My reading list

Off Topic
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Here’s a short list. Enjoy!
Even the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (their version of our Royal Society of Canada), which doesn’t usually get involved in current affairs, slammed the Bush government for their unilateralist ways:

http://www.amacad.org/publications/monographs/War_with_Iraq.pdf
& there is a bunch of related stuff here:
http://www.amacad.org/publications/occasional.htm

Barry Eichengreen, George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science @ U of California, Berkeley published an article comparing the level of international integration 100 years ago with what it is today:

A report commissioned by former US Secretary of State James Baker and the Council on Foreign Relations entitled “Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For The 21st Century” is submitted to Vice President Cheney in April 2001. The report is linked to a veritable who’s who of US hawks, oilmen and corporate bigwigs. (just scroll down to the bottom). The report says the “central dilemma” for the US administration is that “the American people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or inconvenience.” It warns that the US is running out of oil, with a painful end to cheap fuel already in sight. It argues that “the United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma,” and that one of the “consequences” of this is a “need for military intervention” to secure its oil supply. It argues that Iraq needs to be overthrown so the US can control its oil. Is it a coincidence that something happened just 5 months later that gave them a perfect excuse to dominate Central Asia (1st time in world history that a force not indiginous to that area has done that btw) & Iraq? I don’t know.

Here’s the report anyway:
http://www.rice.edu/projects/baker/Pubs/workingpapers/cfrbipp_energy/energytf.htm

Like the others, it’s heavy-duty reading & you can go through it if you want, but there are summaries in the Sunday Herald (Scottish Indy media):
http://www.sundayherald.com/28224
and the Sydney Morning Herald:

“…In the short run U.S. incarceration lowers conventional unemployment measures by removing able-bodied, working-age men from labor force counts. In the long run, social survey data show that incarceration raises unemployment by reducing the job prospects of ex-convicts. Strong U.S. employment performance in the 1980s and 1990s has thus depended in part on a high and increasing incarceration rate.”
&
“This argument suggests that incarceration has lowered US unemployment rate, but also implies that sustained low unemployment in the future will depend on continuing expansion of the US penal system.”
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/seminars/western.pdf American Journal of Sociology, 1999 104: 1030-60.

National Security Archive @ George Washington U:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

The Daily Mislead:
http://www.misleader.org

Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):

Democracy Now! radio TV & News:

(do a search for your favourite person)

CBC

ZMag
http://www.zmag.org

The Exile, Russian alternative media
http://www.exile.ru

William Blum (former State dept employee)'s homepage:
http://www.killinghope.org

Third World Traveller:
http://www.thirdworldtraveller.org

Centre for Cooperative Research, with the most complete 9-11 timelines I can find:

From the Wilderness:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/

Greg Palast, the reporter who broke the story about Bush stealing the 2000 election:
http://www.gregpalast.com

the Bush Administration’s neo-con think tank, Project for the New American Century:

& their report “Rebuilding America’s Defences” released in 2000 and including the quotation “…the process of transformation is likely to be a slow one, absent a catastrophic, catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.[or WTC attack]” (p.63 of the pdf)

“This War on Terror is Bogus” - former Blair cabiet minister Michael Meacher in the Guardian:

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Good, but what’s on your bookshelf. What kinds of history and political books have you read.

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I beleive someone asked for his reading list in another post, so that person probably cares.

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Hey thanks for coming out morg. Larryalavender asked for an essential reading list in case you were wondering.

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i guess larry cares

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I’m interested in seeing what some of the folks I disagree with are reading. I could guess some of it no doubt but it’s still interesting to see where folks are getting there info. Clearly some people are doing a lot of research. Aside from Michael Moore (really, too dumb to consider)and Chomsky, who are some of the major influences of the far left?

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Here are 2 from the CSIA Studies in International Security:
Richard Falkenrath, Graham Allison, Owen Cote Jr, Steven Miller. “Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy” CSIA Studies in International Security #12. MIT Press 1996.

Richard Falkenrath, Robert Newman, Bradley Thayer. “America’s Achilles Heel” BCSIA Studies in International Security #??. MIT Press 1998.

“Globalisation & its Discontents” - Joe Stiglitz

“Fast Food Nation” - Eric Schlosser

“The Best Democracy Money Can Buy” - Greg Palast

“The Vanishing Country: Is it Too Late to Save Canada?” - Mel Hurtig

“NoLogo” - Naomi Klein

“Fences & Windows” - Naomi Klein

“The War on Freedom” - Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed

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“how bush stole the 2000 election” LMAO hahaha. Get a life dude. Read something worthwhile. Not the trash you listed there. You can find crackhead intellectualls in any organziation, including in most think tanks. Me thinks you probably yearn for those extremes over any rational, level headed non revisionist thinker. Wheres your history books buddy. I hope you get stomped on by a homicidal moose for using such idiotic terms as “american holocaust.” Whats your background in froggie??? What did you study in school, what do you do for a living? Because noone has taught you how to analyze fact from fiction in any kind of academic setting.

10

You can see the BBC Newsnight documentary on Bush stealing the election here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnight/palast.ram

He (Palast) got a copy of the CD given to DBT (the private company who made the computerised voting machines) from Florida secretary of state & leader of the Florida Bush campaign Katherine Harris. It was full of known africans & democrats who were to be wiped off the voters list. Sorry you can’t deal with it. My condolences. :frowning:

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OK Larry, assuming you may disagree with my views so heres a short list of recent readings (limited mostly to books) as pertaining to foreign policy and history:

John Newhouse “Imperial America”

Gore Vidal “Last Empire”, “Dreaming War”

Howard Zinn “A Peoples History of the US” (for historical perspective" and “Terrorism & War” “Declarations of Independence”

Semour Hersh’s excellent pieces in the New Yorker

Robert Baer “Sleeping with the Devil”

Benajmin Barber “Jihad vs. McWorld” & “Fear’s Empire”

Robert Drinan “the Mobilization of Shame”

As to what Dubya hates? “Sitting down and reading a 500-page book on public policy or philosophy or something.” -1999 interview with Tucker Carlson. :slight_smile:

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Everyone read everything posted by MQ then you can think like him.

Brainwashing 101.

Now I did like the cbc.ca link. Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer is on tonight. Oh damn, in Canada.

But I did look at the link that finally tells me why you support Saddam.

“In 1956, only 19 years old, Saddam participated in a failed coup attempt against the monarchy of King Faisal II. A year later, he joined the socialist Baathist party. After taking part in an assassination attempt against Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, Saddam, still a young man of 22, had to flee the country.”

[i]http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/iraq/saddam_hussein.html[/i]

Saddam is a socialist. Finally I understand what is going on with your support. (Not love, support.) Like Stalin, Adolph (National Socialism), and Castro. Socialism is failing all over the world, and only the blind cannot see that.

13

OK, I’m in early this morning, so perhaps I will deal with some assumptions on one or two of these items:

You wrote:

“…In the short run U.S. incarceration lowers conventional unemployment measures by removing able-bodied, working-age men from labor force counts. In the long run, social survey data show that incarceration raises unemployment by reducing the job prospects of ex-convicts. Strong U.S. employment performance in the 1980s and 1990s has thus depended in part on a high and increasing incarceration rate.”
&
“This argument suggests that incarceration has lowered US unemployment rate, but also implies that sustained low unemployment in the future will depend on continuing expansion of the US penal system.”
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/politics/seminars/western.pdf American Journal of Sociology, 1999 104: 1030-60.

My reply: This whole argument is premised on the assumption that those incarcerated would be seeking jobs if they were not so incarcerated. This is a highly problematic assumption.

For the younger people, if not incarcerated and if successful criminals, they would likely not be seeking normal jobs, and thus would not show up on unemployment figures anyway. They would also be imposing the costs of their crime upon society, which I have never seen figured as a balance to the cost of incarceration. The costs criminals inflict on society are great, and run the gamut from higher insurance rates for property such as cars to the costs of replacement of stolen items to medical care for those injured and loss of production from those same injured or killed victims. Simple intimidation of the law abiding could be adding to such costs. Businesses with higher costs expand less rapidly and hire fewer workers than do businesses with lower costs in comparable situations. This would add to unemployment.

For older criminals, the assumption that they would actually survive to old age at the same rate they do if they are incarcerated is problematic. Criminals die younger on average than non criminals, and a lot of that is due to violent death at the hands of other criminals, or reduced life expectancy from injuries suffered at the hands of other criminals. Most violent criminals prey upon those in their own socioeconomic group – their neighbors, basically. You know, the same, unskilled, ethnic men that this article claims are most hurt by incarcerating felons. If not incarcerated, assuming that some of the later-released prisoners with “diminished job prospects” (what this means is that employers do not like to hire those with a criminal record – the solution here is to quit committing felonies) would die and remove themselves from the unemployment statistics is not highly debatable.

Finally, a lot of arguments in this article are seemingly based upon a high incarceration rate for drug offenders. To the extent they parse out small-time drug users, they are probably correct. To the extent they do not parse out large-scale traffickers or users, who likely would not be in the unemployment statistics (remember, you need to be actively seeking a real job to be in the unemployment measures), this is a flawed measure. In this case, they seemingly parse nothing, not even those who are convicted of multiple offenses, some of them violent, and also of drug charges.

A simplistic study such as the one you cited, that does not calculate any of the net effects on unemployment of keeping criminals loose on the street, is not useful. It’s not enough to merely read these articles and just swallow whatever claptrap they try to feed you. It is important to think critically about how the argument is constructed, what are its necessary assumptions, and whether the argument works overall given its problems. This one leaves too many factors out to establish anything.

14

You said:

He (Palast) got a copy of the CD given to DBT (the private company who made the computerised voting machines) from Florida secretary of state & leader of the Florida Bush campaign Katherine Harris. It was full of known africans & democrats who were to be wiped off the voters list. Sorry you can’t deal with it. My condolences. :frowning:

My reply: I read the Palast articles. This is silly. The whole argument is that: 1) Florida is attempting to remove ex-felons, who are barred from voting under its laws, from voting lists; 2) That it employs a procedure with some known failure rate; 3) Since Democrats are more likely to be affected, as the failures often result from misidentifying those with criminal records who have been pardoned or whose crimes did not rise to the level of removing their voting right, and Democrats and blacks are more likely than Republicans and whites to fall into the above categories; 4) Bush is a racist and is stealing elections.

Pure silliness. Any procedure effected to remove criminals from the voting list would have some small failure rate that would affect demographics with higher incidences of criminal records “disproportionately” from those with lower incidences of criminal records. This is not racism or conspiracy. This is a result of the population demographic in question having a higher incidence of criminal records.

This is especially true in FL, in which the effect would be exacerbated by the inclusion in the “white Republican” category of wealthy immigrant (to FL, not to the USA) white retirees, who are even less likely to have criminal records (and if they did, it is less likely that they would be searchable, given any incidences would be much more likely to have occurred in other states before computerized records).

Do you ever wonder why the National Democratic Party, which would supposedly worry that it was being sabotaged by such nefarious efforts by the evil genius Bush (wait, I thought he was just a stupid cowboy? I get confused on these things…), has not raised Holy Hell about such things? Perhaps it is because there is nothing too them if you think even the least bit critically about the claims.

Repeat after me: Conspiracy theories are ridiculous.

15

This one is the best.

You said:

the Bush Administration’s neo-con think tank, Project for the New American Century:

& their report “Rebuilding America’s Defences” released in 2000 and including the quotation “…the process of transformation is likely to be a slow one, absent a catastrophic, catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.[or WTC attack]” (p.63 of the pdf)

My reply:

I am not even going to read this. All I need is contained in your post (and besides, I need to start working). Your basic idea here seems to be that: 1) A neo-con think tank points out that we are more vulnerable to attacks because of the indisputable fact that our military was hugely downsized and weakened under the Clinton administration; 2) It looks at the historical record and sees, amazingly, that military buildups in the U.S. tend to happen more quickly after we’ve been attacked or are gearing up for a war; 3) It points out the most recent historical example of when we were attacked and said an event of that magnitude would lead to a quicker military buildup; and 4) We suffer a large-scale terrorist attack.

The implied conclusion is that because some thinktank noticed the massive spending reductions in the military and pointed out that attacks lead to more military spending [Side note: That took rocket scientists to figure out – I hope there was more to their study], and we then suffered a terrorist attack in relatively close temporal proximity to this revelation being published, someone in either the Bush Administration, the defense industry, or both.

Basically, this ignores all known facts in favor of implying some dark conspiracy on the basis of some think take pointing out the obvious.

Repeat after me: Conspiracy theories are ridiculous.

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I leave you with this – perhaps you can read it for me:

It’s an article on how to construct a logical argument. Actually, I hope everyone on this forum will read it, chimerical as that hope may be.

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B. Barrister, I must take issue with one of your points. Quote “because of the indisputable fact that our military was hugely downsized and weakened under the Clinton.”

This was one of the main charges by Bush in order to play on the fears of the public, but alas it is not true.

Yes, in sheer personel numbers the military was downsized, but according to many in the military it was changed for the better, to one that can move quicker and deal with smaller scale insurgencies.
(By the way I’m no big fan of Clinton)

From the Council on Foreign Affairs: “Summary: Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton presided over a disastrous downsizing of the U.S. military. But this claim is wrong. In fact, Clinton’s Pentagon maintained high levels of readiness and enacted a bold military modernization program that bore fruit in Bosnia and Kosovo – and in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

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“This whole argument is premised on the assumption that those incarcerated would be seeking jobs if they were not so incarcerated. This is a highly problematic assumption.”
I’m not the Princeton sociologist who got published in a mainstream respected journal, you can see his homepage (& email address…) here if you want to discuss it with him:
http://www.princeton.edu/~western/
He specialises in finding out how institutions in general shape labour market outcomes.

“I read the Palast articles. This is silly.”
One more time, the BBC Newsnight show that he made is here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/newsnight/palast.ram

“The implied conclusion is that because some thinktank noticed the massive spending reductions in the military and pointed out that attacks lead to more military spending, and we then suffered a terrorist attack in relatively close temporal proximity to this revelation being published, someone in either the Bush Administration, the defense industry, or both.”
I wouldn’t pay attention to the think tank if it weren’t created by Rumsfeld in 1997 & many of the people in the Bush government were involved in it, like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Fred Ikle & many others. One of Blair’s former ministers wrote about this in the Guardian here:

the Presidential Daily Briefings papers for August 6, 2001 are the ones that everyone wants released because they’ve got all the details on what kind of attack Osama would make in case you were wondering.

& that one you put up is just a bunch of predicate calculus; I learned all that in 1st year. hehe

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Kuri- I’m not so sure that I agree with your last post. One of our last missle launches against Bosnia, I believe, was being drastically shortened due to the lack of Tomahawk missles available thanks to a downsized defense budget. The movement towards dealing with small-scale insurgencies was actually started under JFK with the formation of SF, and has, as the articel noted, borne some tremendous rewards. However, I believe that a complete re-vamping of the military to deal only with “small-scale insurgencies” is a mistake. A small-scale insurgency can quickly escalate into something mucj larger. Like Somalia or Iraq. My main fear is that the military will, in the future, be asked to perform a job for which they are ill-prepared.

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kuri: I had a grad class with Dr. Barber this semester, and have read Jihad vs. McWorld… I don’t think he’s quite as anti-Bush etc. as you may think he is…