CapitalistImperialistPig

How many American soldiers died to make Barry McCaffrey rich? That is the question invited by David Barstow's New York Times expose on the activities of NBC military analyst and retired four star General Barry McCaffrey. It is a long article, but Steve Benen picks out a particularly devastating sentence: . As Barstow explained, "On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC's viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television." Benen also quotes Spencer Ackermans "Get Rich or Die Trying : If this mammoth New York Times piece is wrong, Barry McCaffrey really ought to sue, because if it isn't, he has no reputation for integrity left. [...] [T]he scope of McCaffrey's hustle is really breathtaking. B...

Lumo is giving voice to his inner Nazi again today. His targets this time are the Gypsies. Gypsies are a people of Indian origin who speak a language related to Hindustani and retain a number of Hindu cultural practices, but except in India, are not actually Hindus. Somehow they have managed to survive centuries of pogroms, enslavement, and extermination campaigns and remain widely distributed in Europe and the US. In Lubos's country, the Czech Republic, they have suffered from Nazi extermination, a Communist era sterilization program , and continuing widespread discrimination. The garbage Lumo spews is the usual stuff Nazis and other racists say about Jews, Blacks, the Irish, the Chinese, Eastern Europeans or any other target group of opportunity. Go to the link if you want a trip to the sewer.

Milton Friedman advanced the view that recessions and depressions were primarily monetary phenomena, and that the appropriate weapon against them was expansion of the money supply. He went further, claiming that the Federal Reserve caused the great depression. In fact monetary policies were somewhat effective against recession during most of the later half of the twentieth century, and an anti-Keynesian attitude became standard among conservatives. Then came the Panic of 2008. Conservatives universally poo-pooed what the called the "leftist" Cassandras like Roubini and Krugman. When the tidal wave hit, Bernanke frantically threw money out of helicopter (a Friedman metaphor) but nothing worked. Paul Krugman has a series of blog posts on how the current crisis has exposed the hollow core of monetarism and brought Keynesian ideas once again to the fore. The first one (Nov. 29) features Amity Schlaes as monetarist road kill.

Finally a practical use for all that genetics crap. BOULDER, Colorado: When Donna Campiglia learned recently that a genetic test might be able to determine which sports suit the talents of her 2 ½-year-old son, Noah, she instantly said, Where can I get it and how much does it cost? "I could see how some people might think the test would pigeonhole your child into doing fewer sports or being exposed to fewer things, but I still think it's good to match them with the right activity," Campiglia, 36, said as she watched a toddler class at Boulder Indoor Soccer in which Noah struggled to take direction from the coach between juice and potty breaks. "I think it would prevent a lot of parental frustration," she said. In health-conscious, sports-oriented Boulder, Atlas Sports Genetics is playing into the obsessions of parents by offering a $149 test that aims to predict a child's natural athletic strengths. The process is simple. Swab inside the child's cheek an...

I have been reading Leonard Susskind's The black Hole Wars and intend to do a book review, but meanwhile, I have gotten to the p o int where he presents his principle of "Black Hole Complementarity." This is a riff on Bohr's Complemetarity Principle which maintains that the apparently mutually contradictictory wave and particle pictures of matter describe complementary aspects of a reality not fully captured by either. Ask an electron a "wave question", and you get a wave type answer, ask it a "particle question" and you get a particle answer. For black holes, the contrasting pictures are these: If you lower a probe (Julio, say) and stop it very close to the surface of the black hole, he sees a hellishly seething bath of Hawking radiation. I need to mention at this point that although the BH looks very cold to an outside observer, that is just due to the huge gravitational red shift. Julio's beer can, though, falls freely through the horizon ...

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, an American Admiral apparently said "When this is over, Japanese will be a language spoken only in Hell." One of his Japanese counterparts was slightly more precise: "We have awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible purpose." 9/11 produced similar thoughts about Islam. In the case of 9/11, much of that terrible purpose proved misguided, thanks largely to our doltish President and his corrupt and incompetent advisors who saw tragedy as an opportunity to advance the interests of big oil and their own warped notion of Israel's interest. India is now in just that same state of incoherent and vengeful rage. Exactly how that rage winds up being focussed has momentous consequences for the world, but especially for India.

Benny Sixteen, AKA Joey the Ratz, former head of the Holy Inquisition (and former Hitler Youth) has some news for youz: In quotations from the letter that appeared on Sunday in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily newspaper, the pope said the book “explained with great clarity” that “an interreligious dialogue in the strict sense of the word is not possible