Month: April 2009

Richir Sharma argues that commodity prices always go down in the long run because of "new technologies, greater efficiency in extraction and the substitution of one commodity for another":

At some point, of course, commodities will spike again, but only temporarily. To date, the centuries-old slide in prices has been marked by long bear markets and short bull runs. Data from CSFB shows that the average bull market in oil has lasted from four to nine years, and the average bear market from 11 to 27 years. The bull market that ended last summer saw prices rise tenfold over nine years, mirroring the duration and magnitude of the previous bull market, which ended in 1979 (see chart above). That was followed by a bear market that lasted 20 years. If history is any guide, we're only at the beginning of another long one.

One of Mark Perry's commenters counters.

Maggie Mahar discusses to a new study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Commission to Build a Healthier America:

First, the report observes that, while medical care is important, “Health is More Than Health Care”:  “Although medical care is essential for relieving suffering and curing illness, only an estimated 10 to 15 percent of preventable mortality has been attributed to medical care [or lack thereof.]  A person’s health and likelihood of becoming sick and dying prematurely are greatly influenced by powerful social factors such as education and income and the quality of neighborhood environments.”

Secondly, the report’s lead authors, the Brookings Institution's  Mark McClellan  and Alice Rivlin, acknowledge that: “Many people live and work in circumstances and places that make healthy living nearly impossible . . .Unquestionably, we must take individual responsibility for our health and the health of our families. At the same time, we must recognize that, in many instances, the barriers to good health exceed an individual‘s abilities, even with great motivation, to overcome these barriers on his or her own. In seeking a healthy society, we must consider the choices available to individuals and the contexts in which choices occur—including conditions in homes, neighborhoods, schools and workplaces—that can constrain or enable healthier living.”

One of the disadvantages of relying on a torture-regime for the facts about the torture they have been practising is that they have an interest in lying. And the job of a journalist in these matters – especially after the torrent of deception that came out of the Bush White House – is to exercise skepticism about the government's claims. National Review, in the Bush era, became a de facto propaganda arm for the government, and no more so than on the question of torture, an issue where one might have imagined a magazine steeped in traditional Catholic ethics, might have been just a little bit honest. But nah. So we had Deroy Murdock in one of the most repulsive columns ever printed in that magazine declaring

Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.

Not reluctantly forced to contemplate torture in the last act of desperation to save mass death. But proud. Nonetheless, Murdock was at pains to tell us:

U.S. and Pakistani authorities captured KSM on March 1, 2003 in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. KSM stayed mum for months, often answering questions with Koranic chants. Interrogators eventually waterboarded him — for just 90 seconds. KSM “didn’t resist,” one CIA veteran said in the August 13 issue of The New Yorker. “He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” Another CIA official told ABC News: “KSM lasted the longest under water-boarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.”

Oh really? From the 2005 Bradbury memo:

The CIA used the waterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

In this, you see something that occurs in every instance of torture regimes justifying their stance. They invariably minimize what they have been doing, lie about what they found out, and refuse to allow transparency so that the rest of us can find a way back out of a labyrinth of untruth, pure force, and abandoned morals they have constructed. (I await NRO's and Murdock's correction.)

Moreover, it is worth pointing out that even if you accept the preposterous notion that waterboarding isn't torture – something no legal authority in human history ever has before Dick Cheney came along – and even if you accept the amazingly detailed limits that Bradbury placed on the frequency and severity of waterboarding to make it "legal," even then, we now know that the CIA violated those standards.

Here's Bradbury's unhinged Orwellian judgment of how much waterboarding stayed within the boundaries of legality:

[W]here authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42.  Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

As emptywheel notes,

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times–still just half of what they did to KSM.

So even by the Bush-Cheney standards of legality, the waterboarders far exceeded what was allowed. They broke the law even by Bush's standards. And why, pray, is breaking the law in such a grave matter as a war crime no longer subject to prosecution or even investigation in the United States?

The US is a banana republic if this stuff is allowed to go unpunished. A banana republic with a torture apparatus.

Reason interviews Greenwald about drug decriminalization:

In the last week of news, George Orwell visited contemporary America three times.

A classic from Steven Chu:

Was anyone in your family impressed when you won the Nobel Prize in Physics?

Probably, but who knows? I called my mother up when they announced the Nobel Prize, waiting until 7 in the morning. She said, “That’s nice — and when are you going to see me next?”

A man who has waterboarded hundreds of soldiers to prepare them for potential torture at the hands of regimes outside the Geneva Conventions sees what's at stake in the debate over restoring the rule of law in America:

This is about more than one tactic, waterboarding, that has gotten the lion's share of attention. As a general rule, interrogations without clearly defined legal limits are brutal.  Particularly when they have an imperative to get information out of a captive immediately.  Wearing prisoners out to the point of mental breakdown; forcing confessions through sleep deprivation; inflicting pain by standing for days on end (not minutes like in SERE); beating them against flexing walls until concussion; applying humiliation slaps (two at a time), and repeating these methods over and over.

If it were aimed at a U.S. Pilot, soldier or diplomat, I have no doubt all those defending the Bush Administration now would label these tactics torture. At SERE, I learned and taught that breaking the prisoner for compliance and instilling "learned helplessness" was our enemies' terminal learning objective. Worst of all was that an agency advising the Justice Department, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, knew that these coercive techniques would not work if captives devoutly trusted in their God and kept faith with each other. Yet those two characteristics are pre-qualifications for being allowed into al-Qaeda.

Nick Carr repeats himself:

As I've written before, the essential problem facing the online news business is oversupply. The cure isn't pretty. It requires, first, a massive reduction of production capacity – ie, the consolidation or disappearance of lots of news outlets. Second, and dependent on that reduction of production capacity, it requires news organizations to begin to impose controls on their content. By that, I don't mean preventing bloggers from posting fair-use snippets of articles. I mean curbing the rampant syndication, authorized or not, of full-text articles.

Syndication makes sense when articles remain on the paper they were printed on. It doesn't make sense when articles float freely across the global web. (Take note, AP.)

Once the news business reduces supply, it can begin to consolidate traffic, which in turn consolidates ad revenues and, not least, opens opportunities to charge subscription fees of one sort or another – opportunities that today, given the structure of the industry, seem impossible. With less supply, the supplier gains market power at the expense of the middleman.

The fundamental problem facing the news business today does not lie in Google's search engine. It lies in the structure of the news business itself.

Read carefully.