Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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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.
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"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 chairman of the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks says that the White House is continuing to withhold several highly classified intelligence documents from the panel and that he is prepared to subpoena the documents if they are not turned over within weeks.
The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, also said in an interview on Friday that he believed the bipartisan 10-member commission would soon be forced to issue subpoenas to other executive branch agencies because of continuing delays by the Bush administration in providing documents and other evidence needed by the panel.
"Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach," Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush's desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I will not stand for it," Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.
"That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document."
[...]
While Mr. Kean said he was barred by an agreement with the White House from describing the Oval Office documents at issue in any detail — he said the White House was "quite nervous" about any public hint at their contents — other commission officials said they included the detailed daily intelligence reports that were provided to Mr. Bush in the weeks leading up to Sept. 11. The reports are known within the White House as the Presidential Daily Briefing.
WE LOVES OURSELVES, OUR PRECIOUS. Our crack editorial team here at Amygdala has recently been getting too incestous and has been reprimanded, and reduced in pay, for that, but we've just now discovered the reason for our many hits from the Blogstreet Big 100.
Er, crap, we're 37.
(That would be, "holy crap, we're 37th.") Tbat's 37th "most influential" in the world.
So why don't we have any readers, or commenters?
Either this number is insane or we are. I nominate us.
I HEREBY DECLARE that I am now officialy a bloggers' blogger. I have everyone from Mickey Kaus to James Lileks to Glenn Reynolds to Brad Delong coming by here, but, absent e-mail from me to generate links -- which I've not done in about four months -- I get about 200 hits a day. That's why, I guess, I'm on that list of "most influential bloggers."
I'm terribly influential. I just don't have many, you know, readers. Or commenters.
That sort of thing is what defines a thinger's thing, innit?
It's not, after all, as if a a brilliant prose stylist is making general observations about my website.
Hi. Okay, so, I did the outline. For the paper on Roosevelt. Turns out there are two Presidents Roosevelts. So I didn't know exactly which one to do. And so I did both. And I kinda know, kinda know, they're kinda short, I can flesh them out! Oh, and here's the bibliography!
And I can retype that if you want! You just let me know what you want! I'll get on that.
NASA's flight team is unable to assess the quality of air or water and the radiation levels aboard the space lab because of a growing array of hardware problems that have not been corrected and that may constitute the kind of subtle, creeping risk that NASA officials have vowed to avoid based on the harsh lessons learned from the Feb. 1 Columbia shuttle accident, according to documents, minutes and interviews obtained by The Washington Post.
We desperately need the privatized space program to get into space.
I don't say this out of ideology. I say this out of looking at what's working, and what's not.
A nostalgia post about all the NASA pictures and posters on my walls, and the walls of my parents' hallway, I posted them on, when I was eight to twelve years old, from 1966 to 1972, is another post.
REMIND ME TO COMMENT on Luc Sante on NYC, please? Luc Sante can be a jerk (his stuff on science fiction) and can be brilliant. His take on NYC in the Seventies both repels me, and makes me say "yes, yes, yes, that's it!"
This is not a piece for James Lileks, though I'd be perfectly prepared -- if I had an internet link on hand to provide supporting material -- and would be pleased to chat with James about what can be great and fine about squalor, unobvious as it is clearly is.
I don't care if Sante got his info on junkies from friends, or personal experience, or wherever. That's not a piece of the scene I have much knowledge of.
But the rest of this is so spot on about a certain sensibility, and appeal of, the city in that era, that I say Read The Rest: 4 out of 5. Atmosphere. I breathed and lived and enjoyed that atmosphere. The city is my city.
Here in Washington, on the other side of the globe, a small organization called the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea will today use pictures to discuss the problem of North Korea with anyone who wants to listen. The pictures that the committee has procured -- and now published, together with a report called "The Hidden Gulag" -- are satellite photographs of North Korean concentration camps. With remarkable clarity they show, for example, the contours of Yodok, one of the most notorious prison camps in North Korea: the barracks and "villages" inhabited by different categories of prisoners, including political prisoners; the mines, the flour mill, the farms where prisoners work; the cemetery. They also show the outlines of Bukchang, another vast camp, including its cement factory, its hospital, its punishment barracks, its school for prisoners' children. Distinct objects, including the high walls that enclose the camps, are clearly visible.
[...]
Because I've met diplomats who deal with North Korea, I also know that the impact of the photographs will be limited. Even when they are put together with the testimony of witnesses, they tell an incomplete story, after all. It is now known that entire families are imprisoned at places like Bukchang and Yodok. It is not known how many people are in prison altogether. It is known that prisoners, including children, work 10-hour days as slave laborers. It is not known how important these camps are to the North Korean economy. Only when the regime collapses, and only when more documents emerge, will those questions be answered.
Appearing on "Hardball" last night, John Kerry reiterated his familiar position that there was a "legitimate rationale" for invading Iraq, but that George W. Bush had gone about it in the "wrong way." But this time, Kerry added a new twist: When the show's host, Chris Matthews, asked how much time a president Kerry would have given diplomacy to work, Kerry said that he might still, a year later, be haggling with the United Nations over the use of force. "Why not?" Kerry asked. "Absolutely."
Well, there are a lot of reasons why not. For one thing, keeping more than 100,000 U.S. troops amassed in the Arabian desert all this time would have been a nightmare. For another, America's diplomatic hand was at its strongest just after Congress approved the use of force last October. If the United Nations couldn't be convinced to back a war back then, it's hard to imagine the chances would have grown with time.
Before the war, some argued that U.N. support could be gained if America gave arms inspectors more time to turn up evidence of WMD violations. (And when Kerry says, as he did on 'Hardball' last night, that he would have continued to haggle with the French and Russians, that almost surely would have entailed continued inspections.) But we now know that those inspectors probably wouldn't have found anything incriminating--and that the political and moral cases for war would have been weakened. Reasonable people might argue that that would have been the best outcome. But that's not Kerry's argument--he still defends the removal of Saddam Hussein as justified. How he squares this support of the war in principle with his support for added months of negotiations is more than a little puzzling. Certainly, it's a lot more complicated than saying, "Why not?"
It doesn't seem coherent, does it? As Michael Crowley implies, it might sound superficially good to those who feel the war was a bad idea, but that's not what Kerry is actually saying. (It still, incidentally, seems to me that most, though certainly not all, of the negative opinions about the war are largely simply anti-Bush feeling [which I obviously find understandable], and far less on any objective analysis of whether or not a greater good was accomplished by war than no war.)
Read The Rest Scale: 0 out of 5; that's the whole thing.
"The time has come to think the unthinkable." It is almost an iron law of intellectual life that any idea that is advertised as unthinkable has been thought many times before. The promotion of an idea to unthinkability says nothing about the merit of the idea; many "unthinkable" ideas are not worthy of serious thought. It is not the veracity of the thought that the appeal to unthinkability seeks to establish, it is the courage of the thinker. Only truly free minds think the unthinkable. The rest are shackled by dogmas and sentiments and clichés and interests. The thinker of the unthinkable may even envy the others their intellectual tranquility, but now "the time has come," he has no choice any longer but to wound the others with the truth, to utter something bold and new, to "speak out" or "tell truth to power" or otherwise indicate that the unpopularity of his opinion is evidence for its correctness. Is it dissent? Then it must be right.
If ever an idea was not unthinkable, it is the idea of a bi-national state of Israelis and Palestinians. The fantasy is as old as the conflict itself. It has been thought and thought and thought....
[...]
He does not acknowledge the most inexorable feature of his Levantine erewhon: that in a matter of a few years the demographic realities between the river and the sea would determine its social composition and its political character. It would be a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority: Greater Palestine. The Jewish minority in Greater Palestine would be small, I suppose; many Jews will have prudently emigrated to escape such an outcome. Unlike some other proponents of the bi-national state, Judt oddly does not elaborate any requirements that it be democratic and constitutional. Perhaps he is being realistic; but then he is being even more irresponsible. For what reasons do the Israelis have to depend for security and decency upon the democratic talents of the Palestinians?
Democracy is universal in theory, but it is not universal in practice. It must be seen to be believed. And the political culture of the Palestinians is now a contest between religious maximalism and terrorism and secular maximalism and terrorism. "Palestinian reform" is so far one of the cruelest disappointments of this disappointing time; but Judt would have the Jews of Israel cast their lot with it. The nightmare of ethnic cleansing in Greater Israel disturbs his sleep, but the nightmare of ethnic cleansing in Greater Palestine does not. Greater Israel means war, but Greater Palestine means peace. Will the jihadists of Hamas really stay their hands when Afula finally is theirs? And who will protect the Jews in Greater Palestine from their wrath? An "international force"? The suggestion is outrageous. The record of international forces in conditions of ethnic cleansing is a sentence of death for any people who would look to them for salvation.
Who by fire, who by water, who by professors. Judt has four reasons for his haughty and ugly proposal. The first is that Israel is an "anachronism." It "arrived too late," because by the time it was established "the world ha[d] moved on" from the nation-state--that "characteristically nineteenth-century separatist project"--toward "a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law," of "pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural." Nothing original here, except perhaps the claim that the abolition of the nation-state should begin with the abolition of the Jewish nation-state. Another election of the Jews, I guess. But from the standpoint of the better world, why is Greater Palestine preferable to Greater Israel? More precisely, why is Greater Palestine preferable to Israel? (Greater Israel exists so far only in the plans and the hallucinations of the extreme right. It is wrong, but it is not real.) Judt has not replaced a national state with a postnational state; he has replaced a national state with another national state. He wishes to relieve Palestinian statelessness with Jewish statelessness, to exchange one vulnerable minority with another (even more) vulnerable minority. This, justice? The moral calculus of Judt's proposal is baffling.
Judt's history is also awry, which is unlike him. Israel was hardly the last or the latest nation-state to come into being. India and Pakistan were established at the same time as Israel. They, too, were born in violence and in partition. And the partition did not quell the violence. Was the partition of the subcontinent, therefore, a mistake? If it was, why does Judt not demand also the dismantling of Pakistan? Moreover, the United Nations is swollen with post-colonial nation-states that were created since the late 1940s, whose moral authority in the General Assembly and the Security Council does not seem to be vitiated for Judt by their belatedness.
There's lots more, and it's all superb. Read The Rest Scale: 6 out of 5. (Use "cypherpunk" for ID and password.)
The memo has footnotes. It has exhibits. It is crisp and professional and is written on stationery of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of New York's elite law firms. Indeed, it is the hottest law firm memo around town, but it is not about Enron, Tyco or any corporate scandal. It was not even written by a lawyer.
THE WAL-MARTIZATION OF AMERICA, unions, and forcing people into dead-end, low-paying jobs.
Wal-Mart has already helped push more than two dozen national supermarket chains into bankruptcy over the past decade. That list includes names like Grand Union; Bruno's, once Alabama's largest supermarket chain; and Homeland Stores, formerly Oklahoma's largest. And unionized supermarket workers fear that Wal-Mart's invasion will oust them from the middle class by pulling down their wages and benefits, which, taken together, are more than 50 percent higher than those of Wal-Mart workers. At Wal-Mart, the average wage is about $8.50 an hour, compared with $13 at unionized supermarkets.
[...]
Eager to stay competitive against Wal-Mart, Albertsons, Vons (owned by Safeway) and Ralphs (owned by Kroger) have demanded a two-year wage freeze for current workers, a lower pay scale for new hires and greater employee contributions for health coverage. Those employees now pay no health insurance premiums, while Wal-Mart employees often must pay premiums of $200 a month and deductibles of up to $1,000 a year, if they qualify.
[...]
It is hard to underestimate the power of Wal-Mart. It has 1.4 million employees and had $245 billion in revenues last year, equaling 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product. Each week 138 million shoppers visit Wal-Mart's 4,750 stores. Last year, 82 percent of American households bought at least one item there.
Wal-Mart sells 32 percent of the nation's disposable diapers, and it is the largest customer for Walt Disney and Procter & Gamble. It has singlehandedly persuaded music companies to issue sanitized versions of CD's. Its 1,397 supercenters account for 19 percent of the nation's grocery sales, making it the largest grocery retailer. With Wal-Mart planning 1,000 more supercenters in the next five years, Retail Forward, a consulting firm, estimates that Wal-Mart's grocery and drug sales will double to $162 billion, giving it 35 percent of the domestic food market and 25 percent of the drug market.
[...]
Another big factor is Wal-Mart's relatively low wages. Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job. Mr. Flickinger said wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.
[...]
A big savings for Wal-Mart comes in health care, where Wal-Mart pays 30 percent less for coverage for each insured worker than the industry average. An estimated 40 percent of employees are not covered by its health plan because many cannot afford the premiums or have not worked at Wal-Mart long enough to qualify.
"What this means is, if I'm a Wal-Mart employee and I hurt my hand and go to the emergency room, who's going to pay for it? The taxpayer is," said Mr. Brown, the supermarket executive. "Wal-Mart's fringe benefits are being paid by taxpayers."
Wal-Mart officials say that their expansion will be a boon for California consumers and that their wages and benefits are competitive. Why else, they ask, would 600,000 workers take jobs at Wal-Mart each year?
Desperation, of course. Because they can't find anything better in range of where they live. Gotta love that spin from Wal-Mart, though. Why, we're providing a public service to 600,000 workers!
HOW DUMB IS BUSH, ANYWAY? Amplifying my comments on Bush's brilliant Phillipines analogy, Fred Kaplan observes:
The Spanish empire ceded the Philippines to U.S. control in 1898 after losing that "splendid little war" in the Caribbean. The American military then invaded the Philippines and took over the capital, Manila, in fairly short order. Then, as now, the troubles began. Here's how Max Boot described the ensuing conflict in his book The Savage Wars of Peace: "[T]hough successive U.S. generals proclaimed victory at hand, American soldiers kept dying in ambushes, telegraph lines kept getting cut, and army convoys kept getting attacked."
Over the next three and a half years, until July 1902, when the Filipino guerrillas were finally subdued, the U.S. Army lost 4,234 soldiers. Another 2,818 were wounded. (By the Army's own estimate, 69,000 Filipino combatants were killed, along with nearly 200,000 civilians.) The American war effort was marked by much burning, pillaging, and torturing, and the commanders finally achieved victory through a strategy of isolating the guerrillas. They did this by forcing the civilian population out of towns and into "protected zones"; able-bodied men found outside the zones without a pass were arrested or shot.
Even so, sporadic uprisings continued long after 1902. The American military occupation was forced to remain for 44 years. Surely Bush is not suggesting that victory in Iraq requires a similar strategy or timetable.
You'd like to think that even if Bush is too ignorant to be aware of any of this, someone on the NSC, maybe even the beloved by right-wing bloggers Condaleeza Rice, would know better than to have made such a weird analogy.
But this White House does seem to have a problem with stuff getting into speeches that shouldn't, doesn't it?
Just as the Royal Navy preferred "hunting" to convoy duty in World War I, and the Allied air forces preferred strategic bombing to ground support in World War II, and the cavalry preferred independent action to the support of infantry in the Civil War, so in recent years the United States Army has preferred to plan for fighting battles without worrying about how to govern conquered territory. The Army in World War II had an effective Division of Military Government. It was established in the Office of the Provost Marshall in July 1942, long before there were any captured Axis territories to govern. It was this division and the personnel whom it trained at the Charlottesville School of Military Government that made it possible for the United States later to govern Japan and parts of Germany and Italy in an orderly way, without encountering widespread looting, rioting, or guerrilla attacks.
In the years after the war, responsibility for military government was relocated in the Civil Affairs branch of the Army. Support for this branch was allowed to dwindle, and Civil Affairs survived several attempts to disband it as a separate unit, until in 1987 it finally found a home in the Special Operations Command. There it had to fight off attempts to divert its remaining funds and personnel slots to Special Forces. At the end of the 1980s, an Army-commissioned report, in a chapter called "Pruning Non-Essentials," asked the questions "Should 7,000 reservists continue to be trained to govern occupied nations? Is there a need for those trained in the administration of art, archives, and monuments to preserve the culture of occupied territories?"[3] Civil Affairs became known as a dead end for career officers.
There is now just one active-duty Civil Affairs unit, the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion (Airborne), headquartered at Fort Bragg; the remaining 95 percent of Civil Affairs personnel are reservists. In Afghanistan there are now only about two hundred Civil Affairs personnel, as compared with about 15,000 military government soldiers in the American Zone of Germany soon after the German surrender in World War II. A colonel (not in Civil Affairs) who is just back from Iraq tells me that there are about two thousand Civil Affairs officers there (not all in military government), leaving few anywhere else, and that although they are doing good work, there are not nearly enough of them. Unfortunately the Defense Department's priorities do not seem to have changed. Later this year it plans to close the ten-year-old Peacekeeping Institute of the Army War College.
After all, we can get someone else to do that stuff. Right?
Professor Ikei has this great conversational habit that I really want to start emulating. It happens when I ask him a complex, open-ended question, like, "Do you think baseball in Japan has become so popular due to its one-on-one, pitcher vs. batter, samurailike confrontations and the way it lends itself to becoming almost a martial art, or do you think it is more simply a matter of the decadelong U.S. occupation foisting the game upon the Japanese?" In response to this sort of query, Ikei-san will launch into a deep, sustained belly laugh. AHHHHH HAH HAH ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Then the laughter abruptly stops, and he'll nod once, slowly, with a blank look on his face, and say, "Maybe." I love that. I'm already practicing my own version.
Of all Japan's cultural proclivities, the ubiquity of manga (comic books) perhaps puzzles me most. Japan's tightrope formality, its crushing conformity, its really teeny consumer electronics—these all make sense in geo-historical context. But I have yet to see an adequate explanation for why a nation with one of the world's highest literacy rates would become so obsessed with cartoons. Men and women of all ages can be seen on the subway, in coffee shops, or at racks in convenience stores, poring over thick, bound comic books. And Japanese TV is filled with anime shows. Can't get enough of 'em. Besides CNN and CNBC, the only U.S. channel I get on cable here is the Cartoon Network.
Turning it around: why shouldn't drawings, cute or otherwise, be everywhere? What is wrong with your culture, Mister, that says that art should only be for children, and animation must be childish?
And it's not just the shows and books. Animation pervades the entire society. Buy a subway pass from the machine and a little onscreen animated lady bows deeply in humble thanks, showing you the top of her carefully animated head. Real estate ads will show pictures of apartments, and in the upper corner of each attractively lit room will be, for no fathomable reason, a floating alien creature with cute little antennae and bright orange fur. On the seatbacks in the express train to the airport, there is a three-panel cartoon strip. In Panel 1, a frog is reading a book to a tiny, humanoid hot dog. In Panel 2, the frog is driving a truck. In Panel 3, the frog is sitting on a suitcase, crying, while the hot dog looks on in dismay. What does this mean? I'm not sure. (This is a great thing about Japan. At least once a day you see something, or someone does something, and you cannot for the life of you figure out the purpose or meaning. It's refreshing, at times, to have no idea what's going on.)
True. But you don't have to go to Japan for that.
I do very much enjoy the high value placed on cuteness here. My favorite pop culture character (please, Hello Kitty is over) is Sirotan. Sirotan is a plush stuffed seal, which is cute in itself, but the killer app is that Sirotan dresses up as other animals. After you buy Sirotan, you can buy all his different costumes. He dresses up as sharks, turtles, lobsters, and sundry other aquatic creatures. I still can't figure out why Sirotan disguises himself like this. Maybe he's playing with our conceptions of the seal paradigm. Maybe it's just for yuks. Either way, damned cute, and that's the important thing. Wackiness level: yellow, or "elevated."
STOP IT. JUST STOP IT. Why are you Democrats giving me a reason to be all for fricking President Bush, and think you are greedy, isolationist, selfish, horrifying, morons?
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration threatened for the first time Tuesday to veto an $87 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan if Congress converts any Iraqi rebuilding money into loans.
White House officials issued the warning even though many lawmakers agree that the bill's final version is likely to bow to President Bush (news - web sites) and omit any loans. By underscoring Bush's opposition to loans, the administration threat could make it easier for congressional Republican leaders to nail down enough votes to help the president prevail.
How immoral are you? How is it you want to extort money at gunpoint from people we've hurt? Have you gone insane? Have you decided that since the Republicans win votes by saying "We'll bribe you with your own money via tax cuts [even though we're deluding you]" works, that saying "we'll bribe you with money we'll give you instead of giving it to Iraqis" will work?
Are you insane? Or just immoral? WTF?
What is going on in the minds of these Democrats, besides wanting to destroy our party?
(Yes, they want to spend it differently. So would I. That's not on the table. Committing suicide is. ) Great strategy!
IT ENDS TONIGHT. Goodness. It took me a while of exploration on the Matrix Reloaded DVD to get through to the, you know, actual end of the movie part, where we find an unheralded trailer for Matrix Revolutions. Has anyone made quite such use of rain? It makes one think of a cyberpunk version of Singing In The Rain. (Spin your own jokes off from that.)
It's obvious the whole thing will end with some sort of synthesis/compromise of humans and robots. We shall all get along together! After all! (It's often occurred to me to compare where the Matrix and Terminator universes are and are not contiguous.)
It's the easiest thing in this reality to point out how shallow the Matrix movies are, and irresistable, given the ludicrous, mind-numbing, boring, endless, endless, and yet endless, hype about how deep, philosophical, life-changing, intellectual, and meaningful these movies are. Which is to laugh. They're about as faintly elevated in intellectual level as a good nineteen-forties issue of Astounding Stories was, and don't even approach where Galaxy Magazine moved on to in the Fifties, with Sturgeon, Blish, Bester, and so many others.
But it's good that sf movies are slowly gaining the maturity skiffy got to in writing sixty or seventy years ago. It gives me hope for this new century. In entertainment, and more.
(And clearly the Wachowskis have a fixation/love for the visual iconography of certain Superman images; that's fine; I'm just saying what I've not noticed others, yet, saying.)
JEFFERSON AND SLAVERY by Garry Wills. As is pretty much everything ever written by Garry Wills, absolutely brilliant.
Though the election of 1800 is one of the most thoroughly studied events in our history, few treatments of it even mention the fact that Jefferson won it by the slave count. It is called the first modern election, because political parties contested it. People debate whether it earns Jefferson's own title for it, the "second revolution." But Jefferson's ascendancy is most frequently hailed as a triumph for the stability of the young constitutional system, since the incumbent was ousted without violence: "Above all, the election demonstrated that control of the vast political power of the national government could pass peacefully from one political party to another."[15]
The election is studied, as well, because it was the first to be deflected to the House of Representatives for decision, since the two Republican candidates, Jefferson and Burr, received a tie vote in the Electoral College. That vote led to one of the earliest constitutional readjustments after the adoption of the Bill of Rights—the Twelfth Amendment, which established a separate vote for the vice-presidency. The election can also be treated as a clash between the personalities of Jefferson and Burr, or between Jefferson and Adams. These are all interesting aspects of the event. But they are not enough, in themselves, to explain the odd neglect of the fact that this was an election where the federal ratio made the margin of difference.
Key historical sentence:
When I refer to the slave power, I mean the political efforts exerted to protect and expand slavery all the way up to the Civil War.
The history of the US of the 19th century flows from this.
The national reticence continued long after the Civil War. It skewed the historiography of Reconstruction for decades. In the early twentieth century, it whitewashed the South in popular culture and at sites like Monticello and Mount Vernon. It entertained the absurd notion that the Civil War was not fought over slavery but over tariffs, or states' rights, or federal usurpation. It encouraged Edmund Wilson to romanticize the Ku Klux Klan[43] of the mid-nineteenth century. In our time it has defended the Confederate battle flag as untainted by slavery. And it has kept the image of Jefferson relatively unclouded by the things he did to promote and protect and expand the slave power.
Nixon: Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will-that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there's a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. Well what the hell, did Mitchell know about this thing to any much of a degree?
Haldeman: I think so. I don 't think he knew the details, but I think he knew.
Nixon: He didn't know how it was going to be handled though, with Dahlberg and the Texans and so forth? Well who was the asshole that did? (Unintelligible) Is it Liddy? Is that the fellow? He must be a little nuts.
Haldeman: He is.
Nixon: I mean he just isn't well screwed on is he? Isn't that the problem?
Haldeman: No, but he was under pressure, apparently, to get more information, and as he got more pressure, he pushed the people harder to move harder on...
Nixon: Pressure from Mitchell?
Haldeman: Apparently.
Nixon: Oh, Mitchell, Mitchell was at the point that you made on this, that exactly what I need from you is on the--
Haldeman: Gemstone, yeah.
Nixon: All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest. Thank God it wasn't Colson.
LITTLE-KNOWN: Late in life, Richard Nixon achieved success in a second career as a lounge singer. Ronald Reagan took to asking people, "guess what I've got in my hand?"
(You could read this profile about Haley Barbour running for Governor of Mississippi, if you like.)
JILLETTE: Well, you know, we wouldn't play Sun City when we were asked. And we were the only ones who were asked to play Sun City. No one in the video that said, "We ain't gonna play Sun City" was asked! And actually, we didn't say "no" when we were asked, we just told our agents – they probably didn't pass this off… We told the agents to send out to Sun City that we had a very simple rider – that Penn and Teller each got $500 a week, each of our crew got $500 a week, we got airfare, we had decaffeinated tea and decaffeinated Diet Coke backstage, and equal rights for all people in the country we were performing in. And we said, "Just send that to them, because maybe it will blow by them." We thought that maybe if we ended Apartheid, you'd be able to say, in five years when you saw us on Letterman, "That bit kind of sucked, but hey – they ended Apartheid."
GET IT WHILE IT'S HOT: This profile of Robert Smigel will disappear Real Soon from the non-static page of the NY Observer. Some bits:
In a December 2001 TV Funhouse, the snowman from that annual Rankin and Bass claymation holiday staple, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, decided that, because of Sept. 11, he just couldn’t find it in him to reprise his role as the narrator. "I’m holding three months of Cipro up my butthole and I’m supposed to pick up a banjo?" he said.
Just north of the Port Authority terminal, in a recording studio high above Eighth Avenue, Triumph’s voice boomed from the monitors. "I sniffed J. Lo’s ass and I got too touchy-feelie / She left me a bomb that was bigger than Gigli."
[...]
Mr. Smigel was listening to "I Keed," a hip-hop insult song that will be the single off Come Poop with Me. It’s Triumph’s bass-and-synthesizer-heavy litany of pop-star disrespect: "Avril Lavigne, punk queen? Now there’s a kidder / Go back north, Céline needs a baby-sitter," Triumph raps. He sniffs "Elton John’s tush, just for all the history," takes on Philip Glass— "Atonal ass / You’re not immune / Write a song with a fucking tune"—and Snoop Dogg: "There’s room for only one dog, putz / And I can rap. Can you lick your own nuts?"
[...]
But, later in the song, Triumph sounds almost conciliatory toward Eminem: "Slim Shady, why do you find me so scary?" he asks. "We’re just two regular dudes who banged Mariah Carey."
[...]
Come Poop with Me, a three-year undertaking completed between Mr. Smigel’s other projects, is a mix of live and studio recordings, with a DVD portion taken from live Triumph shows that Mr. Smigel taped at the Bowery Ballroom. "I haven’t felt this much pressure since Marmaduke sat on my face," Triumph says in the CD introduction. The audio and video segments include Mr. O’Brien, Jack Black and Adam Sandler—who is the executive producer of the album—as well as TV Funhouse’s Doug Dale, SNL’s Horatio Sanz and Maya Rudolph, and Blackwolf the Dragonmaster, a robed fantasy-game geek who was one of the stars of the now-classic Star Wars remote that Triumph did for Late Night.
[...]
The Clutch Cargo impersonation of Mr. Schwarzenegger, which Mr. Smigel punctuates with frequent phlegmy cries of "Nooooooooooo!"—a device he said that Mr. O’Brien came up with many years ago when the two were working on a Hans and Franz script—manages to capture the California governor’s action-hero Cohiba-suffused disregard for anything but himself, whether he’s incessantly touting "the smash-hit holiday classic, ‘Jingle All the Way,’" recalling an orgy where he saw "Carl Weathers and Chuck Norris going nuts to butts," accusing the talk-show host of having "a small po-po … an Austrian term for tiny weenie," or declaring after the election: "The people of California have spoken. And they have said a resounding ‘yes’ to the groping and a resounding ‘yes’ to Hitler!"
Most software packages don't, and this one is extra-crispy ambitious, with sprinkles on top.
Code-named Chandler, after the mystery writer (because, Kapor says, what they’re creating was something of a mystery even to them when the venture launched two years ago), the software promises to put all related e-mail messages, spreadsheets, appointment records, addresses, blog entries, word-processing documents, digital photos, and what-have-you in one place at one time: no more opening program after program looking for the items related to a specific topic. It takes the core functions of Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Desktop, and other personal information management programs and integrates them with the rest of your PC and the Internet. All the information you need to complete a given task or project is grouped on-screen, organized around the one function—e-mail—Kapor sees as the central conduit of our electronic lives.
Because Chandler presents information in its logical context—displaying all related items together—and not in the separate folders and application windows of the traditional desktop computer system, you can think of it as a new way into your computer. “It may be hubristic,” says Kapor, “but we’re trying to push the edge of the envelope in terms of innovation, and trying to pioneer a new type of interface”—one that he thinks is sorely needed. “Software is too difficult, too limiting, and pretty severely so, and it’s a raw deal. The average user really gets screwed.”
The fact that this is an open-source project may help it from slipping into obscurity.
I wouldn't put large bets on that, however, myself. But you decide (and let me know).
Researchers from NTT Docomo Multimedia Labs and NTT Microsystem Integration Labs in Japan have demonstrated a 10-megabits-per-second indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables.
The network, dubbed ElectAura-Net, is wireless, but instead of using radio waves, infrared light, or microwaves to transmit information it uses a combination of the electric field that emanates from humans and a similar field emanating from special floor tiles.
The network is faster than commercially available personal area networks like the 1-megabit-per-second Bluetooth radio wave system, and tops the 4-megabits-per-second infrared standard set by the Infrared Data Association (IrDA).
The system could eventually provide high-speed wireless communications indoors among portable electronic devices whose positions constantly change.
Of course, when you go to adjust the antenna, you'll be accused of "doing an Arnold."
HOW TO GET GOOD INTELLIGENCE TO GO BAD, by Seymour Hersh.
One original nugget, which I have no clue whether it has the faintest substantiality to it, or not:
Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.
“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it—‘Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi intelligence.
“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go—to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels—a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”
If this is all wet, the not unimportant question still remains: who created the Niger forgeries?
When the Titan 2 rocket blasts off Wednesday, it will bring to conclusion the decades-long program that began as a missile in the United States' arsenal against the Soviet Union, launched NASA's Gemini astronauts and in recent years carried smaller satellites into space.
[...]
The 14th refurbished Titan 2 was not assigned a mission, so it will not fly. Officials said they are looking at the possibility of placing the rocket in the U.S. Air Force museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
The first of the converted Titan 2s flew in September 1988. It and the following two missions carried classified cargos. Later launches included the military's Clementine lunar probe, two government-owned ocean-wind research spacecraft and five polar-orbiting weather satellites.
MALAYSIA, which took over the chair of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) at its just-concluded summit, was taken on a roller-coaster ride by the foreign media over remarks by Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad that were purportedly anti-Jew.
[...]
Islam-bashers are not going to change their attitude merely because the OIC said its members would stand united, just as NAM has to fight Western notions that the movement is no longer relevant, given that the Cold War is over. And the outspoken premier – a former physician who became one of the longest-serving elected leaders in the world – had to give them lessons in history at the end of the summit to express his displeasure at the distorted information.
Yes, he did tell OIC members to prepare for the defence of the ummah (Muslim world) with guns, rockets, bombs and warplanes. But it was only to stress the importance of science and technology as the weapons and horses of the time of Prophet Muhammad could not help defend their nations today.
As for the Jews, who have long felt they were a persecuted race, Dr Mahathir observed that while Europeans had killed six million of them, the Jews today rule the world by proxy by getting others to fight and die for them.
Thank you for clearing up the "distorted" idea that there was anything erroneous or offensive in what the Prime Minister said.
To the countries of NAM and OIC, Malaysia stands as proof that a developing and Islamic country firmly entrenched in its past glories can be forward-looking and committed to the lofty goals of prosperity and a sense of purpose for all.
Forward-looking and committed to the loft goal of having a sense of purpose for: killing Jews.
But I'm undoubtedly just being over-sensitive here, and finding anti-Semitism where none exists.
Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said Malaysia will continue to uphold its stand on various issues and not fear any outside criticism.
He said the country would face challenges calmly and voice its opinion on issues fearlessly.
[...]
Abdullah said it was common for foreign countries to practise double standards and condemn Malaysia for its stand on certain issues but what was important was that the Government remained strong and firm in its beliefs.
He was commenting on a claim by Italy's Foreign Minister Franco Frattini that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad's recent speech on the Jews had hurt their feelings.
Said Abdullah: "We should not forget that what we are doing is not to fight them.
"The most important thing is we make changes so that the Muslim people will succeed and love peace and harmony."
But first we must work against the Jews who rule the world.
MALAYSIAN Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has thanked French President Jacques Chirac for blocking a European Union declaration condemning his comments last week that Jews "rule the world by proxy," news reports said today.
[...]
Malaysian newspapers said Mahathir had expressed his gratitude to Chirac for his "understanding" of the speech he made at the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world's largest Muslim grouping, in Malaysia last Thursday.
[...]
"I never thought the Europeans would be against me," the New Sunday Times quoted him as saying. "I can't understand them. I'm glad that Chirac at least understands. I would like to thank him publicly."
Mahathir said that "anybody who reads the whole speech through will understand what I said," the Sunday Star reported.
EVER RELIABLE BRITISH JOURNALISM. In an otherwise slightly amusing piece on Kevin Bacon:
'I told them to take the subway, but they looked really scared,' says Bacon. So the star and his son helped them buy tickets and accompanied them on the subway.
After which they no doubt went to the loo and then were hit by a passing lorry.
I'm amused to read that Bacon always slips the DJ a twenty dollar bill at any wedding or party he goes to, to ensure they won't play "Footlose," but I can't be sure it's true.
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5. Inevitably, the writer turns the article into being about himself, and his alleged resemblance to Kevin Bacon. How utterly fascinating.
In France, it slipped away quietly in May - withdrawn less than three years after a shocking disaster on take-off from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport. But Britain will not let its beloved Concorde go gently.
The last three commercially operating airliners to fly faster than sound are to touch down consecutively on Heathrow's north runway at around 4pm on Friday. More than 150,000 people are expected to gather around the airport to capture Concorde's final moments, although police and airport authorities would rather they didn't.
Thousands more will stare skyward at strategic points in the south-east. If the weather suits a western approach by the planes, visitors to Windsor Castle may be treated to a final patriotic glimpse of the world's first supersonic passenger plane.
One aircraft is due in from New York - its most famous destination. Another will have left Heathrow and broken the sound barrier over the Bay of Biscay before returning home. The third, on the final leg of a UK tour, is to arrive from Edinburgh.
[...]
Only on Concorde could Paul McCartney have led the passengers in an impromptu singing of Beatles songs. Only via Concorde could Phil Collins have played both London and Philadelphia on the same day as part of the Live Aid concert. Rock stars, actors, captains of industry and political leaders were what Concorde came to epitomise. It was the global elite's own transatlantic shuttle.
I'll never get to fly in one. Sad now.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.75 out of 5 for some interesting stuff on luxury flying.
I especially love them steamed in beer and vinegar, with Old Bay® and Cajun seasoning.
I also love them broiled in crabcakes, as a filling for omelettes, as a stuffing for flounder and other fish, and in a tomato sauce with pasta.
And then Fritz uses this as a wimpy excuse to go on about how this makes him an environmentalist. And about marshes, tidal flats, wetlands, regulation, and other salty lawyerly stuff.
Ha! We here at the Amygdala editorial team think the environment is all well and good, but particularly if it gives us crabs.
Crabs, my precious, all fishy and sweet. We wants it, we wants it!
