Out of Work

Punditman says...

I am closing this blog for now. I lost my "real" job yesterday. With a tinge of unintended irony, the hammer came down on my head eighty years to the day after the crash of 1929. That is to say, my main client for whom I have worked for four and a half years suddenly laid off a whole bunch of folk: consultants, editors and the like. Thus I have no spare time to dedicate to this blog, as finding work takes precedence.

If you know of anything that you think may suit, (even if you don't know me), please use the comments section or email me here: wayne@editme.ca

I am open to all ideas, locally, or in a telecommuting sense.

Thanks.

(Peacenik, who still has a real job, may in future, be found somewhere in the blogosphere, espousing his witty, intelligent, doom-filled musings. We will keep you posted as to his landing spot, should this occur.)

When the Tough Should Get Going

punditman says...

A little levity for these panic-ridden times is just what Dr. Punditman has ordered for you today.

You may know Garrison Keelor as the American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, radio personality and the host of the Minnesota Public Radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," who also wrote the screenplay and appeared in the '06 movie of the same name. Or you may not.

Here, he makes a series of witty points about about stubbornness and futility we are seeing on the part of officialdom as the Afghan War continues to drag on...and on.

By Garrison Keillor
www.antiwar.com

The former Marine officer Matthew Hoh, who resigned his Foreign Service post in Afghanistan because he feels the war is pointless and not worth dying for, deserves all the attention he’s gotten and more. The Obama administration faces hard decisions there, and the man made a good case against deeper American involvement. He says that our presence among the Pashtun people, the rural, religious people, is only aggravating a civil war between them and the urban, secular (and, it seems, fraudulent) government of Kabul, and the role of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is not central – the real issues are tribal and cultural.

American families, he said, "must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more."

It is rare that a high-level official – he was the senior State Department guy in Zabul province – resigns in protest, and in all the to-do about his four-page resignation letter [.pdf], nobody had a single bad thing to say about Matthew Hoh.

The American people tend not to admire quitters, which is maybe why protest resignations are so rare. You can get up on your high horse and talk about your principles, but we suspect that you’re just another slacker looking for an easy way out. Your old football coach told you that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and by "get going" he didn’t mean "write a four-page letter about your disillusionment with his coaching and the split-T offense in general" – he meant, Toughen Up, Assume the Three-Point Stance, Hit ‘Em Hard, Eat Some Turf, Get Up and Hit ‘Em Again.

Keep Reading...

Pandemic puts

Peacenik has been concentrated on the health effect of the swine flu pandemic, whether or not the funeral industry is able to handle a surge in flu related fatalities (it can't), whether or not there will be mass burials (there will be), etc. Peacenik hasn't been thinking about the economic, financial impact. But Garth Turner has.

By Garth Turner

Lining up for flu shots

On a highway not too far from the bunker is a yard where a local bus company keeps its rigs. These guys make their money in the charter business. You know, hauling old ladies to the casino, providing transportation for conventions, trucking tourists from the airport to Niagara Falls.

In the yard are tie-ups for about 30 buses.

One summer day in 2003 I was driving by, and noticed that every slot has a bus sitting idle. Then I heard that most drivers had been laid off. If bus rentals were a measure of economic activity, we were in trouble.

Read on...

Flus and Vaccines: Playing the Numbers Game

Punditman says...

Punditman did not want to have to wade into this morass once again, but he couldn't resist offering another perspective. While Peacenik prepares to line up for his two flu shots, Punditman is noticing that important people on the news are saying that this whole swine flu vaccine decision is all about numbers. So here are some numbers to consider as you make the big decision for yourself and your loved ones.

Punditman does not know what it was about the 1976 swine flu vaccine that caused all those health problems including Guillain–Barré syndrome for many and killed others in 1976. Neither, apparently do the experts. Some say it was bacteria that caused problems, while others suspect the cocktail itself. Why does punditman get the feeling that this was never studied thoroughly enough? Given the fact that the US government ended up paying millions in compensation to those they injured, you would think there would be hundreds of studies to find out exactly what went wrong, so it won't happen again. Maybe there are. Please locate them if you can.

This is where all our biases come in. Obviously punditman's own bias says there is not a lot of incentive (i.e. money) to be made looking at why certain products don't work, especially after the fact. That includes pharma products. Surfing around internet forums, Punditman has found all kinds of anecdotal stories about health-related nightmares from people who received the 1976 vaccine. Punditman has no idea if all these people figure into the official numbers. But punditman thinks his bias makes sense: if you don't study something enough, obviously it is easy to conclude there's nothing behind claims that run contrary to accepted wisdom, especially when a helluva lot of money is to be made.

On another note, why are completely healthy people routinely urged to get the regular flu shot? It is well known that regular flu shots are a shot in the dark, and a not very good percentage shot at that. Could the profit motive play a role? Hmmm. Even if bad reactions to flu vaccines are rare, is that risk better than getting the seasonal flu? After all, the vast majority of healthy people survive just fine. Or, is it really that horrible for a healthy person to get the flu and have to stay home from work or school for short while? The case of this Washington Redskins cheerleader, is particularly tragic. In any case, would it not be better to concentrate on maintaining healthy life styles and strong immune systems? Oh, punditman forgot: no money there.

Contracting swine flu is obviously very scary and potentially tragic, as we are seeing. But the tragic cases remain relatively rare. So are vaccine-injured children, I'm told. Which makes me ask about another numbers game, perhaps the biggest guessing game of all: given the fact that symptoms range from mild to severe, how many of us have already had H1N1? Apparently untold...ummm...numbers. In fact, last August, it was already being reported that over a million Americans had already contracted H1N1. So how many tens of milions are there now? And how many deaths? After all, health officials are only testing those who become hospitalized; yet, as always during flu season, everywhere people are coughing, sniffling, feeling lethargic, achy and naseous, the very same symptoms as swine flu. But most recover from whatever it is that they have.

So what are your chances of contacting swine flu? And does it constitute the admitted (rare) risk associated with any vaccine (beyond a sore arm). So far there are 87 deaths in Canada and around one thousand in the United States. Now compare the numbers above to the projected numbers of deaths we were told were coming: 30,000 to 90,000 U.S. deaths from swine flu by mid-October, warned President Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, back in August.

Now compare those numbers and those projected numbers to the 8,000 deaths in Canada annually from MRSA in hospitals. No one is talking about that at the moment. One could be forgiven if one thinks there are greater risks out there right now than swine flu, but one would be going against the herd mentality.

As one wag once said, "there are lies, damn lies and there are statistics." Good luck deciding whether or not you and/or your children get the jab. Punditman remains skeptical, but in truth, he doesn't have a clue.

Ask Punditman about Iran or something.

6 Signs That the American Empire Is Coming to an Early End

"The day of America's global pre-eminence is over" so says Michael Klare. Is that a bad thing? Is that a scary thing? Is that a good thing?

Did America use its decades of global pre-eminence to advance good causes? to advance world peace? to advance global justice? Peacenik doesn't think so. So Peacenik doesn't think the collapse of America's pre-eminence is a bad thing. But it could be scary.

Can America be irrelevant when America is sitting on enough military power to blast the world apart many times over. In hindsight the Soviet Union seems to have accepted it's fall from co-global pre-eminence. But will the United States. The U.S. military and political class is already full of wingnut, religious crackpots. How are they going to adapt to the new reality? Not to mention the simultaneous collapse of their economic might. Scary indeed.

by Michael Klare

The day of America's global pre-eminence is over. We must face the new global realities.

Memo to the CIA: You may not be prepared for time-travel, but welcome to 2025 anyway! Your rooms may be a little small, your ability to demand better accommodations may have gone out the window, and the amenities may not be to your taste, but get used to it. It's going to be your reality from now on.

Okay, now for the serious version of the above: In November 2008, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), an affiliate of the Central Intelligence Agency, issued the latest in a series of futuristic publications intended to guide the incoming Obama administration. Peering into its analytic crystal ball in a report entitled Global Trends 2025, it predicted that America's global preeminence would gradually disappear over the next 15 years -- in conjunction with the rise of new global powerhouses, especially China and India. The report examined many facets of the future strategic environment, but its most startling, and news-making, finding concerned the projected long-term erosion of American dominance and the emergence of new global competitors. "Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor [in 2025]," it stated definitively, the country's "relative strength -- even in the military realm -- will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained."

Read on...

The Atlantic article: sur rebuttal

Peacenik has read a cross section of articles. Pro vaccine and con vaccine. Vaccines are becoming publicly available in Guelph on Friday. There will be clinics running all day for weeks. The Canadian vaccine will have adjuvants. But Canada has ordered some vaccine without adjuvants for pregnant women. This fact has added to any apprehension Peacenik has about the vaccines.

Peacenik doesn't know if the Canadian vaccine will create side effects that a vaccine without adjuvants will have. Helen Branswell, a respected Canadian medical reporter, says that this year's Canadian vaccine will cause sorer arms than last year's due to the adjuvants. Peacenik is hoping to golf on Saturday. Peacenik doesn't want a sore arm. So Peacenik will delay getting vaccinated until the first available chance after Saturday. Peacenik will get the swine flu vaccine and the seasonal vaccine.

But Peacenik also has a question. Peacenik Jr. almost certainly had the swine flu. But no tests were taken to confirm it. Should Peacenik Jr. still get vaccinated? Should Punditman? Should Don Cherry? Should Taxi Guy?

Posted on: October 27, 2009 6:31 AM, by revere

On Saturday we posted our take on The Atlantic magazine article by Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer. It's a major story in the November issue, a banner across the top of the cover page reading: Swine flu: Does the vaccine really work? We tried to ignore it. People kept asking us to comment on it, but we didn't want to get entangled in vaccine controversies. As Orac warned me, it's a game of Whac-A-Mole. But we got fed up and posted our global response, not a point by point refutation, since that wasn't what the issue was. Our main point was that it was a straw man argument built around the narrative device of the brave, mavericky truth teller who is shunned by colleagues and has to eat alone at conferences. A scientific Enemy of the People. Not unexpectedly it drew a sharp response from the authors here and elsewhere. So like the worker who gets his sleeve caught in the machine, we are being drawn inexorably into the gears of the vaccine controversy. Sigh. We should have known better. But what's done is done, so we will add this to our initial immediate reply to the authors.

Brownlee/Lenzer title their response to us, "Faith-based science not methodolatry is the problem." This is apparently a reference to our use of the neologism methodolatry to describe what we see as Dr. Jefferson's overweaning fealty to the randomized trial as the only reliable knowledge. It was actually a rather minor point, but not to hear the authors tell it:

Read on...

Insurgents Share a Name, but Pursue Different Goals

punditman says...punditman is posting an article from the New York times. That's probably a first. The Times has been a bastion of neo-con warmongering for as long as this man of punditry can recall. Of course, as with all corporate media, there are always exceptions. There are informative articles. This is one such piece.

Even experts have trouble keeping up with how complex the situation really is in the AfPak theatre. No surprise then, that many people do not know the difference between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, or the fact that there are real tensions between these two movements. Or, that the Afghan Taliban are a "genuine national movement," whatever we may think of them. Or that the Afghan Taliban say that their interests lie solely in Afghanistan. In fact, in a recent interview, an Afghan Taliban leader said that they “don’t have any interest in fighting against other countries.” “Our aim was, and is, to get the occupation forces out and not to get into a fight with a Muslim army,” the commander added. Many people don't realize that while the Afghan Taliban are supported by elements in Pakistan's intelligence services, it is the Pakistan Taliban who are attacking Pakistani forces and causing a lot of havoc and misery for Pakistan.

This is worse than Iraq. Western governments are deluded if they really believe they can somehow manage and control this region. When you read this, you should realize that idea has become a joke, really--something to keep in mind when you hear shallow platitudes about "staying the course" from idiotic politicians.

Punditman says that the United States and NATO face an impossible situation, which is what often happens when you invade and occupy other countries. You stir up a hornet's nest. It is one helluva mess over there.

Punditman is posting an article from the New York times.

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: October 22, 2009

WASHINGTON — As it devises a new Afghanistan policy, the Obama administration confronts a complex geopolitical puzzle: two embattled governments, in Afghanistan and Pakistan; numerous militias aligned with overlapping Islamist factions; and hidden in the factions’ midst, the foe that brought the United States to the region eight years ago, Al Qaeda.

But at the core of the tangle are the two Taliban movements, Afghan and Pakistani. They share an ideology and a dominant Pashtun ethnicity, but they have such different histories, structures and goals that the common name may be more misleading than illuminating, some regional specialists say.

“The fact that they have the same name causes all kinds of confusion,” said Gilles Dorronsoro, a French scholar of South Asia currently at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Read On...

Raising up dead horses

Joe Bageant isn't happy as he surveys the detritus of what was the American dream. This guy is a downer. And unfortunately Peacenik saw Peacenik's self in Joe's article "you got your common man living on hope, lottery tickets, or the dogs and ponies." Yes Peacenik buys lottery tickets. Peacenik feels modestly anxious that Peacenik hasn't bought a 649 ticket for Saturday night.

But Peacenik said it before, Peacenik would rather trust the future to lottery tickets than to Stephen Harper or the rest of our oleaginous leaders or the corrupt and crooked stock exchanges. The DOW and TSX are in the red and only 4 hours to go till the closing bell. Does it matter? Do you have your lottery tickets?

By Joe Bageant



When Barack Obama took office it seemed to some of us that his first job was to get the national silverware out of the pawn shop. Or at least maintain the world's confidence that it was possible for us to get out of debt. America is dead broke, the easy credit, phantom "growth" economy has been exposed for what it was. A credit scam. Even Hillary Clinton and Obama's best efforts have not coaxed much more dough out of foreign friends. But at least we again have a few friends abroad.

So now we must jackleg ourselves back into something resembling a productive activity. No matter how you cut it, things will not be as much fun as shopping and speculative "investing" were.

The fiesta is over, the economy as we knew it is dead.

Read on...

It’s that simple

Peacenik was up early this morning and thought Peacenik would check a few blogs while Peacenik's English muffin toasted in the toaster oven. And the finanical news was all bad. Garth, Mish, Ilargi, Denninger. They all portend a crash...sooner rather than later.

But Peacenik was also listening to News570 a Rogers all news radio station in Kitchener. At 5:29 every morning the financial pundit/reporter/cheerleader always has a one minute business report. The cheerleader was cheerful. The futures market today was pointing up.

Garth mentions it in his post today and Peacenik recalls it from other articles. When empires collapse, they collapse very quickly. And black swan events can bring on a rapid collapse. And this impending collapse may not even need a black swan trigger. Who you gonna believe? Garth? Ilargi? or Rogers' pundit? By the time Peacenik gets home from work today investors may well be fricasseed. Have a good weekend.

by Garth Turner

Ont Treasurer Dwight Duncan: busted

It’d be hard to make this stuff up.

* One of Canada’s biggest banks is slapped with a debt review and a likely credit downgrade.

* The country’s biggest province says half its business taxes vanished, and doubles its deficit. It, too, gets a debt downgrade.

* And it’s taken a mere 12 months for Ontario and Canada itself to pile $83 billion more in debt on taxpayers’ shoulders. In fact Ontario alone figures new debt will hit $70 billion over the next three years, while the national government heaps on $200 billion.

Was it only a year ago we heard this: “We will not be running a deficit. We will keep our spending within our means. It is that simple. The alternative is not a plan. It is just the consequence of complete panic, and this government will not panic at a time of uncertainty.”

Read on...

What 'Controlling the Media' Really Means

The dysfunctionality of U.S. government and society is a direct consequence of hate radio, talk radio, right wing media, FOX, and all the rest of the wingnuts, and nattering nabobs of negativity. Peacenik never thought Peacenik would quote Spiro Agnew.

Of course the media doesn't want a progressive pushback against the media's rightwing slant. The biggest myth about the mainstream media is that it is liberal. At least the Internet has some progressive media and progressive points of view. Routinely described by the MSM as far left. The MSM is dying. It can't happen soon enough.

by Glenn Greenwald

The same media whining over criticisms of Fox was happy to be bullied and controlled by the Bush administration.



Hypocrisy is far too common a feature of our political culture to comprehensively chronicle, particularly when there is a change of party control and each side starts doing exactly that to which they spent the last several years vociferously objecting; see here for a vivid example of that dynamic, from a new Pew poll released today:

The belief that the press should keep political leaders from doing things that should not be done often depends on who those political leaders are, or more specifically, which party controls the White House. Currently, in the midst of the Obama administration, two-thirds of Republicans (65%) support the so-called "watchdog role" for the press, compared with 55% of Democrats. But last year, while Bush was still in office, only 44% of Republicans felt it was good that press criticism keeps political leaders honest, and Democrats were much more pro watchdog (71% supported press criticism). This partisan pattern has existed since the question was first asked by Pew Research in 1985.

With hypocrisy that pervasive, who could ever hope to take note of all of it? Still, the complaints from America's Right -- and especially former Bush officials -- that the Obama administration is attempting to "control the media," all because the White House criticizes Fox News, is in a class of hypocrisy all by itself. That those petulant complaints are being amplified by a virtually unanimous press corps -- "it's Nixonian!" is their leading group-think cliché -- makes it all the more intolerable.

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