Author: Buck Banks

Sussing Out Bush’s Never-Ending Surge

Buck Banks

Political analyst Craig Crawford equates the pattern the Bush administration has established with Congress with Muhammad Ali’s infamous boxing tactic he used against George Foreman — the “ropa dope.” By laying back on the ropes, Ali was able to prolong the fight until Foreman wore himself out whaling away on him.

The White House might be preparing the way for another “ropa dope” of Congress.

Crawford sees the same kind of tactic at work in George Bush’s surge, which seems to somehow keep getting extended. As Crawford sees it:

Back in December, when Bush announced his new Iraq strategy, his GOP war supporters — and even the White House itself — had pinpointed this summer as the soft deadline for determining whether it is working. But early last month the president announced that the troop boost would not even be completed until June, thus buying a few more months.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss., among others in their party, are now settling upon September as a deadline. But the White House might be preparing the way for another “ropa dope” of Congress. Yesterday the Pentagon announced that another 35,000 troops were notified that they are likely to be heading to Iraq by December. That suggests that, come September, the White House will be asking for a reprieve until the end of the year — and possibly beyond.

Second Life Slides – Inevitably – Into Virtual Kiddie Porn Realm

Buck Banks

From the ick files: I’ve been alternately fascinated and repelled by Second Life, the virtual world where 6 million people around the globe pursue virtual lives. But when I found out that some of those virtual people, or avatars, were having virtual sex with virtual teens and children — in exchange for real virtual money — the needle got stuck way on the repelled side.

Virtual sex with a virtual child is illegal in Germany, but not in America.

The whole idea of Second Life was creepy to me in the first place, but then, I have enough trouble keeping up with my non-virtual existence to imagine having to live in a parallel universe simultaneously. But Second Life has hosted politicians like former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, Reuters and C-Net both have news bureaus there that report on happenings in the virtual world, L$1.93 in Linden dollars is traded in-world every month (that’s about $62.5 million real dollars), and some people have quit their real-world jobs to work full time in Second Life and are making a living at it.

Now German police are investigating reports of child pornography and virtual sex between adult and seemingly under-aged avatars. Seemingly, because there are real people who will take on childlike “skins” in Second Life and have sex as if they were children with adult avatars. Second Life’s touted age verification function apparently is pretty easy to circumvent. Virtual sex with a virtual child is illegal in Germany, but not in America. Same with virtual bestiality, which is reportedly also happening in Second Life.

When I first heard about Second Life, it reminded me of a Philip K. Dick science-fiction short story whose name escapes me. In the story, people in a remote mining colony on Mars play a virtual game using a dollhouse and figurines. By taking a drug, the real people inhabit the dolls and the dollhouse and have collective hallucinations where they explore different relationships with each other and take on different characters and personalities, and even have sex. But when the drugs run out, the social fabric of the colony crashes and real life gets really bad.

Trouble is, in Second Life, unless the world’s power grid fails, there will be no crash. And it’s not surprising that humans would import all that’s bad from the real world into Second Life — it’s natural for humans to contaminate their space, real or virtual. So you have drugs, sex for Linden dollars, virtual child pornography for sale and virtual criminals out to separate naive avatars from their hard-earned Linden dollars.

What really bothers me about Second Life, though, is that while people spend an average of 40 hours a month in that virtual world, the real world is getting progressively worse. There are very real political, social and environmental problems right here, right now, that don’t penetrate the walls of Second Life. It’s kind of like the millenialist Christians who say, Why bother with global warming, the end of the world and the coming of Jesus is nigh — global warming indeed is just another sign of the end times.

Why bother with the problems of the real world if you can stay hunched over your keyboard in whatever basement or cave you’ve descended to to get away from the harsh glare of a world gone wrong, making and spending your Linden dollars in a place that consumes only one extremely valuable non-renewable resource — time.

Florida: More Experiments in Voting

Buck Banks

Still glad I’m an Independent: Florida thinks it has been getting the short end of the presidential primary stick, so it has struck out into the no man’s land of January to set its vote date. This, despite the fact that the Democratic National Committee has threatened penalties, like stripping the state party of delegates, making the vote nonbinding and penalizing candidates who campaign in the state.

Whoa, them’s fighting words, but, like the big Republican-controlled brute it is, the Florida legislature moved the state’s primary from March to January, despite the threats.

Who needs Katherine Harris?

The result could lead to a scenario like this:

On Jan. 29, Florida Republicans and Democrats head to the polls to pick presidential nominees. Republican votes count, just as you would expect, but the results for Democrats would be nonbinding. No delegates would be awarded based upon the results and instead party activists and insiders would decide on some later date how to divvy up the state’s more than 200 delegates to the Democratic national convention.

See, while the Dems face stiff penalties for the primary shift, the Repugs don’t face any. So, we could potentially see Dem candidates giving the state a pass while Repugs campaign all over the place, with a predictable effect on the general election.

Who needs Katherine Harris when you’ve got a Republican-controlled state legislature to influence the presidential election outcome and guarantee we stay a red state.

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Deny human rights, and however little you may wish to do so, you will find yourself kneeling at the feet of that old-world god, Force — that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever erected for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obliged by the law of conflict into which you have plunged to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you to commit harsh and violent actions.

— Auberon Herbert (1838-1906), British journalist

Quote du Jour

Buck Banks

Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the lowbrow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses.

— Lee Loevinger, Federal Communications Commission, 1966.

Writing the Book on Iraq Reconstruction

Buck Banks

Wasteful reading: The plot is thick, the characters familiar. The inspector general tasked with overseeing the Iraq reconstruction has been criticized by disgruntled former employees for using agency resources and personnel to produce a book along the lines of the 9/11 Commission Report about the reconstruction. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen is currently the subject of an ongoing investigation that some believe might have been instigated from the White House due to the agency’s occasional (gasp!) criticisms of the Bush adminsitration’s handling of the decon … er … I mean reconstruction of Iraq.

Waste represents a transgression that is less than fraud and abuse, and most waste does not involve a violation of law.

SIGIR spokeswoman Denise Burgess said the project, called the “Story of Iraq Reconstruction,” or SIR, is a “capping report” that will present SIGIR’s unique perspective on the reconstruction, including the period before oversight was established.

“What it’s not going to be is a publication with a whole bunch of reports in it,” Burgess said, explaining that it would use a narrative style to appeal to a wide audience. Citing the Iraq Study Group report and the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission as models, she said the SIR project would “drill up” to capture the full picture of reconstruction.

Burgess said plans for publishing the report still are being fleshed out, but it is expected to be complete by the end of 2007. She said she did not know the size of the team working on it, but said it consisted of in-house employees, though she said contractors have done much of the writing for the IG’s quarterly reports to Congress and three lessons learned reports.

But, in a plot twist eerily similar to the firing of federal prosecutors, some have seen the heavy hand of the White House behind the yearlong investigation:

Some news reports have suggested that the investigation could be a form of retaliation by administration officials against Bowen, whose office often has been critical of the reconstruction effort.

White House spokesman Tony Snow also has said there is no link between the White House and the investigation, noting that “when people raise allegations, somebody is going to look into it.”

So who can blame Bowen for wanting to protect his reputation in these days of legacy-building? Meanwhile, he continues the difficult task of overseeing the rebuilding of a ruined country:

In February, Bowen worked with the head of the Government Accountability Office and IGs at the State and Defense departments to come up with a common definition for “waste.” The overseers agreed that “waste represents a transgression that is less than fraud and abuse, and most waste does not involve a violation of law. Rather, waste relates primarily to mismanagement, inappropriate actions or inadequate oversight.”

Whew! I’m glad we finally got that “waste” definition out of the way four years into the thing. Now we can carry on with the real job of rebuilding. Once we definitively define it, that is.

Book Review: With God on Our Side

Buck Banks

What would you do if you found that people espousing a brand of intolerant evangelical religion were turning an organization that was responsible to a large degree for shaping your life and career into a tool for coercive recruitment? No, I’m not talking about the White House; I’m referring to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Mikey Weinstein, a self-described “militant Jew” took on the academy, the Air Force and the Department of Defense a couple of years back because of flagrant violations of the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution by the officers and cadets of the Air Force Academy. Their officers, chaplains and classmates were subjecting cadets to a robust and pervasive proselytizing of fundamentalist Christian doctrine. And if you happened to be Jewish, it was likely that you would be treated like an outsider, subjected to humiliation and possibly called a “Christ killer” by classmates.

“With God on Our Side: One Man’s War against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” chronicles Weinstein’s crusade against the school from he himself graduated with honors in 1974 and followed it with a distinguished record of service in the judge advocate general corps and three years on staff in the Reagan White House. So he’s no slouch. Instead Weinstein is the third generation of a four-generation military family, and both his sons graduated from the Air Force Academy.

While the narrative occasionally gets rather breathless — especially the first couple of chapters where the author is desperately trying to hook the reader with the power of Weinstein’s personality and the gravity of his crusade, the book is well-written.

For a look into the underpinnings of the race to theocracy and the rise of radical evangelicalism that we are witnessing in America today, read this book.

Study: Bill O’Reilly is a Propaganda Pro

Buck Banks

While I knew Bill O’Reilly was a bloviating blowhard before I read the Indiana University study, I did not realize that 40 percvent of Americans consider him a journalist while only 30 percent of Americans think Bob Woodward is a legit journalist. Now granted, Woodward’s creds have been somewhat reduced by his recent tactics, but still, he was half of the team that exposed the Watergate scandal, so he at one time was the kind of journalist that journalists want to be.

But O’Reilly has never been a journalist and should not be confused with one. Instead, according to the study, which used methods employed in the 1930s to measure propaganda, O’Reilly should be considered a master at propagandizing.

Politicians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists — never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy.

Using analysis techniques first developed in the 1930s by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, [researchers] found that O’Reilly employed six of the seven propaganda devices nearly 13 times each minute in his editorials. His editorials also are presented on his Web site and in his newspaper columns.

The seven propaganda devices include:

  • Name calling — giving something a bad label to make the audience reject it without examining the evidence;
  • Glittering generalities — the oppositie of name calling;
  • Card stacking — the selective use of facts and half-truths;
  • Bandwagon — appeals to the desire, common to most of us, to follow the crowd;
  • Plain folks — an attempt to convince an audience that they, and their ideas, are “of the people”;
  • Transfer — carries over the authority, sanction and prestige of something we respect or dispute to something the speaker would want us to accept; and
  • Testimonials — involving a respected (or disrespected) person endorsing or rejecting an idea or person.

The same techniques were used during the late 1930s to study another prominent voice in a war-era, Father Charles Coughlin. His sermons evolved into a darker message of anti-Semitism and fascism, and he became a defender of Hitler and Mussolini. In this study, O’Reilly is a heavier and less-nuanced user of the propaganda devices than Coughlin.
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