Month: May 2009

Quote For The Day

This is an important point in the letters section of the NYT today:

There are other crucial voices missing from the torture debate, particularly those civilians who were arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, tortured and then released months or years later without being charged. This happened in Afghanistan, Iraq (remember Abu Ghraib) as well as in Guantánamo and at C.I.A. black sites.

In the Physicians for Human Rights 2008 report “Broken Law, Broken Lives,” my colleagues and I documented the profound physical and psychological suffering resulting from the torture and abuse of 12 people, all of whom were ultimately released without charges, but not before being subjected to beatings, sexual humiliation, sleep deprivation, death threats and extremes of heat and cold. In other words, they were tortured.

In several instances, health professionals were complicit. Then there are the voices of torture survivors, like my patients at the Bellevue-N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, subjected to brutalities in their home countries eerily similar to what we did. Their voices must be heard along with those of innocent civilians living under despot regimes who now face greater risk of torture because of our misguided policies.

There needs to be an independent and complete investigation.

Victims of the Bush-Cheney torture and abuse program – thousands of them – deserve a hearing. As, one might add, do those Americans who will always live with the screams of the people they tortured in their psyches.

Would A Carbon Tax Be Worse Than This?

Frum attacks Cap and Trade:

As the cap-and-trade bill has progressed through committee — a draft is expected any day now — more and more pollution rights have been allotted in advance to favored interests, free of charge. The final committee bill will probably give away at least 50 percent of all allotments, maybe even 75 percent. The freebies blow a huge hole in the budget plans of the White House, which has been counting on cap-and-trade payments from industry to help cover the enormous deficits the administration will run in coming years…

Cap-and-trade legislation will not only be contorted to favor the Democrats’ regional loyalties. In addition, it will be skewed to favor the preferred energy sources of the Obama administration — wind and solar. These two sources face daunting technological hurdles and unforgiving economics on their own. Consequently, the measures to promote them must be hidden from sight, since no Congress would pass the taxes otherwise necessary to make them viable.

Waxman’s committee looks likely to include a straightforward quota for wind, solar and other renewable power. Utilities will ultimately be required to derive up to 25 percent of their power from these sources — without regard to cost or the existence of cheaper, non-carbon emitting alternatives. The massive extra cost will be spread across power bills in ways that consumers will never see.

Yes, Actually

My interview with Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys is now online at Out.com. From my intro:

I love them because they can write for Kylie Minogue and champion Dusty Springfield even as they write a score for Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin for the Dresden Symphony Orchestra. I love them because no man sings as a woman as well as Neil Tennant; because no techno master is as unashamed of disco or as contemptuous of rock ‘n’ roll as Chris Lowe; because they have written the simplest song about gay love, “Nervously,” and the most wrenching account of gay death, “Your Funny Uncle.”

Their music is about big things — Casanova and Catholicism, terror and religion, politics and pretension — but it is guided by an intelligence that doesn’t balk at fun.

Here's my conversation with Neil on the terror war, America and Obama:

Your songs, in a way, don’t really offer solutions.

NT: No, and they don’t intend to. Otherwise, one would be a politician.

They do, however, offer a critique. For example, “Luna Park,” on Fundamental, is set in a fairground. Is that a metaphor for the West in this period?

NT: It’s probably America. Someone is looking at a fairground at night and all the lights and people screaming on the Big Dipper and the rifle range and all the rest of it. I mean it’s not a particularly original metaphor, but it’s about why people enjoy being scared and whether that is used politically. I think it is done politically, and I think America at that particular time — the American president and his cohorts — were doing it.

Although, obviously, the original terror was utterly understandable.

NT: The original terror was understandable, yes. There was a moment, at that period, when America had the moral leadership of the world and threw it away.

And Obama is a belated attempt to regain it at some level.

NT: Yeah, I think he probably is.

You have your usual skepticism.

NT: No, no, no, we love Obama. We’re crazy about Obama in Europe. We’re all Obama crazy. Everyone thinks he’s sexy. Lovely teeth, as my mother would say.

And he glides. He has a great physical fluency about him.

NT: He actually would have made a very good cardinal, that sort of gliding across St. Peter’s Square thing he does. He’s got that kind of bearing. He’s just brought back dignity, which is an amazing thing to put back on the cultural agenda. There’s a slightly corny song on our album called “More Than a Dream,” which was written when Obama was slugging it out with Hillary in the primaries, and you could feel the potential for the world to change away from the sort of paranoia — justified as it may be — to something different.

The Cannabis Closet: The Growers

Weeed1

A reader writes:

Your ongoing reporting on cannabis users is great. So I will make my confession (but because my husband has a high level security clearance, I cannot come clean to the world): I grow marijuana under the house and smoke whenever I want. We have three children, all almost grown. All are good kids, and not one has ever been in trouble. They know about me, but they are good and don't say anything to anyone. Even though it's "live and let live" around here, none of them drink or smoke. We did a good job!

Another writes:

Since making the decision to pursue art full time 20 years ago, I have been scraping by, hustling for money and cheap places to live. About a decade ago I acquired a large, raw warehouse in a mid-sized city and slowly built it into a studio and livespace. I kept my costs low by doing nearly all of the work myself, becoming a carpenter, plumber, electrician, welder, sheetrocker — all while selling my art with varying success. I spent the last boom years one step ahead of bouncing checks and never knowing from where or when the money was going to come.

About two years ago I hit a wall. The sudden increase in fixed costs that accompanied the birth of my second child coupled with my unpredictable sales pattern was forcing me to reevaluate my grim financial situation. Then I got an unexpected business proposition. A friend suggested that I smooth out my cash flow problems by setting up a grow room operation in an unused portion of my warehouse. Thus, with his expert help, I began an interesting journey into the high tech world of completely controlled indoor agriculture.

This is a realm in which skill as a gardener has less to do with a green thumb and more with an ability to build and maintain the outlandishly sophisticated systems. That stuff my dad got stoned on while protesting the Vietnam war is rather different than the genetically engineered stuff I am now bringing to bloom under the glare of artificial light. According to him, mine's a whole lot better.

For obvious reasons, you cannot hire contractors to build you a space that uses more power than an average house. Among the many demands of indoor cultivation, you have to process large amounts of water, bubble out the chlorine, balance the PH, and feed, feed, feed those plants according to their needs at different stages. It takes a special set of skills and a special mindset to do all of this without outside help and entirely in secret.

Yeah, I know I am breaking the law, and I am taking quite a bit of risk. I don't plan on doing this for much longer, maybe a couple of years, but the profits are at least predictably substantial and it's a line of work that fits my variety of skills and talents. I plan on riding out this recession by growing some of the finest cannabis that can be found in this corner of the country. Though not getting rich, it is allowing me a certain freedom to pursue my true avocation while caring for my family.

I find it funny that the biggest proponents of the "free market" and "unfettered capitalism" (government was supposed to be the problem, right?) were also the drug warriors who indirectly helped cannabis attain such extraordinary leaps in quality. Put simpy, if consumer demand stays the same or increases and supply goes down, price increases, thereby incentivizing growers to improve both the quality and quantity of that supply. So I guess I have to thank the right wing for giving me both fine smoke (I do partake) and a fine living. Once pot is legal, we should name Ronald Reagan the patron saint of Kind Bud.

The Fiscal Abyss

David Brooks is absolutely right to focus on the pipe-dream that cutting healthcare costs can solve the fiscal crisis Obama inherited from Bush that has metastasized with the recession. Bruce Bartlett has even grimmer news after looking at the new trustees' reports on social security and Medicare:

To summarize, we see that taxpayers are on the hook for Social Security and Medicare by these amounts: Social Security, 1.3% of GDP; Medicare part A, 2.8% of GDP; Medicare part B, 2.8% of GDP; and Medicare part D, 1.2% of GDP. This adds up to 8.1% of GDP. Thus federal income taxes for every taxpayer would have to rise by roughly 81% to pay all of the benefits promised by these programs under current law over and above the payroll tax.

Since many taxpayers have just paid their income taxes for 2008 they may have their federal returns close at hand. They all should look up the total amount they paid and multiply that figure by 1.81 to find out what they should be paying right now to finance Social Security and Medicare.

Something's gotta give, Mr President. Time for some honesty. Don't be like that last guy. Denial doesn't suit you.

Reinforcements In The Carbon War

Leafedge

Phil Levy jumps into the Cap And Trade vs. Carbon Tax slugfest:

The big critique of a carbon tax is that it cannot guarantee a country will come in under a pre-set emissions cap. If the desire to pollute is really, really high one year, we could find that a given tax won't serve as a sufficient deterrent, and we'll blow past our limits.

Europe, though, has had the opposite problem with their cap-and-trade system. In the first phase of the program, they printed more permits to pollute than anyone wanted. That drove the price of permits near zero, deeply annoying anyone who had paid up for the right to pollute. It also meant that the system was ineffective in restraining pollution. That would be hard to do with a carbon tax.

Also, Republicans introduced a carbon tax bill Wednesday:

 [Reps. Bob Inglis of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona] call their measure "tax neutral" because it would reduce payroll taxes by however much revenue the carbon tax raises, with employers and employees splitting the payroll tax cut equally.

And, Yes, The Irony Escapes Him

"In essence what you’re saying, I think, is that I’m going to, I don’t care what the law says, I’m going to come out, I’m going to pursue an outcome that I think is fair and just. I’m going to rewrite the law. And I think that’s dangerous," – Alberto Gonzales, a former attorney-general who secretly approved of breaking the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture.