How dare you say anything honest about the origins of 9/11!

This isn’t in my usual style to write a serious rant where my ‘truthiness’ isn’t slathered with a thick layer of disdain and sarcasm. But here goes:

I am really fed up with the idea that if you discuss the origins of 9/11, you are somehow a coward, not a patriot, not an American, a terrorist sympathizer, or somewhere else between bottom feeding scum and social pariah who thinks too much for one’s own good. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Ron Paul Phenomena and I didn’t watch the majority of the Republican debate. In fact, I only was able to watch the part of the debate with the most significance — where Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani exchange words over the origins of (Watch the exchange and read a more extensive briefing of the exchange at the Nation).

Now, the basis of the argument that occurred is the following: Ron Paul had the fucking audacity to say that September 11th and the rising Islamic/Jihadist movement may have some origins in America’s less than stellar record in the Middle East. Never mind that the 9/11 Commission reported on the blowback from American involvement in the Middle East as a contributing factor and that anyone with a functioning frontal lobe could connect the dots between September 11th, and say, a couple century’s worth of outside interference by the West. After Paul stated the case between these connections, Giuliani quickly stepped in and said in so many words, you are one anti-American fuck and twisted Ron Paul’s words around to make it seem like he insinuated we deserved the attack. And with that, a crowd of overweight arm-chair bullies started hooting and hollering at the South Carolina Republican Debate.

All I could think about when I watched this was these are the people were interested enough in politics to attend a debate and this is their appropriate level of discourse. All that has to be done or said is September 11th and suddenly everyone feels very coy and shy about their beliefs. The sacred cow is also the most profitable one: I never thought Rudy “September 1tth” Giuliani could win the nomination simply by talking about September 11th until my mind explodes, but it’s seemingly working. Despite being a social liberal, Rudy is pretty much coasting through the polls as the Republican front runner because his speeches are jingo games of ‘terrorism’, ‘9/11?, ‘jihadists’, and ‘Islamo-Fascists’. And sadly enough, people eat this shit up. Well, not quite people, but Republicans, but my sense is this would play out in a similar method in the general election as well.

Anyway, I’ve digressed. My point being is that September 11th was not an event in which upon reflection should cause us to curl into a ball and cry for Rudy Giuliani or George Bush to save us. I’m not saying that America deserved to be attacked by a bunch of crazed religious zealots or that we brought this upon ourselves. I am saying that September 11th should have woken us up to the fact that America’s foreign policy has been seriously misguided since the start of the Cold War. We’d do a tremendous favor to ourselves if we realized the cost of an invasive, military-dependent foreign policy bent on serving our short term interests.

The Why Behind Your Powder Coated Nostrils

From Salon: Now comes a paper by two European economists arguing that globalization is also responsible for astonishing price drops for hard drugs over the past two decades… At first glance, the laws of supply and demand seem to be seriously out of whack. Since 1990, trends in the worldwide supply and demand for cocaine and heroin have been more or less flat, but prices have dropped 50 to 80 percent. In “Globalization and the Price Decline of Illicit Drugs,” Claudia Costa Storti and Paul de Grauwe explain: The “intermediation margin” — the difference between producer prices and retail prices, has collapsed. The cost of getting the product from Afghanistan or Colombia to New York or London has plunged.

And you can thank the awesome efficiency of global markets for that:

Transport costs have been reduced and the use of the new [information technology] IT has allowed to dramatically improve the efficiency of the distribution of drugs and made it possible to cut on the number of intermediaries. This new IT has also made the communication between demand and supply safer and quicker, leading to better stock management, and has much improved communication among dealers. In addition, the explosion in the size of international trade flows has made it possible to better conceal the transport and the distribution of drugs. Finally, the sophistication of the international financial markets has greatly increased the scope for money laundering to remain undetected. All this has led to a decline in the cost of distributing drugs.

The authors also suggest that the “risk premium” — the danger associated with getting involved in the drug business, and which consequently results in high prices, has declined because of the flood of new participants in the global economy as a result of the opening up of the economies of China, India and Russia.

Keep Reaching For The Golden Ring America

Four years of hot XXX American Occupation, and those damn brown people still can’t get it right! Oh jeez louise:

Iraq has emerged as the world’s second most unstable country, behind Sudan, more than four years after President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, according to a survey released on Monday.

The 2007 Failed States Index, produced by Foreign Policy magazine and the Fund for Peace, said Iraq suffered a third straight year of deterioration in 2006 with diminished results across a range of social, economic, political and military indicators. Iraq ranked fourth last year.

As eloquently stated by Amanda at Pandagon:

As of today, we’ve spent $436,458,000,000 on this adventure war, and still Bush failed to make Iraq the #1 most fucked-up country on the planet.

Keeping up with my community services of all things feminist and Pandagon related (since we inherently hate females due to our hilarious blog logo), and to do some poetic reiterating, you’re stretching when you say:

Translation: We can accept advertising of sexual devices if they are advertised as benefiting men. But if they insinuate something as crazy as the concept that men should respect women’s bodies, health, and choices, then they’re way out of line.

Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure men and women both benefit from use of contraceptives.

In the international blogosphere, CA has a post with commercial from different countries on military recruitment. The Russian one forgot to mention the wonders of officer-inflicted hazing. Publius has a post on if Russia Supplying Attack Aircraft to Syria, ThreatsWatch on the Net-Centric Operations of Terrorist Groups, and read his take on 54 Million Dollar Pants Lawsuit which has taken on the uncomfortable element of race and Korean/Black relations.

Other thoughts and sounds across the BLOGOSPHERE: Being Middle Class in America Sucks (and if you think that, I think you should try being lower class, say, in Zambia), China Overtakes U.S. As Leading CO2 Polluter, 5 Reasons Not to Drink Bottled Water, This Woman is Supposed to Disgust You, and ‘Exercise pill’ switches on gene that tells cells to burn fat.

Maybe It’s Time You Talk To Your Spin Doctor

Thanks AS.

That Pound of Cocaine Sounds Mighty Good

Yesterday was not a good day for Rudy Giuliani. Apart from being exposed as part vampire, A report says he was kicked off the Iraq Study Group for poor attendance and his South Carolina finance chair was caught with a pound of cocaine. Now, call me crazy, but when I’m on a coke binge, the last thing I want to do is be around a bunch of uptight white fucks talking about Iraq. Actually, when I’m on a coke binge, I like to be in the darkness of a strip club backroom with the majority of my torso exposed and a pair of sunglasses put on sideways. But that’s just me.

Anyway, to those who says socialism doesn’t work:

I am sick and tired of reading ignorant people who’ve never read anything Marx or Engels wrote (except possibly the Communist Manifesto) baselessly claim that ’socialism doesn’t work’.

My simple response to people who spout this empty rhetoric is to ask: how do you know?

Ever since the West witnessed the horror that was the Soviet Union and red China, the dream of socialism has been inexorably married in our literature, politics, rhetoric and culture to these perverse manifestations of totalitarianism. The impact of these horrors has struck all sides of the political spectrum from the left to the right. On left, we have seen them seemingly no longer willing to call themselves ’socialists’ so they go by monkiers like “anarco-socialists” which, at least under the original definition of the term, is as redundant a phrase as PIN number, ATM machine, or NDP party.

Updated: Socialism, and this, give me an erection.

Remember Those Missing Emails? Looks Like Staffers Accidentally Sent 500 Emails to georgewbush.org, Not georgewbush.com. Domain Operator? Anti-Bush Activist Who Holds the Evidence:

I’m listening to Greg Palast on Democracy Now! talking about how Karl Rove’s lackeys totally screwed up when they were sending emails about firing US Attorneys for not being Republican Party and Karl Rove friendly. It seems that instead of sending the emails they typed up to georgewbush.com they sent it to georgewbush.org which is a domain that friends of Greg Palast’s own. Greg Palast now has 500 of the Karl Rove emails. What was revealed in the emails reviewed by RFK Jr. had him saying (paraphrasing) that “Rove et al should be in jail, not in office.”

Other things worth a glance: First Potentially Habitable Planet Outside the Solar System, Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason, Hip Hop Isn’t Dying, It Just Sucks, Reality Check: Who’s the bigger terrorist – the USA or Al Qaeda?, and The Problem with the 8-Hour Workday.

Update Number 2: This is one incoherent fucking blog round-up. I’ll be putting up a new one Friday morning.