It's a cowardice of the spirit

Many times since I moved to Canada 18 years ago, Canadians have told me that Americans are good people ... they just have a very bad government ... and it's not really the fault of the American people; they are just so propagandized they don't know what to believe anymore.  That's an argument that I don't believe holds water.  First of all, because Americans are supposed to be the world's shining example of a self-governing people; Americans are their own government.  If Americans want to deny responsibility for the actions of their government; they cannot at the same time claim to be a self-governing nation

As for propaganda; I have made a serious mistake believing, for years, that access to the truth was the antidote to propaganda.  Alternatives to the corporate-controlled US mainstream media are out there; whistleblowers have informed us of horrendous crimes (like the Abu Ghraib photos or the Collateral Murder video released by Wikileaks) that the US mainstream media chose not to investigate.  And the social media sites are rich, not just with conspiracy theories, though there's plenty of that, but with facts that the mainstream media chooses to ignore or, worse, attempt to discredit.

The mainstream US media is not part of any conspiracy to hide the truth; they are reporting what they believe their viewers and readers want to hear; they are filling a market demand, and that is not evil; that is just business.  Most Americans would prefer to be told what to think and how to feel.  That's comforting; that's security. 

If you are such a person, you will not heed my advice to "read a foreign newspaper once in a while." No. You are going to tune to that network news channel every evening, and get your talking points for the next day.  It feels right.  It comforts you in your beliefs.  It thinks for you.

That isn't ignorance, and it isn't indolence. It's a cowardice of the spirit.  It's a cowardice that makes a man want to give control of his mind and his conscience to a political party or to a church or to religious leaders, or the US Marine Corps or Boeing Aerospace or whatever institution or ideological credo.

Look, I know we all have biases and beliefs we'd prefer not to give up.  But when we willingly, eagerly, attempt to hide the truth, or hide from the truth, because we just don't want to deal with it, or the feelings that it might engender, we exhibit cowardice of the spirit.  It's not cowardice based on fear for our safety; but on a fear of having to deal with basic human emotions and moral decisions.  We run from ourselves.  We let someone else deal with those most basic individual moral conflicts.  We fail to exhibit something that I believe is properly termed "character."

So I'll say, once again, put down that cell phone and read something for a change.  I have zero expectation that anyone will.  Addictive behaviors can be extremely hard to break.

The core of all character lies in individuality. Character is a moral fact: and, until life is individual, it is not moral. And by individual we mean something single, separate, and alone, that cannot be accounted for from outside, cannot be grouped under any general laws, cannot be extracted out of outside conditions. Its actions must spring from out of itself, it makes them happen; and you have to enter into its inner life and secrets if you would know why it does anything. However alike the circumstances may be, no other being would do exactly what this character does, or say what it says. It is this seal of individuality which it sets on everything that comes out from it, which makes it a character. Sometimes it stamps it weakly, and then we say a person has little or no character; or sometimes it stamps it forcibly, and then we say, ‘That is a man of character.’

– Henry Scott Holland, Creed and Character, 1887

On the passing of my friend, Peter Smith (1966-2023)

I was saddened to hear of my friend Peter Smith's sudden passing this week. (his obituary)

Peter was 56.

I moved with my wife and 14-year-old daughter to New Brunswick, Canada in October 2005.  One month later, Peter Smith shared these photos with me.  He was one of the first friends I made in Canada

Peter was a man I knew to love beauty, to love life, to love adventure, and to love his wife, Molly.

I had the utmost respect for him.

Peter took these photos on Sunday, 11 September, 2005, in Sussex, NB

Google knows what you did last summer

 Here's something you may find interesting, even "cute" in a way:

Back in the winter, I returned some equipment to a Bell/Aliant store.  When I approached the building the door wouldn't open.  A guy ran over to the door from inside the store and opened it manually.  "It's because you're wearing a mask," he explained.

"Oh, you have a facial recognition system," I said.

"No, not really," he said, "it just keeps people out whose faces match a profile of bad guys.  We don't collect information on our customers."

"I see, it's a facial recognition system that only detects bad people."  

I would bet money there's an image in a database somewhere of me entering that store, with the exact time and date.  Just like recorded surveillance video footage.  No harm done ... except I bet that image can be used to link me to countless other pieces of data, including every location I've taken my cellphone.

We all have the right to engage in perfectly legal activities that harm neither ourselves or anybody else without continuous scrutiny of our activities and without fear that we'll be mistakenly identified as a "person of interest" or whatever. As I've pointed out before, I'm doing nothing wrong when I use the toilet; yet I still believe I have a right to do that in complete privacy. (trust me, you don't want to watch)

Privacy is a basic human need, and a respect for privacy is basic human decency.  What I say, to whom, and where I say it, simply is not anyone else's business but my own.  I resent being told I'm the one who's doing something ​wrong when I express a desire to protect my privacy.  And I think privacy is worth defending.

I would also like to stress this point: it is not the actions of those who intrude on our privacy that appalls me, it's the passivity of the people who accept one of these two claims:  

1) Heck, who cares?  I've already shared half my life on FB ... nothing's really private anymore, anyway.  

Worse, because it's a passive acceptance of authoritarianism: 

2) I am doing nothing wrong; why should I care if my actions are being recorded?  If you're not doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide.

Yeh, if you are an honest law-abiding citizen, then you should not harbor a desire for privacy.  Not in what you do, or where you go, or whom you love; not in your finances, your personal or your business relationships, your communications, or your personal beliefs and practices.  These things don't belong to you.  They belong to society, to the State.  And if you seek to conceal them; quite obviously you are trying to conceal something you've done wrong.  Bad person.  Bad citizen.  

People are really twisted mentally today ... not just those who control the instruments of ubiquitous surveillance, but those who think they're "cute".

Torture is NOT a "legal" issue (it's a moral issue)

Most of the arguments that were made to defend the use of torture techniques by American military and intelligence agency personnel centered around the "legality" of those techniques.

First of all, that was a classic "red herring."  It was a diversionary tactic, intended to divert attention from the fact that the use of torture is, has always been, and always will be a moral issue, not a legal one.  Those who ordered the use of torture against suspected islamists in secret CIA prison camps covered their legal asses very well ... completely, I'm sure.  I'm not interested in their legal arguments at all ... they are not relevant to the issue as it concerns us, the American people.  And the morality of torture is all that should concern us.

I was concerned only with the honor of the American people; and with the American nation.  And that honor was what was violated by the use of torture ... not merely international law or treaty law.

In short and in summary ... Americans shamed themselves by their defense of this practice.

I am proud that I refused to stoop to that moral low place.

The high ground that was given up has not been recovered.  It is unrecoverable.  And it is the loss of that moral high ground that has been most damaging to the US and to the security of the American nation ... not the revelations that Americans are "torturers."  

Again, I'd like to say that when Americans, as a people, defended the torture of helpless prisoners, detentions without legal recourse or any evidence of wrong-doing, and armed attacks on weaker, unarmed and defenseless nations that had done nothing to deserve those attacks, Americans did not violate any law, or even the rights of others.  Americans violated the very most basic American principles of justice. Americans violated their own principles. Those were my principles, and I hope they were yours.  I was brutalized.  So were you.

Americans made an evil choice: to trade something precious (that which makes America what it is) for mere promises of a little bit of extra promised security.

In sanctioning torture, Americans chose badly.

I'm sure, though, that the United States will never provide cluster munitions to anyone they know will use those weapons.

What does propaganda look like?

A few years ago, I worked on a project for the Canadian federal government. In our project space, we were surrounded by propaganda posters .. one morning I was staring at this one from Veteran Affairs Canada, and quipped to my coworkers, "I want to die in a war, Grandpa, just like Daddy!"

Holy crap... my co-workers did not think that was the least bit funny. I argued (unsuccessfully) that it was a propaganda poster. 

But that poster was propaganda ... emotionally evocative. Crafted for political manipulation.

35 years ago: James Hansen delivered his ground-breaking Senate testimony

 Thirty-five years ago, on 23 June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen gave testimony before the US Senate in which he warned that the global climate was changing; due to greenhouse gases in its atmosphere, our planet was warming.  He predicted that the warming would continue.  The New York Times reported that testimony on Page 1, under the headline "Global Warming Has Begun".

Were Hansen's 1988 projections correct?  The overwhelming consensus of scientists around the world:  "Hansen nailed it."

https://youtu.be/UVz67cwmxTM

The data collected over thirty years proved him right:

Hansen also forecasted that the Arctic would warm even faster than the planetary average

What happened since? The Arctic warmed even faster.

Hansen forecasted that the amount of sea ice in the Arctic would decline.

What happened since? The amount of sea ice in the Arctic declined.

So, was this guy some kind of kooky clairvoyant, or was Jim Hansen just a very good scientist?

Jim Hansen, by the way, is now 82 years old.

Yeh, I'm old enough to remember

Americans are supposed to have short memory spans.  But I remember.

In 1985, US Presiden​​t Ronald Reagan introduced a group of six visiting Afghan mujahideen warriors to reporters on the White House lawn.  Reagan proclaimed, "These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers."

Those warriors were, of course, leaders of the groups that became the Taliban and al-Qaeda.  Neither of those groups would exist today if not for the help of the US, which was determined to hand Russia a defeat in Afghanistan as humiliating as the American defeat in Vietnam.  The Americans were driven by egoism. By hurt pride.  Osama bin Laden wasn't in that group of six at the White House that day, but he was one of those mujahideen leaders, and he was an ally of the United States, trained, armed and funded by the Americans.  Oh, the irony of it is so rich.

And, oh how we laughed when Leonid Brezhnev's soviet army suffered a shameful defeat at the hands of those mujahideen warriors in 1989.  Tucked tail and fled.

Listen.  Yeh, I hear it, too.  That's the sound of Russian laughter, and I can't help thinking, "he who laughs last, laughs best."

That is what happened, 36 years ago.  The wind was sown ...


And, in case you don't remember, and you need to be reminded, neither the Taliban or ISIS existed before the US got involved in Afghanistan, funding and training and supplying weapons to the mujahideen freedom fighters who were determined to expel the Soviet Union from their country.

Remember the Khmer Rouge?  

In 1970, Richard Nixon and then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger sent US troops on secret missions into Cambodia to clean out Viet Cong sanctuaries and destroy their supply lines and started bombing Cambodia (a war crime of the first order).  The Khmer Rouge communists, who were very few in number, with very little popular support, used the heavy American bombing as a recruiting tool among the common people in the countryside, which is exactly what happened in both Afghanistan and Pakistan (if not in much of the Muslim world).

It took a scant five years for the Khmer Rouge to grow from a few scattered camps numbering an estimated 4,000 into the guerrilla army of 70,000 that seized the Cambodian capital in 1975 and began their "purge" of the population, which was basically a purge of anyone who supported or worked with the foreigners who invaded their country.   You know, traitors.  Mostly they killed the people who lived in the cities and who cared more about making money than in making a patriotic defense of Cambodia's sovereignty.

Isn't that what's happening, right now, in Afghanistan?

The Khmer Rouge did not come to power because the US stopped bombing Cambodia ... they came to power because the US started bombing Cambodia.

By the same token, it has been the US occupation of Afghanistan and the propaganda value of its indiscriminate use of aerial and drone bombing that has strengthened the Taliban for the past 20 years.  And, it was certain that when the US tucked tail and left the country in defeat, that the Taliban would "purge" the infidels in their country; it is not because the US failed to "stay the course."  It is because the Americans made the enormous mistake of trying to do what no military power has done in 1,000 years:  conquer Afghanistan, the "Graveyard of Empires."