The latest rendings from the slow-motion train wreck

[solarbird]

A brief note on oil, then to politics; oil is currently acting like a mo-mo stock, hitting $126.25/barrel this morning. In the short term - heading into a recession - I think the momentum of the last month or so is unsustainable, even in a flat production environment. You're also seeing a lot of press idiocy about oil being up each day "on a weak dollar;" the dollar is actually stronger, very slightly, than it was when oil was hanging around $105/barrel, and has been gaining strength the last couple of weeks while oil shoots up to the moon. (The US dollar is up 2% against the basket as oil goes from $115/barrel to $127/barrel. There is cause-and-effect here, btw.) But hey, what's reality got to do with news?

Talking of news, Glenn Greenwald today reports on the broadcast media's continued refusal to cover the illegal domestic propaganda campaign waged by the Pentagon, no doubt because they helped so much. There's been a document dump, and amoungst the things you can trace in those documents are the locking-out of analysts who went off-message, and the co-ordinated attempt to discredit Amnesty International's report on conditions at Gitmo. I wonder how long the network news organisations can continue their silence on this matter?

Meanwhile, Senator John McCain continues to run for Chief Executive Bush's third term, claiming the problem with abuse of power in the Bush administration has been not any claimed powers of the executive (including but not limited to being above both Congressional Law and Constitutional restraint, being able to spend against Congressional law and to block spending by Congress, and, oh yes, editing laws at his whim), but "activist judges" who get in the Chief Executive's way.

This leads, in turn, to that latest attempt by various Democrats to revive retroactive immunity for telecom lawbreaking in illegal domestic spying by the administration. The ACLU has an action item up against it, along with more details than previously reported. The reported plan is to work it in to a "compromise" bill that grants Chief Executive Bush basically everything he wants, as always. As always, it's about closing down the last functioning route to investigate these crimes, and making clear and obvious lawbreaking retroactively legal. I strongly recommend you take action. (Pointer courtesy slashdot and hubbit.)

In other politics, the American Psychological Association has, inexplicably, named two determined opponents of the transgendered to a work group assigned to revise the Manual for Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in preparation for the DSM-V. On the Task Force assigning the workgroup members is Dr. Ray Blanchard, a proponent of the idea that people with gender identity disorder are actually paraphiliacs, or men who have a fetish for forced feminisation. (The proponents of this theory ignore ftm men - half the transgendered population - pretending and sometimes even stating outright that they don't actually exist.) He's assigned Dr. Kenneth Zucker to the workgroup as chair; Dr. Zucker is a proponent of "reparative therapy," a hobbyhorse of the anti-gay "ex-gay" movement, only this time applied now to gender identity disorder. There is, of course, no doubt that this would, if institutionalised against GID, also be used against lesbians and gay men.

[ETA:This story must be going around, as elfs also posts about it, and adds Obsidian Wings' coverage of an NPR story that follows two GID children, one getting okay-let's-deal-with-it treatment and one getting reparative therapy. Guess which kid is all screwed up? ;_; ]

And in other outrages, this story of gang-rape going unprosecuted will be disturbing to anyone sane. And apparently some are shocked! Shocked! that proponents of Michigan's anti-gay anti-marriage amendment would lie about its impacts on domestic-partner benefits. Blocking recognition and benefits for even the children of queers was the entire fucking point, and if you listen to them talking to their core, in their own media, they'd say things like that out loud. But, as always, the mainstream media takes liars at face value without the first hint of fact or consistency checking.

So there you are. Good morning!

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I see we're consuming the same media this week. Yeah, the Zucker thing has me seeing freakin' red, too. But then all this bullshit has me seeing red these days. I can't help but wonder if they're just waiting for us to run out of bile and collapse; you can only swallow rage for so long.

[solarbird]

Well, with the largest media orgs and the government in lockstep - with the former serving as propagandist for the latter - there's not going to be a lot of progress in any of those areas until living conditions on the ground become intolerable, or a replacement media of scale manages to emerge without being co-opted. You and I are doing our parts in being part of that replacement media.

One of the responses governments had to come up with in response to fourth-generation warfare was ways to respond without caring particularly what the public thinks. What we've been seeing is a run at this. So far, it's worked well enough; we'll see whether it holds out, and for how long. I think if the debt situation wasn't so very bad (causing the economy to, in turn, be so very bad) that it could skate on quite a while longer. But this is one of the ways that empires lead to autocracies as a rule, rather than as exception.

The Zucker thing is an abomination, of course.

Grr.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Letter to APA duly sent on lovely letterhead, signed as Dr [Angharad] etc etc FCIM RMSME -- heard from several other Ph.D. and D.Sc. colleagues and figured what the heck, let's be blunt about good outcome here -- figure that I've paid well over a million dollars in personal and professional income tax over the years, post facto, so they can ponder that.

And if this'll get me to poke my head out of the burrow and write a letter you can ruddy well bet I'm steamed about it.

Re: Grr.

[adularia.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad there exist people such as yourself to do that. I saw the NPR story yesterday, via another LJ friend, and had to tell myself I wasn't seeing things and this was the same Zucker.

*screams, for lack of a more coherent or direct form of protest.*

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Arû, credit ought properly be given to the various activists and networkers who have been passing the message onwards in a form that less-connected folks such as myself might see it and take action.

I suppose that what really made me unhappy was seeing what was being done to children nowadays -- it had seemed, through the 80s and 90s, that the world was slowly getting more sensible in some basic ways, especially as regards human rights, but this whole business is just so mean.

I have a very dear friend whose live was utterly f'd-over by Dr Blanchard; the mean-spiritedness of all of this what is most upsetting.

Hence, it's time to write a polite but very straight-forward letter. Enough letters can change things.

[adularia.livejournal.com]

Do you think there are places to direct letters from non-medically-licensed individuals?

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should think so. I certainly don't have my M.D.; I do hold my doctorate but it is assuredly non-clinical. It certainly doesn't stop me from naming my academic credentials and professional credentials when writing the sort of politely stubborn letter that I sent off to the APA -- altho' around my house, when someone starts calling me "Doctor" it's their (hopefully...) kindly way of telling me I'm getting too much into my head.

Bottom line here is that I think they should be receiving reasoned arguments from anyone whose sense of propriety is offended by this move. I do know some very dear transfolk, including some who had an easy time of it, and some who had a dreadful time of it. I'd as lief see that no person is treated shabbily by people who bill themselves as caregivers. It's just plain wrong.

Angharad

[adularia.livejournal.com]

Complacency on this issue is not acceptable to me. I'm not trans... but some of the people closest to my heart are.

[angharads-house.livejournal.com]

Mmm, point taken from your comment. ^_^

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I read about that NPR story on the Slog and just reading the summary horrified me so much I couldn't bear to click through to the whole thing. I find that as a parent my sensitivity towards child abuse is much higher. Taking away favorite Barbies one-by-one and making the child choose each time until they're all gone, even as the child is hiding them in secret caches all over the place and refusing to play with "boy's toys"? Those parents, and Zucker, should be in jail.

As for the price of oil, I think we're due for a correction this fall. The long-term trends are still in favor of high oil prices, but not this much this fast. I'm just worried about what will happen when prices go back to, say, $90 a barrel and everybody talks about how the crisis is over and oil is cheap again. Behavior is just starting to change at the margins. We need higher gas prices to be sustained. Volatility is not helpful.

I think the problem with the domestic propaganda campaign is the same as the problem with all of the Bush abuses of power. There are so many that have gone on for so long with no accountability that it's become business as usual. Those who oppose the abuses have mostly given up or put their energies into electing a Democrat and hoping things will work out. The media, when not actively complicit, make a lot more money focusing on the latest twist in the presidential election, supplemented by celebrity gossip. The Iraq war isn't even being covered, and we're back to 2-3 dead American soldiers every day and the apparent US-led ethnic cleansing of Baghdad under the guise of going after the Mahdi Army in Sadr City.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

Just FYI: I was approached by some of those Pentagon people, having been identified as a war blogger, and offered their 'material.' I asked them too many questions and insisted on my own opinions. I'm sure my name is now on a list somewhere.

[solarbird]

I believe it. What a crime.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

The stuff was pure spin and press release.

[solarbird]

Did you look at those traced-through examples up at the URL? I mean damn.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how blatant it is---and how nobody in the press has the courage to call them on it.

[solarbird]

The New York Times did, for once - tho' they've done plenty of the same crap themselves, and still are. But they did get it out there at least to the paper press, to give credit where credit is due. But I don't see any signs that the broadcast MSM is going to let it get out any further - they'd have to report not just on actual facts, but on themselves! I don't know what'll be needed to push that into action.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

The MSM didn't cover the May Day dockworker's strike, either, so my cynicism knows no bounds. Then again, there's the Special Snowflake Miracle White Baby story that got totally twisted around.

[solarbird]

Cynicism, or realism? Much of today's Greenwald post is quoted material from the Director of Press Operations, DoD.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

I liked how the three-hour Gitmo visit made the guy an expert, and oh, yeah, his company got a contract, too.

This administration has no shame at all. They're not even trying to hide it.