Big big news--big enough that Lou Dobbs was laughing about it on CNN a little while ago, expressing incredulity. Big big news--big enough that even though the suit was filed in Florida, it made the newspapers in New York, Kansas City, and other places. Those darn plaintiff's lawyers with their crazy new theories are out of control! Somebody actually sued a McDonalds franchise for selling them a bagel that was so hard that it broke their teeth! Ho ho ho, ha ha ha, tort reform. The only problem, of course, is that (as anybody who's passed the first year of law school can tell you), such lawsuits have been a recognized and settled part of basic law for decades if not centuries. If you sell somebody food to eat, you are giving an implied promise that it's fit for the purpose it's sold for--i.e., eating--and you are liable if that promise is not kept. In nearly every state, this is in fact a matter of statute, under the Uniform Commercial Code. Ho ho ho, ha ha ha. Can you imagine, that somebody actually filed a lawsuit to enforce their rights against a corporation that injured them? Ho ho ho, ha ha ha. Next up, after this commercial: somebody actuallly had the gall to call the police when their car was stolen! What will those darn lawyers think of next? Ho ho ho, ha ha ha. Liberal media, ho ho ho, ha ha ha.[12:15 AM] [19 comments]
Because the regular media is a bit preoccupied this week, I'd like to encourage bloggers who are not on typical media mailing lists to write to Basic Books, my publisher, and request a review copy.The heck with that. This blogger who is "not on typical media mailing lists" went out and bought a copy at Barnes and Noble, full price, on its first day on sale. Speaking from inside the whale, I assure you that this does a lot more to help rev up Basic Books' promotional machinery than any dozen bloggers trying to leech a free copy.
Hey, you know, this looks like a pretty shit-kicking book, too. Excuse me, I'll be back after I've read just another couple of chapters. [11:31 PM] [6 comments]
Inevitably when something like this happens, someone will feel the need to point out that seven other people somewhere else were killed the same day and we're not making a big deal about them. There may be some value to this egalitarian sniping about priorities, but this is probably not the most constructive way to raise this point. This argument reminds me of the communion scene from Places in the Heart and I imagine Sally Field and Danny Glover breaking bread with the Columbia astronauts, and with the nameless Nigerians killed in that bank explosion, and with Gus Grissom and Ed White and Roger Chafee, and I remember that there's room at the table for all the forgotten and the honored dead and all of us, the living.[05:42 PM] [8 comments]
Says Lucy Huntzinger in AIM: "Let's design their flag!" [05:08 PM] [5 comments]
Here are the bare minimums for journalists operating in Baghdad:"Ironic" might be one word for it. Another might be, what was it? Oh yes. "Icky." [01:24 PM] [18 comments]$100/day fee per journalist, cameraperson, technical staff etc.
That's already $500 and that doesn't include the thousands of dollars daily for each direct live satellite feed for TV networks. Nor does it include the bribes and "tips" shelled out left and right. Nor does it include the money handed over at border crossings and the airport. The networks don't like to talk about how much they actually spend, but one veteran of the media scene here estimated the cost for a major TV network at about $100,000 a month. Others say that is a low estimate. Almost all of this cash (except a few "tips" here and there) goes directly to the Iraqi government. Once you add up the bill for the TV networks alone, we're talking perhaps millions of dollars in revenue a month for the government.
$150/day fee for permission to use a satellite telephone (which the journalists have to provide themselves)
$50-100/day for a mandatory government escort
$50-100/day for a car and driver (some networks have a fleet of vehicles)
$75/day for a room at the Al Rashid HotelThere is a joke here that the major media outlets are now competing with oil smuggling as the number one money-maker for the Iraqi government. It is particularly ironic that while Rupert Murdoch's "troops" from FOX News Network rally for the war, dismissing antiwar activists as dupes of the Iraqi regime, the "network America trusts" is paying "Saddam" (as they refer to Iraq) hand over fist tens of thousands of dollars every month.
TO: So how do we break through the dominant paradigm? The so-called "liberal media?"Recommended reading for overseas readers who think American politics fall into an easily-parsed narrative of "cowboys," "Yankees," etc. We are stranger than you imagine, and probably more dangerous. [07:48 PM] [23 comments]RP: Yeah, who is the liberal media? From my viewpoint, Fox is a bigger threat than CBS. Fox is the bigger interventionist. All the major media in television are like that. How do you do it? I do it my way. I write articles and give speeches and send out letters. The other thing that I do is to make sure everybody knows up front exactly what I believe in. Because if I get elected, I want to make the claim that they elected me knowing fully well what I believe. Not only do I want to be elected under those conditions, I want to follow those rules, never vote to bend them, and get reelected with a better percentage.
I understand that the anti-war movement is a lot stronger than anybody would realize by watching television; that it is stronger compared to where we were when we moved into Vietnam. Then they were killing for five years before the campuses exploded. Now the campuses are sound asleep and there is a strong anti-war movement in the suburbs. It's out there.
Take it for what you will. But kindness can happen even between enemies, and should never be discouraged. [06:56 PM] [5 comments]
In politics, the use of tragedies to score policy points is routine. I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's how you make decisions in a democracy. I would say it really depends on the substance. For instance, using the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to motivate the improvement of occupational safety was entirely laudable. The martyrdom of civil rights workers advanced civil rights legislation. Using the crimes of a tyrant to justify a just war is appropriate. Obviously the question is whether the cause is just, and whether the link is well-founded. One thing is certain--anyone who accuses someone else of exploiting a tragedy for political aims is in the same game. Exploitation is really a question of whether the case is sufficiently plausible to merit further investigation. Some cases are pitched to the uninformed or geared to prejudice.Max's whole post is very much worth reading. [06:45 PM] [2 comments]
I am still listening to the news, and they just were talking to Buzz Aldrin. He said he wanted to read an excerpt from a song by Dr. Jordin Kare and even spelled Jordin's last name. He read the last (?) verse of Jordin's, "Fire In The Sky," .... "and they passed from us to Glory riding Fire In The Sky." And as he read his voice started trembling and he began to cry.If you have a copy of this, audio or video, Jordin Kare would like to hear from you. [11:13 PM] [5 comments]
John Anderson, 59, found close to 80 pieces of debris on his 14-acre patch of grass and woods, mostly pieces of tile, from minute up to two feet long.[11:04 PM] [1 comments]Mr. Anderson said he saw the one that landed on his front porch first, recognized it and knew what had happened before he turned on the television.
"We heard this low-frequency, high-energy sound, an enormous release of energy, sort of a ragged boom," he said. "I hadn't even remembered that the shuttle was landing today. Unfortunately we have gotten to the point of thinking of them as completely safe and commonplace. Then I remembered it was landing today, and I was afraid maybe something happened.
The awful thing, he said, was "the realization that what you had thought possibly could be the case from what you had felt, was obviously the case. We had the TV on, and by that time they were reporting there had been no communication. But we already knew."
COLUMBIA SADNESS(Thanks to Sam Gentile for the pointer.) [06:45 PM]When I was a little boy I believed passionately in space travel. I had a book by Willy Ley, with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell. The hard covers were slick and glossy, and if you ran your fingernail over them, hard, the cardboard beneath the glossy coating dented. Eventually the coating broke, and started to peel off, and the glossy night behind the stars was dull, and sticky as tar, collecting lint.
The grown son of my mother's best friend was a pilot in the Air Force. He came to visit us, in uniform, and I showed him my Willy Ley book and told him about rockets, missiles and space travel. He said it wasn't possible. Would never happen. That Willy Ley was wrong. That you couldn't do that with rockets. I argued with him. It was the first time in my life, probably, that I openly disagreed with an adult.
Later on, I built kits like these:
http://www.strangenewworlds.com/issues/feature-14-monogram.html
The Monogram Space Taxi was a particular favorite, and I kept the space-suited figures long after the taxi itself had broken up and vanished.
Broken up and vanished. In the sky over Nacogdoches County. And I'm sad all the way back to the little boy with his stiff black book and his Bonestell rockets.
But Willy was right, and nobody ever said it would be risk-free.
If it were, it wouldn't be glorious.
And it's only with these losses that we best know that it really is.
UPDATE: From the AP story at the New York Times:
On launch day, a piece of insulating foam on the external fuel tank came off during liftoff and was believed to have struck the left wing of the shuttle. NASA said as late as Friday that the damage to the thermal tiles was believed to be minor and posed no safety concern during the fiery decent through the atmosphere.Re-entry has always been a dangerous thing, and we've never lost anyone during it. Looks like we may have just run out of luck.
FURTHER UPDATE: Attached to this post on Teresa's weblog is a comment from John M. Ford that is a must-read. And lifelong space activist Tim Kyger has a comment to this Electrolite post which brings up something I hadn't thought of.
MORE: A roundup of what we know so far, from Spaceflight Now.
MORE: The debris track, as seen by NOAA radar. Oh my god.
MORE: Of course, dozens--probably hundreds---of bloggers are tracking this story. Seth Johnson is doing a very good job of linking to diverse information. Jim Henley's observations are very much worth reading. [09:57 AM] [56 comments]
UPDATE: Many comments ensued. Notable: a long, thoughtful, and impassioned post by Lydia Nickerson, about scientific truth, religious belief, and real-world medical practice. [07:20 AM] [119 comments]
I know that at this time of international tension, it's completely inappropriate for me to see the headline on Excite News: Bush to Argue Saddam 'Is Not Disarming' and find an imaginary conversation going through my head along the lines of:[11:54 PM] [20 comments]"But George, you were dancing with Saddam all night. You must think he is the most disarming man on the planet."
"I do not. That man is not disarming. I was only dancing with him to please papa."
"George Bush, I do declare that you have started to blush! Mary Lou said Saddam Hussein was the most charming man at the party."
"I am not blushing. He is not disarming, and he is not charming, and he, he's a terrible dancer. Now leave me alone, or I shall tell papa!"
Good night.
(1) Prominent Republican Thomas Kean, former governor of New Jersey, is the new chairman of the 9/11 commission.
(2) Kean is also a director of petroleum company Amerada Hess.
(3) In 1988, Amerada Hess formed a joint venture with Saudi company Delta Oil.
(4) One of Delta Oil's backers is Khalid bin Mahfouz, who is--here's where you need to clap your hat firmly to your skull--married to one of Osama Bin Laden's sisters. And suspected of financing Al Qaeda. Oh, and named in one of the lawsuits brought by 9/11 victims. Did we mention that he's also been involved in deals with the Carlyle Group, the ultra-secret investment group that includes, among others, George H. W. Bush? And also in deals with--yes, your tinfoil hat, properly adjusted, plays 1980s popular music!--BCCI?
(5) Three weeks before Kean's appointment, Amerada Hess severed its ties with Delta.
Source: Fortune magazine.
I realize that only unreasonable people would make anything of the above. Why would anyone possibly worry about the fact that every time we turn around another prominent Administration member turns out to be up to his ass in business connections with shadowy Al-Qaeda supporters? Certainly I'm not worried. That would be tinfoil hat stuff. Not for me! I dismiss my misgivings with a stern flick of my Rational Mind! Also, monkeys fly out of my butt.
I find the on-line Pepys diary strangely consoling. On just about any given day, I can go to his weblog and discover that he, too, has been fretting about money (never quite enough), the weather (usually bad), and the current political situation (unsettled and disturbing). Some people might be depressed by this lack of evident progress in the betterment of the human condition since 1660, but I draw a certain comfort from the you-are-not-aloneness of it all.[03:55 PM] [0 comments]
The death of newsblogging, basically. For at least a period of time there will be next to no point in linking to "breaking news" because so much of it will be contradictory and disinformative by intent.In support of this, Jim picks at the evidently-contradictory threads of this Ha'aretz report about a possible role for the Jordanian monarchy in post-surrender Iraq, and fires up the immense translation machine at Unqualified Offerings World HQ (dials, levers, mad cackling, Van der Graaf generator). [02:32 PM] [7 comments]
I'm forever getting half-way through what I think is one of Doc Searls' posts, then abruptly realising that I'm actually reading Samuel Pepys' Diary.I hate it when that happens. [11:02 AM] [5 comments]
Hint: Starts with "M." Ends with "soft."
(Via Bruce Schneier, who knows more about this crap than anyone.) [12:42 AM] [3 comments]
War is. Is for children. In a handbasket. Freezing over. Fire and damnation. Damn you all to. Fuck it. Maybe it's the bourbon and maybe it's my hot head, the one that yells at the television set, and maybe it's my snarky anti-authoritarian nature and maybe it's just that I'm a self-hating anti-American objectively Ba'athist Stalinist stooge whose good intentions are greasing the skids down the slippery slope straight to.Read the rest.I don't care.
Forget the shameless politicization of an unprecedented terrorist attack. Forget that every informed opinion says that an attack will trigger reprisals here at home that we are not ready for. Forget the broken promises to firefighters and cops, forget the unnecessary, clumsy, and disruptive invasion of civil rights by the largest and most expensive government ever, forget the staggering arrogance and sobering ineptitude on the international stage. Wipe it all off the table and send it smashing to the floor. I don't care. Sit down across the now-empty table from me and tell me how on earth I can live with an administration that proposes to do this in my name--
Manley's weblog has other treasures to share, including the definitive post relating noirish comic book writer Frank Miller to incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Not to be missed. [12:20 AM] [14 comments]
writes:
I just noticed on your blog the illustration in the Jan 22 entry concerning the death of Bill Mauldin.The altered cartoon is thumbnailed up to the left of this post. The ad's caption reads "With great sadness, the Jeep brand says goodbye to the great cartoonist who immortalized the heroic enlisted men of WWII. Bill Mauldin, 1921-2003."Jeep has taken out full page ads in the New York Times (today, p. A11) with this very illustration, albeit slightly changed: The gun, with which the soldier puts down his wounded jeep, is replaced by a box of tissues! I did not know the cartoon before, and it did not make to much sense to me when I saw this (it certainly made some sense as a tribute to the artist, but in the context of that cartoon, why would the soldier be crying and having a box of tissues on his jeep?) So thank you very much for providing this bit of correction. And shame on DaimlerChrysler for messing up the cartoon.
The crack staff of art critics here at Electrolite agrees with Reader Klein. The original cartoon is funny on several levels: it's a parody of a whole genre of scenes about heroic cavalry officers and their horses, and it's an acknowledgement of the genuine feeling World War II soldiers had for their Jeeps. Obviously, somebody at Jeep understands the second point, at least. But wouldn't it have been much funnier and more appropriate to reproduce the original cartoon? As Klein's remarks demonstrate, the altered image simply makes no sense if you've never seen the original. And it's very strange to pay tribute to a wickedly funny humorist by altering one of his most famous images to remove, well, the humor part.
As for the fact that, in 2003, "Jeep is a registered trademark of DaimlerChrysler Corporation," we pass over it in silence. And the owl was once the baker's daughter. [05:29 PM] [7 comments]
When, 17 years ago, I read the manuscript of Kim Stanley Robinson's first novel, The Wild Shore, I loved the book but I had a big problem with the basic premise--that the United States had been devastated, forced into economic and technological primitivity by a sudden, overwhelming, tactical nuclear attack, and was now interdicted by the rest of the world. It seemed to me to be an unbelievable premise, the kind of thing where you just had to hold your breath and jump in for the sake of the story and the writing. How could we possibly get from here (20 years ago) to there?There's nothing new about us saying that we might use nuclear weapons if attacked with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. But adding weasel words like "in the event of surprising military developments", making sure the alarming threat gets published all over the place, and going out of our way to tell our longtime allies that it's "my way or the highway" from now on--well, that certainly is a new approach.This weekend I read a story in the Los Angeles Times, and was overwhelmed with the sudden knowledge that I now knew the answer to my question so long ago.
From that article:
In a policy statement issued only last month, the White House said the United States "will continue to make clear that it reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force--including through resort to all of our options--to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States."One year ago, the administration completed a classified Nuclear Posture Review that said nuclear weapons should be considered against targets able to withstand conventional attack; in retaliation for an attack with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; or "in the event of surprising military developments." And it identified seven countries--China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria--as possible targets.
The same report called on the government to develop smaller nuclear weapons for possible use in some battlefield situations. Both the United States and Russia already have stockpiles of such tactical weapons, which are often small enough to be carried by one or two people yet can exceed the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.
Not long ago, I characterized the particular heedlessness of this Administration as "Hubris cruising for Nemesis." This is beyond "cruising," though. This is taking out a personals ad reading "Hubris seeks Nemesis for consensual scene. Serious offers only."
UPDATE: Kim Stanley Robinson writes: "After 16 years in Gold Coast country, now this--when does it get to be Pacific Edge's turn?" (Links provided by the management.) [12:22 PM] [38 comments]
The DoD has gone out of its way to make it a snap. An unbelievably badly-protected admin interface welcomes you to register whatever domain you please (http://Rotten.mil anyone?), or edit anything they've already got. The interface is so ludicrously unprotected that it's been cached by Google and fails to mention that you must be authorized to muck about with it. Incredibly, default passwords are cheerfully provided on the page.The Register notes that before running this story, they emailed the DoD employee who manages these sites--twice, in fact--but received no reply. They conclude:Following an anonymous tip from an observant Reg reader, we've encountered the page in question in the Google cache, and after a bit of our own poking about have also discovered an equally unprotected (and Google-cached) admin interface encouraging us to add a new user, like ourselves, say, which requires no authentication.
All you have to do is find that page and you can set yourself up with a user account, manage your new .mil Web site, fiddle about with other people's .mil Web sites, and generally make an incredible nuisance of yourself. We are, of course, straining against every natural, journalistic impulse in our beings by neglecting to mention any useful search strings with which to find it. [...]
Ironically, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently ordered DoD to purge military Web sites of information that might benefit evildoers. That's all well and good, but it might behoove the DoD to stop offering them admin privileges first.(Via Noah Shachtman's fascinating weblog DefenseTech.) [08:48 AM] [5 comments]
In our next exciting installment, I will remark "Give me a break," and a right-wing poster will show up on cue to scold me for demanding a handout, just like all the other liberals. Do you suppose that, as things get rockier and rockier for the Rove Administration, some folks in the party of War Now are getting just a little bit stressed? Could happen.
Meanwhile, in the immortal words of Ted Barlow, if you listen closely, you can actually hear Irony dying. [01:37 PM] [5 comments]
The author knows a thing or two about propaganda: she grew up in Castro's Cuba. (Thanks to Jane Finch on Stand Down for spotting this.) [01:23 PM] [2 comments]
UPDATE: No sooner than I post the above, than one (1) piece of mail comes through, which is (to put it mildly) a lot less than I usually get overnight. Logging into Panix's Unix shell service, I see a message-of-the-day has just been posted:
Many Panix services were disabled on-and-off (mostly off) from about 12:30AM Saturday morning up until recently. This was the result of a massive DDOS (distributed denial-of-service) attack that apparently affected a number of ISPs. We don't know a lot about this yet, though we've been working on it all night, since the volume was far more massive than any attack in our previous experience, and apparently triggered at least two separate bugs in Cisco's IOS (memory leakage and HSRP failures).Sounds like interesting times on the Internet. I've been vaguely conscious that DDOS attacks have been getting larger and more sophisticated. Looks like this one may be affecting a lot of people, so be advised.The attack is continuing, on and off. We've taken certain measures, which are partially effective, but we're uncertain as to how they'll stand up.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Teresa points out that since our home DSL (via Speakeasy) and our hosting provider (the entirely wonderful Blogomania) are both working, it makes sense to let people get in touch with us via an "open thread" on one of our weblogs. Teresa's set it up here. Use it if you need to reach us--or if you have interesting information about this ongoing net problem. (Please note that, for now, if you post in any of our other comment threads, we might be a little slow to notice it, since our email is still very erratic.) [07:54 AM]
is dead. Web writer Robert Sherrill wrote this not too long ago:
A lot of World War II servicemen behaved for years, until that old debbil dotage crept up on them, and they began to think of themselves as heroes, strutting around at memorials, D-Days, V-Days, and Armistice Day parades and whatnot, strangling in VFW and Legion jackets, their fore-and-aft caps cocked high and low, gongs, patches, and other inscrutable garbage all over them. Some might have been heroes, who knows?I read Up Front and Back Home when I was ten or eleven. I've never forgotten them. Bill Mauldin knew the score, lived the story, and told the truth. Farewell. [10:13 PM] [7 comments]This disturbed me and got me to thinking about heroes, real ones--and after a long spell, I poked my head up and my hero ambushed me. He was not Sgt. York or Audie Murphy, he was the World War 2 dogface.
[...] The real source and catalyst of this spirit was Bill Mauldin's Up Front and Back Home. In Up Front, Mauldin tells about his life as a doggie and the cartoons of two dogfaces, Willie and Joe, show it. It is a fine work--funny, grim, and sad, the only indispensable book, as the critics say, on World War II. [...]
Mauldin, boy soldier, seems to have always been at war with himself. Conflicting feelings are, I feel, the surest crucible of art. His work stripped bare war and life, and himself, with humor and honesty. He was a strong, clear, and open writer. His anecdote about the 20-year-old staff sergeant who was shredded when a German dropped a potato masher in his hole is a little lesson in how to write. How to be. In a picture of him in the field, I noticed that he was left-handed. As he asked: Whoever heard of a left-handed artist? He led a somewhat privileged life, but don't be fooled; he was a doggie, a 45th Division doggie.
In the past couple of years, the Web has become a graveyard for dozens of creative, independent sites.And a cradle for thousands more, Talbot did not add. John Scalzi directs some measured words to this point.
Personally, I wish Salon well, I've enjoyed a lot of things they've published, and my own dealings with them have been entirely pleasant and professional...but I find myself just a tad weary of Talbot's habitual claims to be the standard-bearer of all that is creative and independent and non-mainstream. Salon's basic problem is that most of what it publishes is no better than hundreds of thousands of other words of political and cultural commentary being posted to the web every day, for free. So why should anyone give them $30 a year? Heck, for only $10 a year, I promise to give absolutely no money to David Horowitz or Camille Paglia. That's a savings of TWO THIRDS! Creativity, independence, opposition culture, and your mother are at stake! Remember: (1) no Horowitz, (2) no Paglia, (3) no fooling. Join Electrolite Premium! Act now! Act without thinking! Send money today! [03:57 PM] [20 comments]
Regarding the latter, there's a fine old Usenet term for a phony identity you create in order to post messages, ostensibly from someone else, in support of yourself and your positions. That word is sock-puppet. [02:37 PM] [17 comments]
You know, why even bother? An oversized foam middle finger to the families of the victims would get the same job done, and at a tiny fraction of the cost.As the AP story points out, the government plonked down $5 million for a commission to study legalized gambling.
It really couldn't be clearer that this is a put-up job, and that we are ruled by people who wish us harm. [09:23 AM] [28 comments]
Rallies are far less effective than people give them credit for. They make a nice media splash but given the work and time involved, a really poor use of resources. Think about it-- if 100,000 people (to take a conservative estimate) were down in DC this weekend, most of them taking the whole day to get there and get home, that is something like 1.2 million volunteer hours.[10:04 PM] [29 comments]Instead of one media event that most people just barely notice in an impersonal newspaper article or TV message, if all of those people had spent that time in phone banks or door-knocking, they could have literally engaged tens of millions of people individually. They could have asked these new people to come to followup meetings, asked them to host house parties with neighbors, asked them to write their legislators--asked them to do something other than stare at a media report.
By its nature protest is insular, which feeds the sectarian language and the sense of speaking to the converted. [...] Outreach is hard, but reaching new people is really far more important than hanging out for a day with people who already agree with you.
As it happens, I was singing "America the Beautiful" just the other day, while ambling along with a bunch of fellow travellers and other riff-raff. So I wonder if Simon has looked at the full lyrics lately, which seem to me to be as much about history as they are about landscape:
O beautiful for glory-taleI've noted before that "America the Beautiful" is unusual among patriotic songs in that it actually acknowledges that its subject is imperfect, a work in progress:
Of liberating strife
When once and twice, for man's avail
Men lavished precious life!
America! America!I'm down with that.
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
George "The Blogger's Chew Toy" Orwell once speculated that the tendency to skip the "Confound their politics / Frustrate their knavish tricks" part of "God Save the King" might stem from Tory suspicion that those lines referred to them. Likewise, it's easy to imagine the party of Greed Is Good being unenthusiastic about this:
America! America!But it's definitely not about landscape. You gotta give it that. [02:06 PM] [23 comments]
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!
"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."(Thanks to Body and Soul.) [09:10 PM] [37 comments]
As somebody else remarked recently, some posts just write themselves. Boys, please don't block my way.
"Your Red Roots Are Showing!" chanted the Freepers as we approached.
The sign Jim was carrying read "PEACE NOW, SOCIALISM NEVER."
I clapped Jim on the shoulder. "Thank you for your undercover service, comrade," I said. "Your gold bars will arrive from Moscow shortly." [05:47 PM] [38 comments]
You probably saw the story where the Vatican put the knuckle down on American Catholic politicians--read John Kerry and (maybe) Nancy Pelosi--about hewing to the company line regarding certain issues on which a "well-formed Christian conscience" does not permit them to take a certain position. Now, ever since John Kennedy gave his speech to the Baptist ministers in Texas back in 1960, we American Papists have taken comfort in the fact that this peculiar "double loyalty" issue had been put to rest. Now, with their institutional church possessing on issues of human sexuality the approximate moral credibility of a barnyard goat, the bureaucrats in red beanies have decided to raise it again. If Kerry has any brains at all, he'll make a speech this week telling these ermined layabouts to go climb a tree. My own informed Christian conscience won't rest until a battalion of them are hauled off to the sneezer on conspiracy charges.This Boston Globe piece suggests that, by and large, modern American Catholic politicians aren't taking much guff from the Curia. It concludes:
Some scholars said the Vatican's ability to impose its moral views on American politicians has been lessened by the clergy sex abuse crisis.You could light a match on that. [05:55 PM] [21 comments]''One of the lessons of the sex scandal is that lawyers and prosecutors and politicians can't automatically defer to the church on legal and moral questions,'' said Leslie Griffin, a legal ethics professor at the University of Houston Law Center, who studies the relationship between law and religion. ''On all these questions of sexuality, of marriage, of peace, the lay people have expertise.''
I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengance, more desolation. War is hell. (William Tecumseh Sherman)[11:04 PM] [33 comments]
Contact Jim Henley for details if you'd like to join Blogtopia's delegation to this cultural and political event.
UPDATE: Jim Henley provides details of where and when to meet our party--now composed, I gather, of Jim, Max, Julian Sanchez, one Leonard from Unruled, and a group of antiwar organizers from Lexington, Virginia. (Lexington, Virginia? Surely, just to balance things, there must be a Manassas, Massachusetts.) [12:21 AM] [21 comments]
"The fact that the inspectors have not yet come up with new evidence of Iraq's WMD program could be evidence, in and of itself, of Iraq's noncooperation," Rumsfeld said.Writes our friend Jim Macdonald, Navy veteran: "I wonder if Rumsfeld would like the same standard of proof be applied to him and the kiddie porn on his personal computer." [10:44 PM] [10 comments]
Teddy Bare had hanky panky with a chick who wound up dead, Biden plagarized, Clinton got head from a ditzy Jew broad and lied to the people, KKK bigwig Byrd bandied the white N*gger around, Condit got caught hanky panky with a ditzy jew chick who wound up dead.From someone calling themselves "Army E8", email address "roknokr@aol.com", IP address 205.188.209.16.
Okay, then. [12:23 AM] [23 comments]
Q: How many Andrew Sullivans does it take to change a lightbulb?[03:37 PM] [2 comments]A: Bush again gets it exactly right. While the leftists continue to marginalize themselves by mewling and snorting at the lack of light, the rest of America will be enjoying the darkness that Bush has shrewdly provided. Once again, his instincts and deep bond with the American people carry the day.
KRUGMAN AWARD NOMINEE: "I think I liked it better when the lightbulb worked." Jimmy Thompson, 4th grade, quoted in (where else?) the New York Times.
A letter-writer in the Washington Post remarks:
"Thousands of Vietnam-era draftees came home for burial in wooden boxes, and many more still suffer the effects of napalm exposure or were otherwise disabled in combat. It is comforting, I'm sure, to their families that they were of 'no value, no advantage, really.'"I agree, and have recently argued, that for most modern purposes volunteer armies are liable to be more effective than conscripts. But for a Secretary of Defense to fliply dismiss the value of 1,800,000 Americans' service is stunningly crass. I know teenagers with more thoughtfulness and discretion than Rumsfeld displays. And less vanity. [03:30 PM] [36 comments]
So we'd be a receptive audience for the book Bjorn Lomberg's The Skeptical Environmentalist claimed to be.
So we're all the more disappointed that it's no such thing. As Australian economist and weblogger John Quiggin articulates:
I began with a very positive attitude towards Lomborg. He seemed to be taking a sensibly optimistic attitude towards environmental problems, pointing to our successes in fixing up pollution problems, the ozone layer and so on, rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios. Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems--whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing. In particular,he came up with an obviously self-contradictory case for doing nothing about global warming, and gave a clearly biased summary of the economic literature on this topic, which I know very well.[11:19 PM] [46 comments]After that, I looked at his story about being an environmentalist reluctantly convinced of the truth according to Julian Simon. As I observed a while ago, I first heard this kind of story in Sunday School, and I've heard it many times since. It's almost invariably bogus, and Lomborg is no exception. You don't need to look far to find errors in Simon's work as bad as any of those of the Club of Rome, but Lomborg apparently missed them. Going on, I realised that Lomborg's professed concern for the third world was nothing more than a debating trick--otherwise he wouldn't have been so quick to dismiss emissions trading with poor countries as politically infeasible.
There's nothing I hate more than being conned. Lomborg tried to con me, and, for a while, he succeeded. That's why I'm far more hostile to him than to a forthright opponent of environmentalism like Simon.
What they teach in seminary[11:00 PM] [7 comments]What they should teach in seminary
- Old Testament: Pentateuch, Wisdom, Prophets, Lesser Prophets, Psalms, Writings.
- New Testament: Four Gospels, Letters of Paul, and other infinitely variable combinations
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Liturgy
- Pastoral Care: Rogerian and Whitehead Models of pastoral conversation
- Field Education: in which the Field Ed supervisor, usually the Rector of a local church, gets a Youth Group leader for a semester.
- Theology: Systematic and Foundations and other elective perversions.
- Preaching
- Canon Law
- Christian Education
- Christian Ethics
- Bioethics
- Human Rights
- Christology
- Church History (I actually stood at the ancient tomb of the Venerable Bede at Durham Cathedral in England this summer and cursed him for having to read his History of the Church in middle English)
- Anglicanism (insert the appropriate -ism for your denomination)
- Clinical Pastoral Education - in which the seminarian approaches and occasionally exceeds the limits of his/her ability to endure an endless summer of colonoscopies by peers.
- Small business management
- Yoga
- Desk-top Publishing
- Alternative spiritualities
- How to relate to people who think you are God
- How to relate to people who think you are Satan
- Small engine repair
- How to relate to people that you think are God
- How to relate to people that you think are Satan
- The difference between annuals and perennials
- How to keep from thinking you are God
- How to keep from thinking you are Satan
- Landscape Design
- How to relate to your Music Director who thinks you are Satan
- The Music Director is incapable of thinking of you as God
- Electrical Contracting
- Masonry
- Plumbing
- How to relate to the Altar Guild who thinks you are Satan.
- The Altar Guild is incapable of thinking of you as God
- Telephone repair
- How to relate to your Office Manager who tells you not to ever touch the office machines while she's away.
- How to buy something you desperately need but have no money with which to pay.
- How to get the church Matriarch to think something's her idea.
- How to age bills gracefully.
- How to keep from counting the days to retirement.
- How to tell someone at three in the morning that their teen-ager has just been killed in a wreck.
- How to have a relationship with your family
- How to continue to have a relationship with God (who?)
We all have some things that makes us want to simply march down the corridors of power, find the miscreant, and punch them in the nose. This is one of mine. [08:12 PM] [14 comments]
Marginal tax rates are no longer at 70% and there's no special reason to think that the United States is suffering from too much taxation at the moment. But the Republican party has become like some kind of mutant cyborg whose programming has become defective: the only words left in their vocabulary are "tax cuts" and they are simply going to keep repeating them over and over like a Hari Krishna chant regardless of whether they make any sense in current circumstances. It just boggles the mind.[06:56 PM] [36 comments]
UPDATE: Jeanne D'Arc has a thoughtful post about all this over on Body and Soul. [03:25 PM]
In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.As a publishing professional I'm fascinated by these probings into webloggery as a promotional tool. Most authors build their audience slowly, one reader at a time, and accumulating readers who feel a sense of personal connection is very important. But publishing-industry stuff aside, it would be excellent to see more informal writing from Bill, who was always good at this sort of thing, and reliably full of surprises. [09:14 AM] [7 comments]
That the extremists had taken over the SCV became clear in the months that followed [Ron G.] Wilson's victory. Wilson appointed half a dozen hate group members to key posts on the SCV's national staff. A gag order was imposed on internal critics in a bid to silence dissenters like Gilbert Jones. Efforts to purge some of those who opposed Wilson's faction got under way. Violently racist jokes and commentary circulated on a popular SCV e-mail list run by a key Wilson ally. Ties between the SCV and [Kirk] Lyons' radical law group, the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC), were cemented. Sensing a sea change, SCV moderates either hunkered down, joined a new, dissenting organization to try to fight the extremists, or simply quit.The "Council of Conservative Citizens," of course, is that organization that both Trent Lott and John Ashcroft have palled around with. It's the successor organization to the old White Citizens Council. Trent Lott is the incoming chairman of the Senate Rules Committee. John Ashcroft is Attorney General of the United States.William “Chip" Pate, a North Carolina moderate, put it like this when he left in September: "The organization is now being led at the national level by angry, misguided bigots and what has charitably been called 'the lunatic fringe.'"
The takeover of the SCV did not come out of the blue. Lyons had laid out a strategy for radicalizing the organization two years earlier in a speech to the neo-fascist American Friends of the British National Party in Arlington, Va. Speaking from the same podium as former Klan leader David Duke, Lyons told the audience of racist activists that the needed to get rid of its "grannies" and "bed-wetters" and get serious about the political struggle.
"The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution," Lyons told his colleagues on that April 2000 day. "We seek nothing more than a return to a godly, stable, tradition-based society with no 'Northernisms' attached, a hierarchical society, a majority European-derived country." Four months later in August, Lyons, a man who was married by a neo-Nazi "reverend" on the grounds of the nation's most infamous hate group compound, was elected to his first national SCV office.
Lyons already had helped steer the SCV into working alliances with white supremacist groups like the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens in an effort to defend the Confederate battle flag.
One would prefer to see this stuff as the last thrashings of an old dragon in its death throes. But who's in power, and who isn't? [08:47 AM] [0 comments]
Owners of other gay bookshops say they are floored by the fact that Manhattan cannot seem to support a gay bookstore.It's no surprise to me. Manhattan no longer has a science-fiction bookstore, either.
On the other hand, you can buy a startling variety of science-fiction titles at huge chain bookstores all over Manhattan, and I suspect the same is true of gay-interest books. Moreover, unlike in the days when little Village shops like Oscar Wilde and The Science Fiction Shop flourished, you can find this kind of wide selection out in the suburbs as well.
Some said that the failure of the gay bookstores in Manhattan was actually a sign of the gay movement's success in making gay issues mainstream, which would be in keeping with what Oscar Wilde wrote in Lady Windemere's Fan: "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."I would say that sometimes it's important to ask ourselves what's more culturally important: the preservation of particular bookstores, or the widespread availability of books.
Obviously, I don't want bookselling to be controlled by one or two behemoths, but as I've written before, people who focus on the loss of charming old independent shops in Cambridge or Berkeley or Greenwich Village have a tendency to forget how completely devoid of bookstores most of America was fifty years ago. The fact that all over the country, in the second-tier cities and suburban sprawls where most people live, you can find a decent selection of books in all sorts of highly specialized categories--well, that's a change. Indeed, sometimes it's hard to convey to people who grew up in Cambridge or Berkeley or New York what a transforming change it really is. [07:01 AM] [130 comments]
Faced with a real problem--terrorism, the economy, nukes in North Korea--the Bush administration's response has nothing to do with solving that problem. Instead it exploits the issue to advance its political agenda.Twelve paragraphs follow, analyzing the administration's "stimulus" plan. They're good paragraphs. But those twelve paragraphs could have been devoted to any administration policy. The first paragraph could still have been the same. And also the last line:
Will these guys ever decide that their job includes solving problems, not just using them?No wonder they hate him. [11:27 PM] [3 comments]
New blogger John Duffy, of The Better Rhetor, is mad as hell about the naked cynicism of pushing Trent Lott out as Majority Leader while leaving the equally-shameful John Ashcroft in office, and he's organizing--wait for it--a letter-writing campaign. It's easy to dismiss this sort of effort as small potatoes, but imagine if enough people actually did it. I've heard worse ideas.
Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft and Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit seem to agree: MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is an increasingly questionable organization. Says Reynolds:
MADD has morphed from an anti-drunk-driving organization to an anti-alcohol organization. The pitch has gradually shifted from "don't drive drunk" (utterly correct and reasonable), to "don't drink and drive" (not really the same as "don't drive drunk," but perhaps within the zone of reason) to, essentially, "don't drink"--which is fluorescent idiocy.Merritt quotes an email from NACDL media director Dan Dodson, who has his own view of the real reason for the constant pressure to keep lowering allowable blood-alcohol counts:
The insurance industry likes the high-risk premiums that result--usually about four times regular rates. And no one can afford more than the minimum liability limits, so the victims of DUI convicts' later mistakes, DUI-related or not, have a minimal pool of insurance money for compensation.It's hard to avoid the suspicion that a significant number of America's worst social problems would be alleviated by summoning the insurance industry's top managers to an economic summit, and then setting packs of wild dogs on them. [03:50 PM] [6 comments]
"There! By mixing my labor with this table and these chairs, I have appropriated them out of the Lockeian state of nature and have made the right to sit at them for the next two hours my private property!" "Throwing your sportcoat on a table is mixing your labor with it?" "Don't fight with me, go fight with John Locke." "He's dead. And I thought items in the state of nature were things like trees...soil...animals to be domesticated...not tables and chairs made in the Shenzhou Special Economic Zone." "I don't inquire into how they got into the state of nature, I just observe that the right to sit at them for the next two hours was in the state of nature, and that I have just appropriated it." "Well, now that you have Locked in our seats, I had better see if I can find someone to sell us drinks. Oh. Isn't there something about 'as much and as good' left for others, and wasn't this the last free table?" "You seem to think that I am using Lockeian doctrines as part of a serious philosophical argument to justify our monopolizing this table. I'm not. I'm using it as an ideology--as a plausible but ultimately specious justification that gives us the right to ignore the glowers of others standing around, others who clearly wish we would get up and leave so that they can sit down here instead."[07:45 PM] [5 comments]
From 1942 onward, the United States abducted some 3,000 people of Japanese, Italian and German ancestry from Latin America, shipped them to the United States and placed them in internment camps. These prisoners were never charged with crimes.Kevin Drum comments on this:
This is why I think it's important not to romanticize the past: it prevents us from learning from our mistakes. Yes, interning those people was wrong, but it's different today. Don't you understand that the world is a far more dangerous place than it was in our parents' day?[10:00 PM] [4 comments]No it's not. And if in hindsight something was wrong 60 years ago, it's also wrong today.
I was wrong. The author, Stephen Downes, emails to say that the problem is specific to situations where more than one URL points to the same page. Which is in fact the case for The Sideshow, and indeed, Avedon figured this out herself some days after I posted that. I should have remarked on it earlier. Downes says he intends to fix this problem in the next release.
While we're discussing being wrong, evidently one of today's themes on Electrolite, I should like to note that SF writer John Shirley sent me an email out of the blue a couple of months ago, having just come across the transcript, still available on the web, of a live online interview with me that took place on Hotwired seven years ago. (Remember Hotwired, web old-timers?) In that interview, I made a passing remark about Shirley's work that suggested it was derivative of the work of William Gibson. Shirley points out that, in fact, he published recognizably "cyberpunk" SF well before William Gibson did, and that moreover he introduced Gibson's work to Terry Carr, who would ultimately be the editor who brought Neuromancer to print.
Shirley points out that the transcript has probably been read by more websearchers in later years than one might otherwise guess, since the interviewer was (I had forgotten this) Jonathan Lethem. I'll see what I can do about getting it amended. Meanwhile, Electrolite is probably the place where I can most efficiently acknowledge that Shirley is right about this--it was a stupid thing for me to say, and also plainly untrue. [12:09 PM] [2 comments]
Have you ever noticed that your writers have changed? Semi-serious question. You’ll spend six months in a romantic comedy, then you turn around one day and you're in a ghost story or a medical thriller, or you spend a year in a kitchen sink, grittily realistic drama and then, without warning, your life turns into a sitcom...[08:53 AM] [11 comments]It’s always sudden. It often happens with a bang. Ah, I think, when that happens to me. New writers...
But just as we're periodically boggled by fellow liberals who seem to think the whole point is to coerce people into virtue, we also have our moments when we want to take a long shower and deny ever having been friendly with any self-described "libertarians" in our entire life.
Like, for instance, when we read this post, from one "Sarah Rimensnyder," on Hit and Run, the collective weblog of Reason magazine:
This attempt to bring the Internet to Laotian villages via wireless networks, low-wattage computers, and hand-crank generators, is one of the Web's hot stories right now. It's the brainchild of Bay Area genius Lee Felsenstein, whose organization needs money to get the system in place before the monsoon season. Will people be as generous with him as they were with another Web charity hit, the New York chic chick who raised more than enough Internet donations to pay off her towering Bloomie's bills? I'll let you know...Maybe I'm just not smart enough to penetrate the hipster irony here, but as far as I can tell, this nothing more than a crude attempt to yoke two utterly unrelated things--the admirable and well-thought-out Jhai project to deploy cheap and robust computer technology to help some Laotian villages, and the obviously flaky attempt of a young lady in New York to get Internet donors to bail her out of her credit-card debt--in order to somehow suggest a connection between the naivete of people taken in by the latter, and anyone who supports the former. After all, they're both nothing more than "Web charity hits".
In other words, generosity is for chumps, no matter what it's for. Let's have a good laugh.
That's why I'm not a libertarian. Because every time I warm to this crowd, I come across something like this. Not just a principled devotion to human freedom, but a gratuitously thuggish antipathy to any kind of decent generosity.
I'm sure I'm all wrong about this. I can practically write the posts I see incoming to my comment section. But right now I just want to enlist in some other, less disgusting species.
UPDATE: Neel Krishnaswami thinks I've seriously misread the weblog post in question, and says so in my comment section. I lean toward thinking Neel is right. Neel Krishnaswami, and I am not even the first blogger to say this lately, should consider doing a blog of his own. [02:56 AM] [35 comments]
It will certainly outrage all the right people, many of them on this side of the border. Should be an interesting next several months. [05:35 PM] [10 comments]
It's called Old Man's War, and it can be best described as a Heinlein juvenile whose protagonist happens to be 75 years old. And I couldn't stop reading it. We'll publish it in hardcover in late 2003 or early 2004, and in paperback about a year after that.
Neither John or I are entirely sure that this is the very first instance of a novel being snapped up by a major publisher based on its being posted to the web, but whether it is or not, I'm very happy with the deal. Scalzi is in fact a professional writer, but primarily in nonfiction; this is his first novel sale.
I've just been tipped off that Andrew Sullivan's weblog mentions this deal, and links to Scalzi's own site, which I imagine accounts for the big wash of hits rolling over nielsenhayden.com this morning. Welcome, new readers. Have a look around, and do drop by Teresa's Making Light as well, if you're so inclined. [09:41 AM] [18 comments]
We can't believe the number of "liberals" touting Rangel's obscene proposal to invoke a mandatory draft as a means of avoiding a war in Iraq--the faulty premise being if you put the sons of the rich at risk, perhaps the rich will come to oppose the war.[10:52 PM] [0 comments]With all due respect to our "liberal" friends, this is sophomoric and dangerous to the futures of tens of thousands of American youth. What right do they have to call for the interruption of the lives of these young men who have done nothing to them?
Which seemed to me a perfect sidebar to this article in the New York Observer about the crisis in modern English Studies. [08:14 AM] [9 comments]
Here on his weblog, Lessig unearths a great illustration of how the entertainment industry's legal overreach has impoverished the rest of us. The whole post deserves to be read and disseminated:
So I've been telling this story about the birth of Mickey Mouse for some time now. See, e.g., my OSCON speech. The story goes like this: Walt Disney was a great creator in the tradition of great creativity: his creativity was to rip, mix, and burn popular culture. Even Mickey Mouse, who was born as Steamboat Willie (released in 1928), was a rip, mix, and burn take-off on Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill (released in 1928).[12:00 PM] [3 comments]
But I hadn't realized just how true that was until I opened my very cool set of Disney "Treasures"--a special DVD release of the early black and white Mickey Mouse films that Disney is now selling (comes in a cool tin case, with a serial number pressed into the tin). The DVD is a great collection of the early cartoons, with some "bonus" features including the script for Steamboat Willie. Here's a screen shot of the first page of the script. Notice the direction from Walt: "Orchestra starts playing opening verses of 'Steamboat Bill.'" Try doing a cartoon take-off of one of Disney, Inc.'s latest films with an opening that copies the music, and see how far your Walt Empire gets.
New wrinkle: Electrolite's comments-section moderator is now Teresa Nielsen Hayden. So if you value your vowels, you know what to do.
Be fleet of foot. Be amusing. Remember, no matter what you do:
Life'll kill ya / That's what I saidThank you, Warren Zevon, for everything.
Life'll kill ya / Then you'll be dead
Life'll find ya / Wherever you go
Requiescat in pace / That's all she wrote
And Happy New Year to you all. [12:00 AM] [18 comments]
According to the New York Observer, Patient Zero in this epidemic among the mainstream literati is (why am I not surprised) Jonathan Lethem, whose 1990s ascent from genre science fiction to mainstream renown was so rapid that his decontamination was, evidently, incomplete:
These days, if you're looking for a bunch of New York writers, magazine editors and publishing types on a Friday night, track down Mr. Lethem, who has become a kind of mob boss among an ever-growing salon of poker-faced literati obsessed by the spiky parlor game they call Mafia. There's no money involved, everyone stays clothed, and the alcohol intake is surprisingly moderate-—but to witness Mr. Lethem's disciples in the throes of their favorite game is to know that the stakes run high.According to the Observer, "A Russian psychologist claims to have invented it in the 1980s, to show how an informed minority (the 'mafia') power-play against an uninformed majority (the 'village'). Since then, it's developed avid followings at Harvard and Princeton, where clubs have formed around it." That may be so, but I don't believe that's where Jonathan Lethem picked it up."People got so upset," said Ms. Schappell, "stalking around and screaming: 'I can't believe you don't believe me! How come you don't believe me?'"...If the conflict is fictional, it also has an uncomfortable grain of reality to it, playing the edge between a game and actual social torture. Mr. Lethem's converts talk about it with the flushed, exhilarated fervor of people who have just tried acid for the first time. "It's so intense!" said Ms. Schapell. "People are so flipped out. You're playing a game, and there's tears in people's eyes."
Make that the brown acid. "It's even more venal than what you experience in daily life," said Todd Pruzan, a senior editor at Blender magazine. "Most people sell themselves, but most don't sell out their neighbors, too. This is about selling your neighbors down the fucking river. It's about saying to your mugger, 'Don't mug me, mug him.' It's a zero-sum game.
Coming in 2003: The American diplomatic corps takes to all-night sessions of Dungeons and Dragons. It is a proud and lonely thing to, er, never mind. (Via Gawker and BoingBoing.) [03:39 PM] [6 comments]
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.Sam Heldman remembers being told in fifth grade, "One of the questions on tomorrow's test will be 'What was the cause of the civil war?' And if you answer 'Slavery,' that is wrong and you will get no points."
Can't imagine why it's still such a divisive issue. I mean, lying to people for generations always works. [02:18 PM] [3 comments]
In next week's headlines: "WHITE HOUSE REVISES ESTIMATE OF SPEED OF LIGHT. Asked about outgoing chief economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey's figure of 186,282 miles per second, OMB director Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. said 'That wasn't an estimate. It was more of a historical benchmark. Our new figure of 55mph is nothing more than prudent contingency planning.' Mr. Daniels then red-shifted backwards across the room, pursued by monkeys emerging from beneath his chair." [01:56 PM] [0 comments]
In characteristically orderly fashion, Drum lists all of Heinlein's major books in order from good to terrible. I could quibble a bit. Good on him for putting Starman Jones so high up the list, but Podkayne of Mars all the way up at #20? As Northrop Frye said in a letter to Startling Stories, gag me with a sevagram. And my choice for the top slot would certainly be The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a novel that shares with The Lord of the Rings the interesting characteristic that many of its most strenuous boosters miss the fact that it's a tragedy.
Chip Delany, in his introduction to the Gregg Press edition of Glory Road, wrote "The arch-conservative Balzac was one of Marx's favorite novelists. And Heinlein is one of mine." Well, then. [01:27 PM] [7 comments]
They said, what if mass puts a bend in this four-way here of ours? The more mass you have in one spot, the more bent that spot gets. So now pick out a spot A and a spot B, one on each side of some mass, and each at its own time. What does it look like when a body goes from A to B? You will say: A line. Well, yes and no. It is a line, but it's also bent, as it goes past the bent spot. You see, this line will only look like a line if you can see all four ways! If you can't see one of the ways, if for you the way you can't see is what you call time, then you will see it as a line with a big old veer in it, half way in. Now, take a lot of mass, as much as our sun has, and pick spot A and spot B to be near the mass, and to be the same spot but for the time. Well, when you do that, the line from A to B in the four-way here will be an arc to you and me! An arc that will spin on and on, with that mass as the axis!(Via Incoming Signals.) [11:45 AM] [0 comments]
What is this goofball thinking? Has he forgotten why we abolished the draft in the first place?Our conversation moved to AIM:And as far as "more reluctant to authorize military action," ha ha, it is to laugh. We have the Prez saying words to the effect of "I don't have to ask your permission anyway," and Congress rolling over and saying "Yes sir! Anything else we can do for you, sir? Shall we lick your boots for a while?" If Rangel wants to actually do something useful and intelligent, he could say "No war without a declaration of war," which is actually, you know, constitutional and everything, and sit back satisfied with a job well done.
(08:48:11) patricknh: I do think that it's a perfect illustration of Liberalism Gone Rotten, when someone like Rangel convinces himself that the only solution is something this coercive.Young Matthew Yglesias, whose sharp weblog is a daily must-read here at Electrolite World HQ, opines that "this is a complicated question and there are lots of factors to consider, including the fact that a conscript military would probably be less effective than the volunteer one we have now. Nevertheless, I hope the country has a serious debate about the issue and that perhaps it will make everyone think a little more seriously about foreign policy."
(08:48:17) warsnit: Based on the story I saw, Rangel thinks that (a) we have a draft, (b) rich kids go into the army, (c) congress will be reluctant to send their big campaign donors' kids to get their heads blown off.
(08:51:13) warsnit: What we'll have instead will be rich kids pay $300 to be excused (Civil War) or go to college, or get a nice cushy slot in the National Guard (where they don't even have to show up, especially after drug testing starts), and poor kids who don't have the bucks, or the connections to pull the strings, get their heads blown off. All this, plus riots in the streets.
(08:51:43) patricknh: I'm sure Karl Rove could work with that.
(08:51:47) warsnit: Plus, the professionalism in the services gets shot straight to hell.
(08:51:58) warsnit: And the pay will start to suck again.
(08:52:07) warsnit: Which will kick your career people.
The current-serving Sgt. Stryker, on the other hand, takes a dim view of screwing around with the military merely in order to "make everyone think a little more seriously about foreign policy":
Rangel's the flip-side of the draft coin used by some conservatives who feel that we need the draft to "toughen up" young people or make them appreciate America. That same conservative feeling is the basis for those inane "Boot Camps" where young criminals get yelled at, then released. It's inept social engineering no matter how you slice it. [...][11:11 AM] [4 comments]The U.S. military is not your daycare center. We're not here to correct mommy and daddy's errors or make your son a better man. We're here to defend the Constitution and we employ whatever tools necessary to ensure the success of our mandate. The values the military attempts to instill in its members are those that have traditionally proven to be successful in providing a disciplined and orderly force capable of success in battle. Any secondary benefits these values provide to society at large are irrelevant. [...]
Rangel and his spiritual brethren on the conservative side care more about their own little agendas than having an effective military. A draft will weaken and diminish the military, because anyone with the least amount of talent, skill or money will be able to legally dodge the draft, leaving only the worst this society has to offer to fill our ranks.
Right now, we have the most powerful military force this world has ever seen and it's manned solely by volunteers. That's a powerful idea and it's something Americans can be proud of. [...] An all-volunter force is more motivated, professional and dedicated to mission accomplishment than a bunch of conscripts forced to be there. If you want to weaken our military and demoralize our forces, then institute a draft.
So is it just me, or is it just a little weird that the music in the current Juno commercial, targeting AOL, is "Dueling Banjos"? I nearly fell off my chair.
Says Teresa: "Oh, that movie was a long time ago." Okay, I'm old. [10:17 AM] [5 comments]
As their web site informs us:
The citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution.Let's take a look at these "best qualities of America." Where better, than the well-known speech of Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederate States of America, at Savannah, Georgia, March 21, 1861?
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. [...]What I know about my great-great grandfather is that he fought in Company K, 4th Kentucky Mounted Infantry. That he was probably at Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chickamauga, among others. And that he came home to his small Kentucky farm, raised a family, and refused to talk about the war to the end of his days.As I have stated, the truth of this principle may be slow in development, as all truths are and ever have been, in the various branches of science. It was so with the principles announced by Galileo--it was so with Adam Smith and his principles of political economy. It was so with Harvey, and his theory of the circulation of the blood. It is stated that not a single one of the medical profession, living at the time of the announcement of the truths made by him, admitted them. Now, they are universally acknowledged. May we not, therefore, look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgment of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with the proper material--the granite; then comes the brick or the marble. The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so.
Says Frank Hall, "Commander" of the Olympia, Washington chapter the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, "Most people think that the whole Civil War was about slavery, but that's just not accurate."
What I know about Frank Hall is that he wears a Confederate-flag necktie. And that he's a lying son of a bitch. [11:34 PM]
In other news, Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim. [07:01 PM]
Meanwhile, Chris Mooney has posted links to two Tolkien pieces of his own. One, in the Washington Post, makes a point similar to what Eric Tam was saying, which is that, notwithstanding Aragorn and Gandalf's entreaties to Theoden in The Two Towers (a bit of plot punched up in the movie), attempts to enlist Tolkien as a cheerleader for aggressive war are liable to founder on his deep distrust of power.
Mooney also says something I tried to get across in the Sideshow argument, which is that it's probably a mistake to read Tolkien's orcs as fully and irredeemably evil. In fact, Tolkien goes out of his way on several occasions to depict them as brutalized infantry rather than ravening hellspawn. Interestingly, the passages Mooney quotes in this regard are the same ones cited by Tom Shippey in his very intelligent J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Shippey argues that Tolkien's universe encompasses an unresolved and unresolvable tension between two views of evil: one, the "Boethian" (and Catholic) view that evil is only the absence of good, and the other the pagan (and Manichean) view of evil as an active and malign force in the world. The narrative constantly pulls us in both directions: we overhear orcs who wish for creature comforts, who demonstrate a sense of justice (even if self-serving and depraved), and who long for the war to end; and we also sympathize with the Rohirrim who overtake a party of orcs and slaughter them without mercy.
This tension is also alluded to in Mooney's other piece, in the Boston Globe, taking issue with the evangelical Christians who have laid claim to The Lord of the Rings as a work of unalloyed Christian apologetics. Of course it's a novel by a Christian, and Tolkien himself called it "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." But for such a supposedly Christian work, the morality of The Lord of the Rings is as much infused with the stoical pessimism of the ancient world as with hope for redemption. Professor Shippey addresses this at length, observing that Tolkien spent his academic life on works like Beowulf and the Elder Edda, works of grim paganism passed down to us by later Christian writers. "The whole poem Beowulf," writes Shippey, "is a meditation between contrary opinions, with strong similarities to The Lord of the Rings." Mooney quotes Christian critics who extol the trilogy's images of "Christ-like sacrifice," but as Mooney points out, The Lord of the Rings is a story of universal loss. Evil is defeated for a while, but the world is diminished. As a medievalist quoted in Mooney's article observes, it's a "very Norse outlook: Even the winners lose."
Tolkien was serious, serious about his Catholicism and serious about his love for the virtues of ancient Northern myth and legend, the virtues of courage in the face of hopelessness and certain defeat. He never fully resolved the contradictions between them--as David Bratman notes, at his death he was still worrying over matters that hinge on them, such as the redeemability of orcs. The actual text of The Lord of the Rings encompasses both outlooks, stated at various points with dramatic energy and rhetorical force, which is one of many reasons the book exerts more appeal than the more morally-schematic fantasies of, for instance, C. S. Lewis. Or, well, pick a name.
The Lord of the Rings is an affectingly Christian work. It's also a work of abiding darkness and loss. Which may be one reason that, for all its obvious flaws and sometimes silliness, it still inspires so much thoroughly-engaged argument. Like the real world, Tolkien's subcreation is haunted by contradictions and warring impulses. Those who read Tolkien's novel as a simple Christian allegory are missing half of why it works. I'll end this overlong post with more from Shippey:
It would be quite wrong to suggest that [Frodo] is a Christ-figure, an allegory of Christ, any more than the Ring is one of nuclear power--the differences, as Tolkien pointed out in the latter case and easily could have in the former, are greater than the similarities. Yet he represents something related: perhaps, an image of natural humanity trying to do its best in native decency...with no certain faith in rescue (or salvation) from outside, from beyond "the circles of the world." In this he is once again a highly contemporary figure, an image for a society which Tolkien knew perfectly well had largely lost religious faith and had no developed theory to put in its place. Could "native decency" be enough? As a Christian, Tolkien was bound to say "no", as a scholar of pagan and near-pagan literature he could not help seeing that there had been virtue, and a wish for something more, even among pagans. The myth, or story, that he created expresses both hope and sadness. It is a mark of its success that it has been appreciated by many who share its author's real beliefs, but by even more who do not.[10:13 AM]
So I don't think I'd put a whole lot of stock in those referrer lists we're suddenly seeing on bunches of blogs. I'm familiar with how results can vary from different tracking services, like Extreme Tracking and Sitemeter, but what Avedon and I were seeing wasn't minor variation. [02:55 PM]
Incidentally, Gary seems to have blogged more in the last few days than in the previous three months, and it's good stuff, too. [02:42 PM]
I have to confess, I didn't link to the airport-security story myself because I simply have a hard time believing anything posted to LewRockwell.com, which probably means I'm missing some important facts about the world because I can't quite make the time for a site that routinely mixes libertarian polemics with paeans to the glorious Confederacy. So it goes. [02:22 PM]
[...A] good--but by no means the only, and certainly not the most important--example of the first thing I wanted to post about, in connection with my holiday journey out of the liberal metropolis. That is this: that if anyone tells you that the Republican-leaning areas of the nation, and the Republican-leaning parts of the population, are more live-and-let-live than us progressives, that it is only the leftists who are humorless busybodies who have lost the art of minding their own business when appropriate--if anyone tells you that, the wise response is "ha ha ha ha ha."[12:41 PM]
Best geeky fine point: The great seventeenth-century diarist's journal entries will also be available in both RSS v0.91 and RSS v1.0. (Via Brad DeLong.) [12:37 PM]
Gosh, it certainly is a wonderful thing that racism is all finished now.
(Full jawdropping story in the Washington Post. Via the infrequent but always trenchant weblog of reporter Peter Maass.) [09:58 PM]
McCain was certainly cold-cocked by the Bush campaign, but it's obvious that he was as willing as the rest of the GOP to sidle up to the hard-core racists. Keep that in mind the next time you're being charmed by McCain's skillful handling of the national media. [05:22 PM]
Charles Dodgson was onto this a week ago. Now Ampersand has a crisp post enumerating seven points you need to understand, and trust me, you do.
Ampersand also usefully links to both the Nation's David Corn and the Cato Institute's Barbara Conry, converging from left and right to discuss the really quite stunning creepiness, corruption, and flat-out incompetence of the "National Endowment for Democracy," the nominally-private but in fact federally-funded outfit that appears to be up to its elbows advancing "our" interests in Venezuela. Great. [05:06 PM]
To be honest, a system under which the government of the day gives you the authority to demand a payment from every ship that enters a port, and which states that failure to recognise this authority is treason (at the time, punishable by death), does not really look to me to be very much like a free market exchange. In fact, in giving the producer of a product the authority to demand on pain of death or imprisonment that everyone in a particular market has to buy their product, would seem to me to be very much more government involvement indeed, than the current rather light regulation of the housing market. I'm not saying that the analogy Coase used in that Reason magazine interview was completely outrageously misleading. I'm just sayin'.A great trick, if you can manage it. [12:34 PM]
Indefatigable liberal and Arrow Shirt model Kevin Drum takes issue with this:
Trying to deduce people's real motivations is absolutely central to all human activity. We talk about it, we think about it, we argue about it, and we make most of our decisons based on it. We fight or follow people based on our assessment of what they really think. We applaud or denigrate the exact same actions depending on whether we think they were made for the right reasons.I think this is exactly right. Note that Drum isn't claiming this is the optimal way to think; merely that it is, in fact, the way we think.Motivation is the key to everything. Actions come in a poor second.
We think in stories. We make narratives; when we need to, we impose them. And we need to a lot. [11:38 AM]
I won't spoil the movie or Bruce's points by quoting specifics, but you can read his post here.
Speaking for Teresa and myself, we saw it at noon on opening day (geeks? us?), enjoyed it like crazy, and have been niggling about the details ever since. As I said coming out of the theater, "I have about four dozen arguments with what they did, and in about two dozen of those cases, I could just as easily argue their side." But just as with the previous movie, any film of Tolkien that gets so much so right earns a lot of slack from me. We'll probably see it a couple more times in the next week or two. [11:23 AM]
To: The Blogosphere
From: A. N. Editor
It's spelled T o l k i e n.
If that's too difficult, just remember the central rule of English spelling: I before E except when it isn't.
(In our next exciting installment: Azimov, Delaney, and Phillip K. Dick.) [10:22 AM]
It's nothing like what you might expect. It's funny, profane, and profound, and full of belief, unbelief, and the dark night of the soul.
It's only been going since December 6. Use the little calendar in the upper right-hand corner to read the preacher's posts in order. It's worth your trouble. [11:16 PM]
It was Inauguration Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played 'Dixie.' Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who swore in the newly elected Southern president, was himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, "an unidentified associate of the new Chief Executive warned that since the South ran the nation, Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race." Somebody had even sent the new president a possum, an act supposedly "consonant with Southern tradition."As Freund points out, Wilson's status as a progressive saint is based on his losing crusade to bring the US into the League of Nations. Back at home, though:This is not an alternate world scenario imagining the results of a Strom Thurmond victory in the 1948 election; it is the real March 4, 1913, the day Woodrow Wilson of Virginia moved into the White House.
One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington's large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson's cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington.Don't forget that Richard Nixon, architect of the modern Republican "Southern strategy," liked to mau-mau easily-confused journalists by describing himself as a "Wilsonian liberal." How right he was. (Credit to Jim Henley for spotting this fine Freund piece.) [10:20 PM]Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: White government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by blacks. [...]
When the startled journalist William Monroe Trotter objected, Wilson essentially threw him out of the White House. "Your manner offends me," Wilson told him. Blacks all over the country complained about Wilson, but the president was unmoved. "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me," he told The New York Times in 1914, "they ought to correct it."
