On Leadership

Heard an interview with Ralph Nader today on KALW in San Francisco. When he was asked why he was running as an independent and not in the Green Party he said there was too much petty, bickering in the Green Party.

Question Worth Asking

Mr Nader, if you can't organize and lead a party composed of people who agree with your policy positions, how are you going to lead a country filled with people who don't?

Another Question Worth Asking

Petty? Bickering? You sure he was talking about the fringes of the far left?

Another Question Worth Asking

Do the numerous lefties who say that "politics isn't/shouldn't be a popularity contest" listen to what they are saying?

The Origin of the Origin of the AIDS Myth

I was listening to Talk of the Nation Science Friday. Jon Moore, a Professor of Microbiology at Cornell University Hospital was on discussing the state of the art in AIDS treatment. He said something that surprised me. It seems that the source of the myth that the US created AIDS is actually well known.

He said it was a propaganda campaign from the old KGB coordinated by the Stasi, the German Secret Police. This is from the book Comrade Kryuchkov's Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975-1985 published by Stanford University Press.

[Service A's] main triumphs occurred in the Third World where it was able to tap a rich vein of anti-Americanism and anti-imperialism, combined with receptiveness to conspiracy theory about the West. In 1983, Service A began to disseminate the claim that AIDS virus had been 'manufactured' at Fort Detrick,Maryland. The story was slow to take off. But form late 1985 onwards it swept the Third World as well as taking in some Western media. In the first six months of 1987 alone, the AIDS fabrication received major news coverage in over forty Third World countries.

The source for this revelation is former KGB Col. Oleg Gordievsky, who was also a double agent for British intelligence.

Question Worth Asking

How do you combat a pernicious misperception when facts don't do the trick?

Another Question Worth Asking

How many people have died for this clever bit of spy craft in support of a government that no longer exists?

Another Question Worth Asking

Do the people who cooked this up still find it funny, or only then?

Another Question Worth Asking

Have the lives saved come anywhere close to the lives lost because of covert intelligence agencies?

Popular Will

The American working man needs defending, and the army of supporters is vast.

Well mostly from rich people. Rich media people. Rich foppish, WASPy millionaire elite fanboys of the supernal Homo Americanus.

That man is George F. Will. Barack Obama only the second non-millionaire to win his party's endorsement for President in since 1964 impugned their impugnable honor:

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Awww! Burn! And sliming the man's wife isn't all he's got: Will has more:

What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

Will's column is a bravura performance. He bludgeons Obama with FDR, marries Bhim to the ineffectual -and equally weirdly named- Adlai Stevenson, makes a brief detour to kick the corpse of Marxism, before watching the glory of the American sun set over heroic Muncie, Indiana.

Of course this about the bitter comment. But what truly was he saying? Sometimes people's economic interests aren't the only thing that determines their vote.

Clearly this is some new post-racial creeping fascism? Will has surely done it this time and relegated the quasi-fascist ideology of liberalism to history's ash can.

I do like Jonathan Chait's response to Will in the New Republic called Popular Will -

[C]onservatives routinely express their fury that a majority of Jews stubbornly flout their own "self-interest"--defined as low tax rates and a maximally hawkish Middle East policy--to vote Democratic. The process of trying to persuade others to reconsider the nature of their self-interest is not some Marxist exercise or an accusation of false consciousness. It's what we call "democracy."

Question worth asking:

Can we stop using Brazil to illustrate inequality and instead wave our hands around and say,"mmhmmm"?

Another Question Worth Asking:

In a speech in 2007 Warren Buffett pointed out that his tax rate was 17.7 per cent while his secretary was taxed at 30 per cent. Does he hate working people too?