Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 117

RT Gets Colbert Bump

If you missed ex-RT anchor Liz Wahl with Stephen last night on "propaganda" and Putin. 


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11 Years Ago: Krugman Warned of Aftermath of Attack on Iraq

Every year at this time I look back at the pre-war Iraq punditry--for much more on the media malpractice see my new book--of various NYT columnists this month (Brooks and Friedman bad, Dowd good) and now we get to Paul Krugman, a newcomer back then.  How'd he do?  Amazingly, even before WMD were not found, he was that rare U.S. pundit to write something like this, charging that from the Bushites "we got assertions about a nuclear program that turned out to be based on flawed or faked evidence; we got assertions about a link to Al Qaeda that people inside the intelligence services regard as nonsense. Yet those serial embarrassments went almost unreported by our domestic news media....And once the shooting starts, the already loud chorus that denounces any criticism as unpatriotic will become deafening."

Below are other excerpts from his March 18, 2003, column.

What frightens me is the aftermath -- and I'm not just talking about the problems of postwar occupation. I'm worried about what will happen beyond Iraq -- in the world at large, and here at home.  The members of the Bush team don't seem bothered by the enormous ill will they have generated in the rest of the world. They seem to believe that other countries will change their minds once they see cheering Iraqis welcome our troops, or that our bombs will shock and awe the whole world (not just the Iraqis) or that what the world thinks doesn't matter. They're wrong on all counts...

Meanwhile, consider this: we need $400 billion a year of foreign investment to cover our trade deficit, or the dollar will plunge and our surging budget deficit will become much harder to finance -- and there are already signs that the flow of foreign investment is drying up, just when it seems that America may be about to fight a whole series of wars.

Greg Mitchell’s book So Wrong For So Long , on the media and the Iraq war, was published last week in an expanded edition for the first time as an e-book.  

The Best Way to Rob a Bank

Here's a chance to get a quick and dirty education in the real reasons behind the worldwide financial meltdown. Be prepared to hear the "f" word quite a lot, as in "fraud." That $11 trillion the public lost, along with 10 million job losses? Completely avoidable. 
So says William Black, former director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention who now teaches Economics and Law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. In this TEDx talk, based on his all-too-prescient book, The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One, he explains how banks instigate recurring and intensifying financial crises. Their weapon of choice? Accounting. Follow this recipe:
1) grow like crazy
2) make or buy crappy loans at a high rate
3) use leverage
4) keep only trivial reserves to cover your losses
Follow this recipe, and "you are mathematically guaranteed" to report record bank profits; CEOs will be made massively wealthy, and the bank will eventually suffer massive losses. Rinse, repeat.  (h/t @nakedcapitalism) -- Barbara Bedway

2 Dead, 23 Injured in Drunk Driver Crash at SXSW

News here.  I will update.   Home page of Austin paper.   Police chief's briefiing.  Did police recklessly chase in this crowded area?  Man and woman on a moped dead, 5 still critical.  Suspect fled on foot, tasted, and captured.  Will be charged with two counts of capital murder and face death penalty.  Police chief asks witnesses to not just post stuff on social media but contact police with videos, photos, eyewitness accounts.  Audio of police dispatches during chase.   “Austin definitely has a drunk-driving problem,” Lt. Derek Galloway, the head of the DWI Unit for the APD’s Highway Enforcement Command, told the Austin Monthly last year. “Your biggest issues are in the downtown area.”

Police chief  Art Acevedo:  “We do these events very well but you cannot stop a person who rather than face drunk driving charges decides to speed at a high rate of speed, go around a uniformed officer forcing him to run out of the way, then at a high rate of speed show total disregard for the sanctity of human life.”   Note: I was invited to be on a panel but could not attend.

Video of scene just after it happened (naturally music by X still going on at club there):

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'Scuse Me, While I Lick This Guy

New USPS "forever" stamp for Jimi Hendrix unveiled--on sale today--tribute concert at SXSW also Thursday.

McClatchy With CIA/White House Exclusive

Frankly, I am not enough up to speed on this week's developments to be able to say much about how this advances the story but I'm told that it does and just seeing Jonathan Landay's by-line seems like a good indicator.  Excerpt:

The White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege.

In contrast to public assertions that it supports the committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found.

The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.

The dispute indicates that the White House is more involved than it has acknowledged in the unprecedented power struggle between the committee and the CIA,

Cohle Hearted Woman

Cynthia McCabe offers this synopsis (below) of the entire True Detective season...in emoji.  Now, do your own!

Oh, Beehave

My sister and her intrepid friends (left) who made their first foray into beekeeping in Ohio last year will surely be intrigued by a new software program that's designed to help beekeepers and bee fans everywhere understand what makes a colony thrive, or fail. Called, yes, BEEHAVE, Pacific Standard reports that the software simulates a colony's whole life, "with models for the queen laying eggs, nurse bees attending to her brood, foragers collecting nectar and pollen, and allows users to throw in stressors like food shortages, mite infestations, pesticides, and diseases to see how their digital bees fare over time in different contexts." 
With bees, the world’s primary pollinators, used commercially to grow more than $200 billion worth of crops each year, a lot is riding on solving the mystery of why the bee population is in perilous decline. Field research is the most crucial tool, but programs like BEEHAVE  allow users "to test and analyse the effects of a variety of factors and interactions between them in a fast and cost-effective way.”
You can watch the entire lifespan of a honeybee colony play out in seconds, which is a lot easier than gathering data over years, not to mention actually doing the hard work of bee raising. My sister and her friends will start again this year, after last year's valiant but failed attempt. 
BEEHAVE's  researchers designed the program--free to download http://beehave-model.net/--so it can be updated, expanded, and user-friendly enough so that non-bee experts can explore the mysteries of what makes a hive thrive.

Firebombing USA

For over thirty years now, I have written hundreds if not thousands of articles about the atomic bombing of Japan and its aftermath there and in the USA, plus three books.  In this time, like most others, I have probably shortchanged the massive firebombing of Japan, even though the firebombing of German cities has received a good deal of notice, perhaps because it's Europe.  Now here's a fresh corrective at a key site, which attempts to show the scale of the bombing by comparing the results to comparable U.S. cities. 

Back Door Man

Colbert roasts "Huffing Post" for report on "hottest" trend on campus...anal sex?


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