[Welcome Bread and Roses readers -- lambert]

Boris at the Canadian blog (Canada is up to its eyebrows in Afghanistan) The Galloping Beaver has an instructive take on why colonial wars like the ones in Afghanistan and/or northwestern Pakistan are so futile.

...Tahira Abdullah posits a hell of a problem for anyone involved who does not favour the Taleban: What is to be done?

To all those Americans who wish they had the benefits or protection of Canadian citizenship, well, the value of the above has dropped like a stone in recent history, and none so obviously as with the current absurd Abousfian Abdelrazik episode. The poor man has a family in Canada, is a Canadian citizen by refugee asylum, and has been stuck in a Kafkaesque multiyear nightmare starting with imprisonment and torture by the Sudanese government, and ending with his residence at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, which will not offer him a passport to return to Canada.

In one of these freakonomical perverse results, apparently right-wing memes about socialism have been overused and are hence rebounding against them. Via Yglesias:

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better. Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.

Trawling through the Pravda web site reveals more juicy amusingness. Yes, I know, it is not news that it is a buffet of nuttiness. This time it is Sir Cabbagemallet, keeping the dream alive:

Having thus bravely rallied the international community and summoned the United Nations -- a fiction and a farce, respectively -- what was Obama's further response? The very next day, his defense secretary announced drastic cuts in missile defense, including halting further deployment of Alaska-based interceptors designed precisely to shoot down North Korean ICBMs. Such is the "realism" Obama promised to restore to U.S. foreign policy.

Can we all take a moment for a mocking chuckle at the hard right thinktankazoids? Jesse Taylor has an entertaining take on Ramesh Ponnuru's plan for expanding health insurance.

*BOOP*

Brad DeLong has, this morning, put up a rather oblique post citing the lyrics of a classic song (Last.fm Chumbawumba song link) about Nedd Ludd. And immediately after, one about Swing. I can hardly imagine the motivation for it at this moment.

Wikipedia has this interesting comment about the Luddites that may put Brad's post into a certain perspective:

Thompson argues that it was the newly-introduced economic system that the Luddites were protesting. For example, the Luddite song, "General Ludd's Triumph":

So I was planning to write a long, witty song-and-dance about a theme to which I've occasionally alluded lately: the importance of globalization in this bailout crisis. But then I decided I'd spare the words and write it out as a few easy and very approximate steps.

Brad DeLong is one of the few liberal(ish) economists willing to stick his neck out and spend his personal credibility as a blogger and academic economist on the bailout plan. For him, apparently, there are only two options: paying off the bankers works, and we are able to dig ourselves out of a Depression, or the Depression falls into apocalypse. However, apparently he's willing to stake his reputation on the former hypothesis:

Some of you may have noticed that a certain recent thread has been embroiled in the endless discussion of the primary and the general, and 11-dimensional chess, and progressive A-list bloggers and so on and so forth. It would be pointless not to acknowledge at the outset that that isn't the initial motivation for writing this post. And some of my critics are ultimately correct in pointing out after a certain point, it's not productive. So let's abstract away from it for a moment.

So, it's also been suggested that I "be the change I want to see" or whatever. Well, the change I want to see is, actually, more serious discussions of what I'll call "process issues". Leaving aside the fact that I have done this before, I'm going to ask the question again: can anyone spell out the process by which you see leftist political blogging parlay itself into elected power and policy?

Has anyone else encountered this dude? I have a request for information about something he says.

At Pandagon, Jesse Taylor recently had an appendectomy and has been undergoing a Kafkaesque (I keep using this word, truly we are in the era of fatal paradoxes...) billing nightmare:

So, in the latest update in my appendectomy idiocy: I’m in collections for $16,040.

Every time I call my insurance company, they tell me they’ve contacted the hospital “for information”. Every time I contact the hospital, they say they’re “waiting for information” from the insurance company. When I ask for supervisors, they tell me they can’t do anything until they “get information”.

The phrase "uniquely American" is, to me, key in understanding the ideological predicament of any attempt at efficient delivery of public services in the United States, particularly but not only in the area of health delivery. It represents not merely a nationalistic claim of a need for difference from the effective policy solutions of other countries, but a shorthand for a more specific ideological claim.

Via goddammitkitty, who sometimes used to post around here until real life made her cut back. Language a bit NSFW for workplaces where you are forbidden from using vernacular terms to discuss excrement:

I hope this meets Lambert's standards for non-truthiness.

Ezra Klein has been talking to anonymous administration officials. And they explain why they don't want to nationalize the banks. I link, you decide.

Let it not be said that Mandos does not bring the yum, if absurdly spicy food is to your taste. Let it also not be said that Mandos is not up on his Bahb Dohle impressions.

I was visiting close relatives very recently and raided the pantry to make dinner completely out of ad hoc ingredients which I didn't measure, and hence what I made will never be made again. If I could find a few spoonfuls at the bottom of an old jar, I used it. And if I may say so myself, it was delicious, a culinary leprechaun of deliciousness that has been let go for all eternity. But here is the vague guideline from memory on how to repeat this experiment.

Brad DeLong has a condensed FAQ of the Geithnerist POV on the bailouts. Naturally, to read it as intended, you have to make the first assumption is that it (the bailout) is being done under good faith.

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?

A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world's largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off--in either case at an immense profit.

On a Canadian economics blog I read (and often disagree with, BTW), we have this discussion from Carleton University economist Nick Rowe on the relationship between liquidity and risk, as (presumably) a prelude to answering the question of whether we have a liquidity crisis or a risk crisis in the US and world economy.

Via Republic of Dogs, where you can test it out, I found this awesome widget that, when clicked, adds unicorns and rainbows to your blog. I thought that Lambert might get a kick out of it.

Does it work here?

Apparently not (except for the icon)...mean ol' Lambert actually has Drupal be somewhat secure or something. Pfft.

I do recall, lo, that here among us there were people who hoped that Canada would arrest George Bush or something. Well, not only did they not do that, but they've just prohibited another George from speaking in Toronto: maverick British MP George Galloway.

More specifically, Alykhan Velshi, an aide to the execrable minister Jason Kenney, quoth trollishly:

The Canadian comedy troupe This Hour Has 22 Minutes has the following appeal to viewers everywhere:

Now, Bob Somerby has an excellent post up about the obsession with earmarks:

Those high-profile spending measures total nearly $2 trillion. By way of contrast, the EARMARKS which have Sheneman frightened total $7.7 billion. (No one has made the slightest attempt to show how much of that is “wasteful.”) But guess what? Trillions are much larger than billions! In fact, those EARMARKS represent roughly one two hundred and fiftieth of the total spending in these high-profiles measures. That amounts to one quarter of one percent—one dollar of every 250.

But to Sheneman, these EARMARKS are larger than human life. They may swallow the White House itself.

plover at Three Bulls! has particularly interesting take in rê Somerby that I thought was worth quoting here.

He condemns people as “tribal”, because, from his standpoint, “tribal” is outside the realm of “rational”. The problem is, it’s not. Tribalism, in a generalized sense, one not limited to reflexive, herdlike behaviors, is one part of what our human brains use to reason about life as a social animal (most of our brains, anyway — the ones that more or less don’t we label things like “autistic”). Declaring oneself an adherent of reason does not mean that one is not using tribalistic modes of thinking. It’s not something a person can think their way out of as it is part of thinking.

...

Behold another Mandos movie review to brighten your day.

Last night I saw "Echelon Conspiracy". Verdict: OMG! Worst. Script. Writing. Since. Attack. Of. The. Clones. My eyes! My eyes! I tried hard but I cannot find a way in which it does not suck.

Fortunately, it is the kind of bad that makes it an ideal candidate for geek movie nights. As you can tell from the title, it's a techie surveillance-paranoia movie, and in fact it is a knockoff of "Eagle Eye". "Eagle Eye" was no "Slumdog Millionaire", not least because it stars that annoying Sunni LePoulet guy, but it had a plot twist that was worth the price of admission. "Echelon" tries, but it is completely deus ex machina and weak.

The recent outcome of the Israeli election following the Gaza war reflects an Israeli population increasingly frustrated with the inability of its leaders to make Israel into a "normal" state on the terms that Israelis felt were "promised" to them---in a metaphysical sort of way---by their early leaders. I recently read this op-ed piece in Ha'aretz which really puts the frustration into stark terms: