Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
Commenting Rules: Only comments that are courteous and respectful of other commenters will be allowed. Period. You must register to post; this takes about thirty seconds, and you need give no information other than a name/handle you will be known by; just stick gibberish into the line about creating a blog, and forget about it; you'll be done in under 30 seconds.
Also: posting a spam-type URL will be grounds for deletion. Comments on posts over two months old are now closed.
I'm underemployed (historically particularly as an editor in book and magazine publishing), recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring severe clinical depression. See here for a major crisis. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. This is a previous update on my situation & this -- and this from December 19th, 2005 update.
If you like my blog, and would like to help keep me find and stay in a new place long enough to get my disability claim approved, and maybe even afford food and prescriptions --
you are welcome to do so via the PayPal button. In return: free blog! Thank you muchly muchly. Only you can help! (I'll just handle preventing forest fires while you're busy for a moment.) So. LATEST UPDATES here and here.
New Option! Show your support by subscribing for $5/mo.! Free koala bear included! They're so cute!
Additional new options! $25/month Supporter subscription!
$50/month Patron subscription!
"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 606
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
THE REAL POWER OF SUPERHEROS: Virginia Postrel has an excellent entry from June 25th on Gerard Jones' Killing Monsters. She quotes Jones from his Mother Jones piece, "Violent Media is Good for Kids":
Across generations, genders, and ethnicities I kept seeing the same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by immersing themselves in violent stories. People integrating the scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into fuller senses of selfhood through fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction.
Postrel concludes:
I highly recommend Killing Monsters, both for its psychological and literary insights and for Jones's many disturbing stories of how powerful adults punish children's imaginative play.
It's amazing the lengths adults will go to to do this, I note.
This quote's for you, Meryl:
At 13 I was alone and afraid. Taught by my well-meaning, progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was something to be overcome and cooperation was always better than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona. Placed in a small, experimental school that was wrong for me, afraid to join my peers in their bumptious rush into adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s, built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture.
You scored 9 out of a possible 10 Total Recall. Frankly this is a little freakish. PKD's world is so fiendishly complicated that surely only the man himself knows his way around it as well as this. Either that or you're part of Richard Nixon's evil matrix and have somehow managed to download Dick's psyche via the bug in his cat litter tray. Spooky.
I thought it was pretty simple, actually. An awful lot of people know more about Dick than I do.
IF ONLY MARTY FELDMAN WERE STILL ALIVE: No kidding.
LONDON - British theater company says it doesn't want to offend hunchbacks so it's changing the title of its adaptation of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame."
The producer says she'll call the play "The Bellringer of Notre Dame," because she doesn't want to "reinforce any stereotypes" about Quasimodo's disability.
In an exclusive interview, Spielberg explains he has tried numerous times to persuade director George Lucas to let him in on the fun.
"I've asked him!" Spielberg says. "He won't let me do one."
The discussion between Spielberg and Lucas on this issue goes way back.
"I wanted to do one 15 years ago," Spielberg says, "and he didn't want me to do it. I understand why - 'Star Wars' is George's baby. George is my best friend and I believe I am his, but we are all competitive."
Spielberg says he doesn't blame Lucas.
"It's his cottage industry and it's his fingerprints. He knows I've got 'Jurassic Park' and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.' But George has 'Star Wars' and I don't think he feels inclined to share any of it with me."
Now you can dress Elvis and make him talk - on a new Web site launched by Graceland.
To prepare for the release of the "Elvis 30 Number One Hits" collection in September, Graceland has launched a new site at http://www.elvisnumberones.com.
On the site, users can dress up a virtual Elvis in a number of outfits, including a Hawaiian shirt and an Army uniform, and embellish it with Elvis sunglasses, a lei, a guitar and other accessories.
Then choose a phrase and Elvis will talk from archival interview tapes. The site also has pages for each No. 1 hit that carry details about each song.
It even allows visitors to view pages according to date, era or how Elvis influenced the project.
Still to come: viewing pages according to what drugs Elvis was on.
According to the site, in 1971 Elvis's profession became "style setter."
OBBUFFY: Lengthy account of the panel at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences on "Behind the Scenes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer" with Joss Whedon, Marti Noxon, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon , James Marsters. Michelle Trachtenberg, the Buffy Director of Photography, and the Buffy Production Designer. Many spoilers for Season Six, a few for Season 7.
Joss joked 'Yeah, next season we're going to advertise it as: Watch Buffy this season! Not every character wants to die!'
[...]
One of the biggest laughs was when he was asked if we'd see the Doublemeat Palace again. The response was 'not likely'. Apparently, Joss said, while this season was the most graphic and dark ever with lots of sex scenes, the only episode to actually lose advertisers was Doublemeat Palace... because they were making fun of fast food! It was not so gently suggested that he not do that again!
[...]
Joss said that the geek trio were the ones closest to the writers' true voices and that the conversations the trio had were pretty much exactly the conversations the writers were having during the story breaks and then would stop to say 'oh, we should get back to the story, now'.
YIKES: I've skipped on posting all the other baby-bomber pictures, because pretty much every political blog posted them; ditto the interview-with-the-Saudi-3-year-old-who-hates-Jews. But this one makes me wonder when the Palestinians will hit on the idea of baby-bomber trading cards:
...your best online source for everything EVIL. If you are a supervillain, mad scientist, warlord, dictator, or despot, then this is the place for you.
Most days, things are back to normal, but you never know when it's going to hit you again. Today it did. Unexpectedly.
This afternoon I went for a drink with a friend, who had to cover Sept. 11 close to ground zero, who is about to be transferred to another city. On our third margarita, she started to cry. And I started to cry. We're both pretty tough chicks. But the tears were this leftover fear, sadness, regret and whatever more from the people we knew who died in September and how our lives have changed and how our city has changed since then.
And I do mean "bloody." It's minimal, but at least and at last Bush has taken a small action.
President Bush told his key allies today that the United States would cut off aid to the Palestinians if they failed to embrace the kind of changes he demanded on Monday.
He also stepped up his pressure for the removal of Yasir Arafat by warning that "we won't be putting money into a society" dominated by corrupt leadership that helps to finance terrorists.
The Precrime unit is a storytelling conceit, a wild idea, that Dick and Spielberg make temporarily believable. It's not really plausible, but you don't care. We do believe the highly-interactive computer system, and those robot spiders, and all the other surface nuances of this future world, borrowed not only from Dick but many other science fiction writers, Gibson and Sterling not least among them.
SUBTEXT BECOMES TEXT: Andy Sawyer, well-known British SF critic and administrator of the SF Foundation, writes on why Buffy, The Vampire Slayer is as popular with academic fans as non, and how much there is to find in Buffy.
It’s so referential in fact, that you suspect virtually any utterance.
GOP Makes Gains With Jewish Voters Democrats Worry Party Critics of Israel Are Costing Support
[...]
The issue of Democratic conflicts over Israel policy took center stage last month, when the House voted 352 to 21, with 29 members voting "present," for a pro-Israel resolution sponsored by Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.). Many of those voting "present" were expressing their unwillingness to support a resolution that strongly endorsed Israel while condemning "the ongoing support and coordination of terror by Yasser Arafat and other members of the Palestinian leadership."
Of the 50 "no" and "present" votes, 44 were cast by Democrats and six by Republicans. More significantly, five of the most senior Democrats voted against the resolution, including Democratic whip David E. Bonior (Mich.), and four members in line to become committee chairmen if Democrats win back the House: David R. Obey (Wis.), John D. Dingell (Mich.), George Miller (Calif.) and John Conyers Jr. (Mich.).
[...]
The vote also forced to the surface long-standing tensions between the Jewish and black communities. Of the 37 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a total of 17 either voted no on DeLay-Lantos (4), voted present (8) or did not vote at all (5).
Two black Democratic House members, Earl F. Hilliard (Ala.) and Cynthia McKinney (Ga.), have become lightning rods in the Jewish community, and their primary challengers are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars from Jewish supporters determined to defeat the two incumbents because of statements they have made.
HOW LONG?: I wish someone could explain to me why this is so:
The director said the FBI's new Trilogy computer system will take several years to install, despite his frustrated efforts to speed things up. Mueller said his insistence last year that new hardware and software be in place within 18 months was unrealistic, and that the project will not be complete until December 2003.
He has hired computer experts from Lucent Technologies and elsewhere to upgrade the FBI's relatively primitive computer systems, to make them capable of accessing huge amounts of information, user-friendly and secure.
THROW THE BUMS OUT: Andrew Olmstead, generally sensible fellow, also a libertarian and military man -- certainly not a left-winger -- editorializes on the Administration's vacillations on the war on terror, and general failings:
Several months ago, it appeared the Bush Administration had a solid plan for dealing with terrorism. Wipe out al Qaeda infrastructure around the globe and work for regime changes in terrorist states. Today, it seems they don't know what they're going to do. The Middle East problem has caught their attention and seems to be fully able to delay any further action against terrorism indefinitely. Plans to attack Iraq are on hold or nonexistent, al Qaeda remnants have been allowed to slip out of Afghanistan and are undoubtedly trying to rebuild elsewhere, and the President is urging Americans to get fit.
[...]
...we need to send a message to our elected leadership by tossing them out on their collective ear. Only if we can convince the government that we consider fighting terrorism their first priority can we hope to see real action against the terrorists. Otherwise, it's business as usual in Washington, and terrorism is just one more issue to be politicized for each side's advantage. So I'm endorsing Enrak's call; let's throw the bums out and try again.
This result will surprise some, and not at all others. I can't say this description truly describes my beliefs very well, though:
Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality. Your Personal Self-Government Score is 100%. Your Economic Self-Government Score is 40%.
I'd say that at best this grossly exaggerates my desire for "central decision-making on economics." I surely favor more such than any self-declared libertarian, but I also favor keeping government regulation of and involvement in economic affairs to what I'd consider a minimum, if not what a strict libertarian would.
And I wouldn't agree that I favor "economic equality," but simply a strong safety net for the poor and help for them to cease being poor. (I've favored the negative income tax since I first read about it in Analog as a child.) I have no problem with the rich getting richer, and though I favor a progressive, not a flat, income tax, I wouldn't ever want to see a highest rate of more than 50%, absolute max.
My answers, incidentally, were, of the ten questions asked, "yes" to seven of them, which is the libertarian answer. I'm rated as "left-liberal" for disagreeing that:
Minimum wage laws cause unemployment. Repeal them. End taxes. Pay for services with user fees. All foreign aid should be privately funded
I cheerfully admit that my disagreement on minimum wage is "left-liberal," and non-libertarian. But color me wacky for thinking that "End taxes" is just a wee excessive, simplistic, and radical as a practical policy. As for foreign aid, I consider that a considerably more complex question that can usefully be reduced to an issue of libertarianism vs. liberalism considerations, but certainly there are libertarians who would disagree with me.
So all-in-all, thistesthas some limited application, but "limited" is the operative word.
I'M GONNA GET ME SOME OF THAT: The Duma is about to pass a law to legitimize buying and selling farmland in Russia. Ah, that's what I want: the rich life of the earth, growing potatoes on the steppe in Russia! But what's this?
An amendment would prevent foreigners from purchasing land, but would allow them to lease it. [...] The left wing fears that foreigners with far greater spending power than Russia's farmers will take advantage of the country's economic plight to grab vast tracts of land.
Sensitive to the political risks, Putin said in April it was probably too soon to allow foreigners to buy farmland.
WHEE!: It's the 75th anniversary of the Cyclone rollar coaster in Coney Island!
Mr. Joseph has a favorite spot at the roller coaster. It is on a small bench tucked away on a triangle of grass that faces the coaster's 85-foot first drop. From there, he can see the faces of the riders as they crest the hill and head down, hitting the drop's nadir no more than eight feet away from the bench. "You can see right into what you call the `face of fear,' " Mr. Joseph said, smiling.
The manager of the Cyclone for 28 years has never ridden it.
It's one of the biggest cliches there is that things are never as good as they were when you were a kid, but truly, Coney Island became a faint shadow decades ago of what it was when I was a kid in the Sixties. It was in decline even then, but still, numerous amusement parks and attractions were open then that have long since perished, and the area dedicated to amusements is less than a tenth of what I knew.
I won't even go into all the used paperback bookstores that used to thrive there, that supplied my early years with copious amounts of $.10, $.25, and other paperback available for change. I'd head down on the Coney Island Avenue bus, around the corner from me on East 10th St., and come back with two shopping bags full of paperbacks, having carefully hoarded allowance for weeks to buy my treasures.
Yeah, I'm from Brooklyn: Flatbush and Midwood. Ya wanna make sumpthin' of it?
But on this afternoon, the lookouts — whose faces she had memorized, whose names she knew — did not recognize her. And no wonder. On her more than 100 incognito trips to Chinatown, she has posed as a pregnant woman, a homeless person, a French tourist, a bewildered Midwesterner and a sanguine Southern belle. She can assume 10 accents. To deflect suspicion, she has flirted, cajoled, bargained, even improvised one-way arguments on her cellphone.
Today she was playing the part of an out-of-state wholesale buyer.
[...]
To conceal their goods, some Chinatown counterfeiters have engaged in a second deception: constructing elaborate networks of secret rooms, fake walls and trapdoors. Some of the entry points have electromagnetic locks, operated by garage door openers. Some of the networks extend down to labyrinths of basements, subbasements, living quarters and factories, all beneath the streets of Chinatown.
"You can go for a couple of blocks underground," said Dempster Leech, a retired private investigator who has wandered into those catacombs in the search for counterfeits. "I got lost down there a couple of times."
[...]
Another time, while combing a series of connected rooms underneath Mott Street, Mr. Holmes lifted a fake panel and stepped into an underground casino. "There were little tables, people gambling, drinking and smoking," he said. "Everything went quiet. A few guys reached under their jackets. And I just put my hands up and said, `I'm just looking for counterfeit goods,' and stepped back through the panel."
CLEAN-UP AT THE WTC, though declared over nearly a month ago, when the last steel beam was taken out, didn't really end until today, when the search for human remains concluded.
Days passed, then months. On the second floor of 10-10, a tiny city firehouse within spitting distance of the World Trade Center site, the passage of time, and the sad success of their brutal labor, was tracked with a yellow fluorescent marker.
Each time a firefighter, city or Port Authority police officer or uniformed Port Authority worker was identified amid the ruins, the chiefs would highlight the name underneath the row after row of headshots of the deceased that had been posted on the firehouse wall.
Yesterday morning, Battalion Chief Ronald W. Werner edged his finger under the collections of photographs — the fluorescent yellow still only covering about two-thirds of the names — and carefully pulled off the tape that had kept them in place for more than 250 days.
[...]
When 5:30 came, it was time for the final joint meeting. The construction crews still had more work to do in the coming weeks, shoring up underground walls. Over at Fresh Kills they will spend several more weeks sifting through final debris. And the medical examiner still has months of work to try to identify more of the 2,823 victims, 42 percent of whom have now been identified.
But this was the last time the Fire Department recovery crews would be there at ground zero. The search for human remains was over.
"We made it," Mr. Vitchers of Bovis announced to the 32 people gathered. "It is the last load."
It was then, as they went one at a time around the room to thank one another, that the broad-shouldered men, some in fire helmets others in hard hats, started sobbing.
Who wouldn't?
I attempt to imagine all that was involved in scouring the neighborhood for the tiniest slivers of possible flesh of 2,823 people, mixed admidst concrete dust, metal, fiberglass, and all the endless other materials, and my mind rejects the attempt.
And the thought that clings is: it might yet be so much worse.
THE VIRTUES OF THIRD WORLD SWEATSHOPS are pointed out by Nicholas Kristof.
I look forward to the day when global wealth, democratization, and the luxuries of the West are available to all the world. Unfortunately, we've got at least a decade or three before such benefits will truly penetrate the poorest sections of the globe.
And until such penetrations are under way, seeking to deprive the poor of what to us are low wages and terrible conditions, in favor or no or worse wages and even worse conditions, which is typically the available alternative, not First World union wages and OSHA-level standards, hurts the world's poor terribly. That, too, is part of globalization discussion. This is scarcely a new point, but it bears repeating, and Kristof puts it well.
THE NIETZSCHEAN AND MACHIAVELLIAN VALUES of Harry Potter are explained in new Cliff's Notes -- SparkNotes, actually -- as described in this piece about the new such notes for contemporary fiction so you can fake your way through book clubs and conversation.
Y'know, I'd say that I don't see these as working very well for any remotely interesting or, indeed, intelligible, conversation, but I suppose oddities could always simply be put down to the user's odd opinions, or perhaps general dimness. It's not as if CliffNotes are necessary to generate such responses from some folks. But, gosh, how efficient use of such notes are!
I do speculate further, though, about how a person, using only such notes to attempt to understand and appreciate the experience of a book, might, if they are a sufficiently interesting person, generate an imaginary version of a book in their head that in some cases might be more enjoyable or worthwhile than the original.
English grad students wishing to expand on this for use in theses on semiotic theory and how the reader brings as much to the text as vice versa have my permission, but I'd like to see a copy, please.
CONSPIRACY THEORY, CARMEN MIRANDA STYLE: this is an interesting regional take. It's not really about Brazil, of course: we all know that the US is the fount of all evil in the world, so it's merely Brazil's variation on US conspiracies against the region.
PUT reason aside, for a moment, and imagine this: American students are taught that the Amazon should be taken away from Brazil and made into an "international reserve" under United Nations administration. United States Army special forces are training in Florida to seize control of that zone once it is established. And, to accelerate the process, Harvard University advocates the immediate dismemberment of Brazil.
All of this, of course, is pure imagination. The Brazilian imagination.
[...]
Such mythmaking helps explain the widespread acceptance given to the notorious map. It appears to have originated on a Web site operated by a right-wing nationalist military group, but Brazil's left has also shown a penchant for Amazonian fantasy.
At the moment, one favorite theory has to do with "Plan Colombia," the American effort to bolster Colombia's fight against drug traffickers and Marxist guerrillas. Leftist groups here say the real objective is to give the United States a foothold that would allow it to seize the Brazilian Amazon and thus command the southern flank of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez.
Then there is Sivam, a $1.5 billion Amazon radar system being installed by an American company. Though the project will enhance Brazil's sovereignty over the region by allowing it to track and intercept planes smuggling drugs, arms and gold, many here are certain that its actual purpose is to allow the United States to gather information by satellite about oil and mineral resources it wants to exploit.
