I can remember, vividly, the first time that I learned of the curious psychological concept of “emotional contagion.” It was, for me, an “Aha Moment” that put the incomprehensible 1960s and ’70s, with which I was (not entirely successfully) trying to cope, into slightly better focus. For those who are unfamiliar with the term (but probably quite familiar with the social phenomenon, itself), emotional contagion is the tendency to catch and feel emotions that are similar to and influenced by those of others. It is emotional contagion that makes human group dynamics tick along a vast spectrum of emotions; from a crazed lynch mob to an anti-war peace march, emotional contagion plays a role in human group-think.

Faced with another incomprehensible American epoch, I’ve decided to dust off the old text books and look for some comfort, or at least some sense in the context of emotional contagion. The ability to transfer moods appears to be innate in humans; anyone who has raised a child knows all about this innate ability. That knowledge of human behavior has been used to great effect in “persuasion” of all kinds from advertising to political propaganda. Want someone to buy your ridiculously over-priced anti-aging cream? Share your fear of becoming pathetic human detritus as a result of wrinkling and age spots. Want someone to vote you into the Oval Office? Share your fear of a national security breakdown if you are not elected to keep us all safe. A daily barrage of similar appeals to emotion is a familiar fact of American life.

One fine point having to do with emotional contagion that escaped me in my youth, though, is particularly useful in trying to understand the crazy (and quite unattractive) fits that our country is going through in 2010. That point is this most excellent distinction, made by Erich Fromm, that a higher cognitive development, autonomy, is necessary for human empathy but not for emotional contagion and, as most of us can attest, there is a pronounced variable of empathic capacity among humans. As with so many of our human reactions there is a primal element underlying a higher-functioning, thinking element; clearly, we are not yet so highly evolved that the higher functions always prevail.

With all of that in mind, it is a quite interesting conundrum that our generals and politicians are grappling with at the moment and some of the solutions that are being signaled are undesirable to say the very least. I have to assume that, by today, 99% of Americans are at least somewhat familiar with last week’s events in the Big Apple…

During the course of a fairly humdrum day on Times Square, a Muslim immigrant (no less) street vendor alerted NYPD that a van was double-parked, idling and smoking up his turf. Investigating officers discovered that the vehicle, a van, contained an odd assortment of potentially incendiary devices (propane tanks for gas grills, fireworks in a can, along with a footlocker full of (non-volatile) fertilizer. Now before any patriots get their panties in a wad over my making light of the danger to Manhattanites — a number of whom might have been incinerated, had this been a real car-bomb — I would emphasize the fact that this was NOT a real car-bomb. It was an ass-hat collection of things that might look remotely like a car-bomb to uniformed beat cops, on initial inspection.

Immediate suspicion fell on a skinny, middle-aged white man caught on camera changing his shirt in Shubert Alley. When the vehicle’s VIN number was traced, however, authorities discovered that it had recently been purchased by a young man from Connecticut who was born in — OMG — Pakistan.

In a cinematic race-against-time, Faisal Shahzad was apprehended on a flight departing JFK for Dubai, which event kicked off a bout of political hysteria.

By the time the Sunday Talking Heads were “on air” there was talk of expanding to a ground war in Pakistan and “modifying” Miranda Rights for terrorism suspects. Sheeeeesh…

Attorney General Eric Holder met little to no resistance from Jake Tapper (standing in for George Stephanopoulos) on This Week, when Holder pronounced that:

“Well, we’ve now developed evidence that shows that the Pakistani Taliban was behind the attack. We know that they helped facilitate it. We know that they probably helped finance it and that he was working at their direction.”

It never occurred to Tapper to “get the story” on the evidence that led to Holder’s statement despite plenty of unclassified, well-publicized reports to the contrary. Like these:

• Gen. David Petraeus, earlier in the week, telling us that Shahzad was apparently acting as a “lone wolf”
• The Pakistani Taliban publicly disowning him — several times
• Ample evidence of his utter ineptitude as a bomber that firmly contradicts any notion that he was “trained” in Pakistan (or anywhere else where effective car bombs go off on a regular basis)
• Mounting evidence that Shahzad’s life was falling apart — his house was in foreclosure, his wife took his two kids and left him, he was being hounded by bill collectors and was forced to go, “hat-in-hand” to his well-to-do relatives for financial help (which probably has more to do with his annual trips to Pakistan).

Then, on 60 Minutes, we had Secretary of State Clinton banging the drum loudly and matter-of-factly reversing our diplomatic stance toward “our Pakistani allies”:

“We want more. We expect more. We’ve made it very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be very severe consequences.”

Surely, Clinton’s words on Sunday night were a reprise of a message already delivered to “our Pakistani allies” who pledged their allegiance, on Sunday morning, by carrying out a helicopter gunship assault on insurgent hide-outs in the Orakzai tribal region, killing 23 militants, according to local officials.

So now we have to choose between the “emotional contagion” of: the “Pakistanis are training each other to blow up Times Square so let’s pound them into oblivion” appeal or a more measured (and sure to be dubbed “sissy”) approach of gathering evidence and facts so that we can understand what we’re truly dealing with.

Certainly current events can be twisted to support the “Carpe Diem” approach that our politicians and military seem to favor. How fortuitous for the “Pakistan Problem” to rear its head just in time to deflect attention from our fool’s errand in Afghanistan, our tiresome hounding of Iran, or our loosening grip on global power and respect, generally.

Try, for a minute or two, to detach from the fear and loathing that might well prevent you from ever attending another Broadway show and let’s just look at the facts dispassionately…

• During the period of time that the suspect was thought to be a 40-year-old white guy, there was far less hysteria despite the fact that the net effect, if that car bomb had gone off, would have been the same regardless of the bomber’s racial background (it just wouldn’t have been a credible excuse for a war on Pakistan).
• We are expected to believe that the suspect, Faisal Shahzad, went to considerable trouble and expense, at a time that his life was in a shambles, pursuing an education in bomb-building. Does anyone really believe that Shahzad was such a prize that the Taliban was providing him with an all-expense-paid educational grant to learn the ancient art of car-bombing? Most American teenagers, without benefit of a Taliban education, could build a more effective car bomb than Faisal Shahzad did (I daresay, I could) despite his supposed intensive Taliban training. And, too, most American teenagers would have the presence of mind to not leave the keys to the getaway car in the vehicle rigged with the bomb…
• And then, of course there is the bomb, itself, consisting of propane tanks without the caps removed, rendering them useless as bombs; a fuse, of sorts, fashioned from firecrackers specifically manufactured so that they can’t ignite each other in a chain reaction, and a foot-locker full of non-volatile fertilizer.
• A far more compelling argument can be made that Shahzad was just a loser who, faced with having to return home to Mom and Dad, without his family and in financial ruin was at least hoping to go back as the mastermind Times Square Bomber.
• The Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban) were, at first, tempted to take credit for the commotion in Times Square but, when they realized what a joke Shahzad’s bomb attempt was, they quickly made several public statements praising his bravery but, at the same time, confirming that they didn’t have a clue who he was let alone take credit for training him.
• On May 6, McClatchy newspapers cited “six U.S. officials” who stated that “no credible evidence has been found” that Shahzad “received any serious terrorist training from the Pakistani Taliban or another radical Islamic group.”
• In fact, Tehrik-i-Taliban has never attempted, nor do they seem to be interested in, carrying out terrorist attacks on foreign soil.
• Some American reports have suggested a link between Shahzad’s father, a former military officer, and a radical Taliban leader. But, according to Pakistani police, they questioned Shahzad’s father about his son’s activities, but he is not a suspect in the case. And nothing has come out of Islamabad confirming any connection between the Senior Shahzad and the Taliban.
• And the far-fetched story of Shahzad being located when his cell phone was detected by a secret spy plane? The rather more mundane fact is that, at the last minute, immigration officials recognized Shahzad’s name on a passenger list and contacted the FBI.
  

  Some of us may really, really want Faisal Shahzad to be taking orders from the Pakistani Taliban but most of the available evidence doesn’t support that scenario. Of course, if one has secret, inside information and isn’t pressed to produce any substantive facts, well … Bombs Away.

  UPDATE: The New York Daily News published results of a poll of their readership, this morning, in answer to the question: Will the recent bomb-scare keep you away from Times Square in the future? The answers:

  • Yes. I refuse to go there — 15%
  • No. Clearly the NYPD has it under control —73%
  • Not sure yet — 11%

  Good for you New York City!

  
  Posted by Frumpzilla at 11:00 AM

Again the Rude Pundit nails it. (Image by Ben Tolman)

Our unending state of stress-out is al-Qaeda’s greatest victory against the United States. As the AP reports today, al-Qaeda got one big message from the Underwear Bomber’s failure: “the group that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and has prided itself on its ideological purism seems to be eyeing a more pragmatic and arguably more dangerous shift in tactics. The emerging message appears to be: Big successes are great, but sometimes simply trying can be just as good.”

Yeah, it seems like the simple cave dwellers have figured out big, complex, allegedly bad-ass America: we’re just a bunch of sticky fat kids crying because our ice cream fell off the cone. That wedgie-bait, Adam Gadahn (née “Pearlman”), an American in al-Qaeda, taunted, “Even apparently unsuccessful attacks on Western mass transportation systems can bring major cities to a halt, cost the enemy billions and send his corporations into bankruptcy.” He may be a traitorous asshole who can’t grow a decent beard, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Ask anyone who was at Newark Airport in January, where security imprisoned thousands of innocent people for six hours because some idiot took a shortcut…

Indeed, the right has so successfully torqued the country into what our enemies believe it is, it’s almost as if the GOP is a subversive arm of al-Qaeda. They have nearly bankrupted us, thus making any great social advances impossible; they have turned mild dissent into sedition; and they have turned the Constitution into a loophole-ridden contract, filled with more fine print than a subprime mortgage. They did most of that shit when they were in power. Now, out of power, the right is seeking, as it did in the Clinton years, but even more insidiously, to undermine the very functioning of government…

The poor-little-me ad for Dodge Charger during the Superbowl was, essentially, ineffable. But I’ll give it a shot anyway:

The commercial presumes — and who am I to say the marketers are wrong — that the American male is a brow-beaten, miserable, helpless, pussy-whipped drudge. The only recourse left for the poor wretch — his last, desperate chance at manhood — is to take out a loan for a new Charger. Each one comes with a 12-volt socket that doesn’t talk back and never gets a headache.

Looking at the bright side, here’s Maggie Mahar, at Health Beat:

For example, under the House bill, a family of three making $32,000 a year would pay $1,360 in annual premiums for good, comprehensive coverage; under the Senate Finance Committee bill, that family would be asked to lay out $2,013. Today, without reform, if that family tried to buy insurance, it would find that the average plan costs $13,500. For this household, the current legislation makes all the difference.

Too often, the press suggests that such a family would be expected to pay $10,000 out of pocket to cover co-pays and deductibles. That just isn't true.

Even if the entire family were in an auto accident and racked up $200,000 in medical bills, at their income level, the House bill caps out-of-pocket expenses at $2,000 a year. Under the Senate Finance bill, the family would have to pay $4,000.

Moreover, under both bills, there are no co-pays for primary care. Even private insurers cannot put a $25 barrier between a family and preventive care.

We are, as a nation, when it comes to sex, deeply insane. I am the father of five sons, all of whom at one point or another were both ten and fifteen years old. If anything so frightful, so revolting, so deeply scarring as this had happened to any of them at the hands of a pervert so vicious, I would not have rested until she was sentenced to harsh psychiatric evaluation followed by at least six weeks of group therapy, perhaps alongside the Prime Minister of Italy.

Under state statute, the only prison term possible for the former Tacoma school teacher, convicted of sex crimes involving a 10-year-old student and his older brother, was 25 years to life in prison…

Prosecutors contended that Rice had a sexual relationship with the 10-year-old boy for several months while she was a teacher at Tacoma’s McKinley Elementary School. The ordeal came to light in August 2007, when Rice sneaked the boy out of his home and drove him to Ellensburg. The two had sex at a rest stop before she returned him to his home, court documents alleged.

During the course of the investigation, detectives learned Rice also had sex twice with the boy’s older brother in July 2007. The boy was 15 at the time.

Steiner convicted Rice in April of first-degree kidnapping, first-degree child molestation and two counts of third-degree rape. He found the kidnapping and child molestation charges were predatory offenses because the victim was a student. The predatory designation – required when a teacher is accused of certain sex crimes – meant Rice faced stiffer sentencing requirements.

You’ve been hearing about the C Street house where Sanford and Ensign and Wamp and many another sinner of the GOP lived and loved and laughed together.

But it’s all a whole lot creepier that you even think, unless you happen to remember Jeff Sharlet’s 2003 piece in Harper’s called “Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats.”

The book which grew out of it, The Family, is just out in trade paperback, and I urge you to buy it. And you will, once you read the 2003 piece. Excerpt:

It is April 2002, and I have lived with these men for weeks now, not as a Christian — a term they deride as too narrow for the world they are building in Christ’s honor — but as a “believer.” I have shared the brothers’ meals and their work and their games. I have been numbered among them and have been given a part in their ministry. I have wrestled with them and showered with them and listened to their stories: I know which man resents his father’s fortune and which man succumbed to the flesh of a woman not once but twice and which man dances so well he is afraid of being taken for a fag. I know what it means to be a “brother,” which is to say that I know what it means to be a soldier in the army of God…

From The Symbols of Government, by Thurman W. Arnold. He was a Yale Law School professor and FDR’s trust-buster, and then a founder of the Washington mega-firm, Arnold & Porter.

This is the attitude of the so-called “legal mind.” Thomas Reed Powell of Harvard has described that attitude as follows: “If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”

Arnold and Powell were advocates of what is now called situationism. Back in law schools of their day it was was called “legal realism.” By the 1970s the same general approach had been reborn as “critical legal studies.”

P.S. An hour or so after posting this, I came across this on Politico. Now “legal realism” is being used by the GOP faithful as a stick to beat Sonia Sotomayor. Reality is always the enemy of religion — in this case the absurd religion of the law.

You may have read G. Gordon Liddy’s thoughtful comments on the chances that 54-year-old Sonia Sotomayor will so crazed by menstruation as to be incapable of functioning on the Supreme Court.

Anyone who has read Liddy’s fascinating autobiography, Will, understands that he is deeply disturbed, and will not be surprised by the substance of his comments. But their style was striking. He stumbles and mumbles. Both his words and his thoughts wander. He seems to have crossed the line from simple nuttiness into incapacity. He is a husk of his former husk.

Sure it’s like kicking a cripple, but let’s explore the crossed synapses of the Newt brain anyway. Here’s Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal’s house liberal:

…As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. “The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations,” he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely “the Left’s attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents.” And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, “there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left.”

Mr. Gingrich’s side failed to “root out” and destroy their opponents; now he imagines that this is what is being done to his team.

Psychotherapists might call this “projection,” and something similar pervades the essay the remarkable Mr. Gingrich published only two days later in the Washington Post. Here the former speaker can be found calling for a populist revolt in the “great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites.”

A healthy sentiment, to be sure, except for the fact that “elites” are exactly what decades of conservative rule gave us by unleashing the banks, smashing the unions, and funneling the economy’s gains into the hands of the rich…

George W. Bush came close to winning the 2000 presidential election by pretending to be a closet Democrat — this being the barely-coded message of his “compassionate conservative” nonsense.

And Reagan won the 1984 presidential election fair and square by doing the same thing, although this is less generally understood. A while back I went into the question in some depth. I’m dusting off that 1988 piece now not because it’s particularly relevant to anything in the news, but because I was reminded of it yesterday when I posted that old video from Ronzo’s pink period.

And because it’s my party and I’ll post if I want to. So here goes:

Now Ronald Reagan has beaten the Democrats twice — not because he was an elephant, but because he had done such a good job of looking like a donkey.

Most foreigners could no more tell a Democrat from a Republican than they could distinguish between the male and the female of the Galapagos tortoise. But just as the tortoises are able to sort themselves out, so can we Americans. In the narrow mainstream of our politics, ranging from kind-of-far right to pretty-far right, the Democrats are the liberals and the Republicans are the conservatives.

The normal way to tell a liberal from a conservative is that the liberal is an optimist, while the conservative is a pessimist. The liberal imagines that the world can be changed for the better. The conservative imagines that it can’t. He looks into his own heart, supposes that all hearts must be similar, and concludes that very little can be expected of mankind.

Others must be as ready to attack him as he is to attack them, and so praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. Government is bound to be organized theft, so that the only remaining question for the intelligent man is who gets robbed. Liberated woman would prove to be no better than liberated man has been, and thus, in the interest of reducing the general level of mischief, should be kept barefoot in the winter and pregnant in summer. Only a sucker would believe that faith could move mountains, but greed will do the job just fine. Look at Appalachia. The mark of Cain is on all of us, and we are none of us any better than we should be. “In Adam’s fall,” as the New England Primer said, “we sinnèd all.”

These things being so, the path of history must lead downward, and it would be useless to stand in the way of this general decline. About the best a conservative can hope for is to preserve the status quo; the absolute best is to turn back the clock for a few moments, so as briefly to recapture some status quo ante…

In his most usual guise, then, the conservative is full of gloom and pessimism. He knows our sloth will drive us to bankruptcy, our lust to license; our anger to war; our envy to civil unrest, our covetousness to crime; our gluttony to a triple by-pass; and our pride to a fall.

The point is not whether this view is correct. The point, politically, is whether such pessimism is appealing.

Someone with a more favorable view of mankind’s capacities — someone, in other words, more liberal — might indeed think that the voters were up to hearing a few unpleasant truths.

Carter and Mondale seemed to have thought the country was mature enough for a little castor oil, at any rate. In Carter’s world petroleum was running out and the American Century was in danger of ending before it was over. His was a complicated world that required careful planning to manage.

Nor was Mondale’s world a cheerful one. It, too, required planning and discipline if we were to cope with Reagan’s deficits while at the same time restoring fairness to American life. Carter’s and Mondale’s faith that the voters could grasp these concepts was essentially liberal in its optimism about the human condition. And it was essentially misplaced, as the country showed both men on election day.

Reagan didn’t seem to see the world this way at all. In Mondale’s America, as the Republican commercials said, it was always April 15; in Reagan’s it was always the Fourth of July. Whether by temperament or by design Reagan ran as an optimist, which is to say that he ran as a Democrat.

His issues may have been traditional Republican ones, but this misses the point. If you campaign in poetry but govern in prose, as Governor Cuomo likes to say, then Reagan’s poetry was Democratic.

In both campaigns, but especially in the 1984 one, Reagan went beyond poetic license and into outright theft. The bands at his rallies played “Happy Days Are Here Again.” He adopted Roosevelt and Truman as Republican saints, and it worked; he sounded more like a Democrat than Mondale or Carter did. He talked about tomorrow with the cheerful optimism of the Happy Warrior, Hubert Humphrey; he talked about America’s role in the world with the mindless, adolescent macho of the early Kennedy; he offered guns and butter with the fiscal abandon of Lyndon Johnson.

In fact he made Johnson and those other Democrats look like pikers. They wanted to tax and spend; by 1984 it was clear that all Reagan wanted to do was spend. He was the Peter Pan of politics, never growing up and settling down. He was the grasshopper and the Democrats were the ants. Never mind what he actually said; after four years, everybody knew he didn’t mean all that stuff anyway. What he actually was, in both races, was the Democrat.

But how could he be the Democrat when he opposed virtually every social measure the Democrats had passed, over the years and over his dead body? The trick was that he went the Democrats one better. He said we had once had all these good things for nothing, and we could have them again for the same attractive price.

Cut red tape and the mighty engine of American industry will provide jobs for all. Cut funds for libraries and some new Carnegie will build them once again. Cut taxes for the rich and revenues will go up. Cut Matilda off the Social Security rolls and her children will take her in. Cut funds to enforce environmental and safety laws, and voluntary compliance will go up. Cut forests and you cut air pollution.

Reagan offered no-fault government to the Me Generation and to their parents, who often enough were vagabonding around in their RVs with messages like “I’m Spending My Children’s Inheritance” on the bumpers. (The message on their children’s BMWs was likely to read, “The One Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.” The apple, the French say, doesn’t fall far from the tree.)

The old folks liked it that Reagan, old folks himself, stood foursquare for God, the nuclear family, enforced pregnancy to term, creationism, prayer in schools, heterosexuality between married adults — none of which would cost a nickel in taxes.

The younger folks had grown up in a world of homosexuals and casual sex and abortion and divorce. They seldom went to church. They saw little of their kids. But they forgave their permissive and nicely naughty Grandpa Ron for all his preaching, because they knew his fingers were crossed. No way he could really mean all those terrible things he kept saying about what had been, after all, his own lifestyle.

Reagan sounded like an optimist because he was able to sell Americans the notion that to retreat to the past was to advance, that yesterday could become tomorrow. That this might not be such a good idea didn’t occur to people who had little knowledge of what yesterday had been like. Their memories were either too short or, like Reagan’s, too selective.

In his 1986 State of the Union message, Reagan gave Congress an unusually explicit (for poetry) statement of his view that progress is just a question of retracing our footsteps:

Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film, Back to the Future: ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’ Well, today, physicists peering into the infinitely small realms of the subatomic particles find reaffirmations of religious faith; astronomers build a space telescope that can see to the edge of the universe and, possibly, back to the moment of creation …

We are going forward with our shuttle flights. We are going forward to build our space station, and we are going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the next decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low-earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours. And the same technology transforming our lives can solve the greatest problem of the 20th Century. A security shield can one day render nuclear weapons obsolete and free mankind from the prison of nuclear terror.

It’s all there. Magical time machines to take us back to the 1950s. White-coated scientists ranging out in front of the rest of us and stumbling over, of all the darned things, proof of God and His creation of the world. Trips to the Exotic East with Sidney Greenstreet and the gang in a sure-enough time capsule, this one so fast that you arrive hours before you started out. And the same science that gave us the space shuttle will soon give us a warm and woolly security blanket to keep us safe from the Russian bogeyman.

Never mind that the space shuttle itself just blew up a few weeks ago and that the majority of graduate engineering and science students in America are foreign exchange students. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

That all this stuff is nonsense doesn’t matter, any more than it matters that the poem “Xanadu” doesn’t make much sense, either. They both invite us not to think, but to dream.

And Reagan’s dreams are appealing. Where Carter and Mondale offered self-improvement, self-criticism, and self-discipline, like a couple of country club conservatives advising the lower classes to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, Reagan offered no-fault government. High-paid volunteers will take your place in the armed services. Never mind about all those dead marines in Lebanon: look at the way our boys rolled over those commies down in Grenada.

Don’t worry, mon. Be happy.

Mildly encouraging (depending on how you feel about tribalism) news from The Situationist:

White people don’t show hints of unconscious bias against blacks who belong to the same group as them, a new study suggests.

But this lack of bias only applied to black people in their group, according to the findings. Most white people in the study still showed evidence of some unconscious bias towards blacks who were in an opposing group, or who were unaffiliated with either group.

What impressed the researchers, however, was just how quickly these group bonds could form. The lack of bias toward fellow black group members was uncovered just minutes after whites joined the mixed-race group, and without participants even meeting their fellow members personally…

Peggy Noonan totally nails it:

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

Final proof that we are, as a nation, mad:

(CNN) -- A former prison secretary has been sentenced to six months in federal prison for having sex with an inmate she was supposed to be supervising, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Colorado said Friday.

Janine Sligar, 47, of Wray, Colorado, was sentenced Thursday for sexual abuse of a ward. After serving her sentence, she will serve five years of supervised release and must register as a sex offender, spokesman Jeff Dorschner said in a news release…

According to the plea agreement, Sligar, a 14-year Bureau of Prisons veteran, said she and inmate Eric McClain met in February 2007, when he was assigned to clean her office.

“They began to have conversations and realized they had similar interests,” the plea agreement said.

That summer, they initiated a sexual relationship that included 10 to 20 sessions of oral sex and sexual intercourse, ending in October 2007, it said.

From today’s New York Times:

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results…

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

The following piece ran May 17, 2006 under the heading, “Mission Almost Accomplished.” Now that Bush’s awful mission is completely accomplished, I put it up again. No updating seems necessary.

It’s been nearly four years since I first posted my analysis of the nasty psychopathology that has forced George W. Bush to fail all his life, and is causing him to fail so spectacularly now. Consider this from the Washington Post (emphasis added):

Bush’s job approval rating now stands at 33 percent, down five percentage points in barely a month and a new low for him in Post-ABC polls. His current standing with the public is identical to President George H.W. Bush’s worst showing in the Post-ABC poll before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992.

The younger Bush’s career can only be understood as a lifelong obsession with disappointing the father he so plainly hates.

He follows his father’s footsteps in school, as a pilot, as a businessman, and finally as a politician. Unable to fill those footprints, he makes each one seem unimportant by pretending contempt for it. He gets C’s where his father got A’s; he ducks the combat flying that made his father a hero; he burns through the seed money his father’s friends gave him, failing in the oil business which had made his father rich.

Then at last he was taken in hand by a sleazy political op who realized that the father’s name and money would be enough to elect the wayward son governor of Texas. (Polls at the time showed that a significant portion of the voters thought that W. actually was his father.)

Then Rove set out to hand-carry his meal ticket into the White House itself.

Take that, you old fart, junior must have thought as he took the oath of office. Any asshole can get to be president. But even that wasn’t enough. Deep inside, where the Oedipal snakes writhed in his subconscious, there was still work to do.

What better to way to humiliate his father than to degrade the supreme office the old man had spent his life to reach? What sweeter revenge than to slime, like a slug, the presidency itself? And so he enlisted Rumsfeld and Cheney, his father’s ancient enemies, to help in the work of patricide.

Outdoing his father as president, the junior Bush must have known in his heart, was beyond his limited capacities. But his whole life offered proof of his ability to fail, and so he took the only path remaining. He would become, God help the rest of us, the worst president in history.

ß

One normally thinks of a trailer as a modest form of housing that can be towed on wheels which depreciates in value, or the introduction to a film. However, Naomi Klein has produced a short trailer introduction to her book, which appears below. She also had made available a number of videos in which she is interviewed about The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism which follows this discussion — and a few more good links that would be helpful for those reading the book or those who are deciding on whether to purchase or borrow it from the local library.

As I read about nation after nation which has been convinced or forced to adopt the free market principles of Milton Friedman, I am struck by the huge gulf between the haves and the have-nots created when this economic plan is put into place. I am somewhat familiar with the situation in Chile as my niece is married to a Chilean. His family, although very well educated, barely scrapes by.

Most of these countries have a very small middle class. A very large percentage of the population of the countries that have adopted the Friedman plan are poor and a small few are very, very wealthy. Klein also has created her own website for the book, in which she takes on arguments, often lies, created by the likes of the Cato Institute, which deny the facts stated in the book.

Cato Crackheads insist that the countries which adopt the Friedman economic model are better off than they were under Keynesian or socialist economic plans. Iceland just went under. Which Scandinavian country will be next? I hope none. The Milton Friedman model is always held up by these True Believers as the best economic plan ever created, which this book proves beyond any doubt is not true.

As I continue to read through the book, I am struck by the parallels between many South American, Asian, African, and Eastern European countries which have been devastated by the Friedman plan and what George Bush has been trying and succeeding in getting away with in the United States. If these ideologues are allowed to succeed in adopting the Friedman economic plan in the United States, say goodbye to the middle class in this country.

Not that it hasn’t already happened to millions of Americans and not that George Bush was not successful in partially causing it to happen, as were Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Let us hope that although we have driven ourselves as a nation practically into bankruptcy, there is still some hope of rolling back what George W. Bush did to America during the long and tragic eight years he was in power.

And I continue to read the book slowly, as we just sold our old home and I have been embarking on many errands to get this one insulated and ready for the next small shock wave that is coming, the rising utility bills that we will see shortly.

The trailer for the book follows. If you have not read this book, which I consider a Klein masterpiece, I urge you to do so now. The way you think about the world we live in may be changed forever for the better. I am now able to understand things that are happening in the world that previously made no sense to me or which I could not properly interpret.

My psychiatrist son, Matt, emails this:

I have been dealing with the fallout from the election nearly every day as my more vulnerable and psychotic patients were genuinely frightened by the advertising portraying Obama as a dangerous man, and they have trouble understanding the difference between “Obama” and “Osama,” and now they are fearful and even more frightened that the world does not see the threat that so obviously looms.

This last fear is unwarranted, however. Much of the unmedicated world is also quivering before the peril that looms:

From North Carolina:

“People are very, very worried,” said Dean White, general manager of the firearms academy, gun shop and indoor shooting range. “We’re seeing a lot of people who have never even considered purchasing a handgun before coming in and saying that they want to buy one just because they think something’s going to happen and they may not be able to get it in the future.”

From Arizona:

But Barack Obama is good for business. Last Wednesday, the day after Mr. Obama beat Arizona’s own Mr. McCain to become the president-elect, Mr. Chee sold $30,000 worth of guns — mostly the semi-automatics the National Rifle Association claims Mr. Obama’s administration will restrict.

“The election came, and now it’s just a madhouse in here,” said Mr. Chee, 31.

From Pennsylvania:

Soon after Barack Obama won the presidential election, Dennis Dupler bought an assault rifle that he had wanted to protect his home, fearful that a Democratic White House and Congress will impose gun-control laws or taxes on firearms…

“I have a feeling there’s some bad stuff down the road,” said Dupler, of Elizabethtown, holding his rifle purchase Thursday at a gun shop near his home.

From Oregon:

During the week of the election, Flying Cloud sold over 20 AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. It typically sells four or five in a given month’s time … In the past couple of weeks, Smith said the low-end price for a AR-15 at his store has jumped from $900 to $1,050.

From Illinois:

“The best defense against the Obama Gun Grabbing Machine is a solid show of force by law-abiding gun owners,” said Pearson. “The most forceful display of support for gun rights is for citizens to enthusiastically exercise their 2nd Amendment rights. By keeping the gun shop cash registers ringing and the FBI background check computers humming, citizens will send a very clear message that they do not take challenges to their rights lightly.”

And more from Pennsylvania:

Same thing in Brodheadsville, where American Sport Shooting owner Richard Flynn has seen an 80 percent increase of gun sales starting a week before the election. “People are stockpiling ammunition too,” Flynn said…

“The other thing that has people concerned is talk of a civilian security force equally funded as the military. Run by [Obama], I guess. We see that as the Gestapo,” Flynn said.

“The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. It is about being able to protect ourselves against a government gone bad, which is what we have now,” Flynn said. “When a president wants to set up his own national army, that alarms people…”

“Let’s look to Hurricane Katrina. Government agents were going door to door, beating on doors, asking if they had guns, and taking them away,” said National Rifle Association spokesperson Ashley Varner. “It has happened in recent history. Let’s not say it could never happen.”

I haven’t been blogging much recently because being a full-time student really is a full-time job. I only go to class every three weeks but I’m busy all the time.

I haven’t had assigned reading for decades, and it’s really fascinating. Some of it I’m shaking my head No all the way through. I struggled, for instance, with the anarcho-primitivists. Anarchy is one thing; I’m in favor of it when humankind is sufficiently conscious. But primitivism leaves me cold. I don’t think hunting and gathering would be that great, even now that I know they were only spending three or four hours a day gathering food.

I admired some parts of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, but emerged with the impression that his local market must have run out of fresh clues that day. He begins with the assumption that the religious impulse — what his friend called the oceanic feeling that the friend considered universal — is a leftover infantile response, while stating up front that he can find no trace of it in himself. He seems to have considered that the normal state to which well-adjusted people would tend.

I connected strongly, on the other hand, to the autobiographical Camus novel The First Man. Wow, that guy could write! Imagine being the first person in your family to learn to read, then winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. He says that when he was sent home with notes to his family, he had to read the notes to them. Rather than detail his shame he would simply summarize the note as “Punishment”. So there was an up side to an illiterate family.

What’s moved me most is a book I’ll have to read at least once more. Perhaps it was my antipathy to many of Freud’s ideas, but I found his prose somewhat denser than Jung. Freud, in my view, wanted recognition as a scientist; Jung saw himself as an explorer on a mythical journey, and enjoyed telling the tale. Which one’s more fun to read?

Memories, Dreams, Reflections is too crammed with juicy quotes and deep ideas to be representable in any sort of sample. But a couple of quotes I’m trying to work into the paper I’m writing seem worthy of presentation nevertheless. The first brought to mind images of true believers of various religious and political stripes, not that any of those have been in evidence recently or anything.

The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organization to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognized that it is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of “isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth. It would therefore be wrong to regard this intermediary stage as a trap; on the contrary, for a long time to come it will represent the only possible form of existence for the individual, who nowadays seems more than ever threatened by anonymity. Collective organization is still so essential today that many consider it, with some justification, to be the final goal; whereas to call for further steps along the road to autonomy appears like arrogance or hubris, fantasticality, or simply folly.

Nevertheless it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms. It may be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him. He will go alone and be his own company. He will serve as his own group, consisting of a variety of opinions and tendencies — which need not necessarily be marching in the same direction. In fact, he will be at odds with himself, and will find great difficulty in uniting his own multiplicity for purposes of common action. Even if he is outwardly protected by the social forms of the intermediary stage, he will have no defense against his inner multiplicity. The disunion within himself may cause him to give up, to lapse into identity with his surroundings.

This is one of the trials on the road to individuation. Another confronts us as we emerge from the fog of unconsciousness, and gradually become aware that our conscious minds are not the whole shebang.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.