Neither nation’s government is what I would call particularly trustworthy on this one. One is ruled by a fundamentalist nutjob (whose domestic popularity is, happily, slipping), the other is the known willing accomplice of a rogue superpower itching to declare war on Iran.
As such, it is entirely in character for either Ahmadinejad or Blair to be telling lies as to just what side of the border that gunship happened to be. Blair could have been acting under orders from Bush to deliberately provoke Iran and thus provide a pretext for the war Bush wants; Ahmadinejad could have decided to deliberately provoke Britain to rally the populace around the flag in a time of crisis.
Absent hard evidence (which, to my knowledge, has yet to be presented by either side), neither is to be believed.
It’s not just that I inconveniently lost my Seattle job right after deciding it was going to last, renting out my Portland condo (with a one-year lease), and consolidating most of my possessions in Seattle (though that alone is inconvenient enough). I also have set the non-trivial goal of not living alone again.
And it’s not just that. All the good opportunities for shared living aren’t immediately available. Which brings up short-term housing. Which, as it happens, is in extremely short supply in Portland, if you don’t want to pay upwards of $400 per week for it.
There’s any number of very nice apartments I’ve seen listed that I’d have rented in a heartbeat were I in a position to sign a one-year (or even a six-month) lease. And the only alternative to such a thing appears to be those über-expensive “corporate housing” places that start at $400 a week.
I had a wonderful stroke of luck to be the first to respond for a Craigslist ad for a very sweet sublet about three miles south of Downtown near the Willamette River. For the next week, my commute will be on a bike trail through parks and greenspace along the riverbank, and I have a little guest cottage all to myself..
Alas, I’ve been told it’s definitely not going to last more than one week, though I keep hoping to the contrary.
Approximately five times as many were killed outright at Wounded Knee in 1890, and most experts estimate another 150 later died of exposure and injuries. And that’s but one of many massacres that happened during the so-called Indian Wars.
Of course, they weren’t the children of privilege (or, in a few cases, children marked for privilege as a result of their intelligence), so quite naturally those deaths get ignored. I doubt the headline writers are consciously lying: more than likely they aren’t even aware of those earlier deaths. Such is the legacy of institutionalized racism and classism.
It also bears pointing out that, inconveniently for some, it was done by government-owned guns. You know, the guns that gun control fans always tend to overlook.
It doesn’t exhibit the beneficial aspects of checks and balances as much as it exposes the underlying rottenness and moral bankruptcy of the whole system.
We’re talking about someone whom activists have rightly nicknamed “Torquemada” for his role in promoting the use of torture, after all. Yet he got off scot-free for that, in spite of torture being contrary to both the US Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. Instead, we have some passionate bloviating over the careers of eight or so US prosecutors. Now, that in itself is a serious allegation of corruption, but is it anywhere near as serious as conspiring to commit gross acts of sadistic violence against hundreds of detainees? I think not.
What would we say if the ex-USSR had fired a KGB chief, not for being an instrument of an oppressive police state but merely for garden-variety corruption? If he were a particularly nasty and influential KGB chief, we’d probably express some hope that things would improve somewhat under his replacement, but any prattle about a new age of freedom dawning would be quickly dismissed as the nonsense it is.
When Bushies start getting in trouble over their torture and their murderous illegal wars, then I’ll celebrate.
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! news program has a good segment about the war between Ethiopia and Somalia (which I’ve been aware of for a while but have neglected to write about. It’s apparently turning out to be quite the humanitarian disaster, worse than last summer’s attack on Lebanon. Being an African news story, it’s been almost completely absent from the US media.
It’s interesting to note that most analyses I’ve seen of it have said that while the Bush Regime might not be openly supporting Ethiopia’s aggression, they’re certainly not opposing it either, and in many ways are (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) supporting the Ethiopian government, because they are causing trouble for the Islamic Courts movement.
I’m offline now (so can’t determine the URL and link to it), but Google should be able to come up with the web site for the program (which contains MP3 podcasts, the typical way I listen to it).
I suppose I should apologize for the redundancy in the title. “Nightmare” is implicit in “relocation.” Moving is hell.
This move particularly so.
I had set a goal of finally having some sort of shared living situation. I attempted to do so three times. The first time crumbled when the other party needed to move now and at the time I wasn’t certain how well suited I was for my new job (and wondering if I shouldn’t resign). The next attempt crumbled when the group’s house purchase fell through, pushing the household formation unacceptably far into the future (and I need housing now, not several months from now).
I thought I had finally found something with another radical faerie who was about to close on a condo in the Irvington neighborhood. It was an easy commute to downtown, and it’s a beautiful Edwardian building (my favorite architectural style).
The only possible wrinkle was that it bordered a post office. I’ve learnt from bitter experience that any non-residential property is a truck magnet. And that means the noise and smell of idling diesel engines, and morning serenades from the sweet dulcet tones of truck hydraulics. But something I could probably deal with in the name of realizing a long-term goal.
Or so I thought. In the past few days I’ve learnt first-hand how much graveyard shift work is involved in preparing for the next morning’s mail runs. Trucks start showing up at midnight, and from then until 6 or 7 AM my ears are besieged by the loud crashes of the carts they use to move sorted mail being rolled on and off trucks. Think the noise of a shopping cart on rough asphalt, but these are shopping carts on steroids, several times louder as they roll. The carts frequently bump and crash into each other as postal workers push them together to minimize the space they occupy. The cacophony tends to be particularly vigorous between 3 and 4 AM.
The deceptive thing is that it’s a pretty quiet place during normal daylight hours. I feel particularly sorry for my friend (who is still in Santa Cruz and has yet to spend a night here), who just spent a lot of money on his first home. He claims he’s pretty tolerant of noise and even did fine living above a bar. For his sake, I hope so. One thing is clear, however: I am not tolerant enough of noise to get a decent night’s sleep here.
And so, on the eve of a grass pollen season that demands I be already settled, I must launch the housing search anew. I think I may have found something, which despite being in a mid-century modernist building (not exactly my favorite style), is clean, well-maintained, and in an ideal location right at the mouth of Balch Canyon. I’ve sometimes fantasized about living in that part of town simply because of the proximity to the park and how the canyon’s microclimate makes it significantly cooler in summer.
The sucky thing is that I’ll have to sign a lease, but even if I pay the penalty for quitting when the lease is half over, I’d still pay half of what corporate housing costs. And the few lease-free apartments I’ve looked at are absolute dumps. It’s definitely a better option than living in a slum or being bled white. But I am definitely disappointed at how it all turned out. I had hopes for making progress on the life goal of collective living, a goal that will now be postponed once again.
I don’t know what I find harder to understand: the widespread (inside the USA) adoration of Boris Yeltsin or the widespread mystification at how Russia has so quickly reverted to authoritarianism.
The example of Boris Yeltsin shows clearly the regard the capitalist elite have for the concept of the rule of law. As with so many things, such regard is strictly tied to the degree it serves their class interest.
In capitalist countries, where capitalist values are deeply ingrained in the values and traditions of those who write the laws, capitalists are frequently big fans of the rule of law. In other situations, they have no regard for the concept whatsoever.
Just consider the coup in Russia. No, not the one that happened in 1991 — the one that happened in 1993. The one so mistakenly reported as a blow for democracy in the establishment media.
What happened, briefly, was that the Russian parliament did not agree with the pace and breadth of Yeltsin’s pro-market economic legislation. Under the rules of the game of the newborn Russian Federation, Yeltsin had every right to propose those laws and use his bully pulpit to advocate for their passage. And the parliament had every right to act as a check on presidential power and refuse to pass the legislation. Which, in fact, they did.
At this point, Yeltsin and the Western establishment media (and even some of the progressive media) blast the parliament as nothing but enemies of freedom, thinly disguised ex-communists. The absurdity of the charge becomes apparent when one realizes that Yeltsin himself was an ex-communist (and a very high-ranking one at that, having served in the Politburo).
Anyhow, the rule of law quickly became forgotten as Yeltsin had tanks open fire on the buildings housing the uncooperative legislative branch. His death threats worked: parliament collapsed. This was promptly cheered by the establishment as a blow for democracy. Never mind that those much-maligned parliamentarians had been elected to their seats in the same election that gave Yeltsin his. The rule of law was getting in the way of the speedy privatizations the capitalists wanted, therefore the rule of law had no value.
It also bears mentioning that it was Yeltsin who began the process of escalating what later became an extremely bloody and vicious conflict in Chechnya.
Cut to the present, where we now we have all sorts of hand-wringing in the West over the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin. Of course we do. Putin’s authoritarianism is making life hard for Western capitalists, after all.
Whine all you want about Putin, guys. But don’t pretend his authoritarianism is something new and unexpected, and don’t pretend to have any sort of principled moral objection to it. Those turkeys just don’t fly.
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