It was an episode from the original Star Trek.  Kirk and his Enterprise crew were in the grip of psychic monsters who fed off of their fear and anger, which made everyone act like lunatics.  So Kirk finally figures out the way to fight the monsters was to laugh and laugh and not feed them.

And that took care of the monsters.  Not an original plot, but I particularly liked watching Kirk and his crew laugh and laugh.

You have to think kind of well of yourself to do that particular trick, of course.  You need a healthy sense of self-esteem.

I don’t have much to write tonight, the dominant zeitgeist theme thingy this week was everyone exploring their adrenaline levels at the thought of great (scripted!) faux battles with our neighbors at town hall meetings, like that Twilight Zone episode where neighbors are turned against each other by outer space malicious life forms, mwoo ha ha ha ha.

All they have are smoke and mirrors.  I guess smoke and mirrors can be scary the first or even tenth time around.

But after eight years, it’s not such a surprise any more.

For some Americans, it’s been far longer, it’s been hundreds of years.  They see the smoke and mirrors very clearly indeed.

I’d like it if so many of the folks who were not allowed to return to New Orleans after the Federal Flood were invited to a town meeting and we could see and hear what they had to say.  That would be something.  ‘Course some of those folks have died since then, some of them made sure they were buried in New Orleans even though they weren’t allowed to return there in life.  They voted to demolish public housing, you see, in New Orleans, even though the housing itself had not been damaged by the Federal Flood.  The Ninth Ward didn’t do all that well either when it came to helping families return to homes they owned outright.  It was only a coincidence that so many black families, folks who had worked in NOLA for years, for generations, were so disproportionately affected.

It would be interesting indeed to hear a town hall meeting with those folks, hear what they had to say.

Ha.  Like that’s going to happen.

That would be real.  We can’t have that.  No sirree.

The sad thing about all the troubles we are going through fighting against the greedy and ignorant, is that it gives us a feeling of poverty in the midst of endless abundance.

I read the blogs trumpeting the big fights to give everyone the benefit of healing when they are sick.

We have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to knowledge of how to heal — and I’m not speaking here of simply taking a pill and curing a particular illness, but of truly being healed.

It’s an experience that heals both the person who is sick and the person who heals them.

We have all the great achievements of humanity at our fingertips and so many folks around the world who have the answers to the big questions of how to alleviate needless suffering.

Right now we could all be rolling in clover.

From CNN Politics:

Images of detainee abuse at the hands of U.S. troops, which President Obama has barred from public view, so “infuriated” the nation’s highest-ranking military officer he demanded leaders ensure continued training of troops to prevent abuse, according to a senior Pentagon official.

Adm. Mike Mullen said in a memo that mistreatment of detainees would have a lasting negative effect.

In a July 10 memo, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote the service chiefs and the U.S. combatant commanders around the world that mistreatment of detainees would have a continued and lasting negative effect on the image of U.S. forces.

(emphasis mine)

“A lasting negative effect.”  Ya think?

We’re headed into the dog days of summer, so no matter how rapidly events seem to appear it doesn’t matter, still have to go sloooooowwwwwww.

I read somewhere in ancient Chinese lore about a soldier, he was a general, I think, some big honcho in the court of the Emperor of the time, with all that power, subject to all that intrigue and anyway, the reign of that particular Emperor ended and the soldier had to flee the palace.  From various oracles and just his own intiution and supposed political genius, he knew someone would come along to restore the dynasty but it would be like 40 years or something until that happened.

So the soldier found a place to go fishing.

When he was in his 70s the young man came along who he was supposed to teach, a young man who would end up being emperor.

Well I may have this story all wrong, but that’s how I remember it, and who’s to say something like that never happened?

So according to the Washington Post, the Obama Administration is objecting to a provision in the 2010 defense funding bill that would bar the hiring of outside contractors for purposes of interrogations.

The provision, strongly backed by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), describes interrogations as an “inherently governmental function” that “cannot be transferred to contractor personnel.” It would give the Defense Department one year from the bill’s enactment to ensure that the military had the resources to comply with it.

We have seen the egregious consequences of privatization of governmental functions – all one has to do is mention KBR or Halliburton or Blackwater.  But why is the Obama Administration objecting to this provision?

From Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News:

Although people have been complaining about abuse of the national security classification system for decades, such complaints have rarely been translated into real policy changes.

More than half a century ago, a Defense Department advisory committee warned that “Overclassification has reached serious proportions.”  But despite innumerable attempts at corrective action over the years by official commissions, legislators, public interest groups and others, similar or identical complaints echo today.  What is even more interesting and instructive, however, is that a few of those attempts did not fail.  Instead, they led to specific, identifiable reductions in official secrecy, at least on a limited scale.

For example, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) that was created in 1995 has consistently overturned the classification of information in the majority of documents presented for its review.  And the Fundamental Classification Policy Review that was performed by the Department of Energy in 1995 eliminated dozens of obsolete classification categories following a detailed review of agency classification guides.  These and just a few other exceptional efforts demonstrate that even deeply entrenched secrecy practices can be overcome under certain conditions.

Aftergood’s recent paper Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works has just been published in the Yale Law Review’s Spring 2009 edition (warning, pdf).

Title of tonight’s essay is taken from the Declaration of Independence, to-wit:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.  But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I imagine the revolutionaries of the 1700s were equally dismayed to see their countrymen willing to accept despotism rather than declare independence.  Human nature, and all, we’ve seen it so many times — and seen it many times in the history of the United States of America.

From The Washington Post:

Thousands of U.S. Marines descended upon the volatile Helmand River valley in helicopters and armored convoys early Thursday morning, mounting an operation that represents the first large-scale test of the U.S. military’s new counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

The strategy is different this time around:

Once Marine units arrive in their designated towns and villages, they have been instructed to build and live in small outposts among the local population. The brigade’s commander, Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, said his Marines will focus their efforts on protecting civilians from the Taliban, and on restoring Afghan government services, instead of a series of hunt-and-kill missions against the insurgents.

“We’re doing this very differently,” Nicholson said to his senior officers a few hours before the mission began. “We’re going to be with the people. We’re not going to drive to work. We’re going to walk to work.”

I hope they do a better job “protecting civilians” than we’ve done with our drone planes.

Senator Al Franken.

Senator Al Franken

Senator Al Franken:

It’s finally prime time for former SNL writer Al Franken.

The Minnesota Supreme Court affirms that Franken won his Senate seat.

Governor Tim Pawlenty said on MSNBC Tuesday that he would sign the certificate if the court ordered him to.

Congratulations, Senator Franken!

Madoff will spend the rest of his life in jail:

Bernard Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years in prison for his multibillion-dollar fraud scheme.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin handed down the sentenced in New York on Monday.

…

Attorney Ira Sorkin says the 150 years in prison recommended by prosecutors or the 50 years recommended by the federal probation department are excessive.

Discuss.