From the WSJ:
At the suggestion of some of his staff, Mr. Gates has begun referring to himself as the “secretary of war,” saying that shows he and his department have no higher priority than the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At least David “Get Your War On” Rees will be safely employed.
What Atrios says:
The greatest practitioners of whatever it is we call “identity politics” in this country is have always been white males. The lack of self-awareness of this fact is what is termed unexamined privilege.
Really, no way to accurately convey the dead-on observations of Rushkoff other than lifting his BB post wholesale:
It’s not that the irony of an economics reporter – “the chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years” – falling prey to the very phenomena he was reporting on was lost on the Times; that’s what the article was about. Rather, it’s the way the magazine has chosen to embrace the values of the population it failed: instead of reporting accurately on what happened while it was happening, the magazine (and the papers’) reporters simply excuse everyone’s short-sighted greed by admitting they did it themselves. Hell, if it can happen to the economics guy at the Times, then it really is excusable, and the government should restructure or repackage and let us stay in these giant houses we couldn’t afford. At the expense of those who made smarter, non-NY decisions.
But the missed opportunity here was that by dedicating an entire issue to Dilemmas of Debt, the NYTimes put itself in a position to explain debt. To help people understand what really happened, and to think about it more deeply. They could have done a piece on central bank-issued currency, on the bias of currency, on the workings of a debt-driven economy, or on the hundreds of alternative value-driven currencies now on the horizon. They could have looked at how debt itself functions, or how it influences societies who use it as the basis for their economy. They could have at least help readers consider the possibility that debt itself is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It is an invention.
Remember this.
Check it here.
Picked this up from the Ignite DC attendees – P.W. Singer on the effect of more robots in war:
That’s the title of a New America Foundation forum (really, a couple of panel discussions) I’m planning to check out this morning. It’s a topic at the center of an area that I’ve been deeply interested in (and have peripherally worked in) for years. If you share my interest, you can watch the proceedings here.
Equality under the law. Would you have believed the state of things today, a few years ago? I wouldn’t have. So very nice to be wrong, sometimes.
Condoleeza Rice can’t even go to an elementary school without getting questioned about her role in torturing people:
Rice, in her first appearance in Washington since leaving government, was at the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital before giving an evening lecture at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. She held forth amiably before a few dozen students about her love of Israel, travel abroad and the importance of learning languages, then opened the floor to their questions.
The questions had been developed beforehand by students with their teachers and had not been screened by Rice.
[ . . . ]
Then Misha Lerner, a student from Bethesda, asked: What did Rice think about the things President Obama’s administration was saying about the methods the Bush administration had used to get information from detainees?
[ . . . ]
Misha’s mother, Inna Lerner, said the question her son had initially come up with was even tougher: “If you would work for Obama’s administration, would you push for torture?”
“They wanted him to soften it and take out the word ‘torture.’ But the essence of it was the same,” Lerner said.
See, Rice doesn’t deal with questions about torture very well. She lied to the 4th grader, of course, but at least she didn’t browbeat him the way she did this Stanford student last week:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEED_iviTA[/youtube]
While you and I may not have the power to give Rice and crew what they deserve – an indictment and trial – we may well have the opportunity to press them – repeatedly, insistently, and publicly – on what they did. They should have to suffer consequences for what they’ve done for the rest of their lives. The Stanford student gets it. The fourth grader gets it. Do you? Will you do it, when the opportunity comes?
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