The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the "Brit Plot" theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form.
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[The author of the book makes the point]In his fantasies, the novel's central character sees the hidden hand of British imperialism behind every event that has happened in Iran until the recent past. For the first time, the people of Iran have clearly seen the absurdity of this belief, although they tend to ascribe it to others and not to themselves, and have been able to laugh at it. And this has, finally, had a salutary influence. Nowadays, in Persian, the phrase "My Uncle Napoleon" is used everywhere to indicate a belief that British plots are behind all events, and is accompanied by ridicule and laughter. ... The only section of society who attacked it was the Mullahs. ... [T]hey said I had been ordered to write the book by imperialists, and that I had done so in order to destroy the roots of religion in the people of Iran.
Sean Carroll reports here on some other parts of the festival, including the panel on Time Since Einstein, where he explained to the audience that “the fact that an a splattered egg cannot turn back into a pristine unbroken egg is the best evidence we have that we live in a multiverse.”
You probably have never heard of Robin Beaton, and that's what's wrong with the debate over health care reform.
Beaton, a retired nurse from Waxahachie, Texas, had health insurance -- or so she thought. She paid her premiums faithfully every month, but when she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, her health insurance company, Blue Cross, dumped her.
The insurance company said the fact that she had seen a dermatologist for acne, who mistakenly entered a notation on her chart that suggested her simple acne was a precancerous condition, allowed Blue Cross to leave her in the lurch.
Beaton testified before a House subcommittee this week. So did other Americans who thought they had insurance but got the shaft [...]
It was as dramatic as congressional testimony gets. Yet it got no airtime on the networks, nor, as far as I can tell, on cable news, although CNN.com did run a story. Time's Tumulty was all over it, as was Lisa Girion of The Lost Angeles Times. But the story did not make The New York Times.
Nor The Washington Post, which found space on the front page the morning after the hearing for a story on the cancellation of Fourth of July fireworks in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, but not a story on the cancellation of health insurance for deathly ill Americans who've paid their premiums.
Neoconservatism is a radical, deceitful and destructive ideology and nobody is going to be deterred from aggressively pointing that out because Weekly Standard, National Review, Commentary and The Washington Post Editorial Page casually toss around the word "anti-Semite" in order to intimidate people out of that criticism. - Glenn Greenwald
An investigation by the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations showed that health insurers WellPoint Inc., UnitedHealth Group and Assurant Inc. canceled the coverage of more than 20,000 people, allowing the companies to avoid paying more than $300 million in medical claims over a five-year period [...]
Late in the hearing, Stupak, the committee chairman, put the executives on the spot. Stupak asked each of them whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except where they could show "intentional fraud."
The answer from all three executives:
"No."
Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) said that a public insurance plan should be a part of any overhaul because it would force private companies to treat consumers fairly or risk losing them.
"This is precisely why we need a public option," Dingell said.
Every time new revelations of illegal government spying arise, the same exact pattern repeats itself: (1) euphemisms are invented to obscure its illegality ("overcollection"; "circumvented legal guidelines"; "overstepped its authority"; "improperly obtained"); (2) assurances are issued that it was all strictly unintentional and caused by innocent procedural errors that are now being fixed; (3) the very same members of Congress who abdicate their oversight responsibilities and endlessly endorse expanded surveillance powers in the face of warnings of inevitable abuses (Jay Rockefeller, Dianne Feinstein, "Kit" Bond, Jane Harman) righteously announce how "troubled" they are and vow to hold hearings and take steps to end the abuses, none of which ever materialize; (4) nobody is ever held accountable in any way and no new oversight mechanisms are implemented; (5) Congress endorses new, expanded domestic surveillance powers; and then: (6) new revelations of illegal government spying emerge and the process repeats itself, beginning with step (1).
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Ahmadinajad's win is bad news unless you are looking forward to the day when the US goes to war with Iran. Israeli propaganda will continue to program the American public in preparation for that day. They have been doing very well in this effort so far. The media outlets and media friends are busy every day inculcating the idea that Iran is a deadly threat and must be "stopped." The effort to discredit US intelligence is also progressing nicely. The goal there is to gain general acceptance in the US of the notion that Israeli intelligence is better, smarter, more effective than US intelligence and therefore the Israeli estimate of the Iranian "menace" should govern decisions.
If nothing interrupts the progress of this "informational" campaign the US will attack Iran at some not too far distant time, not tomorrow, not next week, maybe not net month, but, soon. The "end of the year" now takes on greater meaning.
The basic story here is simple. Israeli intelligence are doing their best to fake the evidence of rapid Iranian advances towards weaponization of nuclear weapons. In their usual short sighted way, they care not that they are systematically undermining the credibility of the US intelligence community. The US IC has been the source of 90% of all valid raw intelligence information that Israeli intelligence has ever had. Israeli collection operations are really rather primitive and the farther the target from their borders the poorer they are. What the Mossad is good at is covert action and black propaganda, not information work. It is sad to see an era of cooperation ending in such a way.
On the basis of what we know so far, here is the sequence of events starting on the afternoon of election day, Friday, June 12.
* Near closing time of the polls, mobile text messaging was turned off nationwide
* Security forces poured out into the streets in large numbers
* The Ministry of Interior (election headquarters) was surrounded by concrete barriers and armed men
* National television began broadcasting pre-recorded messages calling for everyone to unite behind the winner
* The Mousavi campaign was informed officially that they had won the election, which perhaps served to temporarily lull them into complacency
* But then the Ministry of Interior announced a landslide victory for Ahmadinejad
* Unlike previous elections, there was no breakdown of the vote by province, which would have provided a way of judging its credibility
* The voting patterns announced by the government were identical in all parts of the country, an impossibility (also see the comments of Juan Cole at the title link)
* Less than 24 hours later, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene`i publicly announced his congratulations to the winner, apparently confirming that the process was complete and irrevocable, contrary to constitutional requirements
* Shortly thereafter, all mobile phones, Facebook, and other social networks were blocked, as well as major foreign news sources.
All of this had the appearance of a well orchestrated strike intended to take its opponents by surprise – the classic definition of a coup. Curiously, this was not a coup of an outside group against the ruling elite; it was a coup of the ruling elite against its own people.
“Every photo is a bullet for our enemy.”
In 2005 demeaning pictures of Saddam Hussein in his underwear taken during his imprisonment were "leaked" to the press. This was a big deal at the time because it evidenced a gross double standard. Leaking pictures of abuses at Abu Gharaib was pernicious and threatened harm to the troops, but leaking propagandistic photos would demoralize the insurgency. When pressed about those pictures Bush responded,
"Well, you asked me whether or not that would inspire people. You know, I don't think a photo inspires murderers. I think they're inspired by an ideology that is so barbaric and backwards that it's hard for many in the Western world to comprehend how they think."
It was a pretty amazing quote in 2005 and its pretty amazing now. Even Bush agrees that photos don't inspire murders!
While it is going on, I want my colleagues and the American public to
know that measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions.
At the heart of all these falsehoods lies a particular and specific problem: The ``declassifiers'' in the U.S. Government are all in the executive branch. No Senator can declassify, and the procedure for the Senate as an institution to declassify something is so cumbersome that it has never been used. Certain executive branch officials, on the other hand, are at liberty to divulge classified information. When it comes out of their mouth, it is declassified because they are declassified. Its very utterance by those requisite officials is a declassification. What an institutional advantage. The executive branch can use, and has used, that one-sided advantage to spread assertions that either aren't true at all or may be technically true but only on a strained, narrow interpretation that is omitted, leaving a false impression, or that sometimes simply supports one side of an argument that has two sides--but the other side is one they don't want to face up to and don't declassify.
One can hope the Obama administration will be more honorable. I suspect and believe they will be. But the fact is that a cudgel that so lends itself to abuse will some day again be abused, and we should find a way to correct that imbalance. It is intensely frustrating to have access to classified information that proves a lie and not be able to prove that lie. It does not serve America well for Senators to be in
that position.
Chairman Levin has already done excellent work in the Armed Services Committee, and there is no reason to believe that good work won't continue. Chairman Rockefeller has done excellent work in the Intelligence Committee, and his successor, Senator Feinstein, has picked up the mantle and continues forward with energy and determination. We can be proud of what she is doing. Chairman Leahy has begun good work in the Judiciary Committee, and more will ensue when we see the report of the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility about what went wrong in the Office of Legal Counsel.
The new administration, I hope and expect, is itself drilling down to the details of this sordid episode and not letting themselves be fobbed off with summaries or abridged editions. In short, a lot is going on, and a lot should be going on.
While it is going on, I want my colleagues and the American public to know that measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions.
I ask that my colleagues be patient and be prepared to listen to the evidence when all is said and done before they wrap themselves in that story line.
The comments protested the Obama administration's policy on torture photos. Here's one of them, found by Valleywag:
“The Obama White House is supporting a new bill (sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman) whose sole purpose is allowing the government to suppress any ‘photograph taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009′ relating to the treatment of detainees in the ‘War on Terror.’ In other words, Obama wants Congress to change the FOIA so that the courts can’t compel release of any more torture photos.”
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Still, given the subject of Shepherd's comments -- and their reasonable tone -- we don't expect Flickr's notriously sensitive-to-censorship users to stay quiet about the issue, and that could pose a problem for Yahoo, which makes money from Flickr's on paying subscribers.
Hello Arun:
Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care's Abuse and
Advocacy Team.
Despite however much I personally might or might not like
to discuss this issue with you, our Privacy Policy precludes
us from sharing any member information with third parties.
Cheers,
Joe
Start with the observation that financial markets have six useful purposes:
* to aggregate the money of people who ought to be savers into pools large enough to finance large-scale enterprises.
* to channel the money of people who ought to be savers to institutions and people who ought to be borrowers.
* to spread risks so that no one individual finds herself ruined by the failure of any one investment or the bankruptcy of any one company or the slow growth of any one region.
* to keep managements efficient by upsetting and replacing teams and organizations that have outlived their usefulness.
* to encourage savings by creating liquidity—the marvelous fact that one can own a piece of an extremely illiquid and durable piece of social capital (an oil refinery, say) and yet get your money out quickly and cheaply should you suddenly have an unexpected need for it.
* to take the money of rich people who like to gamble and, by providing some excitement for them as they watch their gains and losses, use it to buy capital equipment that raises the wages of the rest of us (at the price of paying a 20 percent cut to the Princes of Wall Street). This is a superior use for the rich—and for the rest of us—than, say, taking their wealth to the crap tables of Vegas.
Wall Street innovations and practices are useful only insofar as they promote these six useful purposes. Call them aggregation, accumulation, diversification, efficientization, liquiditization, and casinoization.
