Five minutes in Afghanistan

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently touted a "One Million Dollar Grant" that St. Louis will soon receive for developing trails for bicycling and walking. I've long been a bicycle commuter and this new trail is truly a great idea. One million dollars is a lot of money. Too bad there's not money for more of these infrastructure improvements, including bridge repairs and many things that are far more pressing than bicycle trails. Or at least this is what the politicians tell us. In actuality, we're pouring more than $2 billions dollars down the drain every week in Afghanistan. We have nothing to show for ten years of "progress" in Afghanistan. Our strategy mostly seems to consist of shooting at poor people who resent our presence in their county. And we're committed to supporting a known corrupt leader. And we're committed to overseeing a vast illegal drug trade. Our current "peace president" is likely keeping the troops over there for political reasons, not because there is any hope of accomplishing anything for Americans or the people of Afghanistan. Our imperialist adventure in Afghanistan is horrifically expensive, and its foundation is the "sunk costs fallacy. How expensive is our "war" in Afghanistan in terms of the new St. Louis bicycle trail program? In Afghanistan, we burn through one million dollars every five minutes. It is a needless war that is making us poor. [Here's the math: $2B per week equals almost 12 million per hour. Which equals $1 million every five minutes]. Think about it. One million dollars every five minutes to accomplish nothing but to provide make-work for the military-industrial complex. Could your community use one million dollars for anything these days? Perhaps to hire new teachers? Or to fix a collapsing bridge? Or to retrain workers?

Continue ReadingFive minutes in Afghanistan

Not torture = torture

Anyone who reads this post from David E. Coombs, Bradley Manning's lawyer will realize that Bradley Manning is being tortured by the United States of America. He is being tortured in our name. Bradley Manning has not been convicted of any crime. Even if he were convicted of a hideous crime, torture would be immoral. The United States claims that it is not torturing Manning, but consider one example of many disgraceful revelations made by David E. Coombs:

The guards are required to check on PFC Manning every five minutes by asking him if he is okay. PFC Manning is required to respond in some affirmative manner. At night, if the guards cannot see PFC Manning clearly, because he has a blanket over his head or is curled up towards the wall, they will wake him in order to ensure he is okay.
What the phuque. This is not making sure he is "OK," as the military claims. Rather, this is sleep deprivation and it is a way to damage cognitive functioning. For those who suggest that this is not a problem, would they ever allow this to be done to someone they loved? And why is it that medical websites universally caution that we get enough sleep?
Learning and memory: Sleep helps the brain commit new information to memory through a process called memory consolidation. In studies, people who’d slept after learning a task did better on tests later. Metabolism and weight: Chronic sleep deprivation may cause weight gain by affecting the way our bodies process and store carbohydrates, and by altering levels of hormones that affect our appetite. Safety: Sleep debt contributes to a greater tendency to fall asleep during the daytime. These lapses may cause falls and mistakes such as medical errors, air traffic mishaps, and road accidents. Mood: Sleep loss may result in irritability, impatience, inability to concentrate, and moodiness. Too little sleep can also leave you too tired to do the things you like to do. Cardiovascular health: Serious sleep disorders have been linked to hypertension, increased stress hormone levels, and irregular heartbeat. Disease: Sleep deprivation alters immune function, including the activity of the body’s killer cells. Keeping up with sleep may also help fight cancer.
Why would anyone do this to anyone else, other than to torture them? Why, especially, would you do this to a man who has never been convicted of a crime? This is the character of the perennial war-monger totalitarian state coming through loud and clear, and Barack Obama is not willing to step in and call a halt to this despicably immoral situation. Bradley Manning had the guts to speak truth to power, and now, in my name and yours, he is being made into a hideous example so that none of the rest of us get any foolish ideas.

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What do Wall Street Banks do for society?

What do Wall Street Banks do for society? According to a New Yorker article called "What Good is Wall Street?," not much. Many people assume that most of the money made by Wall Street banks is associated with raising capital for fledgling businesses. Not true:

Wall Street’s role in financing new businesses is a small portion of what it does. The market for initial public offerings (I.P.O.s) of stock by U.S. companies never fully recovered from the tech bust. During the third quarter of 2010, just thirty-three U.S. companies went public, and they raised a paltry five billion dollars. Most people on Wall Street aren’t finding the next Apple or promoting a green rival to Exxon. They are buying and selling securities that are tied to existing firms and capital projects, or to something less concrete, such as the price of a stock or the level of an exchange rate. During the past two decades, trading volumes have risen exponentially across many markets: stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities, and all manner of derivative securities. In the first nine months of this year, sales and trading accounted for thirty-six per cent of Morgan Stanley’s revenues and a much higher proportion of profits. Traditional investment banking—the business of raising money for companies and advising them on deals—contributed less than fifteen per cent of the firm’s revenue. Goldman Sachs is even more reliant on trading. Between July and September of this year, trading accounted for sixty-three per cent of its revenue, and corporate finance just thirteen per cent. In effect, many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets . . . Other regulators have gone further. Lord Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain’s top financial watchdog, the Financial Services Authority, has described much of what happens on Wall Street and in other financial centers as “socially useless activity”—a comment that suggests it could be eliminated without doing any damage to the economy. . . “Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?” Woolley said to me when I met with him in London. “It is like a cancer that is growing to infinite size, until it takes over the entire body.”
Yet Wall Street is where great amounts of money exist, and that is why many of America's best and brightest are flocking there to engage in careers of . . . well . . . making money. A starting point for this article is that financial markets are grossly inefficient, and that instead of directing money into productive projects, Wall Street financiers follow trends and "surf bubbles."
These activities shift capital into projects that have little or no long-term value, such as speculative real-estate developments in the swamps of Florida. Rather than acting in their customers’ best interests, financial institutions may peddle opaque investment products, like collateralized debt obligations. Privy to superior information, banks can charge hefty fees and drive up their own profits at the expense of clients who are induced to take on risks they don’t fully understand—a form of rent seeking.

Continue ReadingWhat do Wall Street Banks do for society?

That psychopath in the mirror

In the September/October 2010 edition of Scientific American Mind, I recently read an article titled "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath," by Kent Kiehl and Joshua W Buckholtz. Who are psychopaths? The authors claim that psychopaths are people whose brains have "gone wrong." They claim that psychopaths make up .5 to 1% of the general population, adding up to 250,000 psychopaths living freely in the United States. They offer a list of criteria for determining whether a person is a psychopath, mentioning that "everyone falls somewhere on the psychopathic continuum." What are the basic symptoms?

One of the most striking peculiarities of psychopaths is that they lack empathy; they are able to shake off as mere tinsel the most universal social obligations. They lie and manipulate yet feel no compunction or regrets-in fact, they don't feel particularly deeply about anything at all. So much for the way regular people make sense of the world is through emotion. It informs our gut decisions, our connections to people and places, our sense of belonging and purpose. It is almost impossible to imagine life without findings-until you meet a psychopath. But psychopaths often cover up their deficiencies with a ready and engaging charm, so it can take time to realize what you are dealing with.
Fair enough, but I'd like to focus on that idea that all of us fall along this continuum. [More . . .]

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The Pope speaks. Richard Dawkins replies.

Only a few weeks ago, the Pope arrived at Edinburgh to blame people like me (I don't belong to a religion) for the Nazi holocaust. These outrageous claims constitute the kind of abject bigotry that can lead to ostracism and violence against those of us who, sincerely and after careful consideration of the evidence, do not believe in supernatural beings. As reported by The U.K. Guardian:

Benedict XVI used the first papal state visit to Britain to launch a blistering attack on "atheist extremism" and "aggressive secularism", and to rue the damage that "the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life" had done in the last century. The leader of the Roman Catholic church concluded a speech, made before the Queen and assembled dignitaries at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, with the argument that the Nazi desire to eradicate God had led to the Holocaust and a plea for 21st-century Britain to respect its Christian foundations.
Incredibly, he described pedophilia as an 'illness' whose sufferers had "lost their free will." The Guardian article is well worth a read. It offers a fascinating look into the corrupted soul of the Vatican. Richard Dawkins had more than a few pointed things to say about the Pope and his church. In fact, his speech took the form of an sharp indictment. I couldn't agree more with Dawkins, even though it somewhat pains me to say this. You see, I was raised Catholic and I have many friends who are still practicing Catholics who are generous, kind and thoughtful. It's a pity that their spiritual leader would rather blame secularists and allow millions of people to die by depriving them of condoms, than to own up to the mass-rape perpetrated and covered up by many of the "leaders" of his Church. On top of that, consider the Catholic Church's systemic disparagment of women. Such horrifically screwed up priorities. For many years, the Vatican has annoyed me with its pomposity and hypocrisy, exacerbated by the way the mass media fawns over so many things that Popes utter, rarely pointing out the vagueness or the absurdities. I'm afraid that I've now reached a tipping point. It's time to completely disregard the fact that the Pope is revered by so many others. Despite the fact that the Pope dresses up in expensive clothes and that he works extremely hard to obscure his absurdities with impenetrable language allegedly based on ancient books, he plainly stands before us as a man whose head is filled with numerous terrible ideas. Here's what Dawkins had to say:

Continue ReadingThe Pope speaks. Richard Dawkins replies.