In the midst of discussing the Democrats troubled relationship to foreign policy -- really fascinating stuff from/for the insiders -- Ezra at Pandagon drops knowledge how to have a viable opposition to war, you have to have a viable message and a viable vehicle:

...it's really crucial that the anti-war portion of the left begins representing itself better. Moore is absurd and Kucinich, sorry, seems like he's from Mars... the figures leading the charge seem uniformly unfit for PR purposes. As Matt and I have both noted in the past, part of what sent us towards the hawk camp was that, without much historical context for what war means, we simply evaluated the arguments (and sadly, that means the spokespeople) for the two sides. In that calculus, becoming a hawk seemed not just warranted, but unavoidable. That's not fair to the doves and not fair to the Democratic party, and while we (hopefully) won't make the same mistakes again, it's really incumbent that the anti-war wing funds a media savvy opposition (instead of protests organized by subsidiaries of Maoist groups [read: ANSWER]) so future generations aren't turned off by the absurdity of their spokespeople.

Let's amplify this thought. This has always seemed fucking obvious to me, and I said and blogged so even as I was with the protesters. Something that needs to happen in the Anti-War and more uppity Left in America is for people to realize that the '60s aren't coming back. A "protest movement" is an impotent movement.

Conventional (mass) protests do not drive the media cycle, talking heads do, and they are often able to spin the protest event any way they choose. Mass protest are also very poor places to organize people for effective grassroots activism, maybe you make some friends with the people you happen to be stuck there with, but it's not network-friendly. So, without driving the media or growing successful organizations (or achieving anything through direct action, for you real radicals out there) what good do a million people in the streets accomplish? Not a lot. It might be fun for the participants -- and the ritualistic aspect of becoming radicalized via attending a march and getting tear gassed shouldn't be overlooked -- but on the whole the return on investment seems rather low.

Hopefully some of the sage old heads will expand their thinking and realize that focusing with aclarity on grassroots member growth, earned media coverage, and targeted direct action (hopefully non-violent) rather than the general rubric of "protest" will get us a lot further. Of course, my real advice is not to wait on anyone. We can do this ourselves, and if we do it right we will find some places where we can win, and if we win we'll build momentum. Nothing succeeds like success.

Supposing things don't go well in the world, I wonder when the Bush administration will do its Sportpalast Speech?

Ok, now I've seriously got to get back to work.

Oh man. The order of occupation in Fallujah has some really unnerving aspects. Prank Monkey: Fallujah Gets Flair --

So not only are we occupiers in Iraq, we're now genetically tagging citizens, making them wear identity badges on their clothes, and forcing them into manual labor to clean-up the city we destroyed (in order to save it).

In truth, it reminds me of nothing so much as The Wave, the high school experiment cum After School Special where a teacher allows his students to show themselves just how easy it is to turn into fascists:

A thought-provoking dramatization of an actual classroom experiment on individualism vs. conformity in which a high school teacher formed his own "Reich" (called "The Wave") to show why the German people could so willingly embrace Nazism. This unflinching yet sensitive 1984 Emmy Award-winner raises critical questions: When does dedication to a group cross the line from loyalty to fanaticism? Does power corrupt? What is the nature of propaganda and mass persuasion? Can something like the Nazi Holocaust happen again? Grades 7-12. Color. 46 minutes."

Anyone else ever get the feeling that Iraq -- maybe the whole Bush administration -- is just a big social studies experiment gone wrong? If only it were over at the end of the semester... Say cool! Have a neat summer! Sorry for bombing your house and killing your family! Friends 4ever!

In his most recent NY Times column, Fly Me to the Moon, Tom Friedman (the Moustached One) calls for a national science project to give us energy independence:

nice idea, Friedman, but what does it have to do with your subject - foreign policy?

Everything! You give me an America that is energy-independent and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran.

Nice to see he's catching on. Energy independence, thermodynamic strategy, the Apollo Alliance... whatever you want to call it, a national initiative to make up for the Market's complete lack of a solution to the global energy situation would be a great use of government. A quick look at Bush's biography will tell you why it will never happen, but that doesn't mean it's still not a great idea.

I've considered before what we might have gotten done in response to 9/11 if there'd been different leadership. Bush used the political capital he got there to start the country down the path of hard empire and to give away hundreds of billions of dollars to the upper class. A different mind could have gotten us off foreign oil and given us single-payer health care.

How's that? Well, Tommy boy's spouting the rationale for energy independence, which also pays a peace dividend that would be a comparable economic stimulus to Bush's trickle-down booster shot. As for health care I've got one word for you: bioterrorism. Somebody maken a simple powerpoint on what smallpox would do to our highly urbanized population which contains 50 million people without insurance who don't go to the doctor until they're very ill (if at all). That would get that shit taken care of ASAP.

Jessie Tayor (1/2 of Pandagon) writes: Pandagon: Thank You For Coming To Loews, Sit Back And Relax...Destroy The Show!

It's also a bizarre idea of truth that you can arrive at what's true by reading people supposedly equidistant from the political center and somehow triangulating the truth from that, as if it's merely a factual cartogram. It assumes that centrism is the height of accuracy (which feeds into several false narratives in and of itself, more of a "bias" than anything Matthews talks about) and that partisanship necessarily removes one from truth.

It's been a singular pleasure to read Pandagon over the past year or so, to watch their evolution. These guys are in my generation, I feel, but they're still emerging, coming into their own.

Now we see this line of thought developing -- something that's coming across multiple cultural vectors, I might add -- that averaging out partisanship, the whole notion behind "balance," whether attempted in good faith or not, creates a bias in and of itself. This is a revolutionary idea. The realization that the national debate is a false one, that the choices offered (while real) are also quite limited, leads ones thinking down alternate paths in the pursuit of real change. Couple that with the parallel realization that partisanship (or agenda) doesn't equate to innacuracy, and the next logical step is to look around for Reality, decide what to do, and then start mobilizing yourself and anyone you can convince to get it done. That's the revolution, folks.

Let me state up front that I my theory of revolution is social, cultural, political; not militant. Rather than destroy our institutions of power, I think humanity is better served by reforming them to once again reflect first principles. This isn't quite socialism, capitalism, liberalism, communism, or anarchism. I like to think I'm informed to some degree by all these ideas, but I don't have an -ism yet, ok? Anyway, check the rap...

Historically there are always things the political establishment is reluctant to address, stuff that no one wants to talk about changing. Sometimes these are cushy breaks for the powerful. Sometimes these are traditions which it takes great political will to break from. Often these are the interests of the political class (Left and Right) itself -- a case that becomes especially common when the true number of players shrinks to as small a relative size as it's done in the past 40 years.

There are 115 million people out there who vote, but really about %0.01 of them actually run the show (thx to Britt for the graph). That kind of power distribution inexorably produces corruption. It's as close to an axiomatic law as any social science can get: concentration of power increases corruption, which can be evidenced by ignorance and inaction just as it can by outright abuse.

I've been reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polani, and one of the points he makes is that the Industrial Revolution owes more to advances in the social sciences, rather than the natural. It was mostly amateurs, tinkers and artisans who invented the labor-saving machines of the era. Physicists and chemists were peripheral. The critical scientific advancements of the time were in the human sphere: the development of economics, social policy and the destruction of old community orders which were incompatible with self-regulating markets.

I believe we're headed into an information revolution. After a great period of consolidation in the development of Industrial Infrastructure -- a period in which great applications of natural sciences allowed the wholesale re-invention of life on earth to spread worldwide -- we are poised for the next wave. To put it another way: we can't stay where we are. In times past I've imagined a kind of new dark age settling over the globe, a period of relative stasis, life as usual, whatever it may be. But that's clearly untenable. Given our current trajectory in another century there will be wars over water and oil and clean food if nothing else.

So either things change for the better or they change for the worse. I'm hoping for the better, and my hopes are pinned on the notion of an information revolution, which I believe is already underway. I think it will follow the same pattern Polani lays out: a series of social innovations will allow a new way of life to emerge based on a series of essentially technical innovations.

Today our information artisans are called hackers and designers. Rebel engineers and people who cut their teeth writing utopian business plans. The social sphere is going to go through some serious changes. All these efforts are building up to something. It might not be good, could be Orwellian to the extreme. Will the history books record an explosion in Social Entrepreneurialism or the development of Total Information Awareness? Open question.

However, as it stands, going along this line seems to be the only way going forward that doesn't involve Mass Death/Depopulation at some point, so it's the path I choose to follow. Call me a sucker for sci-fi, but I believe in the promise of progress.

Bringing it all back home, a critical component of progress seems historically to be a strong respect for empirical truth, for the reality that binds us together. That's Truth with a capital T, and it exists in the physical and the meta-physical sphere. Cultures which have respected and revered this do well. Those which run afoul inevitably stumble. We seem to be stumbling.

The joke on humanity is that you can't ever know it for sure. Uncertainty is pervasive. You can't fight Heisenberg in the physical sphere, and post-modern consciousness is essentially the extension of the impossibility of truly neutral observation into the social and cultural sphere. Brautigan: you can have security or you can have sanity. Pick one.

On the whole, the reaction over the past 40 years to these revelations has been a gradual decline in the value of Truth on all sides, which is really too bad. We've got to bring it back. An end to bullshit and mind-games, that's the way. We need to stand up for the principles of the enlightenment, for the promise of the Individual and for the virtue of the Public, because the alternative seems to be the continued ascendency of the State as an instrument of the ruling political class.

Make no mistake, there's certain kind of Truth in fascism, in the cynical observations of Menkin, in the mechanics of propaganda. But these truths rest on the centralization of "reality," in the dispossessing of the people of their own ability to observe and choose, to freely participate. There is truth in mental slavery in that it can work, and possibly even accomplish Great Things, but it's a backward idea. It leads back to that ratio of the power elite to the rest of humanity, and that ends in corruption and ruin, things we can ill afford more of these days.

So the challenge is to develop a pervasive global culture that can allow people to unite to their mutual advancement, but which does so by distributing power to them and allowing them to negotiate for themselves what constitutes advancement. That's a big project, and without some ideas for how to get there and where it goes, I don't think it's going to get off the ground. But we've got time. Fill in the blanks.

Here's a link I'll probably be plugging more and more in the coming days: politicalmonkey.blogspot.com, former colleague of mine. He's off to the races as well:

I've spent the last 15 months talking about how unemployment among 18-29 year olds is double the national average, and how we were getting screwed by Bush. But I was doing it from a kind of ivory tower, a safe place where I could talk about policy and politics from the perch of a cushy job. That's not the case any longer and its strange to be on the other side of this equation now - experiencing it even as I talk about it.

I think this will make for some good blogging.

Their campaign is called "God is Still Speaking" and CBS and NBC have refused to air it because it's all about the UCC's opennes to people of all races and sexual orientations.

"Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other
minority groups by other individuals and organizations," reads an explanation from CBS, "and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and
UPN] networks."

So CBS openly admits that the President's agenda now determines what is acceptable for broadcast on their stations. Have they no shame?

London Free Press: Bush will skip Parliament during visit

American officials involved in planning the trip were worried about a cranky audience on Parliament Hill, sources said.

"We didn't see the need and, frankly, we didn't want to be booed. There are other, better venues," said one U.S. official.

"Other, better venues" seems to mean a "gala dinner" with "hundreds of prominent Canadians."

Wonder if they have to sign loyalty oaths.

Good Raw Source for the next big thing. It's missing any global vision or paltable thrust on security/foreign policy, but that's going to take a bit longer.

Still needs to be done though.

Juan Cole (juancole.com) is a professor of History at the University of Michigan. He reads and translates Arabic and has provided invaluable insights into the historical context and also what's been going on in the middle east and especially Iraq over the past few years.

Now he's being intimidated by a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) because he had some unkind things to say about an organization called MEMRI, which is a right-wing think tank which also does some dubious translating and interperetation of Arabic. He charged that their translations are selective and designed to push a particular point of view about the Middle East.

If the idea of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation is as bad to you as it is to me, maybe you should send an email. Be polite, but firm -- memri@memri.org.

There are heavy overtones of Israel here, which I usually try and stay away from, but which I kind of want to get into for a second. I realize I'm not an expert or direct party to that whole situation. I have plenty of Jewish friends, several of whom have spent time in Israel and I'm uncomfortable at the thought of disrespecting any of them of their heritage. I also have met many people from Israel, and I find I tend to like their national character, though I have also met some pretty bad Israeli tourists.

However, it's hard to look at how that country is going and really think it's all that good or even justified. It seems obvious that history entitles the Jewish people a significant degree of acommodataion, but from an objective standpoint I don't see how Israel really has anything to fear from its neighboring states that justifies a miniature replication of the Great Wall. They're not going to face an invasion any time soon. On the terrorism tip, the reality of the situation is you can have security or sanity. Pick one. The wall is madness.

There can be no absolute physical security on the street level: you'll never stop people who are willing to blow themselves up to kill you. That's a lesson we also need to learn here in the US, but it's a lesson we'll learn eventually. The question is how to make fewer and fewer people willing to do that, and/or how to keep more of the people who remain willing to do such things away from your shopping centers, busses and so forth.

A cold calculus would also suggest another question which is how can you kill all those people before they get close enough to hurt you when they blow themselves up. Now, the degree of brutality needed to follow through on the latter solution breaches the boundary of genocide, but as long as we're thinking outside the box -- not recommending any courses of action -- that's an option on the table.

Things have been simmering for quite a long time in the middle east and elsewhere, and it looks like a boil is on the horizon. The long-term picture is far from hopeless, but the current trends are not good.