A postscript to the last comment:

The Cheney-ites would argue that I am making a too big deal out of what is essentially an alpha male version of hunting for resources for the tribe US. It's reality, deal with it, they'd say.

And this is at its foundation the competitive ethos. It is an ethos lacking morals. It is an ethos that wholey embraces self-interest as being the best policy. Nixonians call it "realism."

What do we say to this? That there is a better way that is both competitive, yet non-damaging to the US and to other nations.

The Cheney-ite view is that democracy is window dressing -- command execution is what really brings the groceries home.

However, democracy says that there is strength in numbers. It assumes that partisanship need not distort reasoning to common interests that would employ greater numbers behind common good.

Cheney-ites will say you can't get such numbers together without first forcing them into a relatively unified group. In America that has come to mean dependency on fossil fuel driven transportation in some sense. Hence those who protest are like those who eat beef while protesting the killing of cows for the beef supply.

Again: how do you answer the Cheney-ites? The answer involves bringing the greatest numbers of Americans together to solve common problems in a way that satisfies key interests among what were once our 'factions'. Where there is an educated population, force is not necessary to make a unifying case to the jury of public opinion.

Posted at July 4, 2008 4:17 PM in response to Paulson Begging in Moscow

Good point. The capital value runs into sovereign creative fiat one way or another.

The following is a cynical take that may be wrong, but it satisfies my intuition / suspicion. I don't say I have proof. I am for investigating the truth of the matter.

Another way of looking at it is, Paulson is trying to generate some election-winning economic investment data from our "partners". The Administration seeks Russian funds to bribe the American people to forget what they've done via the Iraq grab.

The bottom line for relative economic freedom is secure productivity and self-sufficiency in natural resources in one's sovereign territory. These are the basics that Russia has been working on building this past fifteen years.

The Iraq grab may be the US preemptive energy strike to balance Russia's steady nationalization of capabilities for exploiting huge reserves under former Soviet lands. These aren't fully developed by any stretch, but the Russians are getting better at it. Russia could move to number one energy producer eventually, but their own corrupt central powers are reportedly taxing energy development into a coma.

Huge governments (as market participants and employers) cannot act radically without making huge waves in the economy. Russia for example, taxes its energy companies at nearly 65% base rate, combined with other taxes at times reportedly reaching a 92% rate (this from the Economist). This income creates a new consumer culture (bribed Russian citizens) from the government's hand. Beneath that consumer culture is a nationalistic patriotism that waxes sentimental over what consumer benefits the government has 'won'. What it really did was subject the oligarchy to an authoritarian who has charmed the people.

One question: to what extent is the US doing the same thing? In our case, the indentured servants of our latest acquisition of mineral interests and production interests in energy producing territory (Iraq) is the US Armed Forces, and indirectly, the US taxpayers who pay for them.

Who benefits? Big Oil and its cronies in the executive branch. Alan Greenspan said as much, as did the pipe smoke escaping the doors of the conference room where Cheney and the energy scions worked out how they were going to milk the maximum amount of wealth out of fossil fuel before being forced to move on to the next level.

[Were one of those folks to get immunity and proof that a fraudulent conspiracy precipitated the invasion, in a time of war, would that be a high crime against the US (bringing hostile forces against US forces for personal gain)?Trifling with national defense for non-defense reasons damages the actual national defense. That's a treasonous outcome during wartime, isn't it? Isn't that an offense for the firing squad?]

If a private interest wields undue influence in the executive branch, even if temporarily, the concentration of power contracts immensely. Like a black hole. Such a force can pitch enormous wealth into concentrated private hands then let go of the reins again before it brings revolution. The windfall beneficiaries must then do some popular palm greasing to stay legitimate. That comes later.

That's the truly scary giant sucking sound, whether its Russia, the US, China or elsewhere: corrupt influences amassing wealth using a joint venture between industry and government as the principal tool. This is similar to what we see happening in Russia. We just don't want to call our version nationalization. I guess we could call it hijacking.

Posted at July 4, 2008 3:54 PM in response to Paulson Begging in Moscow

C'mon Cville.

The distinctions you make are illusory.

One of your premises about abortion, that "a fetus" that you call "an organism" is all that is at stake, is already stated in the form of a half-truth. You leave out "human fetus" and "human organism," and that is an admission that you believe that such modifiers would discredit your assertions.

Also, in discussing war, you state a positive to imply a negative, that because persons killed or hurt in war are living and breathing, that fetuses must not be. We both know that is false, and that the living and breathing differs only in terms of location, method, stage of development and dependence. Those difference also differentiate born infants from adults.

Your distinctions seem to come down to dreaming and thinking. Yet another's dreams and thought, indeed most peoples', do not give value to anyone else. It seems that subjectively, you imply that these are the things that make people worthy of love. Can you love someone who has no thoughts? Can you love a Zen master, for example, who has achieved no-mind? If she harbors no dreams or thoughts, but seeks to reside in a void, shall we deem that person dispensable like you do an unborn human life in being?

Also, philosophically, I'm not sure we know whether an unborn human being is incapable of what we identify here as life-value faculties. It may well be that they begin more advanced in a connection between wisdom and active daily living, because they focus on the important things, don't they? Love, interdependence, sleep, meals, touch, real emotions, and human relationships. As a person gets more "sophisticated" as some warp the word, he or she may get more attached to things and their accumulation ... becoming even fearsome toward others and breaking down trust in human relations...to the point that they provoke others to do the same ... and it is such a world that in its conduct expresses its hatred for childhood and its centrism on things money can buy.

Abortion is the expression of such a spirit, a spirit that seeks a knife to cut off those which threaten the accumulation, those for whom we should rather put down our weapons but instead allow some of our people to raise knives against them. It is an atrocity in every way, to everyone.

Abortion is analogous to the imperial fiat assumed by Dick Cheney to put human lives into harm's way to benefit industries (material things and artificial persons) to which he has ties, and to which he has attached his personal interests and sense of security. The difference? Abortion is just carried out by "leaders" on a different scale.

Like a politician during a campaign who promises great things for humanity who gets elected and then rescinds the promises and adopts the ongoing evil of those attached to things over people, the person who willingly conceives a child with another and then aborts, acts out a physical, implied promise regarding the power exercised, and then rescinds the meaning of it all and destroys its natural meaning in the form of another human life.

Posted at June 23, 2008 5:26 PM in response to Our CRD has ED: Domestically and Abroad

Akbar, what is going to happen to the persons they group them with? What will they do to each other? What did they do to get there?

I think your comments involve prison and detention conditions in general...is there anyone in there who is truly safe if they want to remain an individual and not someone else's slave or servant? Think about that for a while and then tell me about relative vulnerabilities. All you have to be to be very, very vulnerable in these institutions is yourself. And that's a real problem that is increasingly expanding beyond institutional walls into the public mindset.

Posted at June 21, 2008 8:06 PM in response to AP: NY Juvenile Detention Centers and "Gender Expression Issues"

PCyA,

The examples of categories of persons you have raised have to do with their objectively discernible identities. There are a limited number of clearly objective identifications such as child, race-A, B, C, and so on, that are indisputably matters outside of the control of the identified person. These are situations where the persons discussed have no control over their ID-features. This goes to basic human and civil rights in terms of protected classes of persons.

You are comparing such classes falsely to transgendered demands, which are a subjective set of demands that can take on as many variations of requirements for accomodation as there are folks so identifying themselves. Above I wrote that perhaps TG issues truly are matters for medical care and not for juvenile adjudication. You must have missed that, as did the other commentator.

In this case we are discussing minors. And so minority is a objective ID, or suspect class. You cannot determine your age -- it's not a fashionale variation open to subjective demands upon others. It is something all can ID with.

What I would suggest is that the juvenile justice systems are barbaric in a similar sense that some public high schools are, in that they disrespect individual variation merely by massing children together for nearly all educational and physical development needs. This is not to help them develop their full individual potential as some dreamy theorists pretend, but to utilize the herd experience to form kids into categories easily used by future employers. Perhaps individual educators, some schools and school officers try to provide a different result...it doesn't change the "mass" effect (credit to Alvin Toffler for his discussion of "massification" as something to be replaced by technology assisted individuation).

So I don't accept the straw man criticism because it just isn't correct.

You discussed segregation of convicts who were children sentenced as adults...again, their minority is an objective ID, fictionalized as majority status for the purposes of sentencing and incarceration. This is actually a legal fiction that satisfies retributive desires.

OTOH, you may speak with some in juvenile detention centers and law enforcement who fear the violent youth offenders more than the adults, because they are more volatile, unpredictable, intense and in many cases faster, more limber and sometimes stronger. It is usually only the index crime violence that gets these young people tried as adults. So sometimes putting young folks in with adult offenders might actually make them safer if you consider that child sex offenders are hated most in adult prisons and anyone fooling with a kid there takes on that status. I'd want to see data on this issue before speaking to it more.

Religious differences do not garner special cells or groupings in any prison systems I know of. They trigger access to varied chaplaincies, and sometimes not even that.

Mental disabilities vary. These are objectively diagnosible. Transgender complexes, if they are a mental disability, should mean that youth and adult offenders with such problems should probably go to a psychiatric care facility or ward.

In the main, corrections are way-out-there archaic and even barbaric. They are, I'd suggest, connected intimately with the barbaric cultural cancers that beset people in our civilization. And that's a much broader subject.

Posted at June 21, 2008 7:22 PM in response to AP: NY Juvenile Detention Centers and "Gender Expression Issues"

typos:

para 3, last sentence should read:

"wonder if medical facilities would be a better fit."

para. 4, first sentence should read:

"If "expression issues" warrant special perks in juvenile detention, then must they also be provided for in jails and prisons?

Posted at June 21, 2008 1:03 AM in response to AP: NY Juvenile Detention Centers and "Gender Expression Issues"

Thanks for the feedback. There is much more to say about the denial of due process (case by case hearings on emergency relief enjoining removal) before children were sent off to foster care much less separated. No social studies were even done. And when the group relocation order, supposedly temporary, was entered by Walther, many lawyers hadn't even located their clients. Amazing.

The double standards are enough to cause whiplash if you look at them without cultural bias. Judges in Texas can approve minors' marriages to older people on application either with parental permission or on application if deemed in the minor's best interests. Why isn't that an "abusive belief system," codified at law? That's what CPS calls the FLDS group.

Issues of physical coercion and abuse need to be dealt with, but precisely. Otherwise, the shotgun approach threatens the use of evidence in the real cases.

Posted at May 15, 2008 1:25 AM in response to ABC News Says FLDS Self-Portrayal Is "Propaganda"

Partial birth abortion is not OK if it is not necessary to save mom's life. If it is medically unnecessary to do that, then the Partial Birth Abortion ban does not require a save-mom's-life exception. Putting it in there in such circumstances would give people the opportunity to orchestrate conditions where it becomes "necessary" and then commit the atrocity.

If it is not medically necessary, then competent, up-to-date doctors will know what the alternatives are, and will implement them timely.

Posted at April 1, 2008 11:16 AM in response to Obama and Hillary Could Insure Dem Victory: Oppose Partial Birth Abortion and Propose Measures to De Facto End Abortion

I agree it was all summary. Summaries require no original thought. But they sure can be done poorly, or in bad faith.

Posted at March 30, 2008 10:03 PM in response to Obama and Hillary Could Insure Dem Victory: Oppose Partial Birth Abortion and Propose Measures to De Facto End Abortion

Here is a conversation the truck can start for us.

Why does the graphic truck kill conversation? Why does it silence people who see the carnage that such unsettling uses of the First Amendment involve?

Posted at March 30, 2008 6:26 PM in response to Obama and Hillary Could Insure Dem Victory: Oppose Partial Birth Abortion and Propose Measures to De Facto End Abortion