I read the news today, oh boy

Studying an NYT Article

2010-01-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

Here's a New York Times profile of Democratic Representative Bart Stupak of Michigan, the Congressman who believes that preventing abortions is way more important than health care reform. Jodi Kantor wrote this and it appeared on the front page of yesterday's Times, single column, above the fold. I found this article very interesting because it is an example of how a newspaper of record like the NYT does puff-pieces. Obviously the NYT has to be more discrete than Entertainment Weekly when it is heaping praise on someone, so it promotes Stupak's image by giving us ostensibly neutral declarative sentences about him.

In the article we find that Stupak is a tough man who endures "things others find unbearable" like the knee surgeries he suffered as a hero cop and the death of his son. He comes from a great state with harsh winters and beautiful summers. He enjoys football and beer. He drives his elderly Oldsmobile, a defunct American-made middling-price automobile brand, long distances to commune with his constituents. He stands strong on his principles even though this makes others hate him.

Who could hates such a fine American? The fact that Jodi Kantor doesn't bother to offer even the most cursory details in answer to this inevitable question is what makes it most obvious that this is a puff-piece. Apparently Congresswoman Denise Slaughter is one of the haters. Who is she? Well... she is a Democrat from New York, she is co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, and she refused comment for this article. Also she hates the stoic hero defined in the above paragraph and might have been rude to him once. Apparently that's all we need to know.

Diana DeGette, the other hater who was willing to comment, provides Kantor with the fig-leaf of balance. After spending the front 2/3s of the article--which I believe is all most people read anyway--telling us what a great guy Bart Stupak is, she provides a short passage explaining the alternative viewpoint that he is actually a tool of religious interests and is grossly misrepresenting the extent of his mistreatment by the party mainstream. It's instructive to compare a couple of passages:

his freshman year in Washington, [Stupak] requested but did not receive a seat on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. "I had one or two members tell me I’d never get on because I’m right-to-life," he said.
...
two years after being elected, he joined the Energy and Commerce Committee, and now serves as chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

Stupak's claim of committee members blacklisting him for his anti-abortion views is obviously belied by the fact that he got the seat anyway. Is there in fact anything unusual at all about a freshman Representative's request for an appointment to an important committee being denied until his second term? Probably not.

Here's another direct quotation I thought was particularly interesting:

"If he prevails, he will have won an audacious, counterintuitive victory, forcing a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a measure that will be hailed as an anti-abortion triumph. If party members do not accept his terms — and many vow they will not — Mr. Stupak is prepared to block passage of the health care overhaul."

This passage has a really interesting failure of parallelism. The amendment's success is Stupak's success--in fact his "audacious ... victory" and "triumph"--whereas the bill's defeat is a neutral proposition, defined simply as other party members not accepting his terms. Victory is his child, defeat is an orphan.

Now to the question of the blog post.
Why was this published at all? The information it contains about the actual content of this fight is limited to two paragraphs, one containing a generalized summary of what Stupak's amendment does, the other explaining that there are now more conservative Democrats like Stupak in Congress. The NYT has already had any number of articles about the efforts of anti-abortion Congresspeople to use health care reform as a vehicle for promoting their cause.

Given my above analysis the answer to my question is clearly that the NYT chose to publish a transparent puff-piece for Bart Stupak, but why? According to Jodi Kantor's Wikipedia entry she has a history of pursuing low-content personal interest stories, but still, why put this article on the front-page? I don't understand the reasoning, but then again, this is the newspaper that not long ago hired Bill Kristol as an opinion columnist.

2009-10-21T01:27:00.000-07:00

Here's two short monologues I wrote for No-Shame Theater this season, with short notes to go with:

An Open Letter and Statement of Principles
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Dear United States Congress,

First off it is not just you that I'm addressing here in this letter, congress. I also want you to send copies of this letter to the pope in Rome, to the anti-pope in anti-Rome, to Barack Obama Alleged President of the United States, to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and the Freemasons and Illuminati, to the Mafia, which I believe is also located in Rome but not at the same address as the pope, and to the media. Make sure you get a letter to all of the different media because I don't want anybody to feel left out. I would have sent copies to these people myself but I could not get their addresses so I want you to do it for me. My taxes would pay your salary, if I actually paid any. So you have to do what I say.

Anyway I am getting to my point now which is that you have got to do something about all the problems facing America. Dark forces are gathering. I am seeing you guys on the TV all the time talking about health care and the Panama Canal but you are always missing the point. This debate about public options, illegal immigrants, triggers, and so on, are not realistic and are not addressing the real problems of today. I am writing you to talk about the elephant in the room, the big issue that everybody is always tiptoeing around, which is that the president is assaulting the nature of reality through witchcraft. You all know what I am talking about, especially the pope. The President's idea of health care reform is to take health care from Americans who have it now, and transmute it from a written agreement between those Americans and insurance companies into a physical object. I have it on good authority that the President has already turned our healthcare into a series of delicate glass tubes. Some of these tubes will be smashed, some will be given to illegal aliens, and the rest will be shipped to the President's dual homelands of Kenya and Indonesia . The upshot is that foreigners and illegal immigrants will have healthcare in the form of magical glass tubes, and Americans will not.

This is not the only issue, by far. The President also plans to perform similar occult ceremonies on other abstract concepts including the emotions that average Americans experience on a daily basis. On Tuesday my daughter watched Obama's address to America's schoolchildren. She tells me that during this speech he cast a spell on her, and that when she got home from school and watched her stories she no longer found the Golden Girls funny. I am 110% certain that the president turned her laughter and amusement into a tiny man who now serves him as a butler. I demand that the president produce his true birth certificate showing him to have been born in both Indonesia and Kenya, that he cease his theft of our health care, that he cremate his secret dwarf butler alive on a pyre built from the wood of a sacred oak-tree so that my daughters sense of humor can return to her in the form of vapor, and finally that he resign from the presidency. I do not think these demands are unreasonable. These acts of witchcraft, which give physical form to imaginary goods, cannot go on. How long before the President turns the Pledge of Allegiance into a pair of shoes, or the nation's collective memory of Abraham Lincoln into a rocket-ship? Not long, I fear. Take heed, Congress, and listen to my warning, before all is lost.

Love and Kisses,
Evan Schenck

[lights down]

I don't usually perform political humor or even go near current events because I think it usually sucks, and I worry about that stuff enough without involving an innocent audience, but this piece was performed on September 11. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land was getting crowded and I thought there was potential for actual comedy there, even though the primary emotions I experienced over the death panel kerfluffle were more in the vein of bemusement and sadness. To get past that I resorted to one of my favorite devices, which is asserting a premise that is patently impossible or illogical--the real problem with Barack Obama is that he is turning abstract concepts into tangible objects. I like ideas like that, especially when they involve specific details.

This piece went pretty well on stage, aided in large part by an audience that was large and kind of jazzed up by the other performances. I brought a little more manic energy to it than my usual subdued method and I think it worked.

The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains
or
The Spirit of the 19th Century
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Joachim Wheellock Hammersmith was born in 1815. He was Joachim after the saint, Wheellock after the type of pistol, and Hammersmith after his father, who was a minor official of the British East India company based in Calcutta. J.W. Hammersmith made his first fortune growing opium in Bengal for sale in China. In 1845 he moved to the Ottoman Empire and made his second fortune by founding a company which claimed to arrange pilgrimages to Jeruselam or Mecca but which in fact simply robbed and murdered its customers. Hammersmith increased his profit margins and disposed of the corpses by butchering them and selling the meat to the local Arabs, claiming that it was actually lamb. After being chased out of the holy land by an angry mob, he moved to Britain.

Hammersmith was an early pioneer of the company town concept, in which he made his employees live in a town that he owned and forced them into debt so that they were effectively his slaves. A minor scandal occurred in 1852 when the Times of London reported that each family under his authority was forced to draw a pint of their own blood each month, which was collected by carriage and taken to Hammersmith's enormous mansion, which was a replication of Buckingham Palace sitting on top of a replication of Versailles. He refuted accusations that he was a vampire by revealing that he did not actually do anything with the blood but instead just dumped it in the River Tyne.

By 1888 Hammersmith was widely regarded as the wealthiest and most evil man who had ever lived. That year he was strongly suspected by many in London of being Jack the Ripper, to which he famously replied, “What's this fuss about five prostitutes? Think of my work in Africa. I have probably killed a million men and intend to kill several millions more, but the evil things I do aren't against the law.” To illustrate his point, he sent instructions to the American office of Wheellock LLC to cause the extinction of a major species, adding “I don't care which.” The last known passenger pigeon died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo.

As he grew older, Hammersmith began to worry about death. Specifically, he was convinced that he was going to be condemned to Hell. Initially he funded scientific research into an immortality vaccine, but after a close reading of the Bible he realized that, even if he were immortal, he would still be damned upon the second coming of Jesus. He thus refocused his efforts. In 1900 he moved to the United States and hired Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla to build a machine to kill God, the enmity between the two inventors finally culminating in a fist fight. Edison pushed Tesla to the ground, sat on his chest, and rubbed a handful of pearl necklaces in Tesla's hair, mortifying the deeply obsessive-compulsive Serbian inventor and putting an immediate end to the project.

However, Hammersmith discovered a passage in the bible, Judges 1:19. “And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.” On the strength of this passage Hammersmith ordered a vast mobile tomb to be constructed in his Australian holdings, in the form of an enormous steam-driven iron chariot. Edison dutifully designed the vehicle, which was two hundred feet high, four hundred feet wide, and a thousand feet long. On the front of the chariot was a immense excavator and refinery complex, so that as it surged across the outback at forty-five miles an hour, the chariot could constantly strip mine the coal it needed to continue operations.

Hammersmith bought one hundred infants, 50 male and 50 female. He gave strict instructions that they be raised mute, without language, and taught nothing except the task of maintaining the chariot, so that when the time came to begin his journey they could be sealed inside with his body, living as his slaves after his death, bearing and raising generations of children within the black metallic confines of his cyclopean nomad mausoleum as it drove ever onward into eternity, defying the final justice of God himself. When J.W. Hammersmith died in 1916, his instructions were followed to the letter.

To this day, Hammersmith's tomb can still be seen traversing the deserts of Australia, carving the sacred land of the aborigine's into a blasted moonscape, spewing a column of fire and smoke a mile high by day and night, its 30 steam whistles shrieking an unintelligible babble of discordant notes.

[lights down]

This is my favorite piece of the several I've done so far this year and I was really pleased by it in spite of how heavy-handed the metaphors are. Mark Twain made an appearance in the first version but it was quite a bit too long and had to be cut. I found this piece fun to write and fun to read. It's a treat to toss off phrases like "cyclopean nomad mausoleum" or "blasted moonscape," but one so seldom gets the chance.

In performance it came on kind of slow, because it wasn't immediately clear to the audience what kind of story it was, but they eventually got that it was a kind of absurd narrative and they were laughing by the end.

There's another piece I did last Friday, but I think I might sit on that one until later on, in case I do another piece in the coming show.

Evan Schenck
also posted to Katy Baggs Bloggs

The Proposal

2009-07-07T00:56:00.000-07:00

Oh, Lordy

I was looking at movie showtimes on the Google jest a few minutes ago and I saw a film entitle "The Proposal" being shown at many local cinema outlets as if it was a major release. Having seen the Australian independent-type film that I rented on DVD from the ICPL (Iowa City Public Library) I near to peed myself. Danny Huston as a psychotic killer? Guy Pearce as a conflicted felon feeling the pressure between two conflitcting senses of family duty? Why would this film be shown in American cinnies years after it was actually released?

Twas only then that I remembered the vagaries of film-making. It is only a movie which has the same title as that which I have described. The film that is now being released stars Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock (both of whom I like) in some bland rom-com about a Canadian who needs American citizenship. In summarizing this plot through a haze of rum and Fat Tire ale I have exhausted all the narrative possibilities of the subject. I will never see it, I will never plumb its filmitive depths.

I feel no sense of loss.

In the other cinematic categories the only interesting promontory is Public Enemies, the Michael Mann feature which coincidentally stars Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Michael Mann's name would have been enough to entice me. The man has an intuitive sense for how to direct a battlefield scene. In Hollywood the big-feature action movies are doled out to childish hacks like Michael Bay, or to mechanically inclined technicians like Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott. Somebody who has a true grasp of reality like Michael Mann is only given a moment, a minute, a slice of time in which to address the concept of systematized violence, before that moment passes. Hence the shootout scene in "Heat", which is as immaculate a firefight as could be committed to film.

So I think I should see Public Enemies, if only to observe the planning and execution behind Melvin Purviss's greatest sting.

Transformers 2 debuted recently. I have no idea what this entails, and no interest in exploring this concept. In 10 years, if the idea of these movies has held up to the march of time, if they still make sense in the context of the ages, I might see them. But at this time they have the appearance of garbage. I would sooner watch Porky's or Meatball's, or another film peculiar to the time of its production, than the bombastic offerings of Michael Bay.

Yoghurt

2009-05-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

I saw an episode of Alton Brown's "Good Eats" on the Food Network which was about yogurt, in which he asserted that even the lactose intolerant could eat and digest it, in spite of the fact that it is pretty much the dairy-est thing since milk itself, as long as it contained active cultures. Being lactose intolerant, I decided to put this to the test.

At the store today I looked through the yogurt section of the dairy case. Some brands of yogurt bear the inscription "made with active cultures" or "with active cultures"; apparently this is a way that they LIE to the consumer by hiding behind semantics. These yogurts would make me incredibly sick because they contained active cultures only in the PAST. The active cultures have to be alive at the time I consume them, so that they can digest the lactose for me, so the plastic cup has to specifically say "contains active cultures".

I am eating a fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt as I write this, not having eaten any yogurt in a couple of years, at least. It's delicious. In about a half hour we'll see if Alton Brown was right, and I can eat this stuff. I hope so.

Torture

2009-04-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

So, people got tortured by America. This has been known for some time but recently we got the details in printed form, so in their own feckless way the media are engaging the story. Every time I see this on television, usually on MSNBC because that's what I watch, I get angry and I yell at the screen. This doesn't get much done even to the extent that it's cathartic, because as soon as I express my anger something else is said to make me mad again.

So here are a few specific items about the torture story, or rather about the story of the story, that bother me and elicit my anger at the television screen.

(A) The ticking time-bomb scenario. I would like it if, every time somebody tried to float this one on the news programs, the anchor/moderator/whoever would just stop them and say, "no, you automatically lose because you brought that up, please leave the set and collect your dunce cap."

First, the entire idea, that there could be a situation wherein we capture a terrorist, and we know that there is a deadly attack coming in the near future, but not know where, when, or how, is fiction. It has never happened and it will never happen. To put this in simple terms, if we know absolutely no details of the terrorist plot, how do we know it is going to happen so quickly that there is only enough time to torture this one guy? If we have no details, how do we know that the suspect knows anything about it at all? It isn't plausible.

Second, even if we accept the ticking-time-bomb scenario in a general sense, as a "well this could happen, and in such a case it would be okay to waterboard a guy," it still fails as a justification for any of the tortures that occurred under the Bush administration. After you get past the large plausibility problem with this argument, you run smack into the fact that it applies to precisely none of the detainees who were tortured! Let's relate this to another crime. Most recognize that if someone attacks another with clear intent to commit murder, the victim of this attack would be justified in using all necessary means to defend himself, up to and including lethal force if all other options were exhausted. Now, does this then justify all murders, including those where self-defense is not even claimed? Obviously not.

Third, even if we allow the first two to slide, there is still the issue that torture produces flawed information anyway, so it's doubtful whether it would yield sufficient data fast enough to thwart a ticking-time-bomb attack, especially since the suspect himself knows that he need only stall the interrogators for a short length of time until the attack comes off and his work is accomplished.

(B) Reporting the controversy and the Golden Mean. When there is an argument or a public debate the newspeople love to sit on the fence between the two sides and simply report on the ins and outs of the argument itself, without ever quite figuring out who was right and who was wrong--often, it seems, they're both wrong and the correct answer is somewhere in the middle, right near the Golden Mean. Hence the reportage about whether or not the torture described in the released memoranda is actually torture. It is! It is! It is! Ask the SERE trainers from whom the ideas were cribbed. Ask Amnesty International. Ask professional torturers who worked for Saddam or Pinochet! Ask any expert, but don't ask Pat Buchanan or Newt Gingrich, because they're talking out their asses!

MSNBC does something particularly egregious with respect to reporting the controversy, which is their habit of replacing one expert with two political operatives, one from right and one from left. Like this morning they had somebody representing the liberal blogosphere and somebody representing the conservative blogosphere, and asked them questions about what the lefties and the righties were saying on the internet about the torture memos. Here is what this lefty is saying: get an expert on your show instead of these amateurs! For example, have an expert in international law tell you whether or not we should prosecute the people responsible for Bush administration torturing. Answer: Yes, the US has legally binding treaty obligations to prosecute wrongdoing of this kind.

(C) Please let's talk about what Dick Cheney is saying about torture, without discussing the fact that he was almost certainly deeply involved in the decision to torture and his statements are probably attempts to avoid being prosecuted himself. I mean, the extraneous memos that he is trying to release to demonstrate that torture worked come from his own personal files. Gee, I wonder why he kept those close to hand.

This is a big story with a lot of details, but this is what bubbles up in my mind right now.

Evan

Coraline

2009-02-28T16:46:00.000-08:00

KT and I went to see the film "Coraline" today and I really enjoyed it. The best thing about the movie in my estimation was the art direction, which was beautiful. I've seen the previous movie in the stop-motion style from Henry Selick, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and I thought that its visual style, while interesting, was not particularly arresting. Not so for Coraline, perhaps as a result of the more recent film having the benefit of computer assistance to the puppetry. There were some wide-angle exterior shots showing the fog-shrouded, wooded mountains that framed the setting, and I thought that it was not only suggestive of such landscapes in real life but actually better looking to some extent, which is a significant accomplishment. Given the typical small, weak field for animated features this will probably be the significant Oscar contender in next year's Academy Awards, and I liked the art direction enough to believe it would win, even without having seen it's possible competition.

The story was good, which should be little surprise as it was adapted from a Neil Gaiman story. At various points it became one of those animated features to which people should not have brought very young and/or impressionable children, because I could see how one of those would be terrified by a few scenes.

Some things I wrote

2008-10-18T12:31:00.000-07:00

Here are a couple of things I wrote for No Shame Theater:

Business Concept: Two Dimensional Food
by Evan Schenck

[lights up]

Evan: I came up with a business plan last night, and I’m going to pitch it to you, the No-Shame audience. I am giving you the right of first refusal, here. Okay, get ready, because I’m about to wow you. Here’s the concept: Two Dimensional Food.

I’m not talking about stuff that merely APPEARS to be two-dimensional, like tortillas or fruit-by-the-foot. I’m talking about food that is literally two-dimensional, having length and breadth but no depth. This would result in a completely planar food without mass or volume. The applications of this are obvious. The food would possess flavor, but because it took up no space and had no mass, you could eat as much of it as you wanted without ever getting full. People like eating ice-cream and cakes, right? But they don’t like getting fat, and you can get filled up on them and not get the right nutrients. But people would come and pay to eat our two-dimensional food, and they’d get a great taste that doesn’t ever fill them up. This is a win-win proposition, because the customers would be able to just keep buying until they had to leave and get actual filling meal somewhere else.

Okay, I can tell that you want to ask me, “Evan, how are you going to produce this two-dimensional food?” I’m not sure yet, which is why I need an initial investment, so I can do some feasibility studies. One idea I have is putting the food in the middle of a hardcover book, shutting that book, and putting something heavy on top. I’ve already tried this out with gummy bears and it works. Assuming that the flatness of the end product scales in linear fashion with the heaviness of the weight, all I need to do is find an infinitely heavy object and we’ll be in business.

Your next question, of course, is, “Evan, if the food is two-dimensional, wouldn’t it then have an infinitely narrow edge, effectively no edge at all, and therefore be infinitely sharp and capable of cutting through virtually anything?” The answer to that question is yes, the food will be unbelievably dangerous. This will require us to post disclaimers on the menu which will absolve us of any legal liability. Problem solved.

I will be selling shares in the company after the show, anybody who is interested should speak to Eli.

[lights down]

Museum Tour Audiotape
by Evan Schenck

[Lights up]

Narrator: Now, walk north through the arch into the Adolf Hitler exhibit, which was constructed and filled with paintings through a generous donation from automobile manufacturer Henry Ford. In 1936 Ford granted the museum ten million dollars in the name of German dictator Adolf Hitler and stipulated that the museum must never rename the exhibit. The museum attempted to escape this clause in 1941, 1944, 1946, 1951, and 1982, but in each case was thwarted by Mr. Ford’s estate. The Adolf Hitler exhibit features paintings and sculpture by artists of undisputedly Aryan extraction on a rotating basis, as per Mr. Ford’s instructions.

The painting before you presently is entitled “Der übernatürlich Alpentraum” and was painted by the German artist Gerd Christian Helmut Florian Hans Wiesler von Turm an der Oder. It was commissioned by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund in 1425, and is an attempt by a German artist to improve upon Italian Renaissance painting. Linear perspective, which allowed three-dimensional images to be depicted in two-dimension paintings, had been invented by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1415, and competition among artists to invent the next improvement in painting was fierce. von Turm believed that the next step was to increase the level of perspective in the painting beyond even that attainable by the naked eye.

To this end, he created a painting that depicts not only three dimensional space but the full extent of fourth dimensional space as viewed from a fixed point. The practical effect of this is that, by viewing this painting, one can simultaneously observe all moments in time, past, present and future, showing a view of the location of the Cologne Cathedral of Germany. Look closely at the painting now. Observe feudal serfs digging the foundation of the cathedral in the early 13th century. Observe a microwave laser incinerating the city of Cologne from space in the early 23rd century. Observe small mammals wandering through a prehistoric forest a few million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. Observe the light of the Big Bang shining in the endless void. At the opposite end, observe the heat death of the universe, the entropy at the end of all time.

If by some chance you are going to die in a place visible in the painting, we apologize, as you have also observed your own death. We advise you to take no steps to avert this fate, because any such effort is futile. Any stress resulting from observation of one’s own death is solely the responsibility of the museum patron, as detailed in the waiver that you signed upon entering the museum. To put it in perspective, you have also observed the death of the entire universe. Thank you for visiting the Adolf Hitler exhibit. Please return next week, when we will be exhibiting a series of Dürer woodcuts depicting unusual rabbits.

[lights down]

Economics

2008-10-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

In common with the first presidential debate, I left tonight's televised spectacle in disgust after about 20 minutes. The Vice-Presidential debate entertained me somewhat more. There were two reasons for this.

1) Sarah Palin's bizarre personal style. I divine two possible explanation for her performance. Either she really does talk like that and she saw no reason to gussy up her elocution, or she spent some time with a DVD of Fargo cribbing from Frances McDormand's Oscar-winning riff on a woman from a small town in the Northern Districts of America. Either way she chose to exude that aura. "You betcha"? Winking at the camera? What a trainwreck, what a ridiculous person. Just going from her appearance at that debate (which she chose, and carefully!) can you imagine her pinch-hitting for McCain, across the table from Sarkozy or, God Forbid, Vladimir Putin (the bogeyman himself!)?

Of course the argument goes that she is actually a canny operator and that her attitude was carefully massaged, which I'm willing to believe. But the reverse is that she represented what the GOP thinks we want. That implied insult ought to be enough to send American voters running away from them at the polls, but who I am kidding. It horrified and entertained me, at any rate. I like to imagine that McCain's vice-presidential selection was controlled by John Waters--"Who will be the most tawdry and grotesque while still being at least a simulation of politics?"

2) Rum. Katy and I drank for the debate, which put a glow on it and made it enjoyable.

Tonight, though, I was bored and agitated by the rules of the debate, most prominently that the candidates were not allowed to engage one another. Just before I quit watching, McCain took an opportunity to lie about Barack Obama's tax plan, and then Brokaw refused to allow Barry to address the falsehood. It would have been against the rules, sure, but if that's the case then the rules sucked.

I also had a problem with both candidate's answer to the question about whether the economy was still going to be messed up even after the bail-out (no wait, we're calling it a rescue now). Both of them dodged. This is stupid. The economy is not going to be okay, even if the present crisis is averted, because the problem is systemic rather than temporary. We've had two major bubbles in the past ten years (remember the Dot-Coms?) because of how our economy is structured. It is designed to favor explosive growth and so it seeks to create opportunity for it even when none exists. Entirely speculative value is the result, as in the late 1990s; companies that did nothing to produce wealth were assigned illusory dollar values. More recently, the housing market increased trillions of dollars in value in spite of the fact that it had scarcely changed physically. Why did this value rise? Demand rose! Why was demand rising? Because the value was rising! Get in, cash in, take a loan to buy a house.

In hindsight it was clearly a bubble, but even the financial giants were taken in by it, sustaining and extending the bubble to make their buck, and now we're paying the price of exuberance. And of course it is going to hurt. Several trillion dollars in illusory value disappeared from the economy a year ago August, there is going to be an economic contraction in consequence. The lesson should be that we need to set up provisions to prevent such bubbles from ever occurring again, to design the economy for stability and steady growth rather than explosive expansion and dizzying contraction. But neither candidate indicated that he had especially learned this lesson.

DVDs

2008-04-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

Come now, people who rent movies from various outlets and services, what is your problem? Can it really be so difficult to make that mental leap between the amount of care with which one has to treat a VHS, and the level of caution demanded for the continued usefulness of a DVD?

I will tell you a story, reader:

Not long ago I wanted to watch a movie called "Last of the Mohicans" starring Daniel Day-Lewis et al., a film which I greatly enjoy, especially the beautifully acted, staged, and shot ending of the film, 10 minutes of cinema which are definitely part of my mental highlight reel. Not only was I looking forward to seeing this movie, but I had a guest at whom I had praised the film. We were both to be sorely disappointed.

I put the DVD in the drive of my computer (which, lacking a dedicated DVD player, I use to watch films) and we began to watch it, and we saw no more than thirty seconds of Daniel Day-Lewis and friends running through the woods before the video locked up. I ejected the disk, looked at it to determine the level of scratchiness (very high!), wiped it on my shirt (this being the approved method of dealing with DVD errors) and reinserted it. The video froze again, in nearly the same spot, and this time was such an apparently serious problem that my very DVD drive locked up. Es war kaputt! In the end I was required to eject the drive manually (that is, with a straightened paperclip shoved carefully into the appropriate maintenance aperture) and reboot my computer.

To sum up, somebody had handled that DVD with such carelessness and abandon that it broke my computer, albeit temporarily. How does this even happen? Did some prior user store the disk in a bag of gravel and slice it with a cutthroat razor? It's very simple--when you are watching the DVD, it is in the tray that projects out of the device you're watching it with. When you are not watching the DVD, it is in its case. By following these directives, the DVD should last you in the range of decades at least.

But no! Some arrant fool marred the data surface of the DVD, rendering it useless forevermore, and worse yet, this was a DVD rented from the University of Iowa Main Library, that is to say, a public good, making this not only an example of rank technological incompetence but also of the tragedy of the commons.

Speaking of which, I am making this post on a public terminal in the Library computer lab and about 15 feet from me a young man is using the computer provided to watch fan-edited videos of the Japanese anime series "Yu-Yu Hakusho" on Youtube. He has been doing this for as long as I've been here, about 1/2 hour. Is he making better use of University resources than I am? Maybe.

Tempest in a Teacup

2008-03-24T11:57:00.001-07:00

My opinion on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy is that it's a complete waste of my time, and I doubt anybody outside the insular media community even cares about it. People like William Kristol, whose column today was focused on Obama and race, desperately want to find a "Gotcha!" for Barack Obama, and it's telling that this is the best they can do.

These are the problems I have with the reportage:

1) Why should I care that Obama belongs to a congregation led by a somewhat militant black preacher? It is fatuous to suggest that Obama bears any responsibility for the opinions of his minister, no matter how long he's been a member of the congregation. I myself was for the first 18 years of my life a member of religious flocks, the leaders of which held opinions wildly at variance to my own--disbelief in the theory of natural selection, fear and hatred of homosexuals, etc. etc. I'm no more obligated to defend or deny these beliefs than Obama is.

2) There is a towering double standard at work here. The close association between the Republican Party and its religious allies, many of whom are apt to make statements far more anti-American than Rev. Wright's, is not questioned with nearly this much vigor.

3) There is an important element to the argument against Rev. Wright's statements, never spoken, but always implicit. It is the belief that Wright doesn't have the right to be so angry about the status of African Americans in the country today. Kristol accuses Wright of "using his pulpit to propagate racial resentment", and frankly this is a ridiculous accusation. The racial resentment exists all by itself, because after 140 years of promises, African American communities still have not got their fair share. People like Kristol apparently believe that there isn't anything wrong, and it's just a few agitators like Wright stirring things up. I am mystified at how ignorant and brain-dead someone can be, and still get a slick job writing columns for the New York Times. Kristol insists in his column that we're making racial progress, we don't need a new racial dialog, and in fact it would be counter-productive. If we just keep our heads down, eyes forward, and don't talk about it, everything will be fine.

He even has the temerity to quote Pat Moynihan, a Nixon adviser who in 1969 said that America needed to ignore the race issue for a while and just let "Negro progress" continue on its own. Kristol claims that racial progress "has in fact continued in America" (not bothering to support this assertion with anything, but who cares, it's only journalism) and happily slides past the fact that he was just talking about an adviser to Nixon, the king of the Southern Strategy. I take back what I said about Kristol being better than David Brooks--this column was such a complete lemon that I really feel sorry for whoever has been duped into signing Willy's checks.

Mea Culpa

2008-03-23T23:48:00.000-07:00

A person of whom I am fond pointed out to me that I once said this:

My money is on Romney. He is made of plastic, has no actual positions or beliefs, and if you squint hard enough in low-light conditions he kind of looks like Ronald Reagan. He also has the support of the party elite, which counts for everything in the GOP, probably to the extent of making his coronation a near inevitability.

If my money was on Romney, all that money is lost now, because I was wrong and dead wrong about him. Silly me.

John McCain, eight years too late, has secured the nomination from the Grand Old Party and run Romney right out of town. It remains to be soon who Johnny will choose as his running mate. But, dammit, I'm not afraid to make assertions based on my own analysis and gut impulses, and I'm not afraid to later admit that I was quite completely wrong, as I was about Romney and I was about Thompson. In both cases I was bamboozled. So what? I'm going to say right now that... I have not the least idea who will be the second half of the Republican ticket. Probably some odious mound of flesh to balance McCain's ticket without being able to demand too much on the platform. McCain isn't one to share the power or the limelight. Perhaps he will be some creature belonging to Mike Huckabee, to draw the evangelical vote. Perhaps he will come from the Romney end of things, the better to pull in money. In any case there are holes in McCain's appeal. He is strong among moderates, but I think that when Obama takes the Democratic nomination, Barack will stomp his ugly old-man Naval aviator guts out in that section of the electorate.

In my admittedly poorly founded opinion (see the above for some errors I have made!) I think Obama is a super candidate the likes of which America has not seen in a long time. He is charismatic, a superb speaker, and I think behind his facade of the "last honest politician" there lurks a very canny and very dangerous street-fighter. I think Barack Obama is my generation's Bobby Kennedy, only this time he's going to make it through alive. I think (and this is the time on my blog when I begin to use weasel words!) that he is going to win the Democratic nomination. After all, it is now virtually a mathematical impossibility for Hillary Clinton to catch up to him in either delegates or the popular vote, and I hope to Jeezis that I won't be proved wrong this time. But I think that, when it comes down to Barack Obama and John McCain, Barack will turn poor Johnny into hamburger. All you need to do is watch any of Obama's appearances, and then imagine the gloves coming off, as they would against a member of the other party. The old man hasn't got a chance, frankly. He's weak everywhere Obama is strong, and Obama isn't really that weak anywhere. Barack will eat him. I look forward to it.

Additionally, I've always wondered why the Republican Party is called the "Grand Old Party." The Democratic Party, as it is descended directly from Thomas Jefferson's Anti-Federalists, is something like 70 years older. This does not make sense to me. Then again, the actual structure of parties is meaningless, as their standing changes fluidly. For a long time the Democrats were the conservative party that dominated the South, and the Republicans had a stranglehold on the African American vote. Things are always changing.

McCain has the Experience

2008-03-19T10:03:00.000-07:00

File this one under s**t I knew in 2004 but an experienced public servant like John McCain still hasn't caught up with.

Briefly, John McCain alleged that Iran was supplying Al Qaeda in Iraq with weapons and training. Unless you're a high-ranking member of the Republican Party, you've probably heard that Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist Sunni organization, and Iran is a fundamentalist Shi'ite state. Barring any Bushism queries like "There's more'n one kinda Mooslam?", you should also know that these two kinds of people have a hard time getting along. To whit, Iran backs Shi'ite groups like Hezbollah and, in Iraq, the Mahdi Army. Al Qaeda, by contrast, likes to blow up Shi'ites. Now, you could say that this was a slip of the tongue, but when somebody makes the same statement repeatedly during an appearance in the Middle East designed to promote his foreign policy expertise, it's hard to justify that excuse.

And of course Lieberman is there for the save:

A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then said: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda."

I like that Roy Cohn thing he's doing there, whispering in the Man's ear to keep him from stumbling. Maybe if the Democrats win a comfortable senate majority in the upcoming, they'll strike him from the records and leave him to languish on his own--no loyalty = no committee positions for the new Zell Miller.

Hey What?

2008-03-13T23:23:00.001-07:00

Okay, this is a practice which I have well established for myself, but might well be unfamiliar with people who I know: I like to imbibe alcohol and then watch action movies. I think that, even given the fact that I am consuming alcohol alone and in isolation from others, the fact that I make a ritual of it with involvement in film, this helps to some extent. Sometimes a person has to consume chemical poisons. This is truth, it is fully legal, I am of age, etc., etc., and so on. I have partaken of alcohol and watched Die Hard, and found it good. The action is very well staged, and I respect the acting of Bruce Willis. My one concern is that Die Hard has locked him into a practice of action movie heroism which has obfuscated and even annihilated his comedic talents. I was far too young, at the time Die Hard was made, to be familiar with his comedic work, but it is my understanding that prior to Die Hard Willis was a sit-com actor. Die Hard did away with this. Bruce Willis cannot now be filmed, except as a killing machine.

(Also, it should be noted that at the precise moment I am writing this, I am listening to a false and manufactured Symphonic Metal album created in direct relation to a cartoon series on the Cartoon Network: The Dethalbum, as birthed by the nonexistent and fictional Metal Band Dethklok. I recommend it highly, as I do recommend the film Die Hard. Especially when one has been influenced by chemicals.

There was a time, when I was younger, when I believed that behavior-modifying chemicals were something bad. I had contempt for alcohol, and marijuana, and hallucinogens, and so forth. But in light of experience I must recognize that that the mind itself builds barriers between the emotional self and the conscious self, which can't be broken down, except with the assistance of chemicals. After all, it makes little sense for me to believe that things like lithium et al., can improve the mental perceptions of people by modifying them chemically, and then to disbelieve the efficacy of alcohol and THC, and so forth. Not to say that I have ever done anything illegal in my entire life. I never drank before I was 21, and I have merely observed the effects of illegal narcotics. Seriously. I am a paragon of lawfulness.)

But yes, by God, I have spent time today with my friends, seen how they were doing, and when they departed, drank distilled spirits with the express purpose of watching a ridiculous action movie and then blogging about it. I won't waste anybody's time by trying to describe the gyrations that John McClane puts himself through, in pursuit of Justice. He is a man governed by naught but his own physical powers and the rule of Nemesis, Ancient Greek goddess of retribution. Nemesis was the goddess of "to give what is due." I have been familiar with Greek myth for a long time, since I was a young lad in elementary school, in the system that the state of Iowa calls "Talented and Gifted" or "TAG". I built a diorama. Do not question it. I consider Nemesis the greatest of the pantheon, because where other gods and goddesses bring their own ideas and prejudices, Nemesis gives only what one has earned. This is the greatest justice; each man receives a reward or punishment appropriate to his crimes and virtues.

Thus there is something elemental about the Die Hard series, that exceeds the power of normal action movies. I think there is a part of the population which disregards this kind of film, because it is stupid, because it is not self-aware or reflective--it worships violence, force, and power, and is fundamentally against reason and is (at least it could so be characterized) fascist in sympathy. But it appeals to something in human nature that cannot be denied. John McClane is active, not passive, and he dispenses that final justice which cannot be obtained in real life. Though his world is naive, he represents an idea that will not be denied. Justice, in the form of his Beretta pistol, awaits those who believe themselves above justice.

Whoa Depressing

2008-03-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

For one of my classes I read a German children's book called Pünktchen und Anton by Erich Kästner, which was published in 1933. It was a pretty cute book about a couple of kids living in Berlin at around that time, having kid adventures. Kästner is the guy who wrote the book on which Disney based "The Parent Trap", by the way.

I was just now writing a 3 page paper (in German, mind you--I have mad skills!) and I was thinking about it, and I realized that all kinds of totally horrible things probably happened to Pünktchen and Anton during their 20s... during WWII, I mean. Like, given his age, physical fitness, and like course of education, Anton would almost certainly serve in some military capacity, with a high likelihood of death or maiming. Pünktchen, living in Berlin, would have her own problems to worry about.

Aw man, the book is semi-ruined for me now.

William Kristol is a Fool and Mountebank

2008-02-18T12:32:00.000-08:00

Right Wing Editorial Troll William Kristol wrote an opinion piece for today's NYT which caught my eye because it referenced my hero, George Orwell. A lot of people have a lot of admiration for Ol' George, often including the last people you'd expect, such as rightist pundits and power-worshippers like Kristol. True, Orwell had some positions that they would have liked (he didn't shirk from the use of force against tyranny, which would score him some Neo-Conservative credentials) but a huge load of ideas that they would have had very little time for (such as his socialism and his frank contempt for conservative political thought). I think he's a confusing person for them, because he was virulently anti-Soviet and highly critical of some socialists--i.e. sandal-wearing vegetarians and others he considered embarrassing to the movement--which is something they like, so they just mentally breeze past the fact that he made all those criticisms pursuant to strengthening the socialist movement in the hopes of putting an end to capitalism and people like Kristol.

Anyway, to the editorial. Kristol begins his argument from something Orwell wrote about Rudyard Kipling, which was that Kipling was in one light disgusting because he toadied to the ruling class and supported their positions, but from another angle was admirable, because serving the rulers imbues one with a more concrete sense of what is desirable and responsible in governing. Being a member of the permanent opposition erases one's responsibility for coming up with serious ideas, as one merely needs to oppose, not actually govern. Orwell's criticism was once again very specific to his own context; he is aiming this barb at the people in his own movement who were intellectually sympathetic to Socialism but too doctrinaire or too eccentric to do much.

Kristol says, "aha! I have discovered that the Democrats are the irresponsible party of opposition and the Republicans are the practical, serious-minded governing party!"

There are a few problems with applying this to the American political scene, as Kristol tries to do:
1) There isn't really a "ruling party" in American politics. In the American system, unlike Parliamentary systems like that in Britain, it is possible for one party to control the executive and another to control the legislature. In this case one can consider the party in control of the executive the "governing party" but in practice it isn't quite so. This has been a fairly common situation in American politics, prevailing through the substantial part of the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations.

2) I wouldn't trust the Republican party to run a lemonade stand and neither should you. Suggesting that the Republican Party is somehow more "responsible" than the Democratic Party is specious. Both Reagan and G.W. Bush dramatically increased expenditures while reducing tax revenue, with the effect that this two administrations caused a hugely disproportionate share of the national debt. Moreover, the Bush administration has proven itself utterly irresponsible many times in the past seven years (e.g., our disastrous war of choice in Iraq, widespread appointment of incompetent cronies as in the Katrina disaster, forgetting about the war in Afghanistan, squandering all of our diplomatic capital, taking zero action on critical issues like infrastructure, alternative energy, and global warming, etc. etc.).

3) Support for the Iraq war != Responsibility. One of Kristol's main points in how the Democrats are irresponsible is that they have failed to adapt to a changing situation "on the ground" in Iraq. (As a rhetorical sidenote, I am amazed at all the things going on "on the ground" in Iraq. With all the suicide bombings, corner-turning, adapting to win, listening to the generals "on the ground", I wonder how they have any room at all. Maybe that's why all of their intellectuals are doing their best to flee the country--lack of space.) Implicit in this argument is that things actually have changed substantially enough to require a real reassessment of our aims... which it hasn't. Violence has been reduced overall due to the overwhelming presence after the "surge", but there's no sign of political rapprochement and no reason to believe that violence will not resume just as before the moment our troop levels drop. Moreover, less people getting blown up each day is only one measure of progress, and other key indices (like oil production, employment, electricity, potable water access, and so on) haven't really improved.

Finally, and painfully, the Iraq responsibility argument has to go back to basics. George W. Bush and his Republican party aggressively sold the American people and Congress on an invasion of a country which was no threat to the USA, using deception and fear-mongering to obscure their real reasons. While Kristol (who has always been a big support of the Iraq War) no doubt still feels that it was the height of responsibility to go into Iraq, 64% of Americans now feel otherwise and, to avoid suggestion of argumentum ad populum, basically it's indisputable that we originally went in to find WMDs and depose a dictator, and we have found that there were no WMDs and the removal of Saddam hasn't really improved things very much at all.

4) Support for Warrantless Wiretapping and Telecom Immunity != Responsibility. Kristol also suggests that House Democrats are irresponsible because they failed to pass Bush's wishlist of wiretapping and immunity for the Telecom industry and so endangered America. I'll make no bones about this one--this makes William Kristol him a lying asshole. America is not in any more danger now, because we have simply defaulted to the old rules on FISA, which offer more than adequate freedom to our intelligence agencies and allows them to just wiretap the shit out of anybody they want... as long as they get FISA court approval for tapping calls within the United States (always speedily granted, in point of fact). This is the real rub for Bush and crypto-Fascists like Kristol; they want to be tapping people without any oversight or review whatsoever. The standard FISA rules would pretty much allow them to tap the same lines just as quickly (a FISA warrant can be acquired after surveillance has already begun), but it would leave a paper trail and record of what is going on. This is good for the protection of our freedoms but bad for limitless executive power, so as far as Kristol (and Bush) is concerned it has to go.

The second element is telecom amnesty. This is a long story which I'll briefly summarize (more information on it can be found on the internet, naturally). The NSA and other intelligence agencies approached telecommunications firms like AT&T and Verizon and asked them to help the government engage in activities which both parties knew to be totally illegal and grounds for everybody to get in big goddamn trouble if the story came out. Some telecoms refused, but others (like Verizon and AT&T) smelled huge profits and agreed. Later, as should have been predictable, they all got caught and they are now in big goddamn trouble, of the kind that has multi-billion dollar class action lawsuits attached. The Telecoms have replied to this by salting away large amounts of money to congresspeople in the hopes of getting something rather unprecedented: retroactive immunity. This would mean that, even though the telecoms knowingly and intentionally broke the law, a later action of congress will decide that it doesn't matter and they get away with it (additionally meaning that they will have no motivation to assist further investigation of the lawbreaking they colluded in, meaning that their co-conspirators in the government will also effectively get away with it).

Now, some people (lying assholes, as I said before) have suggested that we need to give this unprecedented, colossal giveaway to the telecoms for any number of reasons. Like if we don't, there'll be a chilling effect and they'll refuse to help future, legal requests from government agencies (bzzt, wrong, telecoms are legally obligated to comply with requests from the government, as long as the attorney general has certified the legality of the request--they can't refuse).

So what I'm saying is that William Kristol is a dishonest neo-authoritarian apologist for the worst presidential administration in American history, and that far from "preserving" anything, the bill that the House rejected was explicitly designed to prevent telecoms from being punished for their indisputable wrongdoing and to prevent the American people from finding out about future government aggression against their privacy rights. How did this happen here, I wonder? I mean, the government and the telecoms get caught breaking the law, and the response is to change the law retroactively to make their activities not illegal, and prevent people from finding out about the next time they choose to go all Stasi on us? Is this really America?

As a note, I find that I like William Kristol as a NYT featured conservative columnist a lot more than David Brooks, because he has some manner of intellectual gravity and can write in the English language. It's hard to get a good head of steam up talking about David Brooks, first because his writing is intellectually impoverished and has no depth to examine, and second because I simply find his lack of facility with writing bewildering.

Fanboy

2008-02-02T20:36:00.000-08:00

Today I saw "There Will be Blood" with some friends, and I have to say that I enjoyed the film a great deal, but on further examination of my reasons for liking the film, I have to question my response to it. It is effectively a tour de force from Daniel Day-Lewis. He comes on the screen, dominates each scene, casts a tall and dark shadow over the rest of the cast (which the manic efforts of Paul Dano just barely manage to keep up with), and generally wows the hell out of the audience. At my viewing the audience gasped in unison at DDL's performance.

I also respect the movie for its rejection of the traditional narrative structure. There is not really rising action to climax followed by a falling action to epilogue. The plot actually manages to resemble a human being's life, with a series of significant events, horror, victory, ignominy, and a lesson that can be accepted or rejected as one pleases. I would call it a very good movie.

However, I have to admit that a certain amount of my enjoyment of this film derived directly from my love for Daniel Day-Lewis. I have seen him in multiple movies and he is among the ranks of the performers who I always enjoy. Daniel Day-Lewis, Edward Norton, Christopher Walken, and Johnny Depp are all actors who I can watch no matter what role they are playing. I am a fanboy for these Hollywood personalities. I would probably watch any movie they made. Edward Norton recently made a film, "The Painted Vail," which was given poor reviews and called a vanity project. I will see this movie eventually, purely on the basis of his involvement in it. I saw "The Score", starring Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, and Edward Norton--purely on the basis of Norton's appearance. I couldn't have cared less about the two giants of cinema being present on the screen. He was all I came for.

Day-Lewis is the single actor whom I most respect for the force of performance and his craft. He is a powerhouse. The Tom Hanks vehicle "Castaway" struck me as an unforgivably stupid concept--much as I like Tom Hanks, my interest in two hours of nothing but him and a volleyball is slight. But I would watch three hours of nothing but Daniel Day-Lewis. Thinking on "The Gangs of New York" I realized that Scorsese had made something that was not actually a good film. The plot is a little contrived; I feel that it leads inexorably, rather than logically to the climax. Some of the key performances are stale (Cameron Diaz and DiCaprio are both miscast). But all of this is made up for, and more, by DDL as Bill the Butcher. He grabs both of your eyes every time he appears. His every movement dominates your attention. You can scarcely see anything but him.

So what does this say about me, with regard to films? I would like even a terrible movie on the basis of one my favorites appearing in it. This is provable by example--I greatly enjoy "The Rundown", a rather odious Dwayne Johnson vehicle which happens to feature Christopher Walken. So is "There Will be Blood" actually a good movie? Probably. I think it is. So does the Academy, but hell, what do they know about anything? These people gave Halle Berry an Oscar the year before she was the Bond Girl in one of the worst films in the series. They stole Denzel's Oscar for "Malcolm X" and gave it over to Al Pacino's scenery-chewing blind-man romp, and didn't make up the error for nine whole years. So you can't trust them.

As a side note, I am hotly anticipating the coming "Incredible Hulk" movie, featuring Edward Norton in the starring role with a screenplay credit to boot. I would eat any poison pill if it had the right kind of sugar on it!

The Snot-Rocket

2008-01-31T18:02:00.003-08:00

Oftentimes when one is out walking, one will experience a buildup of mucus in the nostrils, due to atmospheric contaminants such as smog, pollen, excessive humidity, or cigarette smoke, just to name a few. Indeed, the human nostrils are quite sensitive to changes in environmental and, indeed, physical equilibrium. It is possible that the nose could become clogged by any number of events, from cold weather to the common cold itself.

During a constitutional, or as the German's call it ein Spaziergang, the problem of nasal mucus assumes serious proportions. The useful tradition of carrying a handkerchief on one's person at all times has in recent years become quite dated and in a crowd of twenty people under age forty, it would be unusual to find even a single man in possession of one. Moreover, when one is out for a walk, it is inconvenient and gauche to carry a box of tissue papers. What then, is the educated and stylish man about town to do about his nasal difficulties?

The solution is elegant in its simplicity. Place the index finger of the right hand against the exterior of the right nare (or nostril), applying pressure so as to seal it against the flow of air. Then, turning the head 45 to 90 degress to the left, expel air from the left nostril. This must be done suddenly and with all due force, similar to that resulting from a cough or sneeze, because only a vigorous expectoration can jar the mucus from the walls of the nostril. The end result of this process should be the emission of a small ball of snot (or "snot-rocket") from the left nostril to the ground, thus clearing the nasal passage. The action can then be repeated for the right nostril, all directions being reversed.

However, prospective snot-rocketeers should be aware that this tactic is often considered very rude and even disgusting in polite society. While walking with a lady of the fairer sex or other companion it would be advisable to distract them by reference to some interesting sight or other diversion before expelling any mucus.

Advanced users of this technique will note its potential as an insulting dominance display. It is vastly more derisive and offensive than merely spitting on another person, although considerably shorter ranged and more difficult to aim. Beginners should avoid starting fights with the snot-rocket, until such a time as they have been able to practice and perfect its application.

The GOP Field

2008-01-22T18:53:00.000-08:00

The New York Times today had a nice long article about how Giuliani was a beastly fascist toad as Mayor of New York, who delighted time and again in deploying the full powers of his station to settle ludicrously petty disputes with people much less powerful than him. At this point his standing at the polls is substantially lower than Ron Paul so we can basically write him off and declare his political career at an end. He will retreat back to the swamps whence he came and probably only venture back out to collect $100,000 per appearance speaking fees or maybe write a bestselling book about what a great leader he is. I'm a little sad to see Rudy fade away, though, because he represented the closest thing to Heinrich Himmler in American politics, i.e. a goofy Nazi thug with bad hair and an oddly shaped skull.

A while ago as well, Huckabee got people good and riled by saying

"What we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards, rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

which honestly shouldn't have surprised anybody. I actually admire him just a little bit for his daring, because here in America we like to pretend that the Founding Fathers were just splendid and the Constitution is perfect. People ought to spend less time polishing George Washington's shoes and more time thinking about what the Constitution and the laws of the land can really do for us today. I mean, we're talking about people who drank gin for breakfast, had sex with their slaves, and bathed twice a year. The best of them, Benjamin Franklin, electrocuted turkeys for fun. How much do they really have to tell us about how we should lead our lives, apart from Enlightenment principles which they stole from the French anyway? The Constitution is a fine basis to work from, and it has worked reasonably well in the past 140 years (I refuse to regard the history of the Constitution prior to Amendment XIII with anything but friendly contempt), but let's not pretend it was handed down by God or anything.

Of course, Huckabee goes completely the wrong direction with his idea. But this is to be expected from his sort of man. Huck is not a fan of the Enlightenment, if indeed he has any idea what it is. He is not a fan of the Scientific Revolution, either. I think he probably has some respect for the Protestant Reformation being as it is the conceptual basis of his liberation from Papism, but I'm sure he doesn't much hold with anything that's happened since then. I'm not calling him stupid, as stupid people don't become successful ministers and governors of whole states. Ignorant is a better word.

Fred Thompson dropped out of the race recently, so... so what? Who cares? Maybe his wife. I had some things to say about him on this blog way back when, but it doesn't matter now.

Ron Paul I might talk about in a later post, because I'd want to devote an entire post to him, as he's quite a loon. The internet is a great place for terrible ideas like Libertarianism, they can fail in practice and fail in the court of public opinion, but get a second chance in the modern equivalent of 19th Century New York's "burned over district".

John McCain has emerged from the early campaign knife-fights to look like some kind of front runner, though that's probably just the favorable media coverage (the media wuvs McCain) talking and he's neck and neck with Romney, at best. I'd say he's probably the best GOP candidate, because he's got the best to win the general election and he seems less likely that Romney or Huckabee to run the country even further into the ground once in office. However, he's still phony as all get out. It's embarrassing and infuriating that the press continues to pretend he is a maverick. He might have been, in 2000, but he gave all that up after the drubbing he got in that campaign, and has spent the last eight years trying to be a good soldier. He hasn't convinced the media... nor the GOP bosses. The Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, baby-eating troglodytes that run the party from the smoky back-rooms hate his guts, and this will be his greatest weakness.

My money is on Romney. He is made of plastic, has no actual positions or beliefs, and if you squint hard enough in low-light conditions he kind of looks like Ronald Reagan. He also has the support of the party elite, which counts for everything in the GOP, probably to the extent of making his coronation a near inevitability. But maybe this is wishful thinking on my part, because I think Romney is the very worst choice in the entire rogues' gallery. He's a Mormon with extremely weak credentials on abortion, so he'll drive many of the evangelicals away from the polls, and generally speaking he's got no personality or creativity. He'll be beaten savagely, like a cur, in November.

I read a book a couple days ago, golly

2008-01-21T20:52:00.000-08:00

I read a book recently. Surprised?

What book, you ask. It was Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by one Hunter S. Thompson. The next question you ask is, "What in God's name are you doing reading topical new-journalistic work from 1972 in this day and age? Why, goddammit, in 1972 people thought we would have space-planes and robots and a telescreen in every living room. What can they have to tell us?"

This is a good question, but watch your language. I don't even know who reads this blog. There could be children involved.

I read the book because it interested me on several levels.

ONE-
Hunter S. Thompson at least invented--accidentally perhaps, but then again penicillin was an accident--something which was new and fresh and stunning, and '72 was perhaps the one time he made a concerted effort of applying his hand-crafted Gonzo New-Journalism monstrosity to the national stage. These days all you have to do is crack a Rolling Stone to read prose lifted right out of Thompson's brain and then run through a tenderizer nine or twenty times so it can meet standards. Paragraph after paragraph of neo-Gonzo pablum flung out in an article about goddamn Nickelback or whatever they want to pretend matters. Sometimes meta-Journalism, Gonzo, the act of the journalist turning away from objectivity and facing him/herself is the only sane response. I once read an article a nice young lady wrote about her attempted and aborted coverage of the Godless beast that produces the "Girls Gone Wild" tapes; the entire affair was such a damn travesty that it could only be understood as Gonzo.

But more and more published and televised journalism disgusts me. They've only got two flavors--the one that pretends to be objective but isn't, and the one that doesn't pretend but bores me anyway. Who neutered these people? I think they were fooling us when they did Watergate and the Pentagon papers. It was a trick. They wanted us to think we could trust them, just so they would have time to shiv Walter Cronkite in a back alley and then run credulous garbage about Iraqi WMDs.

At least when Hunter lied it was hilarious.

TWO-
Hillary Clinton is the new Hubert Humphrey. I mean, Jesus, let's qualify my statement a bit, Hell. What do I know about Hubert Humphrey? What I've read, what I've read. But all that indicates that he was some foul barbarous creature who represented the worst of Democratic machine politics and had no real positions apart from wanting to be president. Does this sound like anyone we know?

I watch the bloody primary season and marvel at the determination of some people to nominate the very worst candidate in the entire lot. She's the most conservative, most easily bought, most owned by special interests already, least responsive to the will of the people, indeed least respectful of the people, and she's carrying eight years of Bill Clinton-brand baggage that will hurt her numbers even if we completely discount her general weaknesses, which are manifold.

The only thing redeeming that sad mess is the fact that the GOP field is a bunch of feckless neutered liars who couldn't convince a man dying of thirst to buy a glass of water from them. Even a foundering vessel like Hillary Clinton can overtake a pack of rudderless and mastless cripples like the Republican candidates. I'm looking forward to November to an extent that would almost make a Hillary Clinton nomination worth it. What could be more poetic than watching Mitt Romney or whatever other shambling corpse they stuff into the Candidate Suit get the unholy tar beaten out of him by Bill Clinton's wife? Would they ever recover? I hope not.

Plus Barack Obama is still only 46. Even if Hillary becomes the first lady prez, if he kept his nose clean in the interim and led the liberal wing of the party (if could unseat Harry Reid, that noxious cretin, it would be beautiful), he could turn up as the heir apparent in 2016 and still be younger than Hillary is now. 16 years of Democratic leadership, God Willing.

THREE-
God, I've only come up with two levels. I'm in trouble now.

Things I've Done in Iowa City during my Break

2007-12-31T00:14:00.001-08:00

1) Watched internet videos of Queen performing live.
Freddie Mercury died of AIDS when I was five years old, denying me the opportunity to ever see him perform live. I regard this as a major loss. The man's energy is palpable even in video format. If I had a time machine, I would probably use it first to see the 1985 Live Aid performance by Queen, and only afterwards meet Abraham Lincoln. And I would probably only be able to talk about Freddie Mercury, the whole time I was hanging out with Lincoln.

2) Played video games.
I wrought electronic havoc, accomplished nothing tangible, yet felt nevertheless pleased. I can't imagine the mentality that went into pinball wizardry during the 1970s and '80s, but it must have been exactly the same thing. I spend time on an entertainment application which goes to nothing productive and illuminates nothing. What does this say about the futility inherent in the human condition?

3) Practiced drawing at work in the parking booth.
My friend Janani gave me an instruction book for drawing which was published in 1963 (or something) and contains quite dated instruction, which she picked out for her own reasons but is in fact exactly what I would have wanted! If I ever learn how to draw, ideally I would draw just like Jack Kirby. So the book is perfect. I practiced for about 2 hours aggregate (of a six hour shift I spent 2 hours reading history, 2 hours doing a NYT Friday crossword, and 2 hours drawing) and the improvement over my usual awful scribblings was tangible, even if I was using a pen instead of a pencil because I didn't have anything to sharpen with. I can draw my own portrait with some alacrity, and I tried to draw my friend Travis with minimal success. I think he may have a feminine jawline, though this is no judgment against his character. Maybe in subsequent revisions I'll be able to figure it out. I think I'll try to master the face and then move on, as the book suggests. Drawing is a frontier for me. Something that I can't do, that I want to learn how to do, that is probably possible for me to do. I'm looking forward to this.

4) Bought things with my Barnes and Noble gift cards, online.
I ordered a couple of graphic novels in the new Dark Horse "Conan" series, plus the deluxe version of Dethalbum, the album by the fictional cartoon Death Metal band Deathklok. I eagerly anticipate the arrival of these packages, lowbrow though they may be.

5) Slept 'til nearly 2:00 PM. And it was everything I thought it could be.

I don't recall

2007-11-08T11:34:00.002-08:00

Heres some fascinating news from MSNBC. Apparently the Reagan Library lost track of 80% of its inventory.

An audit by the National Archives inspector general concluded that the library in Simi Valley was unable to properly account for more than 80,000 objects out of its collection of some 100,000 artifacts, the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site Wednesday night.

I find this just amazing and I am deeply impressed at the kind of administrative incompetence that would be required to allow such breathtaking theft. But isn't the Ronald Reagan presidential library the perfect place for kleptomania, piss-poor record-keeping, and plain forgetfulness? I think that this embarrassment is a more fitting capstone to the Reagan legacy than any amount of treasure could have been.

Thing I wrote

2007-11-04T16:18:00.000-08:00

Here's a fake folk tale which I wrote for and performed at No-Shame Theater in Iowa City, reprinted here for the benefit of the people who read my blog, consisting of Bob and maybe my brothers:

On the coast of the Baltic Sea in the middle ages there was a place called Livonia, which is today the countries of Latvia and Estonia. There was a village in Livonia, where lived a girl named Kadri. Kadri was very pretty. Some said that she was the most beautiful girl in all the lands around the Baltic Sea. This would have been much to her good if she had not known of her beauty, but in fact she knew very well and never hesitated to exploit her charms to her benefit. She kept her parents’ heart-strings wrapped round her finger and they spoiled her as few children have ever been spoiled. She broke all the rules and treated all the other children very cruelly, but everyone tolerated her bad behavior because she was so beautiful.

Then as now, Livonia was a country of swamps and deep forests which lay only a few hundred feet beyond any village. Kadri was playing near there one day, when she looked up and saw a miraculous deer in the wood, which was all white with golden antlers, and its eyes were red as blood. She hurried back to her house and told her parents what she had seen, and she told her father, who was a hunter in the village, that he should go and kill the white deer for her, that she might have its pelt for a cloak.

Kadri’s father knew that such miraculous animals belonged to the druids, who were people in those days who had not become Christians, and instead kept to the old ways and lived in the woods practicing pagan magic. It was said among the people of the villages, that if a man went hunting after what belonged to the druids it would be him who was killed and eaten, his skin made into a drum and his skull into a drinking cup. He told Kadri that he would not go and hunt the white deer, but she screamed and yelled and held her breath ‘til she turned blue, until finally he agreed to go into the forest. He took his crossbow and went out each day, saying that he would hunt the deer she had seen, but he lied and instead hunted the other animals, which did not belong to the druids.

Finally, after several weeks, Kadri realized what her father was really doing, and she said that she would go with her father into the forest to make sure that he would catch the miraculous deer. He tried to tell her that she could not, and he made excuses like that she would frighten away the deer anyway, but she screamed and yelled and held her breath, and he gave in, and they went into the woods together.

Now it happened that the hunter had not been alone in the woods, and that the whole time he had been pretending to hunt the deer, there had been a druid following him to see what he did. Now when the druid saw Kadri, who as I told you was very beautiful, he thought that she would be good to eat. So he cast his magic on the father, who fell into a deep sleep, and he grabbed up Kadri and dragged her back to his cottage deep in the forest.

Kadri kicked and screamed and yelled, but no one heard her in the woods, and the druid paid no mind. But when he finally got her home, he poked and prodded at her flesh, and smelled her, and he realized that for as good as she looked, she would taste very foul, like a red shiny apple which has rotted all away inside. The druid asked Kadri what she thought he should do with her.

Kadri, who was so spoiled that she did not even think of the danger she was in, said that she wanted the white deer’s pelt for her cloak. Now it happened that the white deer was actually the druid himself, because such people had the power to take on the forms of miraculous animals. He was very offended by the presumption of this awful little girl, but he said that she would indeed have the cloak she wanted. He waved his magic wand and said a few words in the old language, which the village people like Kadri could no longer speak, and in an eyeblink she had turned into a white hind—that is, a female deer—with just such a snowy pelt as she had asked for. The druid then set her free, and in the shape of this doe she ran back to where he father lay, still sleeping.

It happened that she arrived at just the moment her father awoke, and seeing this white-pelted hind, he raised his crossbow and shot it dead. He hauled the carcass back to the village, where it was skinned and gutted and boned, the meat salted and smoked for the winter, and the pelt made into a cloak so beautiful that the Khan of the Golden Horde, which was a wealthy country far to the Southeast, bought it himself for one hundred gold pieces, this being far more than the worth of the entire village put together.

And no one ever saw Kadri again.

The moral of this story is that parents who spoil their children will only harm them in the end, and also that people should not covet the things that belong to others.

Zeitgeist

2007-10-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I'm just about ready to give up on the news!

Here in the year 2007 I have to cling to the hope that the past six years, the first six years of the American Experiment in the Third Millennium, are some kind of aberration instead of a period that has really set the tone that's going to persist throughout my adult life.

We're talking about a period in which the favorite for the Republican Party's presidential nomination can say something like this little gem and have it be reported in subsequent days in this fashion, as a kind of gentlemanly disagreement about the rules of cricket.

In a question about torture, he ridiculed the way newspapers portray controversial interrogation techniques like water-boarding and sleep deprivation.

If the media think sleep deprivation constitutes torture, Giuliani said, "On that theory, I'm being tortured running for president of the United States."

McCain, whatever his recent failings, is a veteran and a former POW who knows what he's talking about. He was tortured regularly for an extended period! Giuliani is a plastic man, a cipher, who shrouds his egotistical will to power in a thin veneer of tough-guy posturing. Why does the New York Times pretend that these two people have anything approaching equivalency in a discussion about torture?

There's some kind of deep-seated sickness in the media with respect to the sin of taking sides, which we've seen not just on subjects like torture, but also with respect to Global Warming, the justification for the war in Iraq (and now a new conflict with Iran), the theory of evolution, and more. The American media is at best (and I mean discounting the kind of corruption and inbreeding that Glenn Greenwald spends most of his blog carping about) a huge forum for the expression of the Golden Mean fallacy. Forget that the facts don't take sides. Report the poles and decide that the truth falls somewhere in the middle.

When I read things like that article in the NYT I feel very angry but also very small, because there is nothing that I can do about something so stupid. This is the message going out to America: "The issue of torture is mainly concerned with politicians and representatives of the justice department discussing amongst themselves what actually constitutes torture, and whether or not torture yields useful information to stop terrorism. None of the assertions made by either side can be assigned any kind of value with regard to truthfulness."

But we're not talking about an abstruse political debate! We're talking about Khaled El-Masri, an innocent man abducted and renditioned to Afghanistan to be tortured for months. We're talking about real people, being waterboarded and deprived of sleep for extended periods right now, in secret CIA prisons.

Evan

Pop Art

2007-10-23T10:28:00.001-07:00

Here's some stuff I made using the "Graffiti" application of the popular Facebook website, which I'm posting here for the enjoyment of people who don't use the Face-book but might read my blog. Which I think is something like three or four people. Maybe I should send out an e-mail to my family so everybody knows about that, but then again maybe people in my family would find my thoughts off-putting and offensive. It would be awkward at Thanksgiving.

This is the single composition that I'm most proud of.

There's something sublime about it, in the contrast between the heavy, earthbound monster at the right of panel, and the sprightly and whimsical creature at left. Obviously there's some limitations to it, mainly my complete absence of any talent for drawing, but I'm pretty happy with it.

I also drew an entire eighteen-page comic about a couple of colored dots expounding on the subject of modernist alienation, but blogger isn't letting me upload images at the moment, and in any case it might be a little too obnoxious to throw down a solid megabyte of images right here. We'll see, maybe later on.

Er?

2007-10-05T08:18:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to pretend that there wasn't even a service interruption in my posting on this blog. It'll be a short one today, and we'll see if I have time in the future.

This was prompted mainly by confusion and outrage after reading one of Glenn Greenwald's own blog posts on the Salon.com. Greenwald is actually now the only political blogger who I read regularly, because he seems to have it together more than most.

Today his article is the second in a series about how the Anti-Defamation League and Simon Wiesenthal Center like to confront newsmakers for comparing current events and such to the Nazis, because that cheapens Nazism and the Holocaust. I think we can see this principle in effect today with respect to 9/11, because whereas I was very impressed by 9/11 the day it happened, lately I've just gotten tired of it. There was a 9/11 related episode of Law and Order (ripped from the headlines!) on rerun the other day, and all I could think about was the Giuliani campaign.

The problem that Greenwald has, is that the ADL doesn't do much denouncing of the neo-cons and Fox News people who throw "Nazi" around as a pejorative. He gives as his prime example a new book by Jonah Goldberg entitled Liberal Fascism, which features a smiley face with a Hitler mustache and apparently accuses all liberals of being Nazis.

From the blurb quoted by Greenwald:
'Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. . . .

The modern heirs of this "friendly fascist" tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.'

Maybe it's the history student in me reacting with this confusion... but I confused as all hell by this book. I feel like I need to buy it, to understand what is going on in this blurb, or rather check it out from the library or steal it so that I can avoid giving any material support to this Goldberg person. The original Fascists were really on the left? Compared to who? My head is just swimming.

Water Bed

2007-07-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

I have a water bed, and I'm moving into my new apartment sometime tomorrow, which means I need to make the water come out of the bed. The mattress bladder, when filled with water, weighs probably 600-1000 lbs and is sort of unwieldy.

The bed came with a panoply of pumps, faucet adapters, and manuals, but so far I can't remove the water. There is some kind of pump I'm trying to use, which uses what I assume to be Bernoulli's Principle, by hooking up to an ordinary faucet, and also to a hose which is connected to the water bed. The faucet is turned on, a siphon is started, and in 1-2 hours the bed is emptied. In theory. I've yet to make it work, for reasons I can't pretend to fathom. It's very possible--likely--that I'll fail utterly, have to call my friend Travis to help me (because he can make his hands do things), and be forced to find alternate sleeping arrangements. I'm on what will be my final attempt for the night right now, and the prospects are bad.

Watch this space.

UPDATE 1:20 AM

I thought the problem might be that the hose I bought at Wal-Mart has one of those awful plastic caps on it, that turns independently of the metal end and has a purpose I'm not familiar with. It might have been breaking the seal, so that the hose wasn't airtight, making it useless for siphoning. I pried a rubber gasket out of one of the pumps I wasn't using, and jammed it in there, hopefully to create a seal. This time when I started the pump, the hose began to wiggle slightly at my end. A good sign? I don't know!

UPDATE 3:00 AM

It didn't mean anything--I am completely incapable of siphoning anything out of this water bed. Total failure is the result of tonight's efforts. Hopefully, tomorrow will yield more.

UPDATE 2:38 PM
I managed to make it work, actually. It ran from about 4:30 AM to 6:30 AM and got it drained! Hoorah.

Personal Data

2007-07-19T00:47:00.000-07:00

I had my first day at the University Parking Ramp, wherein I sat in a box for 6 1/2 hours taking tickets and reading "Fast Food Nation" while my training instructor read Harry Potter and occasionally told me what to do. It was definitely the easiest job I've ever had.

The only significant occurrences follow--

Crazy Troll-woman
Around the middle of my shift a woman came through in an older model Buick bearing handicapped plates, and wearing a neck brace. I had a premonition that something would go wrong, because when she handed me her ticket to scan, it had no blue stick affixed to it. When a patient parks in the Hospital Ramp and then undergoes medical treatment of some kind at the Hospital, they can have their ramp ticket validated with a blue sticker, which means their parking is free. About 90% of the customers had these stickers. This woman, though clearly a patient, did not. On a side note, this woman was high up in the running for ugliest woman I've ever seen. Not so much obese as bloated, with maybe four teeth, but with plenty of acne scarring and warts to make up for the deficit.

I assumed there would be trouble, but I could not have anticipated what occurred. She gave me the ticket, I put it in the machine.

"One dollar fifty-five cents, please," I said.

"NO! NO! I don't pay anything! I just came from PT!" she was shouting from the word 'please,' maybe just an angry person.

I politely explained, "If you're a patient at the hospital you have to have your ticket validated in the hospital. Otherwise you have to pay money. Sorry."

"NO! I'm not paying. Just call up... just call up to physical therapy! They'll tell you! I don't have a dollar!"

My training guy took over at this time. "Well, they can't really help you with this over the phone, you need a little sticker. If you go back up there, they can give you one, and then we'll be okay."

"I--I can't go back up there! I'm handicapped! You're not supposed to treat handicapped people this way!"

"I'm sorry, we can't let you leave without $1.55."

"JUST CALL THE PT!"

"We don't have their number. You can fill out a form and we can bill you, or you can dispute it, whatever."

Unfortunately this form requires that they give their social security number for some reason, and I can tell from her demeanor that this woman does not give out her soc. Sure enough, she gets angry at the mere suggestion, probably believing us to be identity thieves, and she yells at us some more.

Training guy: "Let me just call my supervisor."

"Yeah, you call him so I can talk to him!"

My training guy calls the supervisor, but sort of spazzes out dialing so he has to try a couple of times. Once he gets the guy, the woman angrily demands to talk to our supervisor, so she gets the handset.

"Hi? Who--! Who is this?! What's your name?! What's your name?! What's your name!?"

(at this point the guy on the other end, not actually the supervisor yet, apparently believed that my training guy was putting him on with a practical joke. The supervisor was put on the line quickly, once it was determined to be otherwise).

The woman's conversation continued. "These two boys in your booth are being belligerent and telling me I have to pay a dollar because I don't have a sticker and they are VERY RUDE and I want them both written up." To my training guy: "What's your name?!"

He elected to give her only his cashier number, which was all she needed anyway. "I want him written up! Are you--are you writing him up right now! Because you should be, he's been rude and belligerent!"

A pause. "What--What's your name?! I'm going to write it down so I can call your supervisor! Let me... let me get something to write it down with!" A minute's search for a pen, and her silent accomplice in the passenger seat, also apparently handicapped, takes the name down. "All of you are gonna be out of a job!" the woman yells.

At this point the supervisor apparently informs her that we were completely correct and she can't leave the lot without paying. She gives us back the phone, which now smells of cigarettes and body odor, and reiterates her refusal to pay.

I should mention that, being as it's my first day and I'm being trained, I have no responsibility for this situation and I'm able to observe it. I am close to laughter for most of the ordeal, and when she loudly demands that we call the administrator of the hospital and "whoever runs this shitty parking ramp" I wink and quietly suggest to my coworker that we also call the President of the University for her.

At this point we're within an ace of having to call the police on her, because she won't pay and keeps demanding to leave, and in America we tend to exchange money for goods and services, as opposed to just stealing. Not to mention the fact that she is "belligerent," to borrow a word.

But she heads us off at the pass by yelling at passers-by to bum money from, which eventually gets a result, and she's able to leave on somebody else's $1.55. My trainer said that this was the worst encounter he had experienced in 3 years at the parking ramps.

Then later on about 8:00 PM it began to rain like the sky was falling and the county came under a tornado warning, so I got to hang out in a basement and then go home 30 minutes early.

A good first day.

Scooter Libby

2007-07-04T15:44:00.000-07:00

The type of generic Cheerios that I favor are called "Scooters." Is there such a thing as coincidence, or do we live in a holistic universe, where nothing is coincidental?

Bush recently commuted the 30-month prison sentence of convicted criminal and Vice Presidential aide Scooter Libby. Personally, I had never believed that Bush was going to allow one of his hatchet men to endure so much as a week behind bars, so count me among the many unsurprised observers. My guess will be that not only will Libby not serve a day in prison, he will also not have to pay his fine, and he might not even be disbarred in the end.

I think what went into the decision was partly a reward for service and loyalty, and partly an effort to undermine the ability of the prosecutor to exert pressure on Libby to secure testimony implicating people higher up. Bush's official rationalization (that Libby had been sentenced to an excessive prison term) is ludicrous. From start to finish the investigation and trial were conducted by Bush appointees, and the Bush "tough on crime" Justice Department routinely inflicts maximum punishment.

The New Times finds some spine.

This article doesn't go so far as to actually call the president a hypocrite, they leave that to the quoted experts. This is a tough article and I'm glad to see the paper of record hitting Bush on this issue.

The Times does skip over an issue that Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com spends a lot of posts on, being the elitist Washington culture. Bush is arguing that the 30-month sentence was excessive, not because the sentence is always excessive for that crime, but because Scooter Libby was his Friend and a member of the president's Movement, so the rules don't apply to him in the same way that they applto a peasant like you or me.

Enter David Brooks with a stunningly awful column (Times Select only).

Scooter Libby is a plain, straight-dealing man, the only pure actor in the "farce" that is his prosecution, beset and victimized by an army of liberal media figures and overweening judges and prosecutors. Joe Wilson is a rotten bastard clawing for media attention, the outing of his wife was completely unimportant and certainly not a crime, the sentence was excessive, and not only were all the Liberal Media Figures totally overreacting with their anger, but it is so unreasonable to be angry about Libby's activities that even they weren't actually mad--they were cynically faking the whole thing!

Throw in a couple of pointless reference to the suffering of Scooter Libby's family (let's forget the original crime, which was an attempt to punish an administration opponent by ruining his wife's career) and to the Clinton episode (lying about a major felony != lying about a blowjob) and you've got a turgid piece of s**t column, one of the worst I've ever read--and I've seen a lot of stinkers. This column is so bad, so logically flawed, and so venomous that it makes me irritated in the same way as getting a parking ticket, that feeling of deep annoyance and irritation that I can feel in the back of my skull, something no columnist apart from Cal Thomas has been able to do.

Stem Cells and more

2007-06-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports on President Bush's recent Stem Cell Veto.

"The veto, only the third of Mr. Bush’s presidency, puts him at odds not only with the majority of voters, according to polls, but also with many members of his own political party."

Why should this issue be any different from all the others?

My perception of the stem cell tempest in a teacup is that it's a purely ideological issue. The anti-abortion camp doesn't want to use stem cells because they have committed ideologically to the idea that life begins at conception, therefore they must, in defiance of reason, oppose this medical research with potentially life-saving applications. I actually find it hard to articulate a coherent response to people who side with Bush on this issue because of how unreasonable their position is, like Flat-Earthers. Embryos which are going to be thrown away and will never be people can be used to save lives? I'm on for that, definitely.

Also, I learned from a blog that my Uncle Bob pointed me to that the Bible does not consider a fetus a person. Exodus 21:22 (KJV) says

"If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine."

This is right in the middle of the whole "eye for an eye" section of Exodus. Moses carefully notes that murder shall be punished by death, and that in case of a man injuring another so that he can't work, compensation equal to the loss of income over that time shall be paid. It's pretty clear, then, that the bible doesn't consider killing a fetus the same thing as killing a person. It's also no reason to assume that in the Israelite camp intentional miscarriage was any less common than it is in any other primitive community.

The passage is also troubling because it isn't completely clear on whether beating your slave to death counts as murder, and also cursing your parents is punishable by death. But this shouldn't be a problem for the pro-life crowd, because after all they're the ones who are setting so much store by that book, not me.

Opposition to Stem Cell research doesn't make any sense, because it's a separate issue from abortion. The embryos from which stem cells are being harvested are already dead; they will be disposed of whether they are used for research or not. I think this just goes more to the spitefulness of the pro-life movement, like I looked at in my previous blog entry about the Informed Consent laws. The pro-lifers are angry because they have no prospect of outright banning abortion, so they want to make it as inconvenient and uncomfortable as possible, and strangle a highly beneficial medical research field because of it's vague association with abortion.

President Bush also dropped this pearl of wisdom on us: The United States is "a nation founded on the principle that all human life is sacred." Anything I can say about this would be trite (e.g. "all human life that is white male and property owning!") so I'll just let it stand alone as evidence that we have a president who lacks even the most elementary historical perspective.

Something from David Brooks here. This column is a fantastic mess, because all he does is briefly summarize the positions of two academics, and conclude by saying that they're both right and the truth was somewhere in the middle. How utterly useless of you, Mr. Brooks.

Free Libby and So On

2007-06-09T23:50:00.000-07:00

Free Libby, says William F. Buckley, Jr. Billy the Younger feels that, although the evidence is overwhelming that Scooter Libby committed the crimes he was convicted of, and appeal is hopeless, the man ought to be pardoned. Because, it turns out, he actually didn't do anything wrong.

I am fascinated by this line of argument. Ordinarily, when a public figure says that somebody should be given a get-out-of-jail-free card, it is incumbent on them to provide some reason that this should be done. For example, if the person were innocent of the crime, but some quirk of justice led to their conviction and prevented appeal. That would be a good pardon. Or if the crime itself was unjust, like if Scooter Libby were a black man arrested in 1958 for sitting at a "Whites Only" deli counter and given ten years at hard labor for this transgression. This would also be a good pardon.

But as near as I can tell in this case, William F. Buckley Jr. says that Libby should be pardoned
just because. He makes the obligatory attempt to prove it wasn't really such a big deal, because after all Valerie Plame "was already moving out of the covert branch of the CIA". This is sort of like defending yourself against charges of arson by saying that the victim was "already moving out of his house" when you burned it to the ground.

An extra bout of inanity comes around as Buckley concentrates obdurately on the argument that the reason for the laws protecting our covert agents from being unmasked were only violated in letter here, not in spirit. This might be a good argument for a pardon if Libby had actually been convicted of this, rather than being convicted of repeatedly lying under oath and obstructing investigation concerning the aforementioned crime. Perjury is serious business, and Buckley's argument that Libby is "sorry" that he was forced to lie to the FBI and the grand jury doesn't pass muster.

Also, aren't these the same people that nearly peed themselves when they found out that Clinton had quasi-lied about having sex with Monica Lewinski? To give an idea defining when perjury is or is not trivial: When you lie about getting a blowjob, it is trivial. When you lie about a major felony in order to cover up serious misconduct by the Executive Branch, it is not trivial. Maybe sometime I'll draw up a Venn Diagram of this.

Also-
"No one, in the perspective of history, believes the first President Bush to have been a furtive advocate of crime when he pardoned Caspar Weinberger or Robert McFarlane for involvement in the Iran-Contra mess."

Wait, I am a person studying the historical perspective, and I actually do believe that President Bush Sr. was a furtive advocate of crime in that case. I also believe that President Bush Jr. was also a furtive advocate of crime when he signed Executive Order 13233, severely curtailing access to presidential records (including Iran-Contra records from the Reagan administration which would have been made available to the public several years ago, if not for EO13233).

Now:
The Weekly Standard is mad at our (relatively) local University, Iowa State, because they denied tenure to an astronomer who is also a proponent of intelligent design. This editorial is pure bunk, because David Klinghoffer cites two professors in the humanities who have "crazy" ideas and tenure as a counterpoint to the astronomy professor who got no tenure because of his support for intelligent design.

The problem here is that Hector Avalos was expressing an academic opinion about the Bible vis-a-vis Mein Kampf which is actually correct if you read the thing critically. Hitler doesn't directly advocate genocide in Mein Kampf; he says that Jews should be deported to Madagascar and Slavs should be pushed back beyond the Urals. The Bible does directly advocate genocide. For just one example, look at what happened to King Saul. He was ordered by God (via Samuel) to completely eradicate the Amalekites, killing every last one of them and destroying all their possessions down to the last mote. In the event he did nearly all of that, and kept only their king and some prize lifestock as spoils--this was the direct cause of God forsaking Saul. Hence, the claims made by Avalos are factually accurate. For his part, Ward Churchill made some hair-raising statements that most people would disagree with, sure, but they were just off-the-cuff opinions.

The reason that "The Privileged Planet" may have cost Gonzalez his tenure is a different matter. According to the editorial, the thrust of the book was that the circumstances of our current existence are so wildly improbable, given our original vector, that we could only have arisen due to an intelligent creator's design. It is problematic when an astronomy professor says this, because it flies in the face of established scholarly opinion on the subject and is pretty much stupid.

For fun, take a standard deck of 52 playing cards and shuffle them. Draw five cards and lay them out in a row. The odds of your drawing that specific sequence of cards was 1 in 311,875,200; it was "astronomically" unlikely. Shall we argue that it was not chance, and that you specifically intended to draw precisely that sequence of cards? Certainly not. When flipping a coin, the odds against it coming up heads 20 times in a row is more than a million to one against--yet if you have an infinite number of people flipping coins, that will happen to some number of them. That is the hole in a probability argument of that kind; space and time are infinite. On an infinite stage, arguments from probability are completely meaningless, and become an elementary argument from incredulity: "I can't believe that something so improbable could have occurred by chance, therefore it was directed by a higher power".

The intellectual bankruptcy of this argument, and the fact that jibes about as well with astronomy as Geocentrism or the Flat Earth, are the reasons that this book was bad for his career. Another point is that having an advocate of Intelligent Design as a tenured professor would open the ISU department of astronomy to professional embarrassment. A lot of Intelligent Design advocates might look at the relative equanimity that the public regards their pet "theory" with and assume that this holds true in the broad sense--not so! Intelligent Design is very much a lunatic fringe in the scientific community. The medical school at ISU would hardly give tenure to a doctor who rejected the Germ Theory of Disease in favor of Hippocrates' humorism.

That's all for tonight.

I am an Internet Failure

2007-06-06T22:46:00.001-07:00

A whole week with no new blog posts? For shame, Evan. I'd like to claim I've been busy, which is only partially true. Full honesty would be to admit that I've been flaking out on more than one thing this summer--so it is admitted. But, despite delays, here is more news that strikes my fancy!

Bush Rebuffs Germany on Emissions

There's something about the sweet little romance between George W. Bush and Angela Merkel that pleases me immensely. For those who hadn't heard, George W. Bush went to a G-8 meeting which was Angela Merkel's (the first female chancellor of Germany) first diplomatic event of that magnitude and gave her an unwanted shoulder rub which resulted in a panicked and disgusted rebuff from Merkel. I consider this my all-time favorite moment of Bush's administration, because in less than five seconds he managed to insult another head of state, insult her entire country by disrespecting said head of state, demean women in general, and make himself look like a total frat-boy idiot. That's talent.

So, whenever they pop up in the news together, I have to smile. This time the news is not so sanguine, however: the typical Bush administration treatment of the Global Warming problem. The more I learn about Global Warming the more I think that it is the key issue of our time, shadowboxing with terrorism and the very unfortunate Iraq war being sideshows in comparison. We're talking about unprecedented changes in the world as we know it, after all.

My favorite part of the story was the quote from our President:

He said the United States “can serve as a bridge between some nations who believe that now is the time to come up with a set goal” and “those who are reluctant to participate in the dialogue.”

So... the United States can serve as a bridge between Germany et al. and... the United States? It's annoying that the New York Times completely bought into the canard that India and China are the countries that we need to wag our fingers at. In the future they will be a problem that needs solving, but for now the United States is the biggest offender and also the nation with the greatest potential for finding solutions. The research infrastructure and resources that the USA could put behind a campaign to improve energy efficiency and decrease greenhouse gas pollution would dwarf the rest of the world combined, if only we had an executive branch that took the problem seriously!

Moreover, we do know that the Chinese government is in fact very interested in being part of the solution on global warming. Personally, I think it's a pragmatist issue for them; all indications are that China will become more and more influential and powerful in the coming years, but unchecked global warming would turn the entire world upside down. Why should they want something like that to check their nation's progress? India I know less about, but I doubt very much that they are as actively hostile to the Global Warming issue as the Bush administration.

Also at the G-8 summit there were some riots. Quelle horreur! Rioters at a G-8 summit? Who would have guessed?

Next:
David Brooks, anyone?

One thing that writing a blog does is that it gives me an excuse to force myself to read things I would otherwise ignore. David Brooks would be one example. I have no idea why he is a featured columnist for the New York Times. He is awful awful awful, and I have never read a column from him that has caused me to think his opinion meant anything. Him working at the NYT is like the Yankees having a catcher who just drops the ball five or six times a game. The only explanation I can think of for his employment is that the New York Times has some bias-related obligation to employ at least one right-leaning columnist, and they choose to retain one who is drab, unskilled, and unconvincing so as to prevent to right-wing looking good in their pages.

This editorial is not so bad, to the point that I'm almost glad I read it. It's just two-dimensional, is all. David Brooks tells us that bad things are happening in Iraq, and briefly describes how it is happening. In fact, he doesn't tell me anything I didn't know at this time last year. Thanks, David Brooks, for your pseudo-commentary.

I'm thinking that in the future I'll keep reading his work and commenting, hounding him as it were, in this blog. We'll see. I'm also considering a little fiction thing that I might write to submit to the UofI rags, and put bits of it here. We'll see what happens with that. I always feel very enthusiastic about that sort of thing but little comes of it.

Whence Frank Thompson, and whither?

2007-05-30T23:39:00.001-07:00

New York Times

Gaze upon the jowly, saturnine face that is apparently the future of American conservatism. My guess, as an unlettered political animal, is that if Fred Thompson runs for the Republican nomination, he will win. If I turn out to be right, I'll take full credit, and if I'm wrong, I'll pretend I never said it. This is how the internet works.

My reasoning goes like this: the current front runners are piloting poisoned campaigns.

McCain has no pull among the party elite, his fevered toeing of the party line in the past few years has failed to win broad GOP support and has alienated the moderate vote (his only chance all along), and his aversion to torture will probably hurt him as well--the stony silence that greeted his strong stand against torture in the Republican debate was as frightening as it was enlightening.

Giuliani is Catholic, Italian, pro-Choice, an associate of luminaries like Bernie Kerik, and publicly reviled by firefighters. With America's hazy memories of 9/11 all he has going for him, and the FDNY chipping away at even that, he doesn't really have a serious chance. Even if he did get the nod, evangelicals would stay away from the polls in droves and he'd go down to a crushing defeat.

Romney is also pro-choice (his extremely recent Saint Paul-style conversion notwithstanding) and a Mormon. Polling indicates that being a Mormon is nearly as bad as being an atheist, electorally. So far, he's drubbing the other candidates in the money race, being the only Republican keeping anything like even pace with the Democrats, but that's probably because the deep pocket Republican donors think he's the only chance they've got. If a better candidate shows up, they'll leave Romney in the lurch.

Fred Thompson certainly seems to have the momentum. Multiple quotes in this NYT article compares him to Reagan in a favorable light. In conservative vernacular, "strong, almost Reagan-esque communication skills" is exactly equivalent to saying he wears a halo and heals the lame. The nay-sayers in the article talk about how he's too far behind in the money race, or that their candidates are stronger, but this is silly talk. Thompson has great grassroots buzz, the other candidates are very weak, and he has nine months before primary season starts. This is plenty of time to pick up the slack, especially since he'll be taking all of that money out of the other guys' pockets. He's also getting a lot of free publicity from the "is-he-or-isn't-he" game that news outlets like the New York Times are playing.

The quote from the Romney rep amused me most. He's talking about how the Romney charisma outweighs anything that Thompson brings to the table, so Mitt ain't scared. The spectacle of a member of such a shambling campaign praising the Romney magic pleases me, and I hope to see more of this kind of thing as the campaign goes on. The sublime incompetence of Romney's hunting/varminting episode has already made Romney a joke (which McCain cannily exploited for a good stomping), and as I mentioned above, he's a Mormon who was pro-choice until the day before he decided to run for president. Also, from what I understand, while Mitt is photogenic as all get-out, he is not actually very good at working the crowd.

The kicker of this whole thing is that Thompson isn't actually that strong a candidate. He has the right stands on the right issues, but he's still got the Iraq millstone around his neck, and the plain fact is that he's only so strong because people don't know anything much about him except for what he's told them so far. Looking into his senate record and plank, he seems to be a pretty standard old-school conservative. The status of the Republican party these days made even "Nasty Newt" Gingrich look good, so it's not surprising that a fairly average candidate would look like gold.

Of course, whichever Republican candidate wins the nomination, he'll be sailing against gale-force winds and will probably go down in a defeat of Goldwater-esque proportions.

Iran?

2007-05-28T23:11:00.000-07:00

I've been at my cousin's wedding all weekend and change, hence no updates. Here's something! Thanks to Janani for pointing me to this fine website.

Commentary?

Is it just me, or is there some very special kind of arrogance that goes into giving your publication a name like "Commentary"? Is this word, unalloyed by any declamatory embellishment, meant to indicate that you will provide the reader with the definitive commentary on any subject appearing within its pages? Or am I reading too much into titles? Questions, questions.

The article I examine here comes courtesy of their editor-at-large, Norman Podhoretz.

Mr. Podhoretz begins by informing us that he considers the Cold War to have actually been World War III, and that this means that the current Global War on Terror is really WWIV. This rhetorical flourish bothers me, so Podhoretz succeeds in pissing me off in the first two sentences of his article. An auspicious start.

Forgive me for my ignorance, but I was under the impression that a "World War" required that a fairly hefty portion of the world be directly involved, and also that a war should be going on. I tend to think that the second requirement is more critical than the first--after all, World War I is undisputed as a World War, thought it was pretty much a European affair. So, calling the Cold War, which amounted to a lot of diplomatic posturing and arms racing plus a handful of proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc.) WWIII might be exaggerating. By that sort of logic we can say that, due to the diplomatic maneuvering taking place prior to August 1914, WWI actually went on from ca. 1905 to 1921 (counting the Russian Civil War as a direct outgrowth).

As for the putative WWIV, America and Britain plus loose change versus a lot of Stateless Jihadists and also Iraq fall rather short of requirement number one, and requirement number two is foggy. If one subscribes to the notion that a cultural and ideological struggle constitute a war, then definitely we're in a bit of a scrap, maybe the biggest since the American Civil War of 1830-1877.

Kidding aside, Podhoretz is just engaging in a completely empty saber-rattling rhetorical exercise. By asserting that we're in a World War he instantly ratchets up the issue and escalates the language, which is always a good position to be in. When a fuzzy-headed liberal insists that we need to stop and think, then you can tell him that it's time to fight the Good Fight in WWIV. Maybe it's the lack of any direct American experience with the toll that a real war, on home territory, exacts on a nation that allows people like Podhoretz to make fatuous statements like this.

I've also noticed a marked strategy of the Neo-Conservatives to reference to long, hard struggles. Podhoretz informs us that WWIV is "likely to go on for decades." By speaking in long timescales and the language of hard struggle, they're achieving two goals. First, this is a long war, so Americans should not be dismayed if there are no results for five or six or twenty years. Second, this is a tough fight, and Americans always rise to the challenge.

Let's not lose our heads, Norman. I'll grant you that eradicating terrorism will be a long fight. The roots of this guerrilla movement within the Muslim world are deep, and while cutting the weed down helps (viz. our invasion of Afghanistan) it's going to take a long time to dig up the roots--economic, political, and ideological--that drive the Jihadists. But as unfashionable as it might be to say this, terrorism is not that great a danger to America in general. Terrorists are very scary--it's in their name, for Christ's sake!--and every death is a tragedy, but exactly how much damage did the 9/11 attacks do to America, to the sinews of its Great Power status, in the realistic analysis? It hurt us substantially less than the invasion of Iraq did, militarily, economically, and diplomatically.

For a long time people were afraid to say things like that, for fear of being accused of "making light of terrorism" or otherwise minimizing the threat. But I think it's beginning to dawn on a lot of people that they've been bamboozled. Certainly Osama bin Laden or any of his thugs would like to kill me if he met me in person. But the concrete likelihood of me, here in the Midwest, being killed by a Jihadist is substantially less than my likelihood of being struck and killed by a drunk driver. Get ready for WWV, the War on Alcohol.

Rather than semantics-mongering about World Wars Three and Four, maybe we should examine the problems of terrorism and radical Islamism on their face and come up with real solutions. Treating them as struggles of national intelligence and law enforcement and economic/cultural change, respectively, would be a start. Of course people like Podhoretz would insist that This is a War unique in human history, and that I'm being a flippant, unrealistic ivory tower liberal by saying that we can handle this with Kid Gloves--we must throw the full force of the immense American Military-Industrial complex behind WWIV. My feeling is that if your house is infested with rats, you should try poison and traps before grabbing gun and shooting holes in all the walls.

Moving on.

Podhoretz follows up this up with typical Iran-based fearmongering. To prove how dangerous Iran is, he cites a State Department annual report about terrorism that says Iran is the main sponsor of global terrorism. The State Department of course being an entirely neutral party as regards Iran. Being as Mr. Podhoretz is a leading neoconservative, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and member of some important neoconservative committees, and being as the Bush administration and State Department are shot through with neoconservativism, isn't there some rule against him citing them? Can I cite myself and my friends as a source as well?

There some kind of cognitive disease at work here, as well. Iran as the leader of global "Islamofascism" is hard to swallow, because Iranians are Shi'ites and most everyone else are Sunnis. And the jihadists of al Qaeda et al. are not only Sunnis, but super-Sunnis who foam at the mouth and so on. Are the Ayatollahs who run Iran sad when al Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups kill Americans? Clearly not. They probably pop open their non-alcoholic champagne on just those occasions. But the aims of Al Qaeda and co. are completely anathema to everything the Ayatollahs hold dear; what the radical Islamists want is one Muslim state, the Caliphate, which will encompass all Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia in one glorious, utopian superstate. For Persian Iranians, this means permanent occupation and horrific religious persecution at the hands of Sunni Arab zealots. Not exactly an ideal outcome, and reason enough to belief the State Department might be making more out of this than actually obtains.

Podhoretz then moves from this mind-bending on to Nuclear panic. For my part I subscribe to the leftist lie that Iran mainly wants nuclear capability for the purpose of generating power, and secondarily for bombs to make themselves even scarier. Iran, despite being a petroleum exporter, lacks refining capacity and has to import gasoline. Nuclear power would alleviate a lot of their problems. It's also hard to believe that Iran wants to attack anybody with nuclear weapons. There's a lot of mileage on the idea of The Bomb in the hands of a Madman, but I have my doubts. If nobody up till now (including Stalin and Mao, legendary for their mental stability) has deployed the nukes, why would Ahmadinejad be the first?

It's also egotistical to think that the Iranians would be willing to go down to certain annihilation in the face of America's colossal nuclear arsenal, irrevocably destroying a 4,000 year old continuous cultural history of which they are tremendously proud, just to maybe kill a few hundred thousand Americans. Do we really think that other nations want to commit suicide just to deal America a few grim but easily survivable blows?

Then there's the more concrete question of whether Ahmadinejad would actually have to power to exercise the use nuclear weapons in any capacity. The answer is no, for reasons that pretty much undo the entire thrust of Podhoretz article. Ahmadinejad is a popular figure in the western media. "Look at the crazy President of Iran. He wants to destroy Israel!" This springs, I think, from an American delusion that the office of President is the same in Iran as it is in the USA. It isn't. Ahmadinejad exercises executive power at the pleasure of the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollahi Khamenei, and his decisions can be overruled at any time. Ahmadinejad's role is mostly ceremonial.

Following Podhoretz, we then move into some kind of bizarre Cold War paranoid fantasy.

"And in the realm of domestic affairs, Finlandization would mean that the only candidates running for office with a prayer of being elected would be those who promised to work toward a sociopolitical system more in harmony with the Soviet model than the unjust capitalist plutocracy under which we had been living.

Of course, by the grace of God, the dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and Ronald Reagan, we won World War III and were therefore spared the depredations that Finlandization would have brought."

Hippies and libero-commie politicians were all prepared to bring down the capitalist system and force us all to live under soft-pedal Stalinism, but Lech Walesa, the Gipper, and the LORD rescued us at the very doors of defeat. What a spectacular world these people live in, of narrow escapes and secret conspiracies.

The article continues to degenerate with a kindly reference to the nonspecific "British Press." Who does Norman indicate with that moniker? Is the Times of London? The Guardian? The Daily Mirror? The Sun? Or (my own guess) a letter to the editor from some East Anglian village newsletter? That counts as the British Press--it came out of a printing press located somewhere in Britain! A few paragraphs later, we run into "some observers". I am a great fan of "some observers", they always have such fascinating things to say. Already some observers are warning that the American government (or "Zionist Occupational Government" or ZOG as they call it) is controlled by a shadowy camarillo of International Jew Bankers whose sole objective is the mongrolization and destruction of the white race.

Only a quarter of the way through this trainwreck and already I'm tired of Podhoretz. It's late and time for bed. Perhaps I'll revisit him in the future, but don't count on it.

Evan

More News

2007-05-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

Most of my blogging is going to come from the New York Times online, because they're kind enough to give me full access for free, just because I am a student.

Abortion Foes See Validation for New Tactic

The article in the NYT today that caught my eye was this one about the grand old abortion debate, the favorite stomping grounds of the Falwells and Dobsons, and the famed litmus test for all GOP candidates. It concerns the evangelical infatuation with their new strategy of claiming that abortion isn't just bad for fetuses/babies/martyred saints, it's bad for women, too.

I have a few immediate problems with this argument:

1) On the issue of psychological harm, well, duh. Of course it's a difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy, only made worse by the vitriolic disapproval from the anti-abortion types. The people who say they only want to look out for the health of both baby and mother are the same people who camp outside the clinics and call the women seeking abortions whores and murderers. Anti-abortion groups assert that there is a psychological disorder called Post Abortion Syndrome which is related to PTSD, but unfortunately this isn't recognized by the psychological or psychiatric communities and isn't to be found anywhere in the DSM-IV (the bible of mental disorders). So, PAS exists in the same murky ground as claims that homosexuality is a mental defect.

2) As for the claims that abortion is a severe danger medically, well, the evidence doesn't obtain. When you're making a medical argument this total lack of reputable, peer-reviewed research is a serious problem. In reality an abortion performed by a doctor in a clinic (e.g., a legal abortion as opposed to the back-alley jobs that would be necessitated by a renewed ban) is safer than childbirth.

3) Finally, the entire argument is flawed. Even if abortion were as dangerous for a woman as claimed, where is the justification for state intervention? Divorce can be an emotionally damaging, difficult experience. Should the state force married couples to undergo counseling before they're allowed to file for divorce?

Then there's the matter of the actual content of these state-mandated "informed consent" sessions and counseling procedures. As reported by the Times, the South Dakota informed consent law (under legal challenge) states that abortion kills a

'“whole, separate, unique, living human being,” and that it carries a variety of psychological and physical risks to the woman.'

It becomes rather clear what the "informed consent" law really is. Abortion foes can assemble across the street from an abortion clinic and yell abuse at women who enter. But, sadly, they can't follow the woman into the clinic and continue to verbally assault her. This where the God-fearing South Dakota state legislature comes in, because now you are directed by law to stop and listen to a state-mandated official tell you that abortion is murder before you're allowed to go into the operating room. How splendid, and might I add, it is wonderful to hear that in the state of South Dakota the government mandates officials inside a medical clinic to make false statements about the medical safety of a procedure.

(South Carolina also wants to force women to look at the fetus via sonogram before having the abortion. I don't think this will work because it is illegal to force people to undergo medical procedures without their consent, but it is a nice touch. Maybe they can also make a law saying that the doctor has to slap the woman across the face and yell "It's a child, not a choice!" before starting the procedure.)

Something else I enjoyed:

"But Allan E. Parker Jr., president of the Justice Foundation, a conservative group based in Texas, compares the campaign intended for women to the long struggle to inform Americans about the risks of smoking. “We’re kind of in the early stages of tobacco litigation,” Mr. Parker said."

Now, see, the difference here would be that tobacco has been established by decades of unanimous scientific evidence to be dangerous, and that there isn't any strong evidence that abortion is particularly dangerous medically or psychologically.

College!

2007-05-21T12:45:00.001-07:00

At the University of Iowa, you need 120 credit-hours to graduate. There is also a regulation that says, of those 120, a maximum of 50 can be derived from any one department. I have run up into that barrier with history classes. The field that I have majored it, the only field in which I have genuine, unalloyed interest (I like German, but as sort of an adjunct to my history work), must now stop contributing credits to my graduation.

This is not going to stop me from graduating, and it's not going to stop me from taking history classes. I have 104 credits right now, and of the 15 I'm taking next semester 9 will apply toward my total. Seven non-history credits in Spring 2008 will be a breeze. I am annoyed, however, partially because I can't divine any purpose to this rule. How did they arrive at the figure of 50 credits from any one department? Arbitrarily, I'm certain. I dispute the legitimacy of this number. Fie on it.

First Post

2007-05-21T10:34:00.001-07:00

Because of encouragement by a couple friends I've decided to try to keep a blog. Hopefully I'll be adding to it daily, but we'll see. My main purpose will be to look at news stories and use my brain to formulate a type-written response, available for your tube-driven internet perusal. Here's my first effort, starting with something from the New York Times week in review.

NYT

The article concerns the claims which are apparently being made about the conservative movement being in its death throes. Right away this gives me pause, because I don't know who's talking about that. Apparently, "many" are behind this line of thought. I wonder how "many". I don't really know anybody who has said that the conservative movement is finished, maybe because all the liberals I know are too pessimistic--or realistic. Or maybe the "many" don't actually exist, and are merely a straw man fallacy, created and held up so that it can be knocked down. Unidentified multitudes say that the conservative movement is over, thus giving us a perfect opportunity to talk about how wrong they are.

The gist of the article is, of course, correct. The conservative movement isn't finished. It's actually very hard, maybe impossible, to kill an ideology. The Nazis were complete and utter failures whose efforts accomplished nothing but the utter ruination of their homeland and stained German history forever, yet there are still swastika-toting goons to be found in any country one cares to look at.

The problem with the article is it's uncritical placement of Wolfowitz and Falwell in the same category. Since both supported the Republican party, the reasoning goes, they're similar enough to talk about them as one. But if you look at what the two actually supported you find they have almost nothing in common. For Falwell social issues (homosexuals, fetuses, condoms, and indecent television) were paramount; Wolfowitz didn't care about anything but invading Iraq. There are multiple movements within the Republican party which scarcely bear resemblance to one another and are allied for political convenience--to whit, Falwell's fundamentalists with their foam-at-the-mouth social agenda, Wolfowitz's neo-conservatives with their military adventurism, and the Eisenhower school exemplified by Arlen Specter or John McCain circa the 2000 campaign (these days he's just another goon). America being a two-party system, these elements overlook their wildly divergent goals and focus on their similarities.

The reason for Reagan's success and his saintly image in the Republican party today was his capacity to make all the different parts of the GOP feel loved by him (he was an actor, after all). Still, making reference to a conservative movement exemplified by both Wolfowitz and Falwell is a little odd--shouldn't a "movement" tend to move in one direction? Maybe Tanenhaus was thinking more about the similarities in rhetorical strategy, with both F and W having plenty of contempt for truth, logic, and the rule of law.

Finally, a last nitpick

"The unpopularity of the Iraq war is nearing Vietnam proportions, and President Bush’s plummeting poll numbers resemble those of Mr. McNamara’s boss, Lyndon B. Johnson."

With margin of error, and depending on what poll you trust, Bush's approval ratings are actually right around Lyndon Johnson's deepest valley of 35%, and have at times dipped even lower. Newsweek polls reported a 28% percent approval rating at the beginning of the month.

Polling Report

Another prominent difference would be that Bush's abysmal poll rating has held steady for quite a long time, whereas Lyndon Johnson's numbers dipped severely after the Tet Offensive and then climbed back to just under 50% by the time he left office. The jury is still out on whether Bush will recover to lofty 40% territory or not, but it doesn't look too good.