While the underwear and shoe bombers may have been unsuccessful in their attempts to bring down a jetliner in flight, they were successful in inducing other manifestations of terror.  The US has been installing whole body scanners capable of penetrating clothing so that nameless and faceless citizens employed by TSA or whomever may inspect our body topography.  In addition to this radiological peepshow during check-in at the airport, TSA security has been authorized to pat down our private parts.   

Cause:  Two imbeciles board airplanes and attempt to initiate their explosives. They failed.  Effect:  The USA, the most powerful military-industrial complex for maybe hundreds of parsecs in all directions, is so freaked out by the presence of a mouse on the kitchen floor that it contrives to supply absolute security.  History is full of many examples of foolish attempts by states to provide absolute security.  The impulse to attain absolute security becomes the lever by which authoritarian states pry liberty from the hands of its people. 

The members of the booboisie who promulgate this foolish notion are not automatically bad people. As viewed from lunar orbit, their intentions are superficially honorable. The gaping flaw is that they accept the premise that trading in the protection against unreasonable search and seizure for what can only be a miniscule uptick in security, is a fair trade. 

It is most assuredly not a fair trade, but it seems to have already been made for us. I strenuously object.

Update:  A friend advises that there are already countermeasures available f0r the scanners.  I would recommend a screen printed lead-based paint with an appropriately artful design that would hide, or perhaps exaggerate the body part to be shielded. Alternatively, a witty slogan may be printed.  Perhaps we can source the lead-based paint in China?

A blog called The Legal Satyricon has an excellent essay on the demise of Senator Russ Feingold. I am compelled to chime in and second the motion. Feingold understands the social equilibrium principle of civil liberty. But a growing population of voters apparently do not.  Feingold’s opposition to the Patriot Act was truly an act of integrity.  He understood the ratchet-like progression of governmental power and saw the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that seemingly appeared overnight, for what it was. An overreach into the lives of American citizens. An overreach that involves weapons, surveillance, and more rigid control over citizens.

But fearful citizens wielding felt tip markers filled in the ballot bubble for the other candidate and Feingold is out. The fearful imagine they are for basic virtues like liberty, but in fact they pull the covers up to their eyes and vote away civil liberties.

Fear of terrorism is fear of an idea. The “War on Terror” is a blindingly stupid and misleading slogan. This kind of sloganeering betrays a basic educational deficit on the part of elected officials. The same applies to the “War on Drugs”. 

Al Qaeda and the extremisms born of Islamic fever are actions based on a philosophy. There are no armies to fight. There are no uniforms and no enemy insignia’s to put the cross-hairs on.  Only the civilian believers in a notion carry this fight forward.  You can’t hope to win a war on an idea by military invasion.  The War in Afganistan is a bug hunt.  As soon as the lights go off, the bugs come back out. The Soviets discovered this the hard way.

Al Qaeda, then based in Afganistan, slams civilian jets into architectual symbols of American power.  The US responds by lavishing massive invasion forces upon Iraq and sending modest forces to Afganistan.  America’s leaders, lead by that vacuous symbol of virtue, George Bush II, seemed bent on knocking somebody down .  So we went and knocked somebody down. 

We tipped the hornets nest of Iraq and unleashed a pornographic orgy of fratricide. Perhaps the tragedy of Iraq’s expression of rage was inevitable no matter how its evolution played out.  Political outrage fueled by inconceivable injustices and inhumanity brought into sharp focus by Iron age religious doctrines lead to a suicidal conflagration of Iraqi society.  In truth, as a Russian colleague once suggested while we sat in my living room drinking vodka and watching Gulf War 1 unfold on CNN, westerners have no business meddling  in that part of the world because we do not understand it. Its history and rythms are alien to us.  He was right. Meanwhile, Afganistan continues to produce most of the worlds morphine which, when acetylated, gives heroin.

America’s ability to project power is a wondrous thing to behold. We are genuinely good at it. Ask us to solve the problem of poverty or drug abuse and we’ll come up with some rheumatoidal public apparatus to throw money at some of it while the smug and secure bitch about socialism.

But ask us to deliver a missile payload of high explosives into a window from 12 thousand miles away, we’ll spare no expense and put the best minds on it.  We’ll put DARPA on the trail and devise new materials and electronics. Hell, we’ll even put up satellites just so’s we can watch a million dollar explosion on TV.  At least a part of the tragedy of 9/11 is the unleashing of our reflex to make war.  There is a dubious future in armed conflict and we should hold elected officials more accountable when they make war in our name.

Every election cycle, we get to have a lingering look up the skirts of conservative dancers who tease the audience with alternating glimpses of their puritan knickers and their pasty white backsides. It is at once revolting yet fascinating in a sick kind of way.  Where are those dollar bills I brought …

Conservative Americans have made a virtue of fear, greed, and anger. This is one of the pure, crystalline forces of history. The Three Pillars of Conservatism.

Liberals fail in politics because they inherently misunderstand power and how it works. Conservatives have an innate grasp of power and suffer little from its wanton and extravagant use.  One never hears conservatives praising the ideals of the Greek thinkers. Conservatives are much more like Romans. The Romans made a show of conquest and of alignment to the doctrine and virtue of empire. Romans understood the value of bread and circuses. And that is what we get today every election cycle. A circus.

I wrote a post a few years ago about a form of social reconstructionism that I recognized as a rebirth or perhaps, a reinvigoration, of the John Birch Society philosophy in American politics. I have noticed of late that others are making this connection as well. 

With the ascendancy of the confederate vaudevillians Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as well as the Tea Party, Bircher political philosophy is being rediscovered.  Only, I’m certain that few of its new adherents have realized it has a name and is a 50’s cold war relic.  With scholars like Glenn Beck delivering lectures from his Fox TV lecture hall, the Tea Bag side is busily manufacturing consent by doing what preachers have done for a long time. By preaching that our society is in collapse and that the only way out of the impending disaster is to follow their recommendation.  This might be manifested as a more rigid adherence to teaching, or as has happened since the 1980’s, greater assertion of influence in political and social reconstruction. 

The Sky is Falling!!  -C. Little

There is a certain innate appeal to Bircher Philosophy that satisfies the inner fascist in all of us.  It is a manner of thought that feeds directly and almost unfiltered from the fear cortex of the brainstem. When uncertain, be afraid. No need for thoughtful analysis, just reject the unfamiliar. Distrust everything.  If it ain’t ‘Merican, then it ain’t no damned good. Study these principles devotionally, not analytically.

Bircher doctine serves as a political glove over the hand of protestant Christian evangelical fundamentalists who seek to de-secularize American culture, which includes government and the public arena.  They see our country as an errant Christian state taken off-track and into a condition of fallen righteousness by elitist liberal intellectuals bent on some kind of social buggery.  Listening to these folks, it would seem that they are engaged in a great battle between the forces of Heaven and the liberal leather-winged angels of darkness.  I think they have been watching too many Cecil B. DeMille movies.

Running a secular democratic state like the USA is hard to do. At least some citizens will demand an explanation for any given decision.  And they’ll want to argue. But a state run according to some religious conservative principles, well, that’s different.  Iron age justice is swift and harsh.  And how do the leaders know what to do? God came to them and expressed His conservative wishes. See, isn’t that so much easier? None of this ambiguity. It’s all so easy to understand.

I do agree with the conservative side in one way. The federal government is just too large and over reaching. But killing it while the citizens sleep is not the answer.  Neither is replacing it with market-style dynamics or reverting into a Confederate States of America.  The American experiment does not reduce to just a market phenomenon and was not kept running exclusively by righteous church-going people.  It does not reduce to a mere extension of the principles of the founding fathers either. It is all of that and much more.

It is the result of hundreds of millions of hard working, clever people who were born or naturalized into an enabled society without having to adopt narrow doctrines on how to think or without impermeable social strata. The American phenomenon is an artifact of the bell curve. It is the expression of a statistical distribution of individuals making a contribution to the betterment of our society by improving their own lot.  All citizens have the right to think as they please and we do not need conservative clowns to rally the dark side in all of us so that they can achieve their personal needs.

So it appears that the US is quietly building up military forces within striking distance of Iran. The island of Diego Garcia (UK) has served as a staging area for standoff weapons. The military-political establishment has been busy with threat analysis and is evidently staging forces to some extent based on their conclusions and evolving policy.

I think there are many credible arguments that rightly assert that Iran is an active threat to what passes for stability in that region. Or at least at the first-order level of political analysis. Iran is plainly an obstreperous theocracy with a particular zeal for the export of its orthodoxy.

As always, the drums begin to beat for war and the business of manufacturing public consent begins in earnest. I’ll go out on a limb and make a gross generalization. All human populations seem to have a fraction, say 1/4 , who are particularly fearful by nature. These are the folks who susbscribe to concrete notions of nationalism, righteousness, and the associated keenness for adherence to orthodox doctrine. These were key proclivities of the US/Soviet cold war era. It is part of a collective consciousness that is especially adept at finding patterns that validate its fundamental fear.

It would seem that we may be in yet another run up to the projection of force on the far side of the world. A good question would be this: Are we addressing the fundamental cause of World-vs-Iran conflict? At minimum we trying to shore up the result of a century of bad western foreign policy.  This region is at the overlap of profound social forces associated with abrupt infusions of petrodollars, reflexive militarism, ethnic antipathy, and religious orthodoxy.

I think that Chomsky has some valid points about the origin of these conflicts. Iran and other groups have used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a bully pulpit for their own regional ambitions. Obviously there is sincere religious and ethnic outrage over the the Palestinian issue. But a state like Iran is sure to use this conflict to their own political advantage to exercise the projection of power.

The US and other western states have chronically miscalculated the magnitude and direction of regional conflicts.  For instance, would a military strike against Iran be viewed as just an attack on the government of Iran, or as an attack by infidels on Shi ‘ism? Are we prepared for what would follow? I think I can guess the answer.

It was reported that the Russian Parliament has approved a draft of a law to increase the powers of its FSB, or the remnant of its Soviet era KGB.

The final version is somewhat weakened from its earlier form, which prescribed punishment for individuals who ignored such warnings from the F.S.B. In remarks posted on his party’s Web site this week, Vladimir Vasiliyev, the chairman of the State Duma’s Committee on Security, described the new power as “a preventive conversation” with “someone who is beginning to move toward committing a crime.” (New York Times, July 16, 2010)

Imagine that. A Future Crimes Division.

When asked about the bill by a German reporter during a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said, “what is going on now is the result of my direct instructions,” and that foreign commentators should not concern themselves with it. (New York Times, July 16, 2010)

The police state is back. The Russian gov’t is moving (back) towards policing perceived intent. What a sad day for Russian civilization and the world.  Queen to E5, check.