharks started to circle in the water.

Though the myth still prevails, the people must get it through their thick heads that, by and large, our representatives in Congress (and the White House) do not represent the American public. Sure, they act like they do around election time, but that's only to convince the masses to vote for them. Once they become ensconced in office, they don't give a damn about what happens to you and me. We don't matter one wit...until they need our votes again!

Which Is the More Dangerous Obsession?

Trey Smith

David Rohde writes in, Our Fear of Al-Qaeda Hurts Us More Than Al-Qaeda Does,

Twelve years after September 11, 2001, the United States’ obsession with al Qaeda is doing more damage to the nation than the terrorist group itself.

On the surface, it's hard not to disagree with him. So much that has gone on under Presidents Bush and Obama has been predicated on this idea that we want to stop the next 9/11 BEFORE it happens. That's why we've undertaken such extraordinary measures like curbing civil rights and spying on anything that moves.

But, if you dig only an inch or two below the surface, things don't add up. The erosion of our civil rights hasn't made us safer; all it has done is make Americans less secure in our public and private lives. The plethora of intelligence programs doesn't appear to be aimed at stopping terrorism at all. What the myriad of recent revelations has shown is that surveillance is being conducted on ordinary citizens of the world and even leaders of allied countries. Unless you think the Chancellor of Germany or the President of Brazil is a closet terrorist, it would seem that the prevention of terrorism isn't what this is all about.

In my mind's eye, this seeming obsession is nothing more than a ruse. Terrorism is this generation's bogeyman. Our leaders use it to shift away our attention from their true obsessions: power and wealth.

When you scrape away all the hubris, power and money for the few is what we're left with.

Adolf, Thanks For the Memories

Trey Smith

Without Hitler, the U.S. military would collapse.

For 68 years, wars on poor countries have been justified by the pretended discovery of Hitler’s reincarnation. Each time it has turned out to be a false alarm. Every post-WWII war looks disastrous or at least dubious in retrospect to most people. And yet, the justification of the next war is always ready to hand, because the real, original Hitler remains alive in our memories, and he just might come back — who’s to say?

Actually, I think anyone vaguely aware of basic facts about the current world ought to be able to say that Hitler is gone for good.

How do I justify not going to war with Hitler, beyond explaining that Assad isn’t Hitler, Gadaffi isn’t Hitler, Hussein isn’t Hitler, and so on?

Increasingly, I believe we must start with the fact that we live in a different world. Colonization is gone. Empires of the old model are gone. No powerful nation is plotting that sort of global conquest. In fact, no powerful nation is seriously considering war with other powerful nations.

During these past 68 years of misidentifying new Hitler after new Hitler, there has in fact been no World War III. We haven’t just made it 25 years. We’ll hit the 75-year mark during the next U.S. presidency. Nuclear weapons, awareness of the costs, understanding of the lack of benefits, established norms against the seizure of territory, the utter unacceptability of colonialism, and the vast increase in understanding of the power of nonviolent action all work against the waging of wars among the wealthy, armed nations. Instead, we have proxy wars, wars of exploitation, and poor-on-poor warfare. And even those wars fail miserably on their own terms. Occupations collapse. Puppets grow legs and wander off.
~ from If Hitler Didn't Exist by David Swanson ~

In order for the leader of any nation to convince the people that a war is justified, a bogeyman needs to be created. It has been this way since the dawn of human civilization. As Swanson so aptly points out, the default bogeyman for the US is Adolf Hitler. Since World War II, almost any time the US Commander-in-Chief wants to sell the American public on a rationale to invade another country, the ghost of Adolf Hitler is dragged out of mothballs.

It was the same thing several weeks ago. Before the Russians pressed for a diplomatic solution, we were told by Team Obama and the war hawks in Congress that Assad was this generation's Hitler and that the US simply couldn't stand by and do nothing. We had a moral duty to bomb Syria to save the Syrians from their own brand of the Third Reich.

~

The other point made by Swanson above should cause you to take pause. The major powers don't fight each other militarily anymore. No, the major powers find weaker nations to attack. This allows the major powers to exercise their bloodlust without incurring very much damage or injuries to themselves. Of the major powers, the biggest bully of all is the US. These days we only pick fights (invade) nations that have no hope of adequately defending themselves.

That fact -- in and of itself -- is sad. It shows that, no matter how our leaders try to spin it, we are about as far away from the moral high ground as a nation could be!

If You Foot the Bill, We Will Pocket the Profits

Trey Smith

Like many Americans, I grew up loving sports. As a youth, I played baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey and, of course, football. I wasn't very adept at any of these sports, but I still dreamed of hitting the big home run or catching the winning touchdown pass. These days I watch ESPN almost every day to catch up on the scores, highlights and background stories, though I rarely watch games from start to finish. I am still a sports nut, but the realization of the typically unfair economic arrangements between privately-held teams and taxpayers has soured my love for most professional sports.

Writing in The Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook tells why people like me aren't half as enthused as we use to be.

Last year was a busy one for public giveaways to the National Football League. In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4 million from taxpayers’ pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins, for the team to upgrade a workout facility. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, McDonnell approved the gift while the state legislature was out of session. The Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. But even billionaires like to receive expensive gifts.

Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.

In Minnesota, the Vikings wanted a new stadium, and were vaguely threatening to decamp to another state if they didn’t get it. The Minnesota legislature, facing a $1.1 billion budget deficit, extracted $506 million from taxpayers as a gift to the team, covering roughly half the cost of the new facility. Some legislators argued that the Vikings should reveal their finances: privately held, the team is not required to disclose operating data, despite the public subsidies it receives. In the end, the Minnesota legislature folded, giving away public money without the Vikings’ disclosing information in return. The team’s principal owner, Zygmunt Wilf, had a 2011 net worth estimated at $322 million; with the new stadium deal, the Vikings’ value rose about $200 million, by Forbes’s estimate, further enriching Wilf and his family. They will make a token annual payment of $13 million to use the stadium, keeping the lion’s share of all NFL ticket, concession, parking, and, most important, television revenues.

After approving the $506 million handout, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton said, “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports … Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.” Even by the standards of political pandering, Dayton’s irresponsibility was breathtaking.

In California, the City of Santa Clara broke ground on a $1.3 billion stadium for the 49ers. Officially, the deal includes $116 million in public funding, with private capital making up the rest. At least, that’s the way the deal was announced. A new government entity, the Santa Clara Stadium Authority, is borrowing $950 million, largely from a consortium led by Goldman Sachs, to provide the majority of the “private” financing. Who are the board members of the Santa Clara Stadium Authority? The members of the Santa Clara City Council. In effect, the city of Santa Clara is providing most of the “private” funding. Should something go wrong, taxpayers will likely take the hit.

I am only sharing a small portion of his article. He offers plenty of other examples of this same scheme at work. In community after community, taxpayers are forced to bear many of the costs WITHOUT benefiting from most or any of the profits! Conservatives like to decry the evils of socialism, but seem to have no problem whatsoever with this form of inverted socialism! The many take on the risks and the few reap the rewards.

What is most galling about this blueprint is highlighted in the second paragraph above. The Ohio county mentioned cut money from the budget of health-and-human-services and gave it to professional sports teams!! That is absolutely i-n-s-a-n-e! Talk about screwed up priorities!!!

Counting on You, Not Me

Trey Smith

Dressed in a hazardous materials suit, full-face mask and hard hat, Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, left his audience in no doubt: "The future of Japan," he said, "rests on your shoulders. I am counting on you."

Abe's exhortation, delivered during a recent visit to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, was only heard by a small group of men inside the plant's emergency control room. But it was directed at almost 6,000 more: the technicians and engineers, truck drivers and builders who, almost three years after the plant suffered a triple meltdown, remain on the frontline of the world's most dangerous industrial cleanup.

Yet as the scale of the challenge has become clearer with every new accident and radiation leak, the men working inside the plant are suffering from plummeting morale, health problems and anxiety about the future, according to insiders interviewed by the Guardian.
~ from Plummeting Morale at Fukushima Daiichi as Nuclear Cleanup Takes Its Toll by Justin McCurry ~

What Abe said to the men risking life and limb to cleanup this horrific nuclear disaster is not that alike what many leaders say to their brave men and women sent off to war. Just like in a war, many of the circumstances at the Fukushima Daiichi plant were set in motion by politicians and corporate bigwigs. In other words, the calamity was intensified by those driven by greed and power, but the work required to clean up the mess is borne by the powerless.

It has been this way all throughout human history. Even back in the days of Laozi and Zhuangzi, the rulers drew up the plans for conquest, but it was mainly poor conscripts who did the fighting...and dying.

It has often been noted that if the rich and powerful had to fight their own battles, they would be few and far between. If George W. Bush and Dick Cheney personally had led the troops into Iraq or Afghanistan, do you think these "wars" would have lasted so long or even taken place at all? If Barack Obama had to put his boot on the ground, do you think we would have bombed Libya?

~

If truth be known, Shinzo Abe is incorrect. The future of Japan (or the world) does NOT rest on the shoulders of the workers cleaning up Fukushima. No, it rests on the shoulders of leaders like Shinzo Abe. If they continue to put their lust for ever more power and profit before anything else, it merely sets the stage for future disasters. It is leaders like Abe and corporate CEOs who hold the cards!

Frankly, My Dear, I Don't Give a Damn

Trey Smith

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.

Mr. Keltner suggests that, in general, we focus the most on those we value most. While the wealthy can hire help, those with few material assets are more likely to value their social assets: like the neighbor who will keep an eye on your child from the time she gets home from school until the time you get home from work. The financial difference ends up creating a behavioral difference. Poor people are better attuned to interpersonal relations — with those of the same strata, and the more powerful — than the rich are, because they have to be.
~ from Rich People Just Care Less by Daniel Goleman ~

Why does recent research suggest that the wealthy are less empathetic than the rest of the population? In my mind's eye, the answer is insulation. We put insulation in our homes to keep the warmth in and the cold out. Insulation serves as a physical barrier that makes the modern home more liveable.

The wealthy insulate themselves in a virtual cocoon of wealth and power. Consequently, their only experiences are with others of wealth and power -- the dreams, concerns and interests of those without wealth and power are kept from penetrating into their royal chambers. If you don't spend any time thinking about the situations of others -- particularly others in the lower strata -- there is a much greater chance that you will deem their issues as inconsequential.

Centuries ago the Taoist sages recognized this same happenstance. Even back then, the rich and powerful showed little empathy for the unwashed masses. That is why they emphasized a life of simplicity -- riches tend to complicate not only an individual's personal satisfaction with life but societal relations as well.

While providing for all the creature comforts of life, wealth/power generates untold amounts of internal stress. Having so very much means there always is the possibility that you will lose so very much. You must be ever vigilant to protect all you have from real and imagined adversaries. The best way to protect yourself from loss is to get more and more. So, you push yourself to become ever more wealthy and powerful. What a treadmill to be on!

With all your attention and energies focused on obtaining more, you simply don't have the time or interest of examining the needs and interests of others who are not in a similar situation. Your all-consuming preoccupation with wealth and power serves to insulate you from the issues that relate to the vast majority of your fellow citizens. Because you have become so self-absorbed, you end up with an empathy deficit and this deficit results in far-reaching implications for the whole of society.

All In a Day's Business

Trey Smith

Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of conspiracy theorists, these technologies are routinely installed in all of our data devices by companies that sell them to Washington for a profit.

That’s not how they’re marketing them to us, of course. No, the message is much more seductive: Data, Silicon Valley is fond of saying, is the new oil. And the Valley’s message is clear enough: we can turn your digital information into fuel for pleasure and profits -- if you just give us access to your location, your correspondence, your history, and the entertainment that you like.

Ever played Farmville? Checked into Foursquare? Listened to music on Pandora? These new social apps come with an obvious price tag: the annoying advertisements that we believe to be the fee we have to pay for our pleasure. But there’s a second, more hidden price tag -- the reams of data about ourselves that we give away. Just like raw petroleum, it can be refined into many things -- the high-octane jet fuel for our social media and the asphalt and tar of our past that we would rather hide or forget.

We willingly hand over all of this information to the big data companies and in return they facilitate our communications and provide us with diversions. Take Google, which offers free email, data storage, and phone calls to many of us, or Verizon, which charges for smartphones and home phones. We can withdraw from them anytime, just as we believe that we can delete our day-to-day social activities from Facebook or Twitter.

But there is a second kind of data company of which most people are unaware: high-tech outfits that simply help themselves to our information in order to allow U.S. government agencies to dig into our past and present. Some of this is legal, since most of us have signed away the rights to our own information on digital forms that few ever bother to read, but much of it is, to put the matter politely, questionable.

This second category is made up of professional surveillance companies. They generally work for or sell their products to the government -- in other words, they are paid with our tax dollars -- but we have no control over them.
~ from The Data Hackers: Mining Your Information for Big Brother by Pratap Chatterjee ~

As the Snowden revelations have come out, it has been laughable to watch the likes of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others fall all over themselves trying to convince the public that they weren't actively involved in the government's vast surveillance apparatus. On several occasions, they have painted themselves as mere innocent bystanders. This defies credulity for one reason and one reason only: MONEY!!

Just like with the defense industry, helping the government to spy on Americans means mega profits. Why should Verizon, Amazon or Facebook care about constitutional violations, when there is big money to be had? Remember, the corporate world is amoral and, if the federal government itself is more than willing to trample on people's right, why would big business object?

As we all should know by now, government and corporations enjoy a symbiotic relationship -- They feed off of each other. Both are in the business of trying to control the masses. Consequently, it should not astound anyone that they are working together to create an all-encompassing web to track everything we say, do and think. The government desires this level of control to quell dissent and to retain power. Corporations, on the other hand, do it for an even more basic reason: greed.  And their greed helps to keep the government in power.

Love of the Capitalist "Free Market" Except When You Lose

Trey Smith

Defenders of the capitalist free market love the inherent competition involved. In theory, businesses compete on equal footing to attract customers and the business that does the best job wins. It is the ultimate "survival of the fittest" mentality. Capitalists simply love the free market...except when they come out on the losing end. When this happens, the large corporate behemoths suddenly aren't so enamored with the system they champion -- they demand intervention by the government or courts.

A while back, the US Air Force was taking bids from Boeing and Airbus for a contract to supply refueling tankers. Airbus -- a French-based company -- won the bid. Did Boeing accept that, in this case, Airbus was the fittest? Hell no! They cried foul. Utilizing their lobbying arm, they pitched a royal fit. They applied so much pressure to lawmakers that -- surprise, surprise -- new bids were ordered. And, not surprisingly, they came out on top in Round 2.

Just yesterday news came out about a court ruling that impacts Amazon.com and IBM. Both submitted bids to build the cloud computing infrastructure for the NSA. The original bid was won by Amazon, but IBM filed a protest and bids were retaken. So, Amazon took the matter to court and a judge recently ruled that Amazon's original bid should carry the day. Undaunted, IBM plans to appeal.

Also yesterday, reports indicate that Japan Airlines -- who, in the past, has always purchased their airplanes from Boeing -- has decided to go with Airbus going forward. I don't imagine that Boeing will take this situation lying down. I won't be surprised at all to read a later report that, after much lobbying and possibly US government threats, Japan Airlines has a sudden change of heart!

You see, when it comes to the unwashed masses, survival of the fittest is the name of the game and fittest tends to be defined by those who possesses the most wealth and power. But out in the dog-eat-dog capitalist marketplace, the corporate monsters truly don't really believe in that mantra. Survival of the fittest is a-ok when your company is declared the fittest, but if you come out on the losing end in a fair fight, then you go crying to mom and dad in the hope that they will "make things right" (i.e., allow you to win by intervention).