On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…

I never leave home without my pocket-sized copy of our Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution And Citizenship Day.
A Day Set Aside for the Constitution.

Protagoras argues persuasively:

To make strong claims about… social reality… you will need to present examples and these can be made vivid if expressed in the form of stories. The most effective – combined with other evidence and information – help bring clearly to mind something you want the audience to think about more, to sympathise with or to see in a new way. They help to establish a picture of a situation and a definition of reality on the basis of which conclusions may be drawn.

Stories come in many genres. They may be little comedies or tragedies, homely confirmations of what “everybody knows” or unexpected revelations. It is important to be sure that your story is emotionally in tune with the rest of your argument (rather than a substitute for it). And it certainly must not dominate.

One of the more annoying techniques of politicians is to use purely personal experience as an anecdotal exemplar – as if, just because the politician “got on their bike”, we must accept that everyone could or should do likewise. Stories about the speaker may be fine for entertaining dinner speeches (on the way to which a really funny thing happened), but they have a limited place in argumentative speeches where the good character of a speaker should be evident and not need explicit mention.

Previously…

Bill Maher writes:

New rule: 12 years after 9/11, and amidst yet another debate on whether to bomb yet another Muslim country, America must stop asking the question, “Why do they hate us?” Forget the debate on Syria, we need a debate on why we’re always debating whether to bomb someone. Because we’re starting to look not so much like the world’s policeman, but more like George Zimmerman: itching to use force and then pretending it’s because we had no choice.

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. p. 3

From The Myth Of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Robert Reich writes:

All major social-change movements in American history that widened opportunity and made this a more just society — women’s suffrage, the labor union movement, the civil rights movement, the anti Vietnam War movement, the environmental movement, the gay rights movement — have depended, to some extent, on leaders who helped guide them, and decision-making structures that provided discipline and strategy for those who joined.

These movements could sustain themselves over many years, sometimes many decades, because they consciously maintained hope on the basis of small but concrete victories, built their numbers by choosing their battles carefully, and kept their eyes on the big prizes. They educated the public about what was at stake, and then used public pressure to push elected representatives.

Occupy served an important purpose, but lacking these essentials it couldn’t do more. Inequality is worse now than it was then, and our democracy in as much if not more peril. So what’s the next step?

Michael Moore writes:

On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired every member of the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) who’d defied his order to return to work and declared their union illegal. They had been on strike for just two days.

It was a bold and brash move. No one had ever tried it. What made it even bolder was that PATCO was one of only three unions that had endorsed Reagan for president! It sent a shock wave through workers across the country. If he would do this to the people who were with him, what would he do to us?

Reagan had been backed by Wall Street in his run for the White House and they, along with right-wing Christians, wanted to restructure America and turn back the tide that President Franklin D. Roosevelt started — a tide that was intended to make life better for the average working person. The rich hated paying better wages and providing benefits. They hated paying taxes even more. And they despised unions. The right-wing Christians hated anything that sounded like socialism or holding out a helping hand to minorities or women.

Reagan promised to end all that. So when the air traffic controllers went on strike, he seized the moment. In getting rid of every single last one of them and outlawing their union, he sent a clear and strong message: The days of everyone having a comfortable middle class life were over. America, from now on, would be run this way:

The super-rich will make more, much much more, and the rest of you will scramble for the crumbs that are left.

Everyone must work! Mom, Dad, the teenagers in the house! Dad, you work a second job! Kids, here’s your latch-key! Your parents might be home in time to put you to bed.

50 million of you must go without health insurance! And health insurance companies: you go ahead and decide who you want to help — or not.

Unions are evil! You will not belong to a union! Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

I don’t tweet. I’m not a twitterer.

Tweeting scares me.

Why? Because I might – indeed, almost assuredly would – post something I’ll regret. It’s the quickness of the shot. So I stay away.

Plus it seems juvenile. Can’t you write something more detailed and conclusive? Are these quick quips really reporting? I guess they can be.

There is a definite attraction to tweeting though. It’s quick. You can say something provocative without having to spell it out. The way it seems to me. It gives the reader responsibility to decipher.

What would I tweet if I did twitter? Let’s see. I’m told this is how it goes:

The Plain Dealer has become less interesting
as a 4-day a week paper, if that’s possible.
And it apparently it is. Because they’ve done it.

Maybe they help by not making it necessary
to read daily. Saves time. What’s happening
with the PD now? A question seemingly on many minds.

The PD chose a weird way
to attack a problem
all papers now have.

People I talk to – not that many, I admit
– say they don’t bother with the paper
if it isn’t delivered.

If it isn’t a hard copy. I find myself spending
less time with the e-edition
(Northeast Ohio Media Group – sounds awful, too).

Does this economic decision really
destroy the advantage of producing a delivered
paper (the paper Plain Dealer in a blue bag)? I think so.

The breakup of the staff –
a web non-union staff and a newspaper Guild staff –
creates a division that seems to me destructive.

People, I’m told, work without the advantage
of a newsroom. No newsroom? Those who’ve gone the
web-way aren’t eligible to join the Guild.

Some consider those who jumped that way scabs.
No city room where reporters come, roam, bump up against colleagues,
exchange information… Continue Reading »

Protagoras argues persuasively:

In making an argument you are trying to bring three things into alignment: yourself, your words and your audience. You are trying to move your audience so that it is in agreement with you – but to do that you need to move too. And between you – what moves you both – is a form of words and a set of arguments. If you are inflexible, using words and making references that are completely at odds with your audience you won’t persuade anybody of anything (except of the view that you are unconvincing and unintelligible).

Previously…

Protagoras argues persuasively:

In a democracy, rather than force or bribe people to assent to our ideology, we try to win them over through persuasion. That can be a challenge. It requires us to understand where other people are coming from and to develop arguments that are outward-facing.

Not everyone thinks as we do. People have different experiences and possess different information; they have different values and do not always share our criteria of judgment. To persuade them we have to make connections with our audience – with what they might think, feel and be familiar with. This is not about tricking people or fooling them. It is about truly persuading them to share our views on a particular issue – and that means developing a relationship.

A glance at the newspapers and much of the internet demonstrates, however, that many people think the purpose of public communication is to reflect well on themselves – to announce their own importance, specialness or cleverness. An infamous academic chooses not to be convincing but to increase his brand value by performing provocatively; a troll communicates publicly but seeks only private “lulz”; shouting things your audience already believes, yet pretending that you’re not allowed to say them, seems to be an easy route to success on talk radio or the op-ed pages. But the only thing such people are saying with their arguments is “look at me!”

Protagoras continues:

True persuasion is democratic. In giving people reasons to act with us we recognise that they aren’t inferiors who can be compelled but thinking, feeling and speaking beings. And true persuasion is an art. Contrary to the books on the self-help and business psychology shelves there are no magic “words that work”. You have to cultivate an “eye”, developing a feel for situations and empathy for those you want to persuade. The name of that art is “rhetoric”.

I’m finding this series in The Guardian fascinating.

John Pilger suggests:

Under the “weak” Obama, militarism has risen perhaps as never before. With not a single tank on the White House lawn, a military coup has taken place in Washington. In 2008, while his liberal devotees dried their eyes, Obama accepted the entire Pentagon of his predecessor, George Bush: its wars and war crimes. As the constitution is replaced by an emerging police state, those who destroyed Iraq with shock and awe, piled up the rubble in Afghanistan and reduced Libya to a Hobbesian nightmare, are ascendant across the US administration. Behind their beribboned facade, more former US soldiers are killing themselves than are dying on battlefields. Last year 6,500 veterans took their own lives. Put out more flags.

The historian Norman Pollack calls this “liberal fascism”: “For goose-steppers substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manqué, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.” Every Tuesday the “humanitarian” Obama personally oversees a worldwide terror network of drones that “bugsplat” people, their rescuers and mourners. In the west’s comfort zones, the first black leader of the land of slavery still feels good, as if his very existence represents a social advance, regardless of his trail of blood. This obeisance to a symbol has all but destroyed the US anti-war movement – Obama’s singular achievement.

More than 50 years ago Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey wrote the political thriller Seven Days In May. Perhaps the book will see a renaissance similar to that enjoyed by George Orwell’s 1984.

Cory Doctorow writes:

This gave me an idea for a more general service: a dead man’s switch to help fight back in the war on security. This service would allow you to register a URL by requesting a message from it, appending your own public key to it and posting it to that URL.

Once you’re registered, you tell the dead man’s switch how often you plan on notifying it that you have not received a secret order, expressed in hours. Thereafter, the service sits there, quietly sending a random number to you at your specified interval, which you sign and send back as a “No secret orders yet” message. If you miss an update, it publishes that fact to an RSS feed.

Such a service would lend itself to lots of interesting applications. Muck-raking journalists could subscribe to the raw feed, looking for the names of prominent services that had missed their nothing-to-see-here deadlines. Security-minded toolsmiths could provide programmes that looked through your browser history and compared it with the URLs registered with the service and alert you if any of the sites you visit ever show up in the list of possibly-compromised sites.

No one’s ever tested this approach in court, and I can’t say whether a judge would be able to distinguish between “not revealing a secret order” and “failing to note the absence of a secret order”, but in US jurisprudence, compelling someone to speak a lie is generally more fraught with constitutional issues than compelled silence about the truth.

We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther Kings’ I have a dream speech. The speech was a powerful speech. I would wager that more Americans, black or white, can quote the catch phrase of that speech — I have a dream — than any other words spoken by any other African American any where or any time.

The speech is inspirational, soaring, perhaps even transformational, but another black man in another city, speaking other words less than eight months later, gave blacks the more important, and in President Barack Hussein Obama’s America, the vitally more critical message:

Why does it look like it might be the year of the ballot or the bullet? Because Negroes have listened to the trickery and the lies and the false promises of the white man now for too long, and they’re fed up. They’ve become disenchanted. They’ve become disillusioned. They’ve become dissatisfied. And all of this has built up frustrations in the black community that makes the black community throughout America today more explosive than all of the atomic bombs the Russians can ever invent. Whenever you got a racial powder keg sitting in your lap, you’re in more trouble than if you had an atomic powder keg sitting in your lap. When a racial powder keg goes off, it doesn’t care who it knocks out the way. Understand this, it’s dangerous.

And in 1964, this seems to be the year. Because what can the white man use, now, to fool us? After he put down that March on Washington – and you see all through that now, he tricked you, had you marching down to Washington. Had you marching back and forth between the feet of a dead man named Lincoln and another dead man named George Washington, singing, “We Shall Overcome.”

He made a chump out of you. He made a fool out of you. He made you think you were going somewhere and you end up going nowhere but between Lincoln and Washington.

So today our people are disillusioned. They’ve become disenchanted. They’ve become dissatisfied. And in their frustrations they want action. And in 1964 you’ll see this young black man, this new generation, asking for the ballot or the bullet. That old Uncle Tom action is outdated. The young generation don’t want to hear anything about “the odds are against us.” What do we care about odds?

No, Malcolm X did not think much of Dr. King’s speech and, nearly half-a-century later I think Malcolm’s words are the more important. His The Ballot Or The Bullet speech was the more prophetic, the more insightful, the more meaningful, and, come next April, on the 50th anniversary of Malcolm’s words in Detroit’s King Solomon Baptist Church, in an all-important primary season as the membership of the Congress is reset, all Americans, disenfranchised by money and power and privilege, ought to remember this speech.

Robert Reich writes:

No company, least of all a giant Wall Street bank, will eschew a chance to make a tidy profit unless the probability of getting caught and prosecuted, multiplied times the amount of any potential penalty, is greater than the expected profits.

Have we learned nothing since September, 2008? Five years ago this month Wall Street almost went under. We bailed it out. Millions of Americans are still suffering the consequences of the Street’s excesses. Yet the Street’s top guns and fat cats are still treating the economy as their own private casino, and raking in even more than before.

The fact is, the giant Wall Street banks are ungovernable — too big to fail, too big to jail, too big to curtail. They should be split up, and their size capped. There’s no need to wait for Congress to do it; the nation’s antitrust laws are adequate to the job. There is ample precedent. In 1911 we split up Standard Oil. In 1982 we split up Ma Bell. The Federal Reserve has authority to do it on its own in any event.

Just as we confiscate the “criminal tools” — cars, computers, houses, boats — of drug dealers, we should take the profits, and all material tools used in amassing those profits, of any bankers found guilty of financial crimes. Then, and only then, will the banking industry begin to approach a state of fair and honest dealing.

Tim Adams writes:

What Ryan knew of relationships, and of women, he had mostly learned from his daily immersion in adult videos, picked from a menu to suit all conceivable tastes, none of which any longer held much curiosity for him. He acknowledged a sadness in himself about all this, but he was addicted all the same; it appeared abnormal not to want to watch. When Kidron followed Ryan back out on to the street, and on to the tube, he appeared to carry everything he had seen with him. “I’ve ruined the sense of love,” he tells Kidron at one point. He approaches potential girlfriends in the same manner he surfs his favourite websites, always restless, always looking for the excitement of the perfect transaction, always vaguely disappointed.

I’ve long subscribed to the thesis that Google the Internet makes us stupid, but the idea that the web makes us sad has given me pause.