Addendum

Let me be perfectly fair. Considering the similarities in the responses to Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, it's entirely possible that sheer incompetence is the only reason Haiti is being occupied right now.

After Katrina, the National Guard sealed off the city and preventing anyone from getting in or out. Even the Red Cross was not allowed in at first. Residents attempting to flee the city were turned back at gunpoint. Meanwhile, private mercenaries poured into the city to protect the property of the town's wealthiest citizens. Four days passed before any serious rescue effort was mounted. It was ten days before they began fishing bodies out of the toxic soup.

I'm entirely willing to accept the possibility that the militarization of the relief effort in Haiti is simply due to gross incompetence on the part of the federal government when it comes to responding to disasters. But I tend to be too cynical to embrace the possibility that bad things happen in Washington "on accident." My hunch is that the 15,000 troops in Haiti will continue to be there throughout the reconstruction effort, which will probably be neoliberal in orientation and therefore highly unpopular among the mass of Haitian poor. That former president Clinton has been praising sweat shop labor in that country as "economic progress" in the media seems to validate my suspicions. My guess is Haiti will emerge from this tragedy even more economically dependent than before, if that is even possible.

Random Crap

Here's a truly astounding article from the Wall Street Journal denouncing the Obama Administration's conduct in Haiti, astounding because most criticism of the occupation has been levied by the left, and the WSJ is of course anything but. And with 15,000 troops in Haiti by now, that it is an occupation is a fact that takes real talent to miss.

Speaking of which:

Here's another astounding article, but for different reasons. USA Today notes the history of Marine involvement in Haiti and manages not to recoil in horror. According to them, "The Corps governed Haiti from 1915 to 1934 after an invasion force was sent to prevent an anti-American dictator from assuming power. Young, non-commissioned officers governed Haiti with little supervision." Marines built "roads, bridges and schools," but "many" of the ungrateful Haitians viewed it as "imperialism." They also note the role the Marines played in the 2004 coup that overthrew the popular Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, except they describe their role with the Orwellian term "to prevent massacres." Of particular interest is this little nugget from one Lt. Col. Gary Keim: "We were required to reread [the 1915 Marine occupation] ... We've been here before. We've been successful before." It does not bode well for the "relief effort" if the US military is preparing for it by revisiting one of the more shameful chapters of American history.

Also:

Here's something that makes my blood boil. The Federal government has awarded the state of Louisiana 474 million dollars for damages to Charity Hospital during Hurricane Katrina. This means that the state now has enough money to renovate Charity and build a state-of-the-art facility within the old shell. Instead, they are going to sit on the money for years, trying to float hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds that nobody will go for, to finance the brand spanking new LSU/VA hospital, to be built for 300 million more than the cost of renovating Charity, be completed 4 and a half years later, and built upon land currently occupied by 200 mid-city houses to boot.

I know people who know people who think that the levees were deliberately dynamited to push the working poor of New Orleans off of their land. This is a grandiose, yet entirely understandable misconception, considering the net effect of the recovery has been to push thousands of lower and lower-middle class residents off their land and out of the city altogether. This is all done in the name of "cleaning up the city," and is received with much applause by the New Orleanian middle and upper classes. The irony is, of course, that one could make a far more convincing argument that it is the New Orleanian middle and upper classes that should be kicked out in the name of "cleaning up the city," seeing as the degeneration of New Orleans into an economic and cultural backwater is entirely their fault. It isn't as though the poor visit these problems upon themselves. The extensive, miserable poverty in New Orleans is due to centuries of mismanagement of the city's resources by the local elite. As late as the mid 19th century many New Orleans streets were still paved with wood.

The middle class would counter this argument by saying that everything was fine until them uppity niggers started voting in people like Nagin and Dutch Morial, but this is an absurd mischaracterization of the way that American elections work. Candidates for offices of any consequence must first be vetted by moneyed interests before they can run a successful campaign. Therefore, the ruling elites in America essentially hold veto power over candidates' campaigns. Besides, in the case of Nagin, it was the conservative white vote, which was encouraged to vote for Nagin by the Louisiana GOP, which proved the crucial swing factor in the election. The New Orleanian elites are deluded to the extreme if they think they have earned the hegemonic right to shape the future of the city.

Supporters Groups And Sports Culture

I watch a lot of soccer. The game itself is pretty entertaining, but what really intrigues me when I watch a match from Europe or Latin America is what goes on in the stands.

Soccer fans are nuts. One almost never sees this kind of hardcore dedication in the United States (and there is a fine line between dedication and punching a fan from the opposing side in the face). Here's a good example of what I mean:

1. FC Union Berlin is a club with a lot of history. During its years in the East German soccer leagues, it was supported by the local Berlin trade unions. It carried on a bitter rivalry with Dynamo Berlin, which was supported by the Stasi, or the secret police. Union fans, whenever they played Dynamo, would sing thinly veiled anti-Soviet songs in the stands as police with dogs patrolled up and down the aisles.

Skip ahead to 2008. Union Berlin's stadium, the Stadion An der Alten Föresterei (Stadium Near the Old Forester's House), is crumbling. The cinderblock terracing can barely support the weight of the 15,000 or so fans that show up to Union's games. The club decides to renovate the stadium. Rather than pay construction companies money to do the job, the club instead uses approximately 2000 fan volunteers to carry out most of the necessary renovation.

Could you ever imagine something like this happening with an American sports team? It can't be done. And there's a reason for this. In Germany, sports teams are actual clubs that people can join, and in fact many teams require that a person purchase a club membership before he can purchase game tickets. Fans are treated as partners and stakeholders by the clubs because they actually are partners and stakeholders. American sports teams operate differently. Sports executives in America treat sporting events like a commodity to be consumed passively. This is so ingrained in their thinking that in recent years it has resulted in a marketing tactic called "sensory overload," wherein noisy music is pumped into the stadium through the PA system because it literally never occurs to the executives that it is the fans that should be making all of the noise themselves. Spectators in the United States are expected to be passive consumers. If you tried to do the things they do in Europe and Latin America, like hoist banners, light flares, stand or sing songs throughout the entire game, you would probably be kicked out. Take your free bobblehead, maybe buy a t-shirt, get a hotdog, whatever. Just don't do anything unexpected or spontaneous.

Fortunately, there are germs of a better sports culture in the North America. Fans of MLS clubs, for example, tend to imitate their European cousins and stand and sing the entire game, raise banners, and occasionally light flares. Fans of Toronto FC in particular have gained notoriety for their drunken, often ill-advised revelry. But this is all good, in my mind. If the growth of soccer in the United States means introducing soccer traditions such as tifos and ultras, then I am all for the growth of the sport here. It would inject some vitality in our moribund sporting culture.

Movie Review: Kickboxer from Hell

Fun fact about this movie: it's actually two movies in one, with original scenes spliced together with a redub of an old Japanese horror movie. It's actually painfully obvious, but it's probably the most interesting thing about this movie.

So the film starts out with a woman running through the woods, doing her best to convince us that she is frightened but falling far short of the mark. You can only do so much when you're being chased by a bunch of Indian guides wearing shirts made out of potato sacks.

She wanders into a clearing where our two manly heroes are doing manly stuff like punching each other in the middle of the woods.

Soon Chief Shitting Bull (pictured) catches up with her, and he and Manly Man #1 exchange such pleasantries as "fuck" and "asshole." Then they duke it out while this guy watches, much to my delight:

Blah blah blah, Manly Man wins, the other guys step in, but the Chief yells "Stop! Leave him for Lucifer," blah blah...wait, what? What exactly was this lady doing? We soon find out, but not before a long-winded, context-less interlude about some Japanese dumb asses who buy a haunted house (HERE'S A HINT FOLKS: THE PRESENCE OF DEMON LADIES DOES NOT HELP YOUR RESALE VALUE) After we return to Whitey White Land, our damsel in distress drops this bombshell:

She's a nun, working undercover for the devil

A nun, working undercover for the devil.

The Caddo Tribe apparently wanted to sacrifice her. But all that isn't half as stupid and ridiculous as M.M.#1's response:

Blah Blah Blah, the Japanese are still scared, blah blah blah, hey check this guy out:

The bad guy in this movie is Gene Simmons?

And his head henchman is Val Kilmer reprising his role as Iceman from Top Gun. Meh. I've seen worse. Anyway, that's all I need to know. Let's skip to the big finish:

M.M. kills Satan by destroying his magic candles. Makes sense.

Anyway, not the worst flick I've seen. Definitely worth the two bucks I paid for it.

State of the Union

Quick thought about last night's State of the Union speech:

Is anybody else creeped out by these things? I mean, what with the Glorious Leader descending from on high to tell the masses what a great job he's doing to thunderous applause? It's all a very bald-faced propaganda stunt, if you ask me.

Put in this light, one might say "I would expect such an affair from a country like the Soviet Union but not the United States," but that would imply a fundamental misunderstanding of the way our democracy works, specifically, how our democracy operates within very narrow boundaries. The parties themselves, of course, are highly centralized and operate undemocratically. Between elections, it is the party bureaucracy that engages in social decision-making, not the public. Democracy in America (and in most modern democracies) thus amounts to choosing between a government of one or the other tyrannies, similar in this one fundamental respect to Medieval European states that were ruled by elected monarchs. A truly democratic society implies rule by the people, not rule by parties.

A few suggestions come to mind that have their roots in colonial-era democracy. First, give the people the right to instruct their legislators. The people themselves should choose directly the platforms that their delegate to congress will push for. Second, give the people the right to recall their legislators if they find their performance unsatisfactory. Third and perhaps most importantly, invest local legislative power in town meetings. The rationale behind representative democracy is that direct democracy at a national level is too cumbersome; at a local level, this rationale does not hold (and even at a national level, this argument is severely weakened by advances in communications technology). At a local level, therefore, the best form of government is direct democracy. Furthermore, only by interacting with government directly through legislating rather than indirectly through voting do the people acquire a political sophistication necessary to the health of a democracy.

New Orleans Music

To start off with, here's a huge list of songs about the Saints, headlined by "All I Want For Christmas" by Kermit Ruffins.

This guy is a lot of fun to listen to.

This song is adorable.

Also, Bust Down:

What.

The Saints are in the Superbowl. What.

I screamed loud and hard when this happened (and not even out of jubilation, I just cold screamed my lungs out):

I'll let the rest of the images speak for themselves: