dysnomia.us

guess who’s back

Baby Doc is back in Haiti. This should be interesting.

• ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier returns to Haiti from exile

a dirty bomb in maine?

Part of this article has been making the rounds:

• Terror in Arizona: Just another ‘isolated incident’? Funny how that list keeps mounting

He’s making the case to blame an entity he refers to as “the Right” for the Tucson massacre, and labeling it as terrorism. I’ve got a different post brewing on that subject, so let’s get right to the part everyone’s reposting. It’s a list of 19 cases of domestic terrorism or terrorist plots conducted by right-wingers, especially white supremacists and their sovereign citizen spinoffs, over the last two years.

Most of them sounded familiar- things I’d read about when they happened. But this one is new to me:

– December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear “dirty bomb” in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb.

Source:

• Report: ‘Dirty bomb’ parts found in slain man’s home

I don’t remember any reporting about this. It only came to light when Wikileaks posted the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center Daily Summary, #2009-036 for Friday, 16 January 2009, the day before Obama’s inauguration. The info on this case is on page 11, but the whole thing is interesting. Curiously, a cursory google doesn’t reveal much about the WRTAC.

This is obviously (to me, at least) a more serious threat than the kid who needed a ride from the FBI. No one seems to have reported it until it hit Wikileaks, and even then only the local papers treated it as big news. If a muslim or an anarchist had been found doing such a thing, do you think it would have stayed so quiet? To quote Uncle Joe, “this is a big fucking deal.”

Anyway, it wasn’t the FBI or local cops who stopped him.  The hero of the day is apparently his abused wife, who fixed the problem with two bullets. She was given a suspended sentence, so she only spent a month or so in jail:

• Amber Cummings Avoids Prison for Killing Nazi Husband While He Slept

Another curiousity: although the guy bought depleted uranium from an American company, no one ever mentions who that company might be. You’d think someone might be interested.

(thanks to sanguine sangha for the tip-off)

on the 150th anniversary of the secession of south carolina

The civil war happened because slavery, which was commonly expected to die out in a matter of a few generations, was suddenly poised for a massive expansion.

Slavery relied on expansion- the economics were always best in the frontier plantations, before the soil was exhausted by decades of monoculture. Until 1848, the slave states were hemmed in by Mexico to the west, and until 1854 by the Missouri Compromise to the north. Northern reformers restrained their urgency, confident that patience would win the day. Many southern planters saw the end coming too, but at a safe distance in the future.

With the seizure of the northern half of Mexico, slavery suddenly gained an outlet again. After much squabbling, Congress in 1850 allowed the new Utah and New Mexico territories to vote on whether to permit slavery. As always, there was more adventurous talk of seizing the rest of Mexico, Cuba, Central America and so on.

Also in the Compromise of 1850 was the Fugitive Slave Act, an intrusive and offensive law that placed the federal government firmly on the side of the slave owners. By enforcing a harsh slave-catching regime in the north, it polarized opinion. Those who had considered slavery a distant evil that had little to do with them now had their faces rubbed in it. This law accomplished more than anything else to turn the north against slavery.

The arid lands of the new southwest, meanwhile, would not support the same intensive agriculture as the Mississippi basin or the coastal plains. And while slavery was debated in Washington, the southwest was settled by people with no interest in establishing it. The slave owners now looked north to Kansas, barred to them since 1820 under the Missouri Compromise.

The Kansas-Nebraska act repealed the Missouri Compromise in 1854, and allowed the new prairie territories to vote on slavery. There was never any doubt that Nebraska would be a free state, but the question was hotly contested in Kansas. The Civil War began there in 1854, with the conflict known as Bleeding Kansas.

Also in 1854, the Republican Party was founded, in direct response to the expansionism of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It was the election of the first Republican president in 1860 that marked the final separation between north and south. Many people today point out that Lincoln was willing to permit slavery to continue if it would preserve the union, and while this is correct, it lacks context. Consider that the Republican Party was founded to oppose the expansion of slavery, and the conventional wisdom that slavery required expansion to survive.  Now Lincoln’s acceptance of continued slavery where it already existed looks a little different- an option for the South to make a peaceful transition to free labor, with time to solve the hard problems before they blew up. We can complain that he would have been trading the lives and the freedom of millions to achieve peace, but that’s the kind of question presidents always face, and there are never easy answers.

Many will also argue that the South was merely standing up for states’ rights, preserving the principles of federalism. But states have always differed over the limits of the federal government. No one seceded when Jefferson bought Louisiana without the approval of Congress. States’ rights, in this period and in years to come, was understood to represent the maintenance of white supremacy.

If you have any doubts, read the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina From the Federal Union. If you wade through the fancy language and appeals to principle, you can’t help but notice that every complaint, every specific material act referred to, is related to slavery. There’s not even a fig leaf of tariff policy.

We shouldn’t need to argue, 150 years on, that the southern states were fighting for slavery, any more than we should need to argue that evolution belongs in science textbooks. But there it is- some people are malicious, some are self-interested, others are simply fooled or don’t care. It sounds like a dry history lesson, but it’s essential to defining who we are. We forgot once, and got nearly a century of Jim Crow. The civil rights era is not far behind us, and its gains may not be as solid as we like to think. Take a moment today to remember what what was fought for in the past, and ask what’s worth fighting for today.

pioneer courthouse square bomber

You’ve got the basics by now, right?

• Teen in Oregon Bomb Sting to Be Arraigned

It seems I got into a little internet argument about this last night (hey, I’ve got time on my hands this week, ok?) My basic position shouldn’t surprise any of you: more smoke than fire, he didn’t do anything without the FBI, fearmongering, who are the real terrorists, etc. It ended up, after a bit of a detour into analogy, with someone saying I must not have read the FBI affidavit because I said the FBI bought him the bomb, and the affidavit clearly states that he built it (or maybe bought it) himself.

Well, I spent today poring over the affidavit word by word, only to discover that the comment I was responding to had been deleted. But I’d already prepared a whole pile of citations, so lucky you, I’m dropping it all here.

My basic take is that while Mohamud was certainly trying to join in jihad, and may possibly have ended up shooting at Americans in Afghanistan, he had no plan to do anything on American soil until the FBI contacted him, and certainly had no ability to do it himself. Before that happened, he’d been trying to get to Pakistan or maybe Yemen, and failing at every attempt. And afterwards, with some room for arguing over semantics, the bomb was pretty plainly provided by the FBI.

Detailed reading after the jump.

READ MORE

lincoln, the civil war and america

With the November elections behind us, we’re rapidly approaching the 150th anniversary of the election of Abraham Lincoln. And in marking Lincoln’s election, we begin the countdown to the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

Officially, the Civil War began in April 1861 with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. The lines had been clearly drawn by John Brown in 1859, and Lincoln’s election in 1860 made it clear where the federal government would stand.

There’s already a lot of talk about Republicans being the heirs to Lincoln’s legacy and therefore (ludicrously) the party of civil rights. Of course, there’s always lots of talk trying to show us that Lincoln was a tyrant, or wasn’t really interested in ending slavery, or whatever it takes to impugn the Northern cause and make us feel sympathy for the South.

As the Civil War anniversary approaches, I expect a fair amount of coverage and hoopla, and rightly so. The Civil War is one of a handful of defining moments in our history, far more important than the Revolution in making us the country we are today.

I expect a certain amount of this coverage will glamorize the South, glossing over a history of racism and terror to show us the supposed honor and courage of the Confederate soldier. And even more will follow the national unity line, in which the war between brothers was a tragedy for the number of (largely white) soldiers who were killed and the destruction visited upon the South (ignoring the destruction visited upon southern blacks every day since 1619), but ultimately served to unite us more strongly than ever before. This is the basis of American nationalism, but it’s a nationalism that excludes an awful lot of the nation.

I plan to be here to refute these positions. There was nothing noble in defending the Confederacy. The South plainly fought to defend the institution of slavery, and if we stand by basic American principles, that is indefensible.

There are a good five years’ worth of anniversaries ahead, so I expect I’ll have a chance to cover lots of ground. I’d like to offer some different narratives of slavery, resistance and the Civil War. This is not only a chance to refute the safe approach to presenting the war, but also the safe approach to understanding history.

You’re probably still caught up in election news today, so I’ll spare you for now the rant about the causes of the Civil War. But you know it’s coming. I’m staking my claim today to a long wandering discussion, spread out over years if I don’t get bored of it, go to jail or die. Stay with me on this one- it gets to the core of what it means to be American.

if you don’t vote…. (an incoherent rant for election day)

Of all the self-righteous puffery that goes with elections, there’s one meme that trumps them all:

If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.

To which I say: Bullshit. No, really- bullshit.

Sometimes people take it further and say if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain. Let’s dismiss this one out of hand- our rights as individuals are not tied to participation in any way. Be suspicious of anyone who tells you you’ve given up your rights- they’re usually too busy telling you what to do to learn what that actually means.

But such literalism aside, there’s a basic assumption here that voting is the source of decision-making in our government. This is patently false. We don’t get a free choice of candidates. We get a handful of pre-selected options, none of whom are going to veer more than a few degrees from the unofficially official positions. Maybe we can vote for someone who will give us slightly better health care, or decrease the penalties for smoking pot. But where are the candidates who want to end the wage system, or get us off oil, or dismantle the prison industry? They’re out there, sure, but only as a safety valve. No one cares if you vote for the Greens or the Progressives or the Constitution Party. It just lets you say “I voted”. Big deal.

Even if you get your vaguely progressive candidate into office, do you think that Congress or your state legislature is acting on the will of the voters? Of course not. You don’t need me to tell you that most laws, most of the time, are made by lobbyists and money. Sure, they’ll bribe you with a stimulus check now and then. But for all the years that Earl Blumenauer has been in Washington, what’s he gotten you other than some bike lanes and a renewed interest in bowties? The system plods along under its own power, and for all the talk of change, we keep sinking a little further every year.

This isn’t to say there’s no point in voting. This year we can really make the difference between slow-motion disaster and fast-forward disaster, and while that sounds dismissive, it’s meaningful for those of us who have to live through these times. I’m not here to talk you out of voting- I already voted myself.

But I am here to say a big “no” to the illusions of the ballot box. There have been plenty of years that I haven’t bothered voting, when I had no choices I cared about or no chance of swaying things. And lots of people will sit it out this year because they’re tired of the lackluster choices, tired of the demand that they vote for spineless Democrats to keep out the slimy Republicans.

So for all of us who are tired of the whole damn charade, we’re going to vote or not as we damn well please, and nobody better tell us to shut up. There’s more to democracy than checking a handful of boxes every year. And if we don’t check our share of boxes, perhaps our silence is speaking louder than any ballot, if only the self-righteous would learn how to listen.

rigging the machine

By way of the Cheezburger Network (now featuring more useful political analysis than the Oregonian!)….

Vegas Slots vs. Electronic Voting Machines!
A look at how Las Vegas slots and electronic voting machines compare.

(click to read!)

diy in spaaaace!

This by way of NASA Watch:

• Make Magazine: 10 Do-It-Yourself Space Projects

- Making Your Own Satellites by Chris Boshuizen – Build and launch your own sat for as little at $8,000
- Rocket Men by Charles Platt – Mavericks of the Private Space Industry
- Listening to Satellites by Diana Eng – Tune in to space with a homemade yagi antenna
- Weather Balloon Space Probes by John Baichtal – Sense, signal and snap photos in the stratosphere.
- High Resolution Spectrograph b Simon Quellen Field – Lab-worthy spectrum analysis for cheap
- Five Cool Participatory Space Projects by Ariel Waldman
- Cash Prizes for Space Scientists by John Baichtal – A summary of student and professional challenges
- Space Science Gadgets You Can Make for NASA – by Matthew F. Reyes
- Open Sourcing Space by Dale Dougherty

(picture from a totally unrelated site)

know your legislative maneuvers: pocket veto

• Obama vetoes foreclosure bill as anger grows

President Obama stepped into a growing political furor over the nation’s troubled foreclosure system Thursday by vetoing a little-known bill that critics say would have made it easier to evict homeowners who missed their payments.

Obama used the pocket veto to kill this. Tl;dr: if he doesn’t sign a bill and Congress isn’t in session, it doesn’t become law.

• Wikipedia: Pocket veto

Why should you care? I don’t know. Maybe you’re a C-Span nerd. I certainly would be if I had cable. Just consider it a drive-by civics lesson.

don’t forget to look up!

• Chinese Space Debris Rains Down on Chinese Villages

When I was 8, we were convinced that Skylab was going to land on us, but no such luck.

Anyway, if you’re keeping score at home, this rocket was used to launch the Chang’e 2.