Mingle Until Departure

Shut it Down!

2006-08-15T13:46:00.000-05:00

Shut it Down Forever!

Er, maybe not. But on to further adventures elsewhere, now. Site will remain up as fodder for future oppo-research on myself and possible self-meme-miming.

By fer now; sign up for AWD if you crave actual content, relatively regularly.

User-Centric Identity

2006-05-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

Reading this post got me to thinking - why not take this a step further. Why not think about it in terms of developing user-centric tagging not as a standalone application but as one expression, one feature, of an entire user-centric online identity.

Earlier, I had been reading this post about social networking sites [and also recommend the May 15 New Yorker article on Mark Zuckerberg - which, btw is still not online. New Yorker: I luvs ya, but get your act together; when you write an excellent profile of the progenitor of one of the more interesting Internet phenomenons in the last few years, put it up online, and quick. I promise - you can sell ad space even - that the page views will make it well worth your while.] and it brought back some of the thoughts I had when Friendster came out - I adopted early and, despite the frustration with the site, developed an extensive network/online persona there. I also do have a MySpace, Orkut and Facebook account, but those are significantly less-developed networks (for a variety of reasons; my co-hort for the most part graduated college well before Facebook). And there's (some) overlap of network connections on those, but it's always been frustrating to me the repetitive/redundant work of doing what is, really, the same thing several times over. And for what? Resolving e-mail, IM contacts; same. And when I do blogging, or other online writing projects - same thing.

All this work and capital and ME is stranded out there, somewhere.

So - claimID is definitely a logical step towards staking a central pivot to what's already out there, and that's good. I think, though, that going forward it might be useful to think of these systems not as individual components but as modules to the unitary online experience: e-mail, IM, blogging, commenting, tagging, social networking are all of a piece.

The hard part, of course, is getting a whole lotta people to agree on a single standard that would then be interoperable across a whole range of sites/features/modules, and getting people cool with the idea that the primary owner and mover of the information is not the site owner/developer but the user, who can with little or no sacrifice move their usage elsewhere if the features are better. As Fred points out in the first-linked post, right now both user and site owner/developer lose value if the user leaves; making it easier for a user to leave with the value of the site experience (e.g., their tags) intact would, I think, actually also end up benefitting the sites. Because an easily portable and interoperable user identity could then be plugged right back in - with no wasted effort on either side - to a site if it became better (i.e., added/gained features that were a proximate cause for the user leaving in the first place).

More later.

Now You're a Man, a Man, Man, Man

2006-05-23T13:43:00.000-05:00

Francis Wilkinson has an excellent article in the American Prospect on politics, manliness, and the politics of manliness. Useful bookends from it:

We are in our sixth year of government by gonads. Through conscious, concerted, disciplined, and relentless effort, Bush and his party have succeeded in cowing critics and defeating Democrats by advancing images of, and insinuations about, manliness in the public sphere. In the Republican political schemata, this is a man’s world. Men have made it dangerous. And only men -- real Republican men -- can make it safe again.
...
The one man who taught us better than any other to conquer fear was no Governor Terminator. His muscles were unimpressive. He had no physical swagger to him at all. His military experience was a desk job. He wore no cowboy gear. He smoked cigarettes not like a Marlboro Man but filtered through a slender, feminine holder that could have been a prop from the Follies Bergere. He didn’t promise to protect us. He made us believe we could protect ourselves -- from the violence of fascism and the vicissitudes of capitalism alike. And he handed us the tools to do the job. We built the better part of the American century on the back of an aristocratic, polio-addled cripple. Now that was a man.

When people say "manly," they are not always speaking, chiefly, about manliness. They are speaking about the positive attributes our society attributes chiefly to men - hard work, responsibility, toughness. Disentangling these positive attributes from exclusively male ownership is one of the chief challenges in the struggle for a truly egalitarian society.

Fight the Future

2006-05-22T09:39:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald notes:

...this spewing of racially-tinged anger over Nagin's re-election is both childish and ugly. These bloggers having their fun with "chocolate" and "flavor" jokes think they have a built-in defense for speaking that way (namely, Nagin's use of those terms), and so, like an 8-year-old who discovers some excuse for using a bad word, they just revel in it over and over. The second they think there is an opportunity to spew all sorts of racially-tinged bile, they take it. And thus, a mayoral election is spoken of in terms of "poverty pimps" and "chocolate cities" and overt claims that he was only elected because he's black.

Beyond that, the comparisons to Marion Barry are as baseless as they are telling. Barry is known for all sorts of behaviors that have long been at the crux of ugly racist stereotypes -- he's a drug addict who has been caught on camera using crack with hookers in a downtown hotel, and he then encountered all sorts of allegations of financial impropriety in connection with his political office.

None of that is true for Nagin. Nagin and Barry have nothing in common other than that they are black Mayors. It would be like comparing every white Southern Governor to Lester Maddux, or every white evangelical Christian male to Jim Bakker or every white Southern male to David Duke. It's deliberately inflammatory, and it purposely seizes what they perceive is an opportunity to traffic in racial stereotypes which they normally are too afraid to voice.

"Afraid" is the right word. These idiot racists are terrified children, terrified of their own weakness, yearning for the days when White Men ruled the world. They look to the future and see that whites will not simply rule based on their Whiteness - they see in their worst nightmares a future where all men are indeed judged by "the content of their character, not the color of their skin." And for these racists - these small, awful men - they know that there will be no glory there for them.

Good.

And - by the way, Nagin was re-elected with a substantial share of the conservative white vote.

Poor, crazy, cracker

2006-05-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

Via MediaMatters:

From the May 16 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Now in 1986, President Reagan thought he could solve the [immigration] problem by granting about 3 million illegal aliens amnesty. The New York Times was in heaven, editorializing back then, quote, "The new law won't work miracles but it will induce most employers to pay attention, to turn off the magnets, to slow the tide." Of course, just the opposite happened. But the Times hasn't learned a thing. That's because the newspaper and many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.

According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.

An open-border policy and the legalization of millions of Hispanic illegal aliens would deeply affect the political landscape in America. That's what The New York Times and many others on the left want. They might get it. And that's the "Memo."

"Sour"

2006-05-16T17:40:00.000-05:00

E.J. Dionne has an excellent column in today's WaPo about Karl Rove's increasingly desperate lying. On one point, however, even Rover has to concede the truth:

In explaining Bush's poor standing, Rove kept going back to the war in Iraq. "They're just sour right now on the war. And that's the way it's going to be," Rove said of the voters. At another point, he acknowledged that the war had created discontent in the land. "I think the war looms over everything," he said.

Gee, I can't possibly imagine why Americans would be "sour" over the war. They just must be a bunch of malcontents and depressives; certainly nothing about being lied into a disastrous war with no end could reasonably make people "sour," could it? And none of that would have anything to do with you, Karl, or your boss, could it? Huh, motherfucker?

Much Respect, Citigroup

2006-05-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

Because it's important to note when the modern world and its many conveniences actually work - i.e., when the conveniences are actually convenient - I think it's worth noting that I just had perhaps my greatest customer-service experience, ever.

I no longer use my CitiCard, so when a charge showed up in my last billing cycle - $3.55 at an Au Bon Pain in Boston - I knew it was, well, fraud. So I called up the customer service number - keyed in my account number - password - and was immediately connected with a customer service representative (who actually sounded like he was somewhere on the North American continent). I reported that I was pretty sure my last transaction - gave the transaction number - was fraudulent, as I hadn't been in Boston since last fall. He asked if I loaned the card to anyone - no - and then said, okay, we're going to credit your account. I asked if there were any other transactions since - nope - okay, have a good weekend, man. Bing, bang, boop. 2:54 of talk time and my problem's taken care of.

So, CitiGroup, big ups to y'all. For today at least, I don't care that you launder and profit from drug money.

Death Star Governance

2006-05-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald notes the following:

This continuous evasion of judicial review by the administration is much more serious and disturbing than has been discussed and realized. By proclaiming the power to ignore Congressional law and to do whatever it wants in the area of national security, it is seizing the powers of the legislative branch. But by blocking courts from ruling on the multiple claims of illegality which have been made against it, the administration is essentially seizing the judicial power as well. It becomes the creator, the executor, and the interpreter of the law. And with that, the powers of all three branches become consolidated in The President, the single greatest nightmare of the founders.

Hmmm...where've I heard something like that before?

GRAND MOFF TARKIN: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
GENERAL TAGGE: But that's impossible. How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?
GRAND MOFF TARKIN: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

He said "butt"

2006-05-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

Gilliard:

Bush will be the butt of every joke around, not in the Jay Leno way, but in the Joey Buttafuco way, someone who just isn't serious, in Bush's case, anymore.

Er...Remind me to never ever go to Cortez, CO

2006-05-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

From a WaPo chat with Kos and Byron York:

Cortez, Colo.: This question is for Byron York. I disagree that Republicans are in trouble. Undoubtedly Mr. Rove will come up with something as compelling as the gay marriage scare to keep the party in line and of course the party owns the issue of world wide war on terror and abortion. After George Bush was elected in 2000 and then relected in 2004 with a Republican congress and supreme court, I was surprised to see no particular push to dismantle social programs including public education. Indeed, there were huge additions to said programs. I am curious now, if you know, what is the Republican plan or goal beyond staying in power and making Christianity a more dominant voice in government?

Byron York: A Republican strategist would probably tell you that George W. Bush never ran as a budget-cutting, small-government conservative. Of course, no one knew he would be as unworried about overspending as he has turned out to be. On the other hand, I think if you asked anyone in the White House what their one big goal is, it would be to win the war on terror.

Really, I don't know what more to say.

Double Shot

2006-05-04T14:10:00.000-05:00

Blogger at my post yesterday, so it's two-for-Thursday: a trolley map of LA circa early 20th C., and a milk-snortingly good post by The Editors. Enjoy!

Sadness Remote and Immediate

2006-04-29T09:25:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure why this story has such particular resonance for me - I wasn't even a fan of any team he ever played for - but the news of Steve Howe's death strikes me as no small thing (of course, no death is small), and quite sad:

NEW YORK -- Steve Howe, the relief pitcher whose promising career was derailed by cocaine and alcohol abuse, died Friday when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, Calif. He was 48.

Howe was killed at 5:55 a.m. PT, said Dalyn Backes of the Riverside County coroner's office. The pickup truck Howe was driving left the roadway, entered the median and rolled several times, ejecting Howe from the vehicle, according to the coroner's office. The accident occurred about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.

Howe had been in Arizona on business and was driving back to the family home in Valencia, Calif., business partner Judy Welp said.

Toxicology tests had not yet been performed.

The hard-throwing lefty was the 1980 NL Rookie of the Year with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and helped them win the World Series the next year.

But for all of Howe's success on the field, the hard-throwing lefty was constantly troubled by addictions -- he was suspended seven times and became a symbol of the rampant cocaine problem that plagued baseball in the 1980s.

During the 1992 season, he became the first baseball player to be banned for life because of drugs. An arbitrator reinstated him after the season.
[...]
Howe was 47-41 with 91 saves and a 3.03 ERA with the Dodgers, Twins, Rangers and Yankees. His final season in the majors was 1996, and the Yankees released him in June.

A moment of silence was observed at Yankee Stadium before New York played Toronto on Friday night. Howe played for the Yankees from 1991-96.

Two days after the Yankees let him go in 1996, Howe was arrested at a Delta Airlines terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport when a loaded .357 Magnum was detected inside his suitcase. He later pleaded guilty to gun possession and was placed on three years' probation and given 150 hours of community service.

Chicago White Sox coach Tim Raines played with Howe in that final year.

"You always get second chances -- third and fourth sometimes. And people really believed in him and that he'd eventually kick the problem. Unfortunately, it didn't happen for him," he said.

Howe tried a comeback in 1997 with Sioux Falls of the independent Northern League and retired after injuring his forearm. That August, he was critically injured in a motorcycle accident in Montana and charged with drunken driving; those charges were later dropped when prosecutors decided his blood test was improperly obtained.
[...]
Howe was suspended for the 1984 season by commissioner Bowie Kuhn for cocaine use. Howe was out of the majors in 1986 after a relapse the previous August with Minnesota.

Texas released him before the 1988 season because of an alcohol problem, and he did not pitch again in the big leagues until 1991.

"Howsie had some issues everybody knew about," Arizona manager Bob Melvin said in San Francisco. "Everybody who hasn't played with him didn't know what kind of teammate he was. What you hear about Steve is the drug stuff. ... He was kind of the captain of the bullpen out there."

Iron Triangle

2006-04-27T13:22:00.000-05:00

Good news from my soon-to-be new home: it pisses Michelle Malkin (OC '91) off.

Specifically, the above picture.

Ooh-rah!

The Future Arrives, Unassumingly, on a Wednesday in My Tertiary E-mail

2006-04-26T23:14:00.000-05:00

This is just extraordinarily exciting:

PayPal Mobile:
Send money to friends and family

Send money securely, anytime, from wherever you are. You don’t need cash or a check – just your phone.

After you activate your phone, you can send money one of two ways:

Text to 729725 (PAYPAL) with the amount and recipient’s phone number.

Example: send 5 to 4150001234
Or

Call 1-800-4PAYPAL (1-800-472-9725) and follow the instructions.

Buy stuff with your phone

Buy it when you see it. Where you see Text to Buy – on a poster, in a magazine, at an event – just order the item securely by text message

Really. No, really. The world just changed. The long-rumored [near-] obsolescence of paper money is really, actually, truly possibly, now. It's not so much that this is a great thing - though I think on balance it's pretty great - as that it's a huge change. HUGE. And about to happen, right about...now. Very exciting.

But...but...I don't wanna live in a police state...

2006-04-25T21:57:00.000-05:00

Too bad!

I've always thought that one of the perverse consequences of a libertarian utopian government that does nothing but national defense, policing and dispute resolution would be that this government would naturally seek to expand its powers in those areas. If a state's only function is policing, it functions as a ... police state.

We've watched the fake small government conservatives spend huge sums of money on war profiteering, oily pork and tax breaks for their rich contributors. But where they have really made their mark is with these ridiculously expanded executive and police powers. And they continue to suck up more of them every day:

Amid intense debate over how far the government can go to keep its secrets secret, Congress is taking up an expansive intelligence measure that proposes tougher steps in cracking down on leaks of classified information and authorizes broad arrest powers for security officers at intelligence agencies.

Provisions tucked into the legislation, which the House is expected to vote on as early as tomorrow, represent a major departure from traditional intelligence agency roles in plugging leaks and conducting domestic law enforcement, according to government watchdog groups and intelligence professionals.

If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation's spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses.

[...]

At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is "just clarifying the authority" of agency security officers "to arrest individuals."

[...]

Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a "worrisome" expansion of power.

"That's why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials," he said. "I don't know that this needs to be an intelligence officer's function. I wouldn't think it should be."

I know I feel safer already, don't you?

This is the kind of stuff that's going on right now in the Congress, even as the president's approval rating sits in the low 30's and the Republicans appear to be poised to lose their majority in the fall. They are like sharks, mercilessly pursuing their agenda no matter what is going on around them. They know that it is much more difficult to reverse this kind of thing than it is to enact it. Their gargantuan, national security bureaucracy replete with gun-toting NSA "security" authorized to arrest anyone they choose will be institutionalized and anyone who tries to end it will be tarred as a Democratic sissy for the next generation. If they can sneak this one through, they will.

This letter from the Project On Government Oversight to Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harmon outlines the various issues of concern. It's hard to believe that these people would have the gall to use this leak controversy as an excuse to create two new secret police forces in the CIA and NSA, but that's what they're doing (among other heinous things.)

In all seriousness...yeah, this is just about what it looks like. Secret police that are the same people who tap your phones and read your e-mail and aren't really answerable to any court and, because of other legal decisions made by and during this administration, can detain you, indefinitely, incommunicado with no judicial recourse.

Welcome to the Terrordome, kids.

Spit-Take for the Day

2006-04-22T15:51:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Billmon.

"Unfortunately"

2006-04-11T15:47:00.000-05:00

From Glenn Greenwald's "Unclaimed Territory, this post, The Endless War:

"Finally, someone at The Washington Post appears to be an admirer of Us Magazine, or People Teen, or something, and they are offering a new (?) feature entitled 'Off Hours' which, as they put it, 'featur(es)Washington's top decision makers in their off hours -- outside the office and inside their lives.'

Today's version contains vapid and oh-so-humanizing details about Attorney General Alberto Gonzaels' not-at-all-contrived-or-self-conscious interactions with his son and wife, but it also contains this significant revelation:

But as Gonzales pumped up a hill, he said he wasn't troubled by critics. He was troubled by terrorists. "I stay up at night," he said, rounding a corner near the water. "I read the reports. Sometimes I ask myself, when will it end?"

The river rippled away from the shore. "The answer is -- it probably never will."

That is an extremely important yet virtually never acknowledged truth revealed by the selfless Gonzales (who doesn't care at all about criticism of him, only about the dangers posed by terrorists). The "war" on terrorism -- which justifies everything from lawbreaking to expanded presidential powers across the board, and which means that we should be muted in our criticisms of the Commander-in-Chief (when we are allowed to voice them at all) -- is expected to end . . . right around never.

All of those Bush defenders who are constantly justifying radical changes to our country based on this "war" are not advocating short-term, temporary or finite changes. They seek fundamental and permanent changes to our system of government, and to transform the United States into a country that is in a state of war that literally has no end. That is not news to many people, but it is still striking to see it acknowledged so nakedly and starkly as Gonazles, likely unguarded by the family puff piece, admitted to it here.

They don't even bother pretending. It's everyone else - their supporters, the media, even us - who pretend that they don't really mean what they say and do.

Listed Uses

2006-04-04T13:47:00.000-05:00

At Overstock.com's $25 and under electronics section, I stumbled upon the above item. It is a USB Massage Ball (only $11.95!). Below is the entire product description:

This USB-powered gadget ball gives you a massage without ever leaving your desk!
Great for massaging shoulder, thigh, waist, neck, back, foot, or hand
One-touch On/Off switch
3600 RPM vibration speed
USB powered
1.8-meter USB cable

Right - "shoulder, thigh, waist, neck, back, foot, or hand." Nothing else.

Who talks about massaging your waist, anyways?

Stadia Et Cetera

2006-04-04T08:44:00.000-05:00

From today's WaPo, the incomparable Hank Stuever:

No amount of Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey songs could mask the pain. One by one, until the wee hours Monday morning, the reigning drag queens of Half Street SE descended the stairs at Ziegfeld's cabaret to strut their last, blowing kisses to admirers and making a few more sweepingly glamorous gestures -- all of it a farewell to the shabby but perfect place they called home for three decades.

Ziegfeld's, and four other establishments on the same forsaken industrial block at Half and O streets, closed yesterday in a cruelly predictable high school metaphor: The jocks win.

...the packed-sardine crowd -- gay men, mostly, and not all of them the kind you see on HGTV. Far from the happy, let's-walk-the-Labrador-to-Whole-Foods realm of Logan and Dupont circles, the O Street scene was the real deal: grubby, hidden even within sight of the Capitol, and just plain ugly-gorgeous.

Xavier, a wicked-eyed diva who has performed at the club for a fraction of the time Ella has, trash-talked the crowd into a mild frenzy: "Now they're going to build a baseball stadium here. And what are we going to do when it's done? Burn it down! That's right! We are gonna burn! It! Down! . . . [Bleep] baseball! Who gives a [bleep] about baseball?"

So now you've done it, Washington. You've spurned the queens, and they are both heartbroken and livid. Besides Ziegfeld's and its full-frontal go-go annex, Secrets, the block was also the home to the Glorious Health Club, Follies (a "movie theater," in the language of old newspaper clippings, back when police were raiding the place, charging the, um, moviegoers with acts of sodomy), and another club called Heat. Nation, a nightclub a few blocks north, has announced that it's closing July 16 to make way for an office building.
...
Ziegfeld's and Secrets are owned by Allen Carroll and Chris Jansen, who have promised their clientele (in ads in the gay press, and in person at the farewell bash) that they are going to reopen -- someday, somewhere.

But no neighborhood wants them, and saving the clubs has so far not been placed very high on the gay agenda. Early in the baseball debate, after a proposal to relocate some clubs in Ward 5 was met with complaints, the city attempted to find Ziegfeld's another option:

"In P.G. County," scoffed Carroll, who told a city representative, "I am born and raised in D.C., and I have been down here 31 years. And they want us to move to Prince George's County?"
...
Driven by an unfriendly police chief in the '70s down to the blight of the Navy Yard, the seamier clubs thrived here. It became the opposite of more mainstream, ho-hum homo club life. Going down to Navy Yard made you feel a little dirty (or a lot dirty), in an adventurous or perhaps even anonymous way. It never felt completely safe. Parking was plentiful but dicey. Razor wire and cinder blocks -- it was a look, and it is perhaps irreplaceable. It may be hard to understand Half and O as a lost gay authenticity; harder still to assign it any civic value.

So come back inside Ziegfeld's. Understand it, at the very least, as home.

This, of course, was entirely predictable. I went to Nation, once, a few years back for a Social Distortion concert (a great concert - a strange venue); over the years, I am sure I will go to see the Nationals dozens of times in their new park. And that's me - most of the future attendees of Nats games are people who would never have allowed themselves within 20 blocks of Navy Yard SE.

Newly constructed baseball stadia - often on the public dime, welfare for billionaires, but that's another discussion - have gone hand in hand with the urban renewal projects in many cities over the past decade or so: Baltimore was first, followed by Cleveland, Detroit, maybe a dozen others. You can argue just how economically beneficial each have been for their respective cities, but the simple fact of the matter is that they - and the surrounding sports bars, family restaurants, etc. - are in pretty much every case a marked improvement over the dingy, often dangerous neighborhoods they replace. Boring and white-bread, yes; but almost always improvements, nonetheless.

There's another dynamic here, too, that Stuever points out - "Far from the happy, let's-walk-the-Labrador-to-Whole-Foods realm of Logan and Dupont circles, the O Street scene was the real deal: grubby, hidden even within sight of the Capitol, and just plain ugly-gorgeous...But no neighborhood wants them..." This is the toll of progress - once upon a time, Logan and Dupont circles were also pretty grungy, sketchy neighborhoods. Over the past 30 years, the neighborhoods and their residents have become prosperous and "respectable," to the extent that the High Heel Race is now a requisite stop for mainstream D.C. politicians. Not being gay, I won't really extrapolate too much further on these contrasting pictures of D.C. gay identity, but the unstated feeling here seems an element of embarassment at the now-departed O St. scene - which is too bad. The marvelous thing about cities is how weird and crazy and mysterious they are - the hidden gems, the hole-in-the-wall take-away place and the wonderful club in the sketchy-ass neighborhood. The fact that all sorts of different people and competing interests and agendas have to figure out a way to coexist in an extremely limited space.

A friend from high school was in town recently, and recounted going downtown with his family only to discover that the former site of the 9:30 Club - and the alley where where he'd drunk 40s before shows - was now the Spy Museum and attendant overpriced cafe. I knew this already and wasn't shocked by it and, all in all, it's also a good thing that one can walk safely downtown after dark. Gentrification and redevelopment has made D.C. a better, safer place to live, with more and better jobs. There is no doubt about that.

But. But. I'm not sure but what - but it's something.

State of the War

2006-03-29T23:55:00.000-05:00

Steve Gilliard:

We do not have an army which can actually prevent mass killing and restore order. We have an army which is trained to kill the Group of Soviet Forces Germany. They are now lost to the mists of history, but our Army remains the same.

Yet, there is no plan to actually make an Army which can fight guerrillas, aid and protect NGO's and mobilize quickly. Instead, we're converting artillery and engineers into ad hoc infantry and MP's and sending people out to die in hillbilly armored vehicles.

Right. I've written about this some, long ago, but it bears repeating that for all of Rumsfeld's talk of "re-structuring" the army, this is a fighting force constructed for a purpose which no longer exists. Plenty of countries - most notably Sweden, Italy and several other NATO nations - have entire branches of their armed services that are dedicated to peace-keeping and development work. And they're actually, y'know, trained to do those things. Rather than just shoot stuff.

So, food for thought. In addition to everything else - a career in a branch of the military where you learn how to do humanitarian work, and then actually do it (even laying your life on the line for it, at times) would be much, much more appealing for a lot of people than the current military.

State of the Union

2006-03-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

Digby:

9/11 changed everything. It made people stupid.

M for McCain

2006-03-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

From a TomDispatch.com interview with historian Chalmers Johnson:

Chalmers Johnson: If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup." We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist. [emphasis mine]

TomDispatch: Do you think that our all-volunteer military will turn out to be the janissaries of our failed empire?

Johnson: They might very well be. I'm already amazed at the degree to which they tolerate this incompetent government. I mean the officers know that their precious army, which they worked so hard to rebuild after the Vietnam War, is coming apart again, that it's going to be ever harder to get people to enlist, that even the military academies are in trouble. I don't know how long they'll take it. Tommy Franks, the general in charge of the attack on Baghdad, did say that if there were another terrorist attack in the United States comparable to 9/11, the military might have no choice but to take over. In other words: If we're going to do the work, why listen to incompetents like George Bush? Why take orders from an outdated character like Donald Rumsfeld? Why listen to a Congress in which, other than John McCain, virtually no Republican has served in the armed forces? [emphasis mine]

I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse.

There is no person in American politics today more perfectly described as a "militarist who acts the populist" than John McCain. His image - created and perpetuated by the media irrespective of reality - is of a maverick, a moderate, a man who is not of the Republican Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the exception of campaign finance reform (a cause from which he is now careful to distance himself), he is a reliable party-line Republican on nearly every issue, stands strongly against equal rights for women and gays, and despite occasional "concern" that he expresses about excessive spending (military and otherwise), almost never votes against any bill put forward by leadership. When you hear about a party-line vote, he's part of that majority party.

McCain has, over the last several months, drawn himself closer and closer to George W. Bush - a man who has been at pains to identify himself at every available opportunity with the military, with his status as "Commander-in-Chief." Bush has gone so far as to, on several occasions, don a fake, custom-made military uniform, and frequently speaks before military audiences who are obliged to applaud on command. It is astonishing how willing our press has been in perpetuating the myth of George W. Bush as High Warrior, a behavior they will almost certainly repeat - enthusiastically - for a prospective candidate, nominee and President John McCain, given that McCain was a bona fide war hero and survivor of North Vietnamese POW camps. They will construct this image, and they will construct the image of McCain as a glorious outsider, a man uniquely able to address the problems our country currently faces - the war in Iraq, a weakened, nearly bankrupt federal government, corruption rampant in the halls of Congress - despite the fact that McCain has been instrumental in creating and furthering these various problems.

Scott Shields at MyDD offers the following:

"...the Republicans are going to pretend that 2008 is a complete changing of the guard -- from Bush to McCain. But it will just be more of the same. McCain will no doubt put a friendlier face on the politics, but the policies will remain bad none the less, because as Lizza says, at the end of the day McCain really is "the last Bush Republican.""

I think that this is exactly what is going to happen, and I agree that McCain is, for now, "the last Bush Republican." But there only needs to be one Bush Republican around at any given time - one High Warrior. It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently just how skillful the GOP has been in constructing of a cult of (militarized) personality around George W. Bush - a man who is not merely ordinary but far below mediocre in nearly any and every category of assessment one might offer of a man. With the chaos of the world that Bush has created, it will be ever easier to create a similar cult around a man who possesses some manner of competence and charisma.

Giving such a man the keys to the country at this point - when the administration of the far-below-mediocre George W. Bush has managed to consolidate all the powers of the federal government in the executive - would be exceedingly dangerous. Digby quotes Bruce Fein, Constitutional Scholar and former Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration from his December 19, 2005 appearance on the Diane Rehm Show, and then offers his own thoughts.

"...if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a wartime President I can do anything I want - I don't need to consult any other branches - that is an impeachable offense. It's more dangerous that Clinton's lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that - would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant."

The president continues to say that as a wartime president he can do anything he wants, openly and without any sense of shame. He has loaded that precedent and unless somebody puts a stop to it, it will lie there waiting for the next time a despotic president and his party want to use it.

The key for Democrats, then, is in preventing the successful construction of such a cult of personality around McCain - the "militarist who acts the populist" - and preventing his ascension to the presidency. To do so, they must begin to expose him for who he truly is. Matt Stoller, also at MyDD offers some hope:

First up, McCain. In Arizona, he's taking a beating in his approval/disapproval ratings. He was up 72-24 a month ago, he's now 64-29. That's a 13 point swing. What's more interesting is where the swing is happening. Among Democrats, his approval rating has dropped from 73-24 to 58-32, a drop of 23 points. Among independents, he goes from 72-25 to 64-30, a drop of 13 points (which I would imagine is occurring among left-leaning independents). Among Republicans, he stayed neutral, going from 70-24 to 72-26. McCain's partisanship isn't new, but the willingness of Democrats to call him on it is new, and this seems to be having an effect.

This, at least, is a possible way out. At least some people who believe - incorrectly - in the construction of McCain as maverick, McCain as moderate, McCain as populist, are willing to chnage their minds in the face of the new evidence in the form of McCain's recent movesto ally himself with the current regime. In terms of public opinion, a move in approval of 23 points in one month in any group, absent a major event, is a large one. This means this task is not impossible - but it is still formidable. Even Arizona Democrats, after this past month, approve of him by a margin of 58-32 - and they are in the best position to know and have known the real John McCain. There is considerable work to be done, but considerable incentive to do so for our Republic - if we can keep it

UPDATE: This, at least, shows we're not there yet.

I'm more excited about Emeril's "Nutria Madness," m'self

2006-03-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

TV chef Jamie Oliver should encourage schoolchildren to eat grey squirrels in an effort to save the endangered red species, a Conservative peer says.
Lord Inglewood said greys had to be culled to ensure reds - native to the UK - did not die out.

"I must confess that I have never actually eaten a grey squirrel... but I am prepared to give it a go," he said.
...
Lord Inglewood said: "Unless something radical and imaginative is done Squirrel Nutkin and his friends are going to be toast."
...
Last year, Mr Oliver launched a campaign to improve the quality of England's school dinners, which resulted in extra government funding to raise standards.

LINK

Chicken Dance

2006-01-31T16:06:00.000-05:00

Sick.
Headache, fever, exhausted, achy.
Probably have the Bird Flu.

If the world starts dying soon around Washington, D.C., probably my fault.

Futbol

2005-12-05T19:33:00.000-05:00

From ESPN:

LEIPZIG, Germany -- Five days before the draw for next year's World Cup finals, the debate began on how seeding for the group phase will be determined. The criteria used to set up the four pots from which the 32-country field will be divided into eight groups of four teams will be decided Tuesday.
Being selected for Pot 1 -- made up of the top eight teams -- will help the chances of the game's powerhouses from avoiding another top country in the first round.
"There are different proposals," FIFA president Sepp Blatter said. "It certainly will be a mix of the performance from the last World Cup and the world rankings."
...
All that is certain is that Germany, as host, and Brazil, as defending champion, will be put in Pot 1 to head one of the groups.
Two-time World Cup champion Argentina is considered a top candidate for Pot 1, while Italy, England, Mexico, Spain and France are among the favorites.

Okay, so I'm hardly naive about us gringoes' not-American football team. We're sure as heck better'n we used to be, and 2002 was a really fun year that is not likely to be repeated. European and South American teams still have a healthy degree of contempt for the U.S., just not the same degree of condescencion.

But Mexico getting the top pot over the U.S.? Bull.

For all intents and purposes, the two teams are tied in the world rankings (Mexico comes in at #7, a few scant points ahead of the U.S. at #8), and tied for the top of the table in CONCACAF - though the U.S. wins a tie-breaker there, having fallen 1-2 in Mexico City, and winning 2-0 in Columbus.

But most importantly: in the last game they played that really mattered - in the 2002 World Cup - the U.S. destroyed Mexico, just beat them to a pulp.

So, this is an offhand reference in a wire story. And really, this is a good team, but a top pool seed would not at all guarantee advancing to the second round. But it'd sure be nice.

Bye-Bye, Sammy; Bye-Bye, Raffy

2005-11-13T13:03:00.000-05:00

Good:

In a move that comes as a surprise to no one, the Baltimore Orioles announced Saturday that first baseman Rafael Palmeiro and outfielder Sammy Sosa will not return to the team next season.

"At this point, we are heading in a different direction," club executive vice president Mike Flanagan told the Baltimore Sun. Sosa, 37, who was acquired from the Chicago Cubs for second baseman Jerry Hairston and two minor leaguers, hit .221 with 14 homers and 45 RBI in 102 games. It also was reported that he and Miguel Tejada had a disagreement that led to an icy relationship between the two Dominican Republic superstars.

While Palmeiro's season included collecting his 3,000th hit, it was his failed drug test that caused a commotion. Palmeiro, 41, continues to deny he intentionally took steroids, but he has no concrete proof as to why stanozolol was found in his system during a May drug test.

Palmeiro had just two hits in 26 at-bats after returning from his suspension and was booed by spectators at Baltimore and on the road. He was sent home to Texas to rehabilitate injuries; the Orioles eventually told him not to return to the team.

So long, jerks.

Burberry Caps and Newcastle Cans

2005-10-31T14:23:00.000-05:00

From the Guardian:

“Tony Blair's ministers distanced themselves yesterday from a scheme to prevent passengers drinking alcohol on trains, buses and planes after police, train companies and rival politicians poured scorn on the proposal.
Faced with a leaked paper from last month's brainstorming session with No 10's "respect" team at Chequers, the Home Office confirmed that a ban - which could include domestic flights - was one of a range of proposals being considered. "Nothing has been ruled in or out at this stage. A paper will be published shortly outlining our proposals," a statement said.
In reality the proposal, opposed by John Prescott, is highly unlikely to feature in the forthcoming safer communities bill, which seeks to nurture better behaviour on troubled estates and the wider public space, threatened by yobbery especially at weekends.” [emphasis added]

The British make me laugh – really, yobbery? That’s hilarious.
But I’m glad for the apparently cool reception for this idea, as I do enjoy being a scumbag and drinking a can or three on the train when in London.

DorkOut v.4.2: New Software That is Exremely Exciting to JKD

2005-10-21T15:53:00.000-05:00

And so it is decreed: use Flock for all of your Internetty goodness. Now.

Don’t get me wrong – I love me some Firefox. It’s just that Flock is, well…Firefox, plus even more neat stuff (e.g., integrated RSS, better in-browser blogging, integrated del.icio.us functionality, half a dozen other things). This is going to keep happening, and happening more and more and more, with all these open-source apps: good code gets improved upon in weeks and months, and sometimes it’s a new release (1.06, 1.2, etc.) of an existing program, and sometimes it’s a new app, and then you switch back to another, etc. Swap bookmarks, spend the 20 seconds setting up the new interfaces with del.icio.us and Blogger and WordPress and Flickr and you’re good to go. Highly exciting – or, as the kids say – w00t!

NanoCreep

2005-10-20T13:29:00.000-05:00

“Without entering your home, I can know what you are eating, drinking, smoking, wearing, or not wearing.”

Read the whole thing.

I Approve Highly of Beer-Making Monks

2005-10-19T15:24:00.000-05:00

An excellent story from a few weeks back on one of the world’s great breweries from…wait for it…wait for it…yes, USA Today. I went through and looked for things to cut, but really there aren’t any, so the article in whole appears below. I’ll take it down if USA Today’s lawyers get up in my craw. Everything is interesting, including and especially the author’s incredulity that there’s anyone who wouldn’t want to squeeze every possible cent of profit out of their business. Have a read:

BRUSSELS — Inside the sanctuary of the abbey of St. Sixtus of Westvleteren is a beer lover's dream and a businessman's nightmare.
Piety, not profit, is what these monks seek. The St. Sixtus monks break every rule in Business 101 except attention to quality. And therein may lie the secret of their success in brewing a beer that some rank among the world's best and that is so hard to get there's a black market for it.
St. Sixtus brews three beers. The Westvleteren 12 is a strong, dark beer with a 12% alcohol content. It is consistently ranked among the top five beers in the world by RateBeer.com, a website for beer enthusiasts with 26,500 members. In the latest survey, it reclaimed the No. 1 spot from AleSmith Barrel Aged Speedway Stout.
The Westvleteren monks also make a dark beer with an 8% alcohol content (ranked ninth by RateBeer.com), and a blond beer with a 6% alcohol content. This is heady stuff compared with a can of Coors, which has 4% alcohol.

No reason to change

The doorbell sounds with a loud chime. Brother Joris, head of the brewery, answers, dressed in the Cistercian habit of white robe with a black, hooded outer robe, gray socks and leather sandals. His dark hair is cropped short. He wears a plain watch with a black band.
It's one of the 72 brewing days of the year, but the abbey is still quiet and peaceful. Brother Joris leads the way past aluminum tanks and the bottling room, where a team of five monks is at work.
During the next five to eight weeks, as the beer ages in tanks and then in bottles, potential customers will call the abbey's "beer phone," which has a recorded message that tells them when the beer will go on sale (36 times a year, for as long as stock lasts).
On the first day the beer goes on sale, cars start lining up at the abbey at 5:15 a.m., says Brother Joris. The gates open at 10 a.m., and buyers are limited to two cases per car. "Not to be resold" is stamped on the receipts, but customers regularly disregard the monks' wish, and the coveted beer is exported, unlabeled and without permission, to America and elsewhere.
While the machinery is more modern today — it was last updated in 1989 — the philosophy is the same.
"As monks, the rule is pray and work. These are the two pillars of a Trappist life," Brother Joris explains. "If you prayed 24 hours a day you'd go nuts. So there has to be a balance between work and monastic life. So that balance is there. We earn our living. There's no reason to change that, or make more money."
St. Sixtus brews just 60,000 cases of beer a year. The famous Westvleteren 12 sells for about $33 a case, the blond 6 is the cheapest at $23 for 24 bottles. That makes enough money to cover the costs of maintaining the abbey, where 28 monks work. There's also a little extra to help the needy.
The brewery currently is running at maximum capacity. And the monks are not interested in raising prices or production, because that would require hiring more outside workers (they have three) and working with distributors.
"At that moment it would cease to be what it is now, an integrated part of our existence," he explains.
Brother Joris, 45, joined St. Sixtus 12 years ago. Before that, he was a captain in the Belgian police force. "We are separated from the world, but we encounter the world in ourselves," he says. "You do not become a saint by entering a monastery."

A tradition of beermaking

There are six Trappist monasteries in Belgium making beer and one in The Netherlands. Several of them rank in RateBeer's top 50. Only the abbey of Achel brews less than St. Sixtus, while the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Scourmont, which makes the Chimay beer, is the largest.
But the monks at St. Sixtus don't see any of the Trappist beers as competition.
"The first Benedictine value, we follow the rule of St. Benedict, is humility," Brother Joris says. "Humility begins with not comparing oneself with another.
"We make one Trappist ale. There are seven Trappist breweries: Each of them has its own character, reflects its own community. They're all good. What's the point of beginning to compete?"
Nor do they care that they are again the top-ranked beer. "Being No. 1 is not news. It's a website. There are other professional beer-tasting contests and beer awards that are more valuable than being No. 1 on a website," he adds.
But they don't participate in those contests either. "It's more trouble," he says, "packing the bottles and shipping them."
No marketing, no competition, no increase in prices or production. It's enough to make a capitalist cry.
Illegally imported Westvleteren beer, for example, sells for $8 to $12 a bottle in specialty bars and restaurants in the USA.
"We bought all the rest of it we could get that was left from the distributors," says Michael Roper, owner of the Hopleaf bar in Chicago.
Roper's bar sold out of Westvleteren two weeks ago. Supply has dried up under pressure from the monks to stop illegal exports, he says.
"Westvleteren is a great beer, and I'm very saddened I don't have any more, and I didn't even save any for myself and now I'm thinking, 'What was I thinking?' "
Roper says he would love to see it in his bar again. "But I also understand they're not a brewery. It's a spiritual community," he says. "I don't think their mission is the same as Anheuser-Busch."
Brother Joris agrees. In fact, he agreed to be interviewed only because he wanted to warn Americans against buying illegally imported Westvleteren.
"My message is, people should know that the beer arrives there in a very un-Trappist-like way," he says. "It's the result of a lot of maneuvering in the dark before it actually shows up there."
Such underhanded tactics go against the Benedictine values under which the monks work. The St. Sixtus abbey also has no way of vouching for the quality of the beer, which is sensitive to temperature and light, when it arrives. Nor are they insured to export beer to the United States.
"I would advise your readers not to ask for or buy Westvleteren," he says. "You do not support the Trappist cause by buying Westvleteren in the United States. So if you want to support the Trappist cause, you drink one from the other six (breweries), which are legally imported."

Destination Nerdout

2005-10-17T10:13:00.000-05:00

I don’t know bloggers, so nobody asks me to participate in blogmemes. That’s okay. I’m going to make one up myself and I can play with my own damn toys damnit. No, I’m not quite sure why I haven’t posted in however long it’s been. Anyways: (via BoingBoing) a new book is out that has a list entitled “The Canon: The 50 most notable science fiction films in the history of cinema.” It was my guess that, as a nerd, I’d probably seen a lot of them. I was not incorrect – here they are alphabetically, the films I’ve seen in bold. Why should you care? I dunno, for some reason you’re reading this in the first place.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!
Akira
Alien
Aliens
Alphaville
Back to the Future
Blade Runner
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Brother From Another Planet
A Clockwork Orange
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Contact
The Damned
Destination Moon
The Day The Earth Stood Still
Delicatessen
Escape From New York
ET: The Extraterrestrial
Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers (serial)
The Fly (1985 version)
Forbidden Planet
Ghost in the Shell
Gojira/Godzilla
The Incredibles
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956 version)
Jurassic Park
Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior
The Matrix
Metropolis
On the Beach
Planet of the Apes (1968 version)
Robocop
Sleeper
Solaris (1972 version)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
The Stepford Wives
Superman
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The Thing From Another World
Things to Come
Tron
12 Monkeys
28 Days Later
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
2001: A Space Odyssey
La Voyage Dans la Lune
War of the Worlds (1953 version)

So, 35 out of 50. Not bad. Yes, it’s weird that I’ve never seen “Close Encounters.”

America, A-mer-i-ca...

2005-10-05T13:51:00.000-05:00

People is funny:

"Little Shop of Whores," huffed one woman standing outside the new Victoria's Secret in Tysons Corner Center. "Slut wear," declared the father of a teenage girl, looking at a feathery-thong-clad mannequin bent over as if she were adjusting her spike heels.
...
"My 13-year-old daughter is going to come here and shop for a bra?" said Mary Lynne Carraway, 40, of McLean. "Come on. I'm appalled. That's like sending her to a street with a strip joint. Is this the kind of message we want to send to our children, that this is what they should look like?"

Um, what else exactly ought people look like when they're in underwear than, y'know, people in underwear?

Also - "a street with a strip joint"? Goodness, I may get the vapors, here.

The Future, Stupidly

2005-09-28T12:41:00.000-05:00

This is a great idea:

SanDisk Corp., the Sunnyvale maker of flash-memory cards used to store photos and other digital files, on Tuesday introduced a new line of cards the company hopes will become the next-generation successor to records, cassette tapes, CDs and DVDs.
SanDisk also announced its first big client -- the Rolling Stones, who plan to release a version of the album "A Bigger Band'' prerecorded on the thumbnail-sized Gruvi brand microSD card. The miniature cards can be played on devices like cell phones, computers and portable media players.

Until…

The $39.95 Rolling Stones card, due out in November, will include extra songs from the band's catalog that can be accessed for an extra fee. [emphasis added]

Ummm…

All of the songs stored on the card will be protected from unlicensed copying using new SanDisk technology called TrustedFlash, which the company believes will help it gain the trust of pirate-wary record labels and movie studios.

Yeah. Good luck with that. Lessee…paying three times as much…for an album for which you could just buy the CD of and rip it to your computer, MP3 player, etc….and now you “can’t” (what’s the over-under on cracking TrustedFlash? I give it…96 hrs. from release) multi-use the files?

Yeah. Something like this will be the future, no doubt. Just…not as stupid.

When the Buried Bodies are Found

2005-09-27T13:45:00.000-05:00

Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot of collective blood on the collective hands of this administration. But the thing that brings down corrupt regimes, as it always has been, finding the specific blood on specific hands. And – well, innocent ‘til proven guilty and all, but the arrows sure are pointing in increasingly specific directions:

Two men were arrested Monday and charged with first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit murder in connection with the 2001 Mafia-style killing of Gus Boulis, the Associated Press is reporting.

Boulis was murdered while in the midst of a business dispute involving indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the names of the two men arrested Monday -- Anthony Moscatiello, 67, and Anthony Ferrari, 46 -- may be familiar to anyone following the Abramoff scandal.

Shortly after Abramoff and his business partner, Adam Kidan, bought SunCruz Casinos from Boulis, Kidan hired Moscatiello to work as a food-and-beverage consultant for SunCruz, according to a May 2005 report in the Washington Post. The Post report said that SunCruz made three payments totaling $145,000 to Moscatiello, his daughter and a business the Moscatiello family ran. According to the Post, Kidan claimed later that the payments were for catering, consulting and "site inspections." "However," the paper said, "there is no evidence that any food or drink was provided or consulting documents prepared."

According to the Miami Herald, Kidan paid Ferrari more than $100,000, ostensibly for security for SunCruz.

The people who are running this country are, without a doubt, criminals in politicians’ suits. Can we even begin to count the number of laws broken every day? And, yes, an illegal war that has killed tens and thousands, and counting, is a level of moral outrage that so dwarfs the death of one man, that it cannot be effectively compared. It’s the hundreds of billions in deficit to the thousand-dollar fender-bender.

But see, and here’s the thing – while history will judge George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and all the rest as moral monsters, they are not pointing the guns and pulling the triggers themselves. They’re using the powers of a state to make war, something done justly and not, but for which there is a certain degree of individual detachment from responsibility for the leaders of nations (well, provided they aren’t captured or defeated). And then there’s the whole Us v. Them mentality of state-based warfare, where the opponents are demonized as not really being human, so their deaths aren’t really deaths to be worried about, etc. You get that.

And really, most citizens of most nations through time haven’t had a damne bit o’worry about their leaders flagrantly violating the laws of other lands, or the rights of other nations or peoples, if it’s all in the name of greater national glory. See, e.g., colonialism.

But - when members of the ruling regime (and surely, Jack Abramoff is counted among them) start acting like the basic laws of their country don't apply to them, people start gettin' kinda nervous. And pissed. 'Cause you're not above the law, and especially in a time and place where everything seems to be going to crap, these assholes in Warshington are livin' high on the hog, and actin' like they own the place. And you're out there, working a job for less money than you were making ten years ago, and the kids are screamin', and...well, you get the idea.

So - the law. Those same anal-retentive geeks who insist on shit like speeding tickets and the like - now you remember why you keep them around. And sure, maybe as the ruling regime is realizing how truly fucked they are, as they swirl in the toilet of their own making and flushing, they'll try an' shove around the judicial branch, try to fire some prosecutors, try to steamroll the FBI. And yeah, the FBI might be chock full o' Republicans (Mormons, even) - but they fucking hate crooks. Hate 'em; that's why they chose their profession, to fuck up some crooks. And a bunch of corrupt politicians who think they're the greatest shit to come down the pike - well, you've seen their kind before, and taken them down a few notches, too. At the end of the day, there's always another politician who can step quite happily into the void left by disgraced crooks. And those disgraced crooks will pull out all the stops as they go down, down, down, try to be the puffed-up bully again as they have so many times before - realizing only at the end, at the very bottom, in wide-eyed horror, that they don't scare anyone anymore and, what's more, nobody really gives two shits about them.

Yes, there's always another politician to step into the stinking vortex, wash his hands of those who came before. When regimes start associating with, and acting like, petty crooks, they end finishing their days regarded as just that.

Was Jack Abramoff involved in the murder of Guy Bolis? Fucked if I know. But it's a good question, isn't it? And a valid one. The fact that we're even asking it sure says a helluva lot about how far this administration has fallen.

Darn Sure

2005-09-26T21:27:00.000-05:00

via Billmon, George W. Bush, today:

We can curtail nonessential travel. If it makes sense for the citizen out there to curtail nonessential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees. We can encourage employees to carpool or use mass transit. And we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation.

Oh yeah? Oh fucking yeah? How about curtailing your own nonessential travel, ya c-bag? How would that hit ya, not flying all over the fucking country in a goddamn 747 for photo ops that you don't even take?

Christ, what a fucking asshat.

Morning Announcements

2005-09-21T09:25:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, you need to go with the cute. Like, say, a box of baby sloths. (via Majikthise)

Don't Mess With Anything Called "Killer"

2005-09-19T14:06:00.000-05:00

The case against speciesism grows:

NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario - An enterprising young killer whale at Marineland has figured out how to use fish as bait to catch seagulls — and shared his strategy with his fellow whales.
Michael Noonan, a professor of animal behavior at Canisius College in Buffalo, N.Y., made the discovery by accident while studying orca acoustics.
"One day I noticed one of the young whales appeared to have come up with a procedure for luring gulls down to the pool," the professor said. "I found it interesting so I noted it in my log."
First, the young whale spit regurgitated fish onto the surface of the water, then sank below the water and waited.
If a hungry gull landed on the water, the whale would surge up to the surface, sometimes catching a free meal of his own.
Noonan watched as the same whale set the same trap again and again.
Within a few months, the whale's younger half brother adopted the practice. Eventually the behavior spread and now five Marineland whales supplement their diet with fresh fowl, the scientist said.
"It looked liked one was watching while the other tried," Noonan said of the whale's initial behavior.
The capacity to come up with the gull-baiting strategy and then share the technique with others — known as cultural learning in the scientific world — was once believed to be one of those abilities that separated humans from other animals. [emphasis added]

“Once” being key here; no longer. I’m reminded, for some reason, of this.

Librarianing iz Kewl

2005-09-16T14:11:00.000-05:00

From We Make Money Not Art via MakeBlog, this is really damn cool:

Non-fiction books checked out and returned at the Seattle Central Library amount to approximately 37000 items per day. From now on, the circulation of books will float in color-coded streams across six big plasma screens located on a glass wall behind the librarians’ main information desk.
All participants to Making Visible the Invisible are anonymous. Whatever is in circulation will be noted, but not the person who put it there.
George Legrady's project is the last major piece of art commissioned for the Rem Koolhaas-designed library.

Belief

2005-09-15T11:04:00.000-05:00

This is a good essay/review on the new Chris Mooney book, The Republican War on Science.” But I think it (and most of the chatter on this subject) misses a central point. There is, without a doubt, a Republican War on Science – and further, on all Enlightenment values. It is a vast right-wing conspiracy all its own, and also part of the larger one. However – it is easy to take that too far, and conclude that it is part and parcel of this Administration’s goals and governing philosophy, which is forever and always, made up of only two elements:
1) accruing political power, in order to,
2) accrue monetary wealth, for Their People, which is in essence a very narrowly defined subset of corporate executives.
That is it. It’s that simple. They’re not geniuses – they’re merely ruthless, and single-minded in their pursuit of these two fairly basic goals.
Science (or anything else) is uninteresting to this Administration, except to the extent that an element of it can be used as a political cudgel to further 1), or in any way in service of 2). Every position and action they’ve ever taken follows from this fairly simply formulation. Viewed through this lens, it’s fundamentally beside the point what they, or Bush, “believes” on anything, as their metric for action is not based in any way on belief or evidence, but in very narrow political and monetary self-interest.

Just, FYI

2005-09-14T14:37:00.000-05:00

Might be something useful to have on hand:

There are many good reasons to want to disappear from society. There are many bad reasons to want to. There are many good ways to disappear from society and there are many bad ways to disappear. While I won't delve too deeply into the whys of disappearing, I will cover my opinions on how to disappear successfully.

This essay covers what I consider to be the most salient points on how to disappear and remain successfully hidden in American society.

Injured Reserve

2005-09-13T08:45:00.000-05:00

Wonder why Bush has seemed…even worse than usual, lately?

The missteps on Katrina came at a crucial moment in Bush's second term, when his top legislative priority at home, Social Security reform, was already on life support and the war in Iraq was becoming a mounting economic and political burden. The Administration that had been determined to defy history and ward off the second-term curse--and early lame-duck status--by controlling the agenda and seizing opportunities appears increasingly at the mercy of events, at home and abroad.And as if the West Wing were suddenly snakebit, his franchise player, senior adviser and deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove, was on the disabled list for part of last week, working from home after being briefly hospitalized with painful kidney stones.

This Land is Your Land

2005-09-12T10:22:00.000-05:00

From an article in Salon by Bill Moyers:

Go to the Web site of an organization called America 21. There, on a red, white and blue home page is praise for President Bush's agenda -- including his effort to phase out Social Security and protect corporations from lawsuits by aggrieved citizens. On the same home page is a call to "Enlist now," with a reminder that "there are [X] hours until our next National Election." There's also a summons to Christian pastors "to lead God's people in the turning that can save America from our enemies." Under the headline "Remember -- Repent -- Return" is language reminiscent of Robertson and Falwell: "One of the unmistakable lessons [of 9/11] is that America has lost the full measure of God's hedge of protection. When we ask ourselves why, the scriptures remind us that ancient Israel was invaded by its foreign enemy, Babylon, in 586 B.C. ... [and] Jerusalem was destroyed by another invading foreign power in 70 A.D. ... Psalm 106:37 says that these judgments of God ... were because of Israel's idolatry. Israel, the apple of God's eye, was destroyed ... because the people failed ... to repent." If America is to avoid a similar fate, the warning continues, we must "remember the legacy of our heritage under God and our covenant with Him and, in the words of II Chronicles 7:14: 'Turn from our wicked ways.'"

I’m sorry, I don’t really remember the passage in the Bible where God forms a covenant with America. Maybe it’s in the New Testament somewhere? I haven’t read all of that, I’ll admit.

The United States of Meathook

2005-09-08T13:33:00.000-05:00

It should come as no shock that NOLA has become a political catastrophe for the President, on top of its mind-boggling human toll. The latest indignity – survivors (black ones, anyways) are being rounded up into camps and held on lockdown, unable to leave, unable to even cook their food, mandated to eat the two FEMA-provided meals daily. This is our United States of America.

It is now well beyond time to realize that George W. Bush and his administration have absolutely no interest in being popular. It would have been easy to handle this situation correctly, rightly, justly, but they have no interest in justice, no interest in any right but their own. Their chief and only interest, is their interests – tearing the country apart along the way is not just an unfortunate side effect, it is a means to their ends.

The waters (though not simply waters but bodies, man and beast, and the most noxious chemicals man has devised) may be pumped out of NOLA, but even beyond that, even beyond the thousands, the tens of thousands dead – the tens of thousands dead – we will all be left in the toxic muck, until and unless we learn to say, “Enough!”, and stand, and walk out.

What does that mean? I do not know, quite, or yet, but the ringing in my ears is growing loud and it’s well past time for something.

UPDATE: Sid Blumenthal gets it, partly -

Hurricane Katrina is the anti-9/11 in its divisive political effect, its unearthing of underlying domestic problems, and its disorienting impact on the president and his administration. Yet, in other ways, the failure of government before the hurricane struck is reminiscent of the failures leading into 9/11. The demotion of FEMA resembles the demotion of counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. In both cases, the administration ignored clear warnings.

In a conversation with a former diplomat with decades of experience, I raised these parallels. But the Bush administration response evoked something else for him. "It reminds me of Africa," he said. "Governments that prey on their people."

Give the man a column

2005-09-07T15:48:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Tom Friedman reads this blog:

"An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town."

(NYTimes, 9.7.05)

gWorld

2005-09-07T09:26:00.000-05:00

There’s a good (well, good if you think that open information is good) analysis of the copyright implications, here (via EFF):

In the Print Library Project, Google is relying on fair use just as it and its search engine competitors rely on fair use when they copy millions of websites every week. Moreover, by giving publishers the opportunity to opt-out of the Print Library Project, Google is replicating the exclusion header feature of the Internet. Most authors want their books to be found and read. Moreover, authors are aware that an ever increasing percentage of students and businesses conduct research primarily, if not exclusively, online. Thus, if books cannot be searched online, many users will never locate them. The Print Library Project is predicted upon the assumption the authors generally want their books to be included in the search database so that readers can find them. But if a copyright owner does not want Google to scan her book, Google will honor her request.
Contrary to the AAP's assertion, this opt-out feature does not turn "every principle of copyright law on its ear." Rather, it is a reasonable implementation of a program based on fair use.

Truth and Consequences

2005-09-04T21:34:00.000-05:00

Grover Norquist once famously said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."I'd like it if, in the coming days and weeks, someone would ask him if he stands by that statement.

Carnivale

2005-08-31T16:06:00.000-05:00

From the WWL, New Orleans, blog:

12:55 P.M. - MIAMI (AP) -- Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines says it is considering a federal request that the company use some of its cruise ships as emergency shelters or help in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in some other way.

Considering? I certainly hope they do the right thing, but are we so far gone as a nation that they really need to think it over?

Talk Time

2005-08-31T15:13:00.000-05:00

In the midst of all the awfulness, this really struck me, from this AP story:

“No regular phones in the Superdome were working and long lines formed as people waited to recharge cell phone batteries from the two available electrical outlets.”

Two. There are about 20,000 people there.

More on all this later.

All Eras End Eventually

2005-08-30T13:51:00.000-05:00

Quote of the day:

“This is the opening of an era in which human beings and robots can co-exist,” the company said.

Way Back in the 20th Century

2005-08-30T12:45:00.000-05:00

Blog meme time.

Head here, type year of high school graduation into search box, up pops Top 100 from that year. Strike through all you hate; bold those you like; leave alone those you don’t know or don’t feel strongly about. Bang:

Too Close, Next 2. The Boy Is Mine, Brandy and Monica 3. You're Still The One, Shania Twain 4. Truly Madly Deeply, Savage Garden 5. How Do I Live, LeAnn Rimes 6. Together Again, Janet 7. All My Life, K-Ci and JoJo 8. Candle In The Wind 1997, Elton John 9. Nice and Slow, Usher 10. I Don't Want To Wait, Paula Cole 11. How's It Going To Be, Third Eye Blind 12. No, No, No, Destiny's Child 13. My Heart Will Go On, Celine Dion 14. Gettin' Jiggy Wit, Will Smith 15. You Make Me Wanna..., Usher 16. My Way, Usher 17. My All, Mariah Carey 18. The First Night, Monica 19. Been Around The World, Puff Daddy and The Family 20. Adia, Sarah McLachlan 21. Crush, Jennifer Paige 22. Everybody (Backstreet's Back), Backstreet Boys 23. I Don't Want To Miss A Thing, Aerosmith 24. Body Bumpin Yippie-Yi-Yo, Public Announcement 25. This Kiss, Faith Hill 26. I Don't Ever Want To See You Again, Uncle Sam 27. Let's Ride, Montell Jordan 28. Sex And Candy, Marcy Playground 29. Show Me Love, Robyn 30. A Song For Mama, Boyz II Men 31. What You Want, Mase 32. Frozen, Madonna 33. Gone Till November, Wyclef Jean 34. My Body, Lsg 35. Tubthumping, Chumbawamba 36. Deja Vu (Uptown Baby), Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz 37. I Want You Back, 'N Sync 38. When The Lights Go Out, Five 39. They Don't Know, Jon B. 40. Make Em' Say Uhh!, Master P 41. Make It Hot, Nicole Featuring Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott and Mocha 42. Never Eve, All Saints 43. I Get Lonely, Janet 44. Feel So Good, Mase 45. Say It, Voices Of Theory 46. Kiss The Rain, Billie Myers 47. Come With Me, Puff Daddy 48. Romeo And Juliet, Sylk-E Fyne 49. It's All About Me, Mya and Sisqo 50. I Will Come To You, Hanson 51. One Week, Barenaked Ladies 52. Swing My Way, K.P. and Envyi 53. The Arms Of The One Who Loves You, Xscape 54. My Love Is The Shhh!, Somethin' For The People 55. Daydreamin', Tatyana Ali 56. We're Not Making Love No More, Dru Hill 57. Semi-Charmed Life, Third Eye Blind 58. I Do, Lisa Loeb 59. Lookin' At Me, Mase 60. Looking Through Your Eyes, LeAnn Rimes 61. Lately, Divine 62. Quit Playing Games (With My Heart), Backstreet Boys 63. I Still Love You, Next 64. Time After Time, Inoj 65. Are You Jimmy Ray?, Jimmy Ray 66. Cruel Summer, Ace Of Base 67. I Got The Hook Up!, Master P 68. Victory, Puff Daddy and The Family 69. Too Much, Spice Girls 70. Ghetto Supastar (That Is What You Are), Pras Feat. Ol' Dirty Bastard and Mya 71. How Deep Is Your Love, Dru Hill Featuring Redman 72. Friend Of Mine, Kelly Price 73. Turn It Up [Remix] / Fire It Up, Busta Rhymes 74. I'll Be, Edwin McCain 75. Ray Of Light, Madonna 76. All For You, Sister Hazel 77. Touch It, Monifah 78. Money, Power and Respect, Lox 79. Bitter Sweet Symphony, The Verve 80. Dangerous, Busta Rhymes 81. Spice Up Your Life, Spice Girls 82. Because Of You, 98 Degrees 83. The Mummers' Dance, Loreena McKennitt 84. All Cried Out, Allure Featuring 112 85. Still Not A Player, Big Punisher Featuring Joe 86. The One I Gave My Heart To, Aaliyah 87. Foolish Games / You Were Meant For Me, Jewel 88. Love You Down, Inoj 89. Do For Love, 2Pac 90. Raise The Roof, Luke 91. Heaven, Nu Flavor 92. The Party Continues, Jd 93. Sock It 2 Me, Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott Featuring Da Brat 94. Butta Love, Next 95. A Rose Is Still A Rose, Aretha Franklin 96. 4 Seasons Of Loneliness, Boyz II Men 97. Father, LL Cool J 98. Thinkin' Bout It, Gerald Levert 99. Nobody's Supposed To Be Here, Deborah Cox 100. Westside, TQ

“Body Bumpin Yippie-Yi-Yo”?

What’s really most notable is that, though I’ve heard of most of the artists, most of these songs, I have absolutely no idea about. I suspect I know some and don’t know the titles, but still…it’s not as if I wasn’t listening to music in 1998. I listed to a lot of music. Just not, y’know, this music.

Best. Simile. Ever.

2005-08-29T15:13:00.000-05:00

From a Salon article on teledildonics:

The physical awkwardness of typing and touching myself was a problem -- kind of like trying to eat an ice cream cone while washing dishes.

Watch the Possessive Pronoun

2005-08-23T21:43:00.000-05:00

You know what I like? [Note: what follows is not actually something I like] How Don Rumsfeld is a flaming asshole even when he's doing the right thing:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration swiftly distanced itself Tuesday from a suggestion by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson that American agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long at odds with U.S. foreign policy.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, appearing at a Pentagon news conference, said when asked: ``Our department doesn't do that kind of thing. It's against the law. He's a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time.''

Our department. He didn't say "the United States," or "the United States government." No. He said "our department" - meaning, the Department of Defense. You could almost see the thought bubble - "That's [CIA Director] Porter [Goss]'s job."

Whose?

2005-08-23T15:17:00.000-05:00

From Gene Weingarten’s chat at washingtonpost.com, “Chatological Humor,” August 23, 2005:

“Gainesville, Va.: Regarding your comments about Canada being hipper than the U.S. last week, I often wonder why more American liberals like yourself (and the vast majority of your readers) don't move there.
I'm not asking this to be flip or snide (unlike the Alex [sic] Baldwins of the world who routinely make such "threats" whenever Republicans win the White House, then never seem to follow up) -- I'm genuinely curious about why more of you don't migrate to a place that seems to be much more in line with your values, views and lifestyle choices than is the case here in the U.S. Conservatives don't really have that option -- there's no place that comes as close to their "ideal" as the U.S., even when the Dems are in charge -- but liberals do. A place like Toronto would seem to offer everything you would want -- national health care, multiculturalism, gay marriage, pro baseball, public transit, proximity to family in the eastern U.S., higher and more progressive taxes, cheaper pharmaceuticals, strong opposition to the Bush foreign policy, and now the right to use the F-word in print. All this, for just a few extra days of snow and cold each year. Other than the usual reasons that we all have for living in our less-than-favorite place (such as a specific job we enjoy), what's keeping you all south of the St. Lawrence?
Gene Weingarten: This is a good question, and it's one I've thought about as the United States seems to be moving toward a conservative theocracy. And I really like Toronto. And Montreal. But: 1. One doesn't lightly jettison one's citizenship, particularly citizenship in this great country. Moreover, politics are cyclical. I believe in Americans; I believe we are on the verge of a backlash to this nonsense. 2. For a humor writer, the United States, right now, is a goldmine. Hypocrisy is funny. I suspect I would not find myself with as much to say in Canada. I'm not sure what I would do if this president, for example, instituted a draft to support this war. And my kids were in jeopardy. They are adults, but I might well move to Canada in support of their decision. Dunno. Don't think it will happen.”

This pisses me off, and I figured out why. It’s not just the condescending, snide tone (despite the assurance that it isn’t) – it’s the basic premise that us liberals don’t value this country, and further, that in an important way it’s not even ours to value. Which is nonsense. All citizens of our great country – and it is a great country, and also awful and mighty and powerful and myopic and a thousand other things – have equal claim on the country, on its history, its present, its future.

Energizer

2005-08-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

It really behooves everyone to pay more attention to stories like this:

BEIJING, Aug. 21 -- Police clashed with protesters demanding the closure of a battery factory in eastern China they accuse of spewing lead into the environment, and dozens of people were injured, witnesses and hospital officials said Sunday.
…
Such scenes of frustration are becoming more common in rural China as villagers vent their anger against corruption, environmental degradation, pollution and the seizure of land for real estate development.
…
Another man, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said about 1,000 police officers later went to villages and harassed and beat those who had participated in the protest, injuring at least 10 of them. The police were holding shields and wearing helmets, he said.
The man said as many as 5,000 residents retaliated later that night by “breaking into government offices and burning police cars.” He said the protesters wanted the factory to shut down or move, but company officials refused.

Why is this important? Because these are our batteries – the batteries you buy to put in your MP3 player, the one in your car, in the smoke detector at work, in the POS printer at Starbucks. They are manufactured, mostly, in China, and manufacturing batteries is a pretty nasty business (let’s leave aside for a moment what happens to them when they’re used up…) – lots of chemicals involved, many noxious, and they’ve gotta go somewhere. Time was, that somewhere was the Cuyahoga or Schuylkill, but now it’s not – it got too damned expensive to manufacture stuff and then dispose of the results of the manufacture in ways that wouldn’t, y’know, cause cancer for all the good folks living around and working at the factory.

So for the last 20 years or so, there’s been a relentless race to the bottom in terms of working conditions and environmental regulations – always someplace to treat workers crappier, pay them less, and give less mind to where toxic byproducts ended up – but that race had to hit bottom somewhere. For most industries, that bottom was (and is) China. The problem, of course, is that nobody (even Chinese! Those inscrutable Orientals, I tell ya…) really likes lead being dumped into their streams and backyards. And so, here is the pushback, finally: riots in the Chinese countryside.

No Comment Necessary

2005-08-19T12:47:00.000-05:00

To some of the 400,000 youngsters attending the event, the sight of a young man in a priest's collar or black suit arouses huge interest.
Young people say they are also approachable enough to ask frank questions such as how they can live without sex.
…
The more dashing young priests at World Youth Day seem to have an entourage of adoring teenage girls.
…
"I know I am hanging in a few girls' bedrooms too, but that's fine -- we need their prayers for more priests," Father Jonathan Meyer said.

Er…yeah.

Do This

2005-08-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

2005-08-16T21:59:00.000-05:00

Yeah, that'd be nice
I wonder what would happen if a reporter were to ask Junior how he felt about the fact that his father's predictions of failure in Iraq had all come true? I'd really like to see that.

But nobody's gonna ask that, are they? Stupid assholes.

2005-08-16T14:07:00.000-05:00

"B*****"; "Get H***"
A public radio station in Kentucky has reversed its decision to cancel Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" over concerns about offensive content, after what station officials said was an outpouring of support.

WUKY-FM, based in Lexington, canceled the show in early August. The daily spot runs a few minutes and features Keillor noting important milestones in writing history, after which he typically reads a poem.

Recent poems had included words such as "breast" and the phrase "get high." Another included suggestive sexual content, according to WUKY General Manager Tom Goddell.

He said there were no listener complaints, but station officials had worried about recent moves by the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on language it considered obscene.

BREAST is now a potentially obscene word?!? "Get high"?!? Good God, what have we come to?

2005-08-15T09:39:00.000-05:00

Creationism Redux
At first glance, with its research-quality replicas and lush dioramas of prehistoric Earth, the Museum of Earth History, which opened in April in this spa town, may seem like any other facility devoted to dinosaurs and fossils. But, with exhibits aligned with the Bible's six days of creation, it is also emblematic of the increasing volume in the national debate over how evolution should be taught in public schools and the emboldening of those who oppose or question evolution.

...

Finishing the tour with their two sons in tow, Robert and Debbie Archer, surgeons from Tulsa, said they were gratified to visit a museum that reflects their beliefs and not Darwin's.

That is why he developed the museum, said G. Thomas Sharp, founder and chairman of the Creation Truth Foundation.

...

Such literal interpretation is essential, Sharp said, because "If we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period."

2005-08-11T09:51:00.000-05:00

Pride
Steve Gilliard sez:

"But there is a deeper and widely shared cultural issue here: New Yorkers hate Southerners and Southern culture. A Southern accent draws scorn from everybody. which is why I find the idea of Fred Thompson as Manhattan DA on Law and Order as likely as Pvt. Jenna Bush. The minute he opened his mouth, most New Yorkers would stop listening. Even white people here call them crackers. Bill Clinton is accepted because white Southerners hate him.

New York doesn't even have a country music station. They tried and no one listened. Yes, Garth Brooks played in Central Park, but even the cops laughed at the idea of New Yorkers actually going to such a thing. Sure, they wanted to build a NASCAR track in Staten Island, but that's Staten Island, our very own Cobb County, but with 10 times the racists. Most New Yorkers laugh at NASCAR as the sport of drunken idiots. If Scott think that disdain for white Southerners is limited to the "elite" we can visit any high school and raise the subject, Stuy, Dalton, Midwood and see what answers we get. We can ask them if any listen to country music, watch NASCAR or what they think of the South.

Target is accepted here because it is low impact, and its image is urban friendly. Home Depot provides a real service since the closing of Woolworths and Martin's Paints. But Wal Mart, while it has low prices, also says cheap. And anti-union. Which matters here.

Wal Mart can keep trying, but when they run into continued hostility, with every candidate forced to oppose them, they might understand the issue isn't big box stores but them."

It's an interesting time in America. Most people don't have a sense of, or pride in, place. But New Yorkers do - all of 'em. They live in the best damn city in the world, and they know it, and they're proud of it. They've got the best baseball team, they've got the best culture, best restaurants - everyone wants to come there. Of course they look down on the South - they look down on everywhere (there was a great back-and-forth a couple years ago about NY-DC puffery). And the South is (for better or worse) one of the only other places in this country that has a sense of pride in place - only, it's also fueled by resentment, and the idea that they're being mocked and looked down upon. 'Cause, well, they are.

Wal-Mart is about not caring, about not even having a right to have an opinion on the kind of place you'd like to live. Cynical greedy bastards.

2005-08-10T14:59:00.000-05:00

Digby, as usual, gets it right
"They have, after all, already demonstrated that they are entirely hueristic decisionmakers who are discontented with the direction the country is going but can't rationally put that together with who is in charge.

...

The Republicans are not fucking around here. They are building an impermeable, corrupt political machine made up of cronies, employees and hangers-on the likes of which we haven't seen since the 19th century. They are court-packing, gerrymandering, impeaching and recalling --- not to mention electronically stuffing ballot boxes and throwing disputed elections to their handpicked Supreme Court judges. They control the DC lobbying process and own a rather large piece of the media landscape. They are not building their "permanent majority" through a civil, democratic process."

That's right. They're installing themselves in power by any means necessary, and in the process are barricading any possible escape routes - e.g., a populace with tools of critical thinking. They want to create a nation that has basically no idea what's going on, and to the extent things are suboptimal, it's the fault of Emmanuel Goldstein/the Democrat Party, just because it is.

On the plus side...um, no, not really anything, no.

2005-08-10T09:01:00.000-05:00

Rising Fa...Fa...Yes, This Smells Like Fascism
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9, 2005 â�� The Defense Department today announced the first "America Supports You Freedom Walk" to honor the victims of 9/11 and America's military personnel, as well as to celebrate freedom.

The Freedom Walk will begin at 10 a.m. Sept. 11 in the Pentagon South parking lot, near the site where the airliner crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. The walk route will consist of a two-mile trek through Arlington National Cemetery, over the Potomac River, and will end by the reflecting pool on the National Mall, where a free concert featuring country music star Clint Black will take place.

"I am proud and honored to be part of the America Supports You Freedom Walk to honor the victims of 9/11 and to support our men and women in uniform," Black said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made the announcement today at the Pentagon.

"Every year since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans have commemorated that anniversary. This year the Department of Defense will initiate an American Supports You Freedom Walk. The walk will begin at the Pentagon and end at the National Mall. It will include many of the major monuments in Washington, D.C., reminding participants of the sacrifices of this generation and of each previous generation that have so successfully defended our freedoms," Rumsfeld said.

"America Supports You" is a nationwide program launched by the Defense Department with the goal of highlighting how Americans across the country are supporting the men and women of the armed forces.

via Steve Gilliard.

This is just ridiculous. And Clint, baby...I LIKED you, man.

2005-08-04T13:12:00.000-05:00

Not a Shock
The axe comes down:

ANAHEIM, Calif., Aug. 4 -- The Baltimore Orioles fired Manager Lee Mazzilli on Thursday morning and replaced him with bench coach Sam Perlozzo on an interim basis, a team official said. The announcement was expected to come prior to the team's game this afternoon against the Los Angeles Angels.

The Orioles were in first place for 62 consecutive days between April and June, but have gone 9-28 since then, including their current eight-game losing streak, falling to 10 1/2 games behind first-place Boston in the American League East.

Mazilli seemed like a nice enough guy, but really - this last month and a half has been just godawful, and he hasn't had an answer for it.

I Have No Idea How I Should Feel About This

2005-08-03T12:42:00.000-05:00

Link:

NOUAKCHOTT, Mauritania (AP) - Mauritanian army officers overthrew the U.S.-allied president on Wednesday, saying a military junta would temporarily rule the Islamic nation that has increasingly looked to the West as the government raised fears of a growing threat from al-Qaida linked militants.

President Maaoya Sid'Ahmed Taya, who himself seized power in a coup two decades ago, was out of the country when presidential guard troops took control of the national radio and television stations earlier Wednesday, cutting broadcasts and seizing a building housing the army chief of staff headquarters.

Taya, who has allied himself with the United States in the war on terror and cracked down ruthlessly on opponents he accuses of being Islamic extremists, refused comment after arriving Wednesday in nearby Niger from Saudi Arabia, where he attended King Fahd's funeral.

...

The junta said it would exercise power for up to two years to allow time to put in place ``open and transparent'' democratic institutions.

...

Oil recently was discovered in reserves offshore in Mauritania and the country is expected to begin pumping crude for the first time early next year.

I suppose the smart money is on this just being the exchange of one brutal, repressive dictator for another. For more on Mauritania (high on the list of Places I'm Glad I'm Not From), go here.

Weingartens

2005-08-02T09:26:00.000-05:00

A Very Important Chatological Humor today.

Monday Daily Silliness

2005-08-01T08:30:00.000-05:00

From an article in the WaPo on Al Gore's new channel, CurrentTV:

Some television analysts have questioned whether the company will be able to find enough amateur content to fill the airtime and to hold the interest of the notoriously fickle Generations X and Y. There's also some skepticism that the channel's lack of a schedule will confuse viewers.

Hahahahahaha. Seriously, hahahaha. Finding free content of eminently higher quality than what's on either broadcast or non-HBO/Comedy Central/Cartoon Network television is going to be the absolute least of their worries. Whether they have the moxie to put the best of it on is the only question.

Day 3

2005-07-27T11:22:00.000-05:00

Finally screwed up Sudoku. Not pleased with self.

Viva

2005-07-25T08:31:00.000-05:00

This, friends and neigbours, is what a mayor oughtta look like.

Woof

2005-07-24T18:39:00.000-05:00

Bored at work on Monday? This oughtta be fun:

In his new book, "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good," Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) argues that it is the family unit, rather than the federal government, that should make up the foundation of a fair society. He says that public policy should reflect this principle through conservative statestmanship as a means of addressing social and economic problems.

Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) will be online Monday, July 25, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his new book, "It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good."

Confused by the post title? Here, and, while you're at it, here.

New Toy

2005-07-24T18:28:00.000-05:00

Th.is

Pigs Fly, Cats Bark,

2005-07-20T19:57:00.000-05:00

and Tom Friedman writes a column that makes a lot of sense:

The real issue is that we have slipped into a symbiotic relationship with another major power that is neither a free market nor a democracy. We have both grown dependent on that relationship - the U.S. for cheap goods and cheap mortgages, and China for high employment and regime stability. We now have to adjust the bargain at the heart of that relationship.

L'etat, c'est Dubya

2005-07-18T16:28:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday , the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit is
scheduled to convene in Richmond to consider a question with vast
implications for civil liberties and the fight against terrorism:
whether the president can indefinitely detain, without criminal
charges, a U.S. citizen captured on American soil.

Gosh, I sure fucking hope not.

Here's a pop quiz!

2005-07-13T19:44:00.000-05:00

Who said the following?

When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While
it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that...a seat of
academic, political, and cultural liberalism...lies at the center of
the storm.

The answer? No, no, it wasn't Joseph Goebbels! No, not the Rev. Sun
Myung Moon, either! It was, of course, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Cocker
Spaniel).

Bing, Bang,

2005-07-12T09:47:00.000-05:00

A friend says:
Ever wonder what it looks like to be heading towards a comet at 23,000 miles per hour?

Trying Again

2005-07-09T19:26:00.000-05:00

Really, I had some great stuff to post. I just...didn't. But it's still worth, rather than my prattling on, reading people's firsthand recountings of the London bomings on the Guardian newsblog.

When I Feel Like It

2005-07-06T20:33:00.000-05:00

The cool bloggers do this on Fridays. I think, I don't even know anymore. I got no idea where I am. In any event, here are the 10 next songs playing on my computer right now, exhibiting excellently eclectic taste and all:

Your Latest Trick - Dire Straits
Soft Revolution - Stars
Speed Of Sound - Coldplay
The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill - The Beatles
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - Daft Punk
Little Miss Can't Be Wrong - Spin Doctors
Fistful of Steel - Rage Against the Machine
The Way Things Are - Fiona Apple
Nobody's Fault But My Own - Beck
El Scorcho - Weezer

Also: this.

New Procedures

2005-07-05T19:56:00.000-05:00

As noted recently, most of my writing energy, right now, is going into another venue. That's cool. But I feel bad for neglecting JKDickel, like that nice kid that you just can't seem to hang out with enough, and then one day you realize it's been, like, a year since you've seen them, and you haven't returned like three phone calls, and jeez are you a dick, so I'm going to put at least one piece of content up here every day, starting today. More or less.

So, here's Cory Doctorow's succinct, excellent description of an damn cool new conception of intellectual property - and it's his:

This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That's a license that lets anyone living in a country that's not on the World Bank's list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you'll drop me a line and let me know what you're up to so I can keep up on the book's spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.

Pretty cool.

It's not London, it's NEW London

2005-06-23T10:40:00.000-05:00

As near as I can tell, this Supreme Court decision is horrendous. Here are two paragraphs that capture it pretty well...

The New London neighborhood that will be swept away includes Victorian-era houses and small businesses that in some instances have been owned by several generations of families. Among the New London residents in the case is a couple in their 80s who have lived in the same home for more than 50 years.

City officials envision a commercial development that would attract tourists to the Thames riverfront, complementing an adjoining Pfizer Corp. research center and a proposed Coast Guard museum.

Yes, yes let's tear down Victorian-era homes so that we can "complement" a Pfizer research center, among other amentiies. I guess the ICC is going to happen now.

Pop Quiz

2005-06-09T09:48:00.000-05:00

Who said this?

It seems to me that the shots at the chairman from Democratic elites says more about our party, sadly, than it does about Chairman Dean. Not much of a mystery really why we're the minority party.

Um, clearly that would be Jim Jordan. Right. Jim Jordan, former campaign manager for John Kerry, unceremoniously booted for his near-destruction of Kerry's campaign in the primaries. Maybe you had to be there, but man...it's kinda weird for him to be the one making sense on this.

Just sort of generally, however, this has been pretty revealing on just what a bunch of fucking useless grandstanders and strivers the leadership of the Democratic Party (such as it is) truly are. There's really no debating the fact that the GOP is, as Dean said, mostly a "white, Christian party." Yes. That is the case.

It's a Good Thing

2005-06-06T19:39:00.000-05:00

Longtime readers of this site (both of you) will note my, er, obsession with hemorrhagic fevers. Why so obsessed? Well, I did read The Hot Zone in high school and it scared the poop out of me; mostly though, I just consider hemorrhagic fevers to be a really, really awful way to die, and most/all of humanity dying that way would be very, very suboptimal.

So, it's a pretty damn great day when I can read this:

Scientists trying to develop vaccines against Africa's deadly Marburg and Ebola viruses are reporting an important milestone, a new type of vaccine that prevents the diseases in monkeys. Successfully immunizing monkeys is an essential step toward the goal of producing vaccines for people.
Two new vaccines, one for Marburg and one for Ebola, were 100 percent effective in a study of 12 macaques being published today in the journal Nature Medicine. Monkeys given just one shot of vaccine and later injected with a high dose of virus did not even get sick. Normally, all the animals would be expected to die.

Now, I'm pretty creeped out by vaccines generally, esp. for the real nasties, as the idea of injecting that which I'm trying to prevent seems...odd. And esp. since there's usually a certain failure rate where, indeed, the live virus functions not as a vaccine but just as the disease that's s'posed to be prevented.

But. 100% effective? Granted, it's only 12 macaques, but 100% is a good number.

This, however, is not as good:

Angola, where a Marburg epidemic was first detected in March, is still struggling to contain the disease, which has killed 340 of 408 victims.

Reason

2005-05-31T21:36:00.000-05:00

Richard Dawkins, famed atheist and evolutionary biologist, manages in a Salon interview of a month back to be at once too alarmist and too generous. And also, to top it off, breathtakingly stupid and naive in his analysis of global politics:

...the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don't despair, these things pass.

Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.

As we will cover later, religion for many ceases to function as a child's story even while they are children.

Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.

Oh, Jesus Christ, that is just so fucking stupid. George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden may be pretty similar, when you get right down to it - ne'er-do-well scions of powerful families (the ties between which go way back), but seriously: neither of those guys believes in God, Heaven, the afterlife, any of that. They believe in power, and they understand power fairly well (don't gimmie none of that guff about how stupid Dubya is - yes, he has surrounded himself with [evil] clever people, but he also has a certain kind of intelligence and ability to communicate to and control people that most lack), and they understand that the use of religion as an instrument of power is truly excellent, because you never need to explain yourself.

Dawkins' perfect society?

How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.

Again - what a fucking moron.

Not able to understand this fairly simple, child's-level view of religion (it's a bunch of stories that talk about how you should act - you know, METAPHORS), he's further not able to process the idea that scientists - and specifically, the Smartest Man Ever) might actually be
able to deal with metaphors:

When you meet a scientist who calls himself or herself religious, you'll often find that that's what they mean. You often find that by "religious" they do not mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to the natural world that you've described. Einstein had it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word "God" to describe it, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I have that feeling, you'll find it in the writings of many scientists. It's a kind of quasi-religious feeling.

"Misunderstanding"? Let's think about this. It's not as if atheism didn't exist when Einstein was around - he understood pretty damn well what religion was, what it wasn't, and the costs of religion or any other sort of system of social organization. He was a Jew who fled the Nazis. Trying to pretend that Albert Einstein - the Smartest Man Ever, a man who truly understood the nature of things and of humanity - made a mistake or somesuch, that there could be any "misunderstanding" about what he was talking about when he was talking about God - which he did not infrequently, and always eloquently - is a task of either enormous stupidity, mountainous willed ignorance, or simple prevarication. I'm not sure which Dawkins is guilty of - willed ignorance seems a good bet, though I'm not going to rule our prevarication - but any way you slice it, this is a tremendously misinformed analysis.

Dawkins is not a stupid man. He is, in fact, brilliant, as would seem obvious from his being "one of the world's leading evolutionary biologists," and when he talks about evolutionary biology, he does so with grace and beauty. In fact, he talks about evolutionary biology with much the same tone of reverance that many Great Thinkers have used over the millenia when talking about Revealed Truth, whether that truth is divine or otherwise. He feels that he understands the world in a truly advanced and profound way, and wants to share his vision of the world with others. He is so enthralled by the beauty of the world that he has found, in fact, that it seems he cannot step back to see that he is an evangelist for The Way as surely as Paul, Siddartha or any roadside preacher. "All other faiths are false - they are stupid stories which
contain nothing. Listen to me, for Truth has been Revealed, and it is Glorious! There is no God, only Nature; you will perish and rot forever, give thanks for the time you have! You shall have no God before me, and you shall exult in the privilege - the remarkable good fortune - that
each one of us enjoys through having been being born!"

Okay. That's different how this how?

In Judaism, life is valued above almost all else. The Talmud notes that all people are descended from a single person, thus taking a single life is like destroying an entire world, and saving a single life is like saving an entire world.

One more point, regarding Dawkins' general style of agrumentation. To say he is an asshole, and cares nothing of what others think (which is, of course, yet another mark of a True Believer) does not do justice to his view of those with whom he disagrees. His contempt fairly drips when speaking of religion, and of those who identify as Believers: "delusional" is not a word you use to describe a friend. By painting opponents - those unwilling to acknowledge the Truth, as it has been Revealed to Dawkins via evoluntionary biology - as being, literally,
mentally ill, the victims of a "disease," Dawkins can safely write off all they say. Who listens to the ravings of a lunatic? All opponents safely vanquished to the crazy house.

Thank Freakin' Gawd

2005-05-17T18:56:00.000-05:00

Look, I know there are far more important things going on in the world, but this makes me fucking happy:

NEW YORK -- Fox has removed one of the biggest mysteries of its fall schedule announcement, saying it has renewed the Emmy-winning comedy "Arrested Development" for a third season.

"Arrested Development" is by far the funniest thing on television, and is one of the most profoundly subversive entertainments to come along in a long time. They are willing to break every single taboo, to do anything for a laugh and still are able to keep a core of essential goodness on a show full of bizarre, flawed humans. They're able to do so because they're willing to acknowledge the central terrible and wonderful truth about humans: we are ALL bizarre and flawed. People aren't ever "basically happy" or "good" or "bad" - we're all confronted with a million strange desires and thoughts every day. Some act, for good or bad; some suppress, for good or bad. We all lie to ourselves about these strange desires and thoughts - some lies are useful, some are counter-productive, some are neutral. But everybody has a secret inner life that they are not willing to share entirely with the world. The genius of "Arrested Development" is the way in which its characters turn so much of that inner life out.

I apolologize

2005-05-15T09:32:00.000-05:00

A while back, I quoted approvingly from James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency," as excerpted by Rolling Stone. Subsequent weeks - and this Salon interview - have caused me to re-evaluate my initial take - mostly because Kunstler is, as Salon puts it,

Kunstler displays a kind of macabre wit about the unpleasantness and strife that await us all. Talking to him is like trying to argue with a prophet. His assertions have a neat way of doubling back to anticipate your critiques. If you express doubt about his views, then you may well be among the deluded masses too addicted to your McSUV and McSuburb to accept the reality that lies ahead.

Salon spoke to Kunstler at his home in upstate New York, mindful that in the future such an hour-long, cross-country telephone call, undertaken so casually, could be a remote luxury, a quaint remnant of a bygone era rich in the splendors of oil.

In other words, he is a dangerous fanatic. Also, he doesn't really have that good a handle on what he's talking about - he is not a climatologist or geologist or policy expert but, sigh, a novelist. With a particular agenda, and book, to promote.

One of the particular howlers is this:

The truth is that no combination of alternative fuels or so-called renewables will allow us to run the U.S.A. -- or even a substantial fraction of it -- the way that we're running it now.

Uggghh. Saying something like this means you're either being willfully misleading, or simply have no idea what you're talking about. Listen - things are not always going to be as they are. But the simple fact of the matter is that, using technologies that wouldn't even cost very much, the United States could today cut its energy usage by 20, 30, 40% without even starting to replace current fossil fuels with alternatives. Yes, oil will one day run out. But if our electrical grid is all nuclear, wind, solar, hyrdo, marginally more people use public transit, and all our cars are either electrics plugged into the grid or running diesel-hybrid engines that get 120 mpg, the current supply of oil will last a long, long, long time.

Okay, moving on, just to discredit this joker further:

What will be the first signs of the long emergency?

We're already seeing them. The two clearest signs are serious geopolitical friction and the volatility in the oil markets. A third one, which hasn't quite gotten traction, will be disruptions in the financial markets. But that could happen at any moment.

Right. Global geopolitical instability is because of "The Long Emergency," and not because oh, I don't know, maybe global geopolitical instability has existed throughout all of human history? Sheesh.

Is your basic critique of renewable energy that wind, solar and biomass all depend, to some extent, on fossil fuels?
That's one critique. I'm not trying to militate against them. We are going to use them. But we're not going to run the interstate highways and Disney World on them. Suburbia is not going to run on biodiesel. The easy-motoring tourist industry is not going to run on biodiesel, wind power and solar fuel.

Why not? Because he says so, duh. No need for anything like, y'know, evidence that this is what will happen.

If there is such a massive threat to the American way of life, why are our government and civic institutions unable to foresee it and make any changes to address it?

You will now be enlightened: The dirty secret of the American economy for more than a decade now is that it is largely based on the continued creation of suburban sprawl and all its accessories and furnishings. And if you remove that from our economy there isn't a whole lot left besides hair cutting, Colonel Sanders' chicken, and open-heart surgery.

Anyone who says, "You will now be enlightened" is just a fucking asshole.

What are the benefits?

I think that we will return to many social relations and social enactments that we lost and that were of great value to us, such as working closely with other people on things that really matter to us.

Like farming, so we can eat?

I'm not saying everybody is going to be a farmer. In the book, I think that I went to great pains to say that we were going to have to reconstruct whole networks of local economic relations and interdependences.

As opposed to the globalized situation we have now?

Yeah. People are working for large entities that they don't care about and that don't care about them. I think that people will be working on things that will tend to be more meaningful, that will tend to have meaning for their neighbors and the places that they live.

One of the great tragedies of the Wal-Mart fiasco has been the destruction of the social and economic roles of businesses in communities. Those roles were pretty complex and created deep webs of culture that we've allowed to be systematically dismantled and destroyed. We're going to get some of them back.

I also think we will cease to be a nation of TV zombies who are merely entertaining ourselves to avoid being bored.

Oh, puhleeze. Look, the fact of the matter is that yes, corporations do control a lot of how life happens in this country today. And they aren't stupid - they see what's coming down the line. The reason we don't have super-efficient cars, or super-efficient electrical devices, is not because we can't but because the very marginal impact on profits. Once our energy consumption becomes a real problem, expect a large, quick switch. Why? Because corporations have a pretty damned powerful self-preservation motive. They need a consumer society to keep humming along, and buying stuff, for their own survival. So right now, corporations tell us that SUVs are cool, and get rich building cheap SUVs. When that's no longer tenable, they start telling us that other stuff is cool, and we do that, and things hum along not exactly as they are not, but not hugely dissimilarly.

Kunstler's points about patterns of development, which I didn't excerpt, are not totally off the mark - esp. in the cases of the Southwest and Las Vegas, there just won't be water for that much longer. But that's different from what he's saying - there is no reason at all that the Southwest and Las Vegas couldn't replace a significant part of their electricity consumption, tomorrow, for relatively small cost, with solar. Really, pretty feasible.

What really tears his whole argument down is this last part, about finding "greater meaning." This is a guy who, for whatever reasons (and there are many possibilities), just hates the suburbs, thinks they're soulless, etc., and wants a new, more enlightened, meaningful society. So he dreams up a way for it to happen, not noticing all the ways that that might not happen. That's a person you need to watch out for - someone who comes up with a solution or preferred outcome first, and then thinks about a way to get there. Like, say, these guys.

Re-assessment

2005-05-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I get into the bad habit of thinking I know things without actually knowing them. Such has been the case until recently with the writing of Neal Pollock, who I had unfairly placed in the same stable as Dave "A Silly, Irrelevant Man in a Serious Time" Eggers. Pollock's reflections on Dave Chapelle's breakdown are stunningly eloquent, after a fashion:

Still, this is different than the usual glee felt when, say, Tara Reid's boob flops out of her dress or when Lindsay Lohan goes on some ridiculous slutbag spree. There's a special joy in watching the reaper scythe of fate swoop down on the talentless and sleazy. With Dave Chappelle, it's different. Not only is he uniquely talented, he's also honest about his failings. And it's impossible now not to assume that his parodic portrayals of mentally disturbed loners are so dead accurate because he obviously knows the subject all too well.
...
Hipsters who made fun of the pope and Terri Schiavo spun no mockery about [Mitch] Hedberg, because his death, unlike those others, actually made them sad. Like them, he was supposed to be a cool, dispassionate observer of life's grand carnival. He died how they'd like to in their dreams, as did Hunter Thompson.
There's something wrong in a culture when it's considered cool to wake up at dusk, do a lot of drugs, and stick a rifle in your mouth while your son is home. When people said, "It's not like you couldn't see it coming," that made me very sad, not because we could have done something to stop Thompson's suicide because, of course, we couldn't have, but because we found it entertaining, or even important. We're making a large mistake if we think that life is art, or even bleakly funny, when it reaches such a place. Because it's not art. It's just darkness.

He is very, very right. There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with our culture, a necrosis that reaches not just through the awful sexual perversions of the Republican Party but into all of our souls, "even" those of us who are supposed to be above it all. Crazy fucking monkeys, we is.

Presswhores

2005-05-12T11:31:00.000-05:00

From a fantastic interview with the fantastic Matt Taibbi:

At the time of "The Boys on the Bus," that kind of reporting hadn't been done before: Nobody was worried about what Crouse was going to write, so they had their guard down. The modern press corps is a lot of company men, and I think back then there were more, well, unwieldy individuals. You would never have had a phenomenon like McGovern's Zoo Plane on today's campaign -- that's what they called the plane they put the press on. Legendary wild parties went on in there, drugs, sex acts. I would doubt that so much as one sex act occurred during the entire Kerry campaign.

Not even a hand job?

Well, maybe a hand job. I don't know. It certainly wasn't a fun gig.
...
There used to be different kinds of people who were journalists. There were real cynics, there were drunks, there were hardened smokers, and now there's this glamour and glow that goes along with being a part of the press corps. I guess what I'm trying to do is take away some of that glow and make it clear it's not quite as cool as they make it out to be. I don't know if that has an effect or not, but that's sort of the strategy.

Having driven those whiny hacks around much of Iowa, I can back him up on that. Not fun people, mostly.

Funny (Part II)

2005-05-09T19:57:00.000-05:00

While I have generally mixed feelings on The Huffington Post (i.e., the blog for famous people) generally, I can't argue with results - specifically, the genius that is Larry David:

I know this may not sound politically correct, but as someone who has abused and tormented employees and underlings for years, I am dismayed by all of this yammering directed at John Bolton. Let's face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it’s like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.

"You stupid ignoramus," I screamed, doing all I could to restrain myself from tossing the luke-warm liquid in her face. “There's too much freaking (I didn’t say freaking) milk in here! What the freak is wrong with you?!”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she stammered. Like sorry’s going to fix everything. I’m not interested in sorry. Sorry doesn’t cut it with me.

“Look, you idiot,” I continued, “I wouldn’t mind so much if you gave me too little milk. Little can be fixed. We can add to little.”

“Shall I get you another cup?”

“No, I’ll suck on my thumb. Yes, get me another cup, you douche bag! And chew on this -- it’s going to cost you a dollar!”

Ha! That is funny!

Funny

2005-05-09T08:35:00.000-05:00

Joel nails it:

Also in the new Vanity Fair: Michael Wolff has a piece titled, "No Jokes, Please, We're Liberal," an attempt to discover the source of an epidemic of humorlessness in the liberal media.
...
The one minor flaw in his argument is that it's completely false.

In an era of bizarre Doublespeak, this may, in fact, be the most bizarre assertion yet. Sure, "War is Peace" and "Love is Hate" are doozies. But "Liberals aren't funny"? I know we're post-reality and all, but that's just a fridge too far for me.

Mainstreaming

2005-05-04T08:39:00.000-05:00

A quick glance at the headline presaged serious trouble: "N.Y. to D.C. On the Quirky Express." They byline - "By Marc Fisher" - promised no favors, either. A man barely equipped to deal - typically in a facile, reductive way - with local politics, devoting his B1 column inches to a genuinely interesting cultural/transportational phenomenon (the Chinatown bus[es])? When presented with a free WaPo at the coffeeshop this morning, I chose instead to read the funnies (a choice, it should be noted, that I generally do make, given as they are one of the consistently best sections of the WaPo and that the WaPo has - despite the atrocities that are "Garfield," "Baldo," "Mutts," etc. - one of the best and most extensive comix sections, anywhere). But I knew that, gadfly that I am, I would eventually force myself to trudge through Fisher's predictably off-the-mark observations.

I knew the Chinatown bus was not going to be like the Delta Shuttle when a woolly old dog made his way down the narrow aisle. A buzz of concern swept through the bus, leaving midtown Manhattan momentarily for the four-hour trip to the District.

It is never a good sign when a writer begins a commentary with a knowing lie. In this case, the writer and the reader are both aware that the only reason the middle-aged, upper-middle-class Fisher is riding a Chinatown bus is to use it as fodder for a column. In point of fact, he "knew that the Chinatown bus was not going to be like the Delta Shuttle" long before "a wooly old dog made his way down the narrow aisle."

Not content to baldly lie simply in the service of a lead, Fisher continues with yet another untruth:

The driver came on the PA system: "Ladies and gentlemen, do not be alarmed. That is my dog, Spot. He is the bus dog. We go back a long way. Spot keeps me sane. When I am sad and lonely, he talks to me, telepathically. We are one. Thank you."

Okaaay. I considered asking for my $20 back, but the silent Hasidic man collecting the fares seemed unfazed, and no other passengers budged, so I settled in for the cheapest ride between Washington and New York.

Yes, this is a joke (albeit a bad one), but just the same it is a blatant and obvious lie. Fisher did not "[consider] asking for [his] $20 back"; it was not only when "the silent Hasidic man collecting the fares seemed unfazed, and no other passengers budged" that he "settled in for the cheapest ride between Washington and New York." To recount - three paragraphs so far, and two knowing untruths, both concerning the essential nature of the column. The only reason that he was on this bus was because he knew it would be fodder for a column, and that was why he was going to ride this bus. Throwing in a "Friends"-esque humor device ("Okaaay.") serves only to further insult the reader; indeed, this can count as yet another knowing untruth. Its use in the carries the connotation of it being Fisher's internal thought processes at that time; in fact, his internal thought at that time was likely more along the lines of, "Oh, boy! This'll be great for the column I'm writing about this wacky bus!"

Fisher goes on to recount a brief history of the Chinatown buses and Greyhound's indignant unease at their success, but as far as actual reporting goes, he seems inclined to sit in his seat and sketch the drivers' characters. He says that the bus riders' languages of choice "seem to be Russian, German and Chinese," not bothering with anything so daring as actually talking to them (or anyone else, for that matter - his recounting of Greyhound's suing the Chinatown buses is sourced from a Wall Street Journal article).

It's not news that Marc Fisher is an out-of-touch hack, or that the Washington Post proves, time and again, that its editor-class is not merely filled with out-of-touch hacks but also are poor judges of who ought to write a given story (for instance: any one of a number of the WaPo's talented Magazine staff writers [Stuever, Achenbach, Weingarten] could have written a far superior rumination on the same subject). But just because neither are news doesn't mean they ought not be pointed out.

File Under "Capitalism, Bizarre Outcomes Associated With"

2005-04-30T13:45:00.000-05:00

What do you mean the Catholic Church isn't isn't secretly a cult of cute animism?

BRENHAM, Tex. - If they only had an attraction, the sisters at the Monastery of St. Clare concluded, they could solve their two longstanding problems. For one, they had to stay cloistered while still somehow spreading the word. Secondly, although the contemplative life is the center of their existence, it does not cover the bills.
"We don't get paid to pray," said Sister Angela Chandler, 48, soft-spoken but kinetic.

The solution to both problems came two decades ago in the form of horses the size of large dogs. Today, the nuns have become so successful in their horse-breeding enterprise that their home is known as the Monastery of Miniature Horses.

Cute, but not as cute as miniature goats. Or miniature goats with cats.

All a-twitter

2005-04-28T21:33:00.000-05:00

And rightly so - as Wolcott says, there's word of "something longed for, searched for, and dreamed of, a flicker of a former world feared lost forever. The Lord God Holy Grail Elvis of Little Peckers." The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. I'm not claiming any special sort of communion with the natural world, any higher spiritual consciousness when I say this - but it's going to be a little bit difficult for non-birders to understand why this next passage puts a lump in my throat and a shit-eating grin on my face:

Gene Sparling, the amateur naturalist who made the sighting that got the experts convinced the birds had survived, was canoeing in a remote, bug- and snake-infested area. "It was a spiritual experience," he said.
He posted his sighting on the Internet and caught the interest of Tim Gallagher, of Cornell University's Lab of Ornithology and his friend Bobby Harrison, a college professor and keen bird-watcher .

Sparling took them to where he saw the bird and one almost immediately flew toward them. "We almost fell out of the canoe," Gallagher said.

I was going to say, "Try to imagine...", but it doesn't do. There is nothing to imagine for this, a thing itself more or less beyond imagination - and then he goes back to where he saw it and "one almost immediately flew toward them"!!!

Birders are an odd lot, to be sure, but central to the identity of every birder is this great love, this overwhelming passion and humility and awe at the natural world, at these wonderful, beautiful, impossible flying things. Birders were the first environmentalists, and remain the front-line chroniclers of the direct effects of climate change, deforestation, habitat destruction: they see, or rather don't see, the ever-decreasing populations of songbirds, and it breaks their (and yes, my) big ol' hearts.

Grand Old Man Roger Tory Peterson was one of the last to see what was thought to be the last Ivory-Billed, in 1942; he'd written it off as extinct a decade earlier in his first "Birds of North America," but he did get the chance to see the grand bird:

"Hardly had we gone a hundred yards when a startling new sound came from our right--an indescribable tooting note, musical in a staccato sort of way. For a moment it did not click, but then I knew--it was the ivory bill! ... Breathlessly we stalked the insistent toots, stepping carefully, stealthily, so that no twig would crack. With our hearts pounding we tried to keep cool, hardly daring to believe that this was it--that this was what we had come fifteen hundred miles to see. ... Straining our eyes, we discovered the first bird, half hidden by the leafage, and in a moment it leaped upward into the full sunlight. This was no puny Pileated [woodpecker]; this was a whacking big bird, with great white patches on its wings and a gleaming white bill."

The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was thought to be one of the early casualties of habitat destruction, and birders were around to see it disappear in real time, a grand impossibility of a bird, dwarfing even the Jurassic-inspired Pileated, flying as no other woodpecker does, a huge white beak, shyly thwomp-ing away at rotted old hardwoods in Southern forests, till there were none more to thwomp. A beautiful, grand bird, rumored to still live in tiny numbers in Cuba, but one that all birders living today could safely assume would never enter their life list. A reminder of things lost, and a signal of what's to come - would our grandchildren never hear a Hermit Thrush?

But no! Hope survives! There are more Ivory-Billed Woodpeckers - for surely, since the last was sighted in 1947, there are plural woodpeckers - and perhaps not all is lost, and perhaps there is the chance for good in this world.

A man went out into the world and saw something that could not be believed. He returned, and the thing that could not be believed flew right towards him. It did not do so to announce its presence; did not do so to prove wrong all who said it was no longer. It flew right towards him because it is a bird, and flying is the thing birds do, bless them. And bless us, too - we get to watch them.

Will I go to see it, make a pilgrimage? No, I don't think I will. Perhaps some years from now, if I find myself in a swamp in Texarkana, I'll point my car towards this particular swamp, but I don't see that happening. I wouldn't want to mob the creatures; wouldn't want to be a thousand paparazzi outside their old rotting oak. Merely knowing they're there is enough, and it fills my heart with joy.

The Art of Not Seeing

2005-04-26T16:17:00.000-05:00

I have a complicated relationship with Joel Achenbach. On the one hand, I think he is one of the finest science journalists working, bringing amazing subjects to life in understandable terms. On the other hand, I have found him woefully guilty – in his writing on the subject in the WaPo, and also in e-mail exchanges – of the worst kind of false equivalency "one-the-one-hand"ism and of, per Marshall via Somerby, a "Washington right-leaning dinner-party centrism." Certainly he is nowhere near as egregious as, say, Richard Cohen (may he be afflicted with horrible foot fungus), but it is nonetheless disappointing given that Achenbach is such a talented writer.

But…well, on his blog yesterday (yes, he has a blog now), he reprinted excerpts from a speech he gave at Georgetown's journalism school. I can't quite stress how important and revealing this one flippant quote is:

3. You can get to know total strangers, learn all about them, but after the story runs you don't have to speak to them ever again. You can pretend not to recognize them on the street.

This is the modus operandi of professional journalism today, written by a fabulously talented scribe for one of the world's most influential newspapers, and said to tomorrow's elite journalists, who he had also been charged with instructing. And that mode of operation is lying. You lie to people, pretend to be their friend, pretend to understand what they're saying, pretend to be on their side, to be campaigning to right the wrongs in their life, their pain – and then after deadline, they're a fucking peasant, and you're on to the next rube (interviewee and reader).

This is a lesson I was first taught while working on Howard Dean's campaign in Iowa, where I was strictly forbidden from talking to reporters. We were taught that they would pretend to be our friends, in order better to pluck out juicy quotes that would hopefully sink Dean's campaign. As it turned out, the paranoia was justified – the media really did want to destroy Dean's campaign, and used every little trick they could to do it.

But it wasn't limited just to Iowa, just to the campaign, just to political reporting. This is elite journalism today – phonies, phonies who have to pretend to understand normal people, while instead merely using them as props to justify whatever storyline they or their editors are pursuing.

I don't mean to beat up on Joel overly – he is, as I noted, an excellent reporter, comes from humble roots and has worked his butt off to get where he is today. There are still many excellent reporters and writers at both the WaPo and NYT (though they seem to be disproportionately assigned away from the more important beats and stories). All too many, however – esp. the up-and-comers – are phakin' phonies, Harvard-educated twits looking out for their own careers. Time was, a journalist had worked years in the business by the time their words appeared in print – delivering papers, working the mailroom, laying type, editing copy, and only then getting a crappy beat for a couple of years, never earning in all their years more than enough to cover rent, whiskey, bad suits and the cigars that go so well with both. Now, kids my age are pulling down six figures filing on presidential campaigns, kids who wouldn't know a real union job from an Elks' Lodge. At this nation's papers of record, we've got a press corps more interested in the furthering of their own careers than truth; more interested in dinner-party invites than sticking up for the little guy. Who'd laugh if you said that journalism ought to be about sticking up for the little guy.

"You can pretend not to recognize them on the street."

Pop Cultural/Cognitive Dissonance

2005-04-24T09:48:00.000-05:00

The title of Thomas Boswell's column this morning in the WaPo - Thomas Boswell, been writing for the Post for 30+ years, is my parents' age, etc. - "No Alarms and No Surprises."

Look, I understand that writers don't do their own headlines (to my own disappointment, else we'd have actually published the greatest headline ever, "Field Hockey Goes Down but not Out"), and that the writer of the headline itself was probably someone who's been waiting for years to pin a Radiohead lyric onto a sports story (I would be, at any rate) - but it's still weird.

In other news, it looks like Marburg might finally be under control:

The Marburg virus outbreak in Angola is being brought under control, the U.N. health agency indicated Saturday.

The agency reports the number of new cases has dropped to 15 from 35 per week during the height of the outbreak.

The Marburg virus, which is closely related to the Ebola virus has caused hemorrhagic fever in 266 people and killed 244 of them since March.

Truer Words...

2005-04-21T17:44:00.000-05:00

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), on "All Things Considered" this evening:

"The hardest thing up here [on Capitol Hill] is keeping in touch with reality."

Yes, that would be Tom "The Craziest Senator" Coburn. How crazy? This crazy:

Coburn says a campaign worker from Coalgate told him that "lesbianism is so rampant in some of the schools in southeast Oklahoma that they'll only let one girl go to the bathroom. Now think about it. Think about that issue. How is it that that's happened to us?"

Yes. Think about that.
It is hard to keep touch with reality.

And again...

2005-04-19T08:51:00.000-05:00

a) it's been nice out
b) I've had "real" work to do
c) I've been out of town a little

But really - it's all pretty loop-y, isn't it? I could've written two weeks ago that Republicans are corrupt; that Marburg, a ridiculously scary hemhorragic fever, continues to rage unabated in Angola (237 dead, now - at least); that a dangerous psychopath will most likely ascend to represent the United States in yet another way; etc., etc. ad infinitum. And that nobody's really paying attention; that the "real news" is that athletes chea t and there isn't another pope yet.

And anyhow - there's wit out there greater than mine. On Ann Coulter, Wolcott:

She is the pinup pundit of White Prerogative, her arrogant vanity perfect for a country and a media-political culture that refuse to recognize its postindustrial decline and decay. A country that still thinks it can whip the world into obeying its will.

On John Bolton, the Rude Pundit:

Bolton is a lying sack of shit, a scumbag whose career has been made comforting politically powerful conservatives, a provocateur whose ego knows no bounds, an asshole beyond any human's reasonable comprehension of assholishness. And, of course, that means he is the perfect man to represent George Bush's United States at the U.N.

And again:

But, in the last week or so, so much has come out about Bolton, after his bizarro confirmation hearing where he had to promise over and over that, no, really, really, he loved the U.N. and didn't want the building blown up and Kofi Annan forced to drink barrels of Iraqi oil. It was a fuckin' disgrace: it's like hiring a gay man to fuck your wife and he has to tell you over and over, no, he really, really loves to eat pussy. No, look, c'mon, he's fucked a woman or two in his life, not just men. Sure, it might be fun to watch the disaster that that fuck session would be, but ultimately everyone's gonna end up unfulfilled. And why? Because you were a stupid shithead in hiring a gay guy to fuck your wife.

And Bolton promises to be the kind of guy who stands in the corner and jacks off while his partner weeps in bed, screamin', "Look at my throbbing, massive cock. You don't get any of it. It's all for me, bitch," smackin' that meat like it's a Frenchman's ass. Then, 'cause he's, you know, batshit insane, Bolton would howl as he came on your curtains, howl and dance in triumph that he jacked off once again.

So now we know Bolton bullied underlings by screaming at them. A "serial abuser," Carl Ford, Jr. called him, and he wasn't talking about Bolton's fury that Cap'n Crunch has a more lustrous moustache. We know that Bolton prevented Colin Powell from receiving full information about strategies that concerned U.S. relations with Iran, outright lying to Richard Armitage when asked a direct question about one piece of info. We know that, according to a letter posted at Kos, Bolton went completely fucked-in-the-head-where's-the-tranq-gun insane on a USAID subcontractor in Moscow: "Mr. Bolton proceeded to chase me through the halls of a Russian hotel -- throwing things at me, shoving threatening letters under my door and, generally, behaving like a madman . . . John Bolton put me through hell -- and he did everything he could to intimidate, malign and threaten not just me, but anybody unwilling to go along with his version of events. His behavior back in 1994 wasn't just unforgivable, it was pathological." And we're not even gettin' into his role in stopping the recount in Florida in 2000.

These are days where profanity is just, for the world is profane.

On hope, Jeff:

Rather than bleeding hearts, we need big hearts. Heavy, swollen hearts, that just can't bear anymore. And because they can drive us to action, rather than to the dead end of cheap sentiment, hearts like those can become weapons.

Surprise! - not good news

2005-04-07T08:35:00.000-05:00

This is really, really not good:

A dangerous germ easily mistaken for an innocuous one has become alarmingly common around the United States, raising concern that seemingly minor boils, pimples and abscesses could increasingly become disfiguring or even life-threatening, researchers reported yesterday.

Because the microbe has become invulnerable to the most commonly used antibiotics, the discovery means doctors should now routinely test all skin infections to identify patients who need urgent treatment with one of the handful of drugs still capable of killing the aggressive pathogen, experts said.
...

"This is just another sign that, unfortunately, the bugs are winning," said Loren G. Miller of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, the lead author of a companion paper describing 14 cases of people stricken by "flesh-eating" cases of the infection.

...

The microbe is a strain of the ubiquitous bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, which usually causes well-known "staph" infections that are easily treated with common antibiotics in the penicillin family, such as methicillin and amoxicillin.

In recent years, small outbreaks of infections with a strain that is impervious to those antibiotics have been reported among athletes, inmates, children and other groups, but otherwise resistant staph strains had been almost exclusively limited to hospitals.

"We're used to resistant staph in the hospital as a problem among patients with heart failure, liver failure, cancer or other health problems," said David N. Gilbert of the Oregon Health & Science University. "It's started attacking normal healthy people, causing serious, often fatal illness."

The germ, which is spread by casual contact, produces potent toxins that kill disease-fighting white blood cells. That rapidly turns minor rug burns, cuts and other skin infections into serious health problems, apparently including "necrotizing" abscesses that eat away tissue. Previously, such cases were thought to be caused only by strep bacteria.

"This has now become a significant problem in this country," said Donald M. Poretz, an infectious-disease expert at Georgetown University who serves as president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. "We see dozens of these cases in our offices."

The resistant strain probably emerged because of the overuse of antibiotics. Public health officials have become increasingly concerned about this trend, especially because little work is underway to develop a new generation of antibiotics.

Experts are also concerned that the shrinking number of effective antibiotics may also be slowly losing their power.

"What people are concerned about is that we'll be losing these drugs one by one until we don't have any effective ones left," said Walter E. Stamm, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America.

Right. So, don't get sick.
And, p.s., this is still happening:

International health workers in Angola say they are still struggling to end an outbreak of the Marburg virus, which has killed 156 people in the southern African nation.

Elevator - Going Down

2005-04-06T10:05:00.000-05:00

From James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency via RS:

Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. It has a tragic destiny. The psychology of previous investment suggests that we will defend our drive-in utopia long after it has become a terrible liability.
...
The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and re-scale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade the products of our work. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class.
...
The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive far into the Long Emergency. Wal-Mart's "warehouse on wheels" won't be such a bargain in a non-cheap-oil economy. The national chain stores' 12,000-mile manufacturing supply lines could easily be interrupted by military contests over oil and by internal conflict in the nations that have been supplying us with ultra-cheap manufactured goods, because they, too, will be struggling with similar issues of energy famine and all the disorders that go with it.
...
Some regions of the country will do better than others in the Long Emergency. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late twentieth century. I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either, for different reasons. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.
The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

This is, more or less, what I've been thinking about for a while. This is the "science-fiction" future; and this is our future. It is the vision of William Gibson's Sprawl America, a tiny minority of super-rich with high technology, the vast majority living in the rotting of former suburbia and abandoned interior. It is Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon, where "things got local," where you can't quite remember or imagine how it really once was, or how it really is. It's Margaret Atwood's increasingly vicious and unstable pleeblands from Oryx and Crake; it's Orwell's 1984 of ever-decreasing production, products, knowledge and freedom, where our hope lies in the proles, and there's no hope to speak of.

There is still a way out of this Long Emergency - there is a way to control the volume level ourselves, to dial down consumption, to re-align our expectations. But I don't know if we can all do it - and there's gonna be a lot of hurt for those who can't.

It's important not only to see the future for what it is, what it might be, what it will be - but to stick together, to know these things together. At the end of The Return of the King, with all creation exploding around them, Frodo turns to Sam and says, "I'm glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things." They survived, the world exploding around them, and so will we.

Not Really a Shock

2005-03-31T17:37:00.000-05:00

to anyone who's talked with me in the last two months, but I've been hanging out in increasingly paranoid parts of the web. I think I've developed reasonably good bullshit filters, but maybe not. Regardless, there is some pretty cool shi t:

There's one problem with hybrid vehicles: They require internal combustion engines. This fact doesn't go unnoticed by many of the people who purchase hybrid vehicles. Since major auto companies refuse to manufacture electric vehicles, individuals are trying to restore and improve the capabilities of the intentionally crippled hybrids that are available to us.

The work done by calcars.org and Energy CS is proof (to me) that the inexcusable state of vehicle efficiency is pre-meditated, on-purpose, by-design and done-with-forethought and malice.

How else do you explain the fact that a few people with cordless tools and off the shelf batteries increased the mileage of a 2004 Toyota Hybrid vehicle up to 180MPG? Yes, they plug the thing into grid power to top off the batteries.
...
From the Christian Science Monitor:

"One guy I know plugs his Honda hybrid into a windmill for power," Kroushl says. "It costs him practically nothing to drive."

Just...ridiculous.

Achenfunny

2005-03-31T12:36:00.000-05:00

Joel makes me laugh:

Not long ago, I got an e-mail from a humorless reader that ended with a message for me and my children: "Shame on them -- and shame on you." Never mind the context: This person simply loved reprimanding me, and her final burst of reproach -- the double use of "shame" -- gave her a climactic jolt of joy. I bet you anything that when she and her husband got together that night she attacked him like a wolverine.

Proper use of similes. Yes.

Exsqueeze me? Baking powder?

2005-03-28T08:06:00.000-05:00

Rob Walker, scribe of consumer identity, with a rather remarkable catch:

Klein-Becker describes itself as a maker of ''weight-control and life-enhancement products.'' As it happens, the Federal Trade Commission suggested that the company was making misleading marketing claims about some of its weight-loss products, including one called Anorex.

Um...that ain't right.