perfidy

Not wanting to be one-upped by the UN-Oil-For-Kickbacks nonsense, the administration has somehow just managed to appoint Ahmed Chalabi's nephew as the "general director" of the Iraqi war crimes tribunal. What the #$%#%? Is that freakin' insane or what? Iraqis, on the whole, seem to hate Chalabi.

Of course, Salem Chalabi's business partner is Marc Zell, of the law firm Feith and Zell. And wouldn't you know it -- the Feith in "Feith and Zell" is Doug Feith, who is one of the "designers" of this war, at least as far as the parallel Pentagon goes.

How can this possibly make any sense?

Shane MacGowan was in a barfight.

So they've picked the commission who will try Saddam Hussein for all those crimes against humanity. That's awesome. But who the hell's idea was it to put Ahmad "Mr. Popular" Chalabi's nephew in charge of affairs?

Look, it's important that Hussein get as fair a trial as he can, given that the blood on his hands is more like a giant pool he can swim around in, but Chalabi is a scam artist and including his family on this court raises the risk that the court's legitimacy can be called into question. How hard would it have been to not listen to Chalabi's baseless posturings just once? He's already a walking joke.

Then again, I'm asking this question of the same people who feel that John Negroponte's record is sound enough to put in charge of the whole freaking country despite no Middle East training or experiene, not speaking the language, and a blood-sauna of his own.

First, a thought. If you look back at last year's posts on Iraq, and the emails that Ministers Buckethead, Mike, and myself exchanged before that, you'll find that I opposed the libervasion partly because I feared that the US would screw it up royally, making matters worse for us here in the US. Not that I didn't see the good that could come from the action, but I felt the stakes were too high not to think things through.

Well, they didn't think things through. Many mistakes were made in the run-up and aftermath to the libervasion-- the disbanding of the Iraqi army, many of whom are shooting at us from behind trees and inside mosques, a wild overestimation of the readiness and capability of Iraq's oil infrastructure, firing the guy(s) who asked for more troops to provide security, etc., etc. That rather pisses me off.

But there is a worse alternative: giving the job to the United Nations. Before the war, the UN opposed any action in Iraq, requesting that weapons inspectors have more time to do the voodoo they do. At the time, I took this as a reasonable, albeit doggedly bureaucratic, tack to take. But the breaking Oil For Food For Large Bags Of Cash scandal (covered at length here by ABC News) makes me think otherwise.

It is now clear that the UN was and is rotten with corruption, and that even such halting work as it can do under the best intentions and clearest administration is now useless. They can't be trusted. That is a terrible shame. I am a great believer in the need for an organization like the UN as a counterbalance to the extreme alternative, a nakedly dog-eat-dog world in which nations all fend for themselves. A little red tape and stifling regulation on that scale is preferable to a free for all, in my opinion, but not if this is the way they are going to do business.

Just look at this partial list of who received oil bribes from Iraq.

Russia
The Companies of the Russian Communist Party: 137 million
The Companies of the Liberal Democratic Party: 79.8 million
The Russian Committee for Solidarity with Iraq: 6.5 million and 12.5 million (two separate contracts)
Head of the Russian Presidential Cabinet: 90 million
The Russian Orthodox Church: 5 million

France
Charles Pasqua, former minister of interior: 12 million
Trafigura (Patrick Maugein), businessman: 25 million
Ibex: 47.2 million
Bernard Merimee, former French ambassador to the United Nations: 3 million
Michel Grimard, founder of the French-Iraqi Export Club: 17.1 million

Canada
Arthur Millholland, president and CEO of Oilexco: 9.5 million

Italy
Father Benjamin, a French Catholic priest who arranged a meeting between the pope and Tariq Aziz: 4.5 million
Roberto Frimigoni: 24.5 million

United States
Samir Vincent: 7 million
Shakir Alkhalaji: 10.5 million

United Kingdom
George Galloway, member of Parliament: 19 million
Mujaheddin Khalq: 36.5 million

Egypt
Khaled Abdel Nasser: 16.5 million
Emad Al Galda, businessman and Parliament member: 14 million

Palestinian Territories
The Palestinian Liberation Organization: 4 million
Abu Al Abbas: 11.5 million

Qatar
Hamad bin Ali Al Thany: 14 million

Libya
Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem: 1 million

Brazil
The October 8th Movement: 4.5 million

Businessmen, statesmen, ambassadors, men of prominence, and (shockingly) the Russian Orthodox Church and a Catholic preist. A massive embarassment to the world community.

And yet the UN is the body that John Kerry wants running Iraq instead of the USA, as if Doc Ock would run Fort Knox better than Spider-Man. I'm no fan of Bush's foreign policy (indeed I think it's terrifyingly dangerous), but Kerry's seems just as stupid, if not even more so. Just who the hell can I vote for in November who won't make me feel like taking a shower afterward?

Now! Newly updated and revised, 4/21!

Blender magazine's new issue contains the latest volley in an increasingly tiresome but still lively debate: the 50 worst songs ever. According to this USA Today coverage, the Blender top ten are

1. We Built This City Starship 1985
2. Achy Breaky Heart, Billy Ray Cyrus,1992
3. Everybody Have Fun Tonight, Wang Chung, 1986
4. Rollin', Limp Bizkit, 2000
5. Ice Ice Baby, Vanilla Ice, 1990
6. The Heart of Rock & Roll, Huey Lewis & The News, 1984
7. Don't Worry, Be Happy , Bobby McFerrin, 1988
8. Party All the Time, Eddie Murphy, 1985
9. American Life, Madonna, 2003
10. Ebony and Ivory, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, 1982

Man... I wish I could find absolute fault with this list, but that's hard to do given the eminent suckitude of each song in the top ten. "We Built This City" is indeed a worthy contender for the title of worst song ever. Nonetheless I personally have a hard time finding "City" worse than, say, Extreme's "More Than Words," Aqua's "Barbie Girl" (reportedly also on the list), or the entire recorded output of Supertramp.

I wonder what metric they used to put this list together? Well, I have some proposals! (Read on: there's a few dick jokes, some graphic revenge fantasies, and some deeply ridiculous angry conviction)

[wik] BTD Greg has his own list up, and no overlap with mine. Just shows to go ya how much bad music there is out there.

The USA-Today piece notes that novelty songs, or songs that aspire to nothing more than shlock, don't rate as "worst ever" because they don't aspire to anything more. I can agree with that. So, no "Who Let The Dogs Out" or "Macarena."

But how do we decide that Madonna's excrescent "American Life," released just last year, is worse than the Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" or Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life," which have more than half a century of sick-making between them? I argue that long-livedness should play a part. I seriously doubt that Madonna's "American Life" will ever surface again, but on any given night, at any bar in the more thinly populated areas of the USA, you stand an awfully good chance of enduring "Achy Breaky Heart."

Then, how do you decide what's worse between an established artist who makes a shitty single (e.g. Madonna's "American Life," Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire," Stevie Wonder/Macca "Ebony/Ivory"), otherwise innocuous artists who have an unlooked-for chart hit with a horrible song (Bobby McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," Wang Chung, "Everybody Have Fun Tonight") and artists who seem to exist only to fester (Limp Bizkit ("Nookie" aside), Billy Ray Cyrus, Starship)? Madonna, Stevie and Paul all have towering achievements to their name, and in my opinion, one bad song from them-- no matter how shit-your-pants embarrassing it may be-- is still better than any song from shlockmeister supremes like Jefferson Airplane's third incarnation, Journey, or Debbie Boone. The flukes are the wild cards: competent bar bands like Huey Lewis who succeed beyond their talent, one-hit-wonders like Wang Chung, and arthouse mediocrities like Bobby McFerrin.

So. We can leave Madonna, Stevie Wonder, and Paul McCartney aside, no matter how I may personally feel about "Ob-la-di."

I would also axe the merely incompetent. So: goodbye Eddie Murphy. Ditto the merely innocuous who punch above their weight. Goodbye Huey Lewis.

Now that I have cleared the field of all but the most serious of contenders, here is my personal, highly idiosyncratic, and dyspeptically jaundiced list of the ten worst songs of all time.

1) Debbie Boone. "You Light Up My Life." Apart from lovesick thirteen-year-olds Christian girls crying into their heart shaped pillows at four-color Tiger Beat centerfolds of Leif Garrett (and the housewives they grew up to be) nobody can honestly claim this song is anything but an affront to all that is good, decent, and holy. More than anything else in the history of the world, this song's fanbase are an absolutely persuasive argument in favor of a rigorous program of enforced eugenics.

2) Billy Ray Cyrus. "Achy Breaky Heart." Made the mullet and dancing in formation fashionable once again. Hey Billy! Those were my people you did that to! My people, the good, honest upright briarhoppers, hillbillies, and piney-barrens homesteaders of the world who, if they only had a chance would groove to AC/DC and Steve Earle, but now wear big stupid hats and listen to your progeny. Cyrus is also to be blamed for collateral damage: the line-dancing craze, the meteoric rise of so-called "country" music machine-tooled for the minivan set, and making pasty drug-taking sons of bitches like Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, and my main man George Jones into pop-culture footnotes for the entire decade of the 1990s.

3) REM. "Shiny Happy People." The same band that crafted such monuments of messy genius as "Radio Free Europe" and "Belong" stumbled bad. I can't find much to say about this song except that I hate it. The worst part (for me) is that it's still a staple of the Adult-Album-Alternative radio I tend to listen to, and therefore I am subjected to this overmedicated pap far more often than is healthy for the members of REM. Someday vengeance will be mine.

4) .38 Special. "Rockin' Into The Night." The Blender list wisely chose to cut out the "low-hanging fruit" of the awful music of the 70's, but some offenses are too egregious to bear. Three years after the punk revolution broke, .38 Special still felt fine about putting out a song whose chorus ran "Rocking into the night, rocking into the night." So... you gonna rock into the night or something? The single most boneheaded of all butt-rock songs, first among a thick field of worthy contenders.

5) Starlight Vocal Band. "Afternoon Delight." Although part of that terrible era Blender wisely ignored, this song's recent resurgence via an inexplicable retro-fondness for the worst parts of the 1970s and films like "PCU" and "Good Will Hunting" renders it eligible for the list. Of all the songs ever recorded about sweet love in the afternoon, this is the only one that makes me wish I could cut off my own penis in protest. Or maybe cut the penises off the Starlight Vocal Band's male members. That's a healthier way to think of this.

6) Marcy Playground. "Sex And Candy."
7) Live. "Lighting Crashes."

These two picks represent all the worst aspects of the Alternative movement of the 1990s. "Sex and Candy" is simply the very worst song I have personally ever heard, though it seems to be quite the popular item among millions and millions of my peers. A more rational mind would conclude that they are right and I am wrong, but that's what they said about Jesus before they nailed him to a tree, and look how far it got him! I hereby announce the establishment of a new religion: the Church of Fuck Marcy Playground.

As for Live, they make it on here because they took a great song with a lovely hook and sound and threw lyrics over top of it that include the line, "The placenta falls to the floor." Nice, guys. Next!

8) The Doors. "Hello, I Love You." Somehow Jim Morrison, in between drunkenly waving his dick around and acting all pretty, got himself rated a poet. A poet! "Hello, I love you/ won't you tell me your name. / Hello, I love you/ let me jump in your game." A poet! "Hello Mother. I want to fuck you." A poet! "There's a killer on the road/ his brain is squirming like a toad /Take a long holiday/ let your children play." A poet! "Hello, I Love You" is the sound of the most overrated band of all time pushing Four Roses and calling it Champagne. Makes me want to dig up Jim Morrison's corpse just so I can pee on it while singing "Riders on the Storm."

9) "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Rod Stewart. The great, the inimitable Rod the Mod burned up an entire career's goodwill with this turd. Worse, this song represented a nadir from which Stewart would never recover, a huge loss to the world's sleazy rock well-being. Nothing more to say, except that the Revolting Cocks cover of the tune is priceless, with an extra verse about the nameless couple realizing they have to buy a rubber and some KY.

10) This space intentionally left blank in honor of all the thousands of songs I'd like to include but can't, ten being a conveniently round number and all. Pat Boone. Jazz guys trying rock. Jess Roden's godawful version of "On Broadway" (Doors trivia: Roden was on the band's short list to replace Jim Morrison when Jim took the dirt nap. Why the hell are the Doors so famous?). Alicia Bridges' "I Love the Nightlife," the song that proved that if disco wasn't dead, it was shooting dirty heroin in a Chelsea bathroom with a shotgun in its mouth. Candelbox's lone hit. There are so many, many, more, but I will leave you now with just three words: "Cold." "As." "Ice."

[alsø wik] Allison, commenting at Begging to Differ, notes that Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be An American" just might be the worst song of all time. Fie on me for forgetting! She's right.

Number 11 with a bullet) Lee Greenwood. "God Bless the U.S.A." The anthem of knee-jerk patriotic Rotarians everywhere. No other song in the world has done so much to make me not only ashamed to be American for the three minutes it's playing, but to wish fervently for a Chomskyite hairshirt-wearing America-hating putsch JUST SO I never have to hear that trash again. Or, I could just go cut off Lee Greenwood's penis, for all the good it would do.

Despite my well-known propensity to comment on rap lyrics, this story is not about a robot learning to rhyme. Rather, it is the next stage in the eventual enslavement of mankind.

Those treacherous quislings at the Boeing Corporation have designed a flying robot capable of dropping GPS-guided bombs.

The first bomb was a non-explosive test munition, but it landed inches from its target, demonstrating the lethal capacity of this new robot. Displaying a frightening lack of regard for the future of a free humanity, Boeing Chief Operator Rob Horton said, "It's absolutely a huge step forward for us. It shows the capability of an unmanned airplane to carry weapons."

The test mission was conducted under human supervision, but the robot handled all the details. The X-45 is almost completely autonomous, flying and attacking without need for human control. A person is still in the command and control loop - the robot must receive authorization before delivering its munitions. Of course, it is only a simple step to remove that person.

Horton, who was sitting 80 miles from the target, authorized the drone to drop the bomb, which was released from 35,000 feet as the plane flew at 442 mph.

The military sees such aircraft taking part in its most dangerous missions, such as bombing enemy radar and surface-to-air missile batteries, in order to clear the path for human pilots.

The Y-shaped, tailless plane has a 34-foot wingspan and weighs 8,000 pounds empty. It is the first drone designed specifically to carry weapons into combat.

Other robotic planes, including the Predator spy drone currently being used in Afghanistan, have been modified to carry weapons. Boeing hopes to build hundreds of the X-45 planes, which would cost $10 million to $15 million each.

Of course they would.

[wik] here are some more UCAV links.
 

Laura writes on the income issue. She's discovered a census bureau paper with an interesting take on the income issue. Because I think there is a good chance it was my comment that got her to do it...

Hello, Laura! There's a good possibility that I am the commenter who inspired you to write this article. I've written quite a bit about the income distribution issue, and have quoted the Piketty/Saez paper often. For some additional historical perspective, there is an IRS study that tells us about income tax rates and how they have changed, over many decades. Saez has an additional paper which analyzes the mathematical effects of tax policy.

You've got a good find here. Read on...
I need some time to digest it, but here's some food for thought:

1. P and S specifically address this issue in their paper. What they indicate is that for the purposes of calculating income, the changes in households (decrease in the number of persons per household) holds roughly even across all income levels. That is, poor and middle class folks have about the same change in household size as rich folks do.

2. What we're talking about here is whether we're really "better off" than we were 30 years ago. By the median income measure adjusted for inflation, 99% of Americans are not. Their income levels have stayed almost constant. You make the argument that _per capita_ income is a better measure of how well off we are, and by that measure things have improved quite a bit; certainly far in excess of 4%-6%, depending on time frame. You also say that while the top income earners have seen dramatic increases in their incomes, per capita income has not remained flat, and that in the median, we are better off. I hope I have accurately represented your position.

Under debate is the following proposition: Tax policy over the past thirty years has resulted in improved circumstances for the median US person. I say it has not; I'd prefer not to characterize your position on that proposition directly, as you haven't addressed it.

The general discussion of whether we are better off or worse off, independent of government policy, is a different argument and has a different set of variables. The per-capita income argument is interesting, but has these flaws, in my opinion:

1. To a very large degree, smaller households are the result of cultural change. Government policy has probably had a minimal effect. If tax policy had not changed, we would still have smaller households.

2. It is distinctly possible that at some point in the future, the size-of-household trend might reverse itself. This would lower the per-capita income rate.

3. Taxation rates on our median individual are very important. The income numbers we are discussing are before taxes. An example: the Social Security Administration gives us a table of social security rates over time. We can see from this table that in 1969, the household income was reduced by about 9.6% (4.8 + 4.8). By 2003, this has risen to 15.3% (7.65 + 7.65). Tax rates have risen substantially over the time frame we are discussing. I'm not sure if that effect has been taken into account in the inflation adjustments.

4. The short-term effect of a drop in the number of persons per household may be beneficial in terms of income per capita. The backside of that is the forthcoming baby-boomer retirement. Taxes will have to rise dramatically, or benefits be cut, to preserve the system we have in place.

5. Employment to population ratios have altered over the time frame, as well. Using the tools at the BLS site, I'd say that we've seen roughly a 5% increase in employment to population.

6. Other forms of taxation have also risen dramatically (state, local, property, fees).

7. Maintaining a house is maintaining a house! Anyone who's had a roommate knows that it's a lot cheaper to share costs. Far more people today maintain their own households, and thus forgo the opportunity to share costs. This brings higher per-capita incomes into focus -- people need to be making more, per person, to maintain the same standard of living as before.

My sense of it is this: Income per capita is a poor way of judging how "well off" we are. The dramatic drop in "married with children" homes is a primary driver; that coupled with dramatically higher numbers of women working makes income per capita too squishy to work with.

And it's besides the point -- we're trying to figure out if tax policy has resulted in higher incomes! Tax policy has resulted in a drop of the top rate from over 90% (which was paid by only 500 taxpayers in the entire nation) way back when to the current top rate of 38.6%, which is paid by over 500,000 taxpayers (from the second Saez paper). The general trend has been a tremendous flattening of the tax system. We have pushed the tax burden "down" the income scale; the idea here is that this will lead to increased economic performance, which will "float all boats".

One of the most striking quotes from the Saez paper:

"Top income shares within the top 1% show striking evidence of large and immediate responses to the tax cuts of the 1980s, and the size of those responses is largest for the very top income groups. In contrast, top incomes display no evidence of short or long-term response to the extremely large changes in the net-of-tax rates following the Kennedy tax cuts in the early 1960s."

Very recently detailed studies have become available that show us what's really happened with household income. Using them, we can see that the supply-siders were just flat-out wrong. The huge tax cuts generated little other than massive increases in wealth for the recipients. While we were cutting these top tax rates, tax rates at the bottom and in the middle have been rising to compensate. The predicted effect of across the board increases in income simply did not materialize.

The statistic I would most like to see is after-tax income, broken down into per-capita and per-household measures, in inflation-adjusted dollars. Maybe there's a way to get there with the information sources I have.

You can go here for the full details. The only winner that I read (saw) was the winner for best screenplay - which went to the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. As further evidence of how completely out of touch I am, I barely recognized any of the nominees or winners. I need to stop reading antedeluvian sf like Norstrilia, and read some new stuff.

Coraline, the winner for best novella, is the only Gaiman book I haven't read. I suppose that will be next on my list.

According to Palestinian DJ Saadeh, it's assassination season on the West Bank, which means his business is booming. In the bizzaro-world of Palestinian society, assassination season is the time for big, fun parties!

It's a time for gathering with friends, enjoying the cameraderie of your fellow rubble-dwellers, exhorting your young people to get themselves killed, and- Allah willing- take out some Jews while they're at it. And no block party is comlete without a killa DJ.

"Yeah yeah, party people in da house... yo yo just the ladies now, 'Revolt, revolt, revolt. Revolt with stones!' "

CBS News is reporting an HIV scare in LA's porn community. Apparently this is only the latest such outbreak. Porn talent tested positive a few times in the '90s, and then, as now, a sort of quarantine was imposed while who had scenes with whom (and whom and whom) was sorted out. New production has been suspended in the meantime.

You know, I had some pithy remarks about... well, about this. But in retrospect I just can't seem to work up humor or snarkiness over people with HIV, be it people in porn, trucking, advertising, insurance, whatever.

But all in all, I have to admit I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.