Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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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
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"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.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 618
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 8 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 5
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, Abi Frost,
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
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
I know it's cool now. But I moved there in the Fifties, and I was the first out-of-stater to be there. Really. I kept getting asked "... and what part of Texas are you from?" And I'd say I wasn't from Texas. And they'd stare at me.
And then I'd say I'd moved here from Virginia, and they'd call me a Yankee.
Yeah, it's cool now. I used to hate Austin, and then it was great, so I had to move.
We're all here to do what we're all here to do. I'm interested in one thing, Neo: the future.
And believe me, I know. The only way to get there is together.
- The Oracle
If there's one supreme thing I can do, it's read science fiction and see where it's going. I've earned a living doing that.
This thing ends in a partnership of humans and machines. Anyone want to bet differently? (November 5th, by the way, happens to be my birthday; it's often election day; who would imagine?)
EYES WIDE. When John Derbyshire met Bruce Lee. And played a thug in a Bruce Lee movie.
Karate chop to.... ah, I'll skip the usual cheap jokes and politics. Life is more than that. This is actually damned interesting, lively, funny, and charming.
Private contractors that received billions in reconstruction contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan contributed significantly to President Bush's election campaign and stocked their staffs and governing boards with well-connected former federal officials, according to a report released today by a watchdog group.
The Center for Public Integrity matched companies with political donations to conclude that dozens of companies that won contracts had contributed to national political campaigns, with President Bush receiving more money than any other candidate since 1990--about $500,000.
The winners of the top 10 contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed about $1 million a year to national political parties, candidates and political action committees since 1990, according to the group, which studies the links between money and politics.
Just coincidence, citizens. We can trust President Harding to run an honest, uncorrupt, Administration! Vice-President Agnew will see to it!
HOW TO SAVE MONEY AND INFLUENCE IRAQIS: Do it the 101st Airborne way! Mark Kleiman has the story. On a blog, anyway; he quotes a NBC news story.
TIBBLES: With many buildings in Iraq falling apart, fixing Sinjar was vital. But how? Army engineers determined that if contracted out, it would cost $23 million and take up to a year to rebuild this plant and get it up and running again. The 101st didn't have the money or the patience to wait that long.
Brigadier General FRANK HELMICK (United States Army 101st Airborne Division): We would love to have a Mercedes Benz or a--a Cadillac, but what we need right now is adequacy, adequacy for the Iraqi people.
TIBBLES: So instead of spending millions on a contract, the 101st took just $10,000 of Saddam Hussein's frozen assets and gave it to the plant managers. Soldiers watched in amazement as the Iraqis cannibalized old machines for parts, fashioned new ones and got the factory running again.
Unidentified Man: The future is wide for us.
TIBBLES: Sinjar now churns out 900 tons of concrete a day, just 25 percent of capacity, but a big first step, and generating $20,000 a day in profit. The 101st is using the same strategy throughout the north, from a sulfur plant and water pumping station to this derelict asphalt factory that even some Americans thought was hopeless.
As Mark points out:
The story doesn't even hint that there might be something wrong with a bid of $23 million to do a job that can be done somewhat less thoroughly for $10,000. (Anyone who suspects that the fact that NBC is owned by GE, which is a huge defense contractor, might have something to do with that omission is a lunatic left-wing conspiracy theorist.)
THE SOUND OF THE BIG BANG has now been much written about. My old pal, sf editor Kathryn Cramer, has all the links on this research by her father, physicist and science fiction writer John Cramer, an acquaintance of mine in my Seattle days (1978-86). Here is the New Scientist story.
Here is the sound. (Turn up your volume; it's neither loud nor a bang.)
Read The Rest to find out about hearing the sound of the origin of the universe. You know, small stuff.
And the other thing I think is, we can smile when we say that. I don't want our side ever to treat the Republicans with the sort of personal animosity and contempt with which Hillary and I and Al were treated. I don't like that, I don't believe that, I don't think that's necessary. But we got to argue. And we got to fight hard. Otherwise they'll run right over us like they did in 2002.
A CORRESPONDENT IN EAST HAM COMMENTS. Avedon Carol gave near running commentary on several of my recent posts.
I've apparently moved up in my Political Comprehension from "not getting it" to "close." In gratitude, an attempt at a clarifying answer to this:
I still can't understand how he can continue to think the invasion of Iraq was a good thing. It all seems pretty simple to me: It was unjustifiable to invade without even letting the weapons inspections be completed. And it was stupid to destabilize the only secular country in that group. Everything that's happened is pretty much what I expected to happen given the lack of commitment this administration was showing. Wanting to win a war is not a good enough reason to start one, and that was clearly their biggest reason for doing it, along with some greed and a little bit of personal pique, which are just more lousy reasons. A guy who brags about how he is not into "nation building" and then claims he's going to do it anyway is obviously a guy who doesn't understand what it's for or what it is or how to go about it. And every step of the way, this administration has demonstrated that. They were ill-prepared in Afghanistan and already creating a diplomatic nightmare worldwide, and people trusted them over Iraq? Why?
To begin with the last: of course, there is no textual justification for even remotely deducing that I've "trusted" the Bush Administration over Iraq. It's completely contradicted by every post I've ever written on the topic, in which I've consistently pointed out how I utterly distrust and despise the Administration.
I have, further, explained over and over and over again, each major time I've addressed my rather tentative and cautious opinions about the wisdom of war or not, that any and all support I've hesitantly given towards the war has been in spite of the Administration, not because of them, and -- this is crucial -- that I separate the wisdom of the war decision from issues regarding the Administration.
That's it's possible to do that latter may be grounds for philosophical disagreement between two camps. I imagine it is. I can see the outlines of the arguments saying why you can't, or shouldn't, do that.
But I don't agree.
And neither do any of the many people I've found myself in political alignment with: the Paul Bermans, and Michael Walzers, and Leon Wieseltiers, none of whom can remotely be considered either Bush supporters or from the right.
In fact, I think one of the things most destructive to useful debate about the wisdom or lack of it regarding fighting the late war, and continuing to have destructive effects upon the debate as to what policy should be towards Iraqi, today, is the inability of the majority of people engaged in discussion to separate out that topic from their partisan stances as being pro or anti Bush.
This seems to be a concept that many from certain corners of the left have trouble understanding: that one can see liberal pro-intervention arguments while still despising the Bushites. That there can be genuine differences of opinion on the left on this (and various other) subject(s).
So I hope we can discard the canard that I, and people of my ilk, "trust the administration." It would be nice if folks from your corner of the left would so so, as it ain't true. Out with your Bush cooties!
Generally speaking, I'm not fully prepared to "defend the invasion as a good thing." It, frankly, remains to be seen. It can only be justified by ultimate results, and we won't see that for, at the earliest, a year, and maybe not for as much as five or ten years. So I really don't know if it will prove to have been justified, or a terrible, horrible, tragic mistake.
What I'm prepared to defend is the idea that it remains to be seen which way it will go. I disagree with anyone sure they know right now. I disagree with anyone who asserts that "the Iraq situation is proving to be a raging success!" and I disagree with anyone who asserts that "the Iraq situation is obviously a complete failure!" Right now.
We don't know. I don't know. You don't know. No one knows.
And I don't believe anyone who claims they know, and such claims lessen my respect for the judgment of the claimer.
Anyone who has twenty-six keys on a keyboard to rub together can cherry-pick "signs" that it-is-getting-better/it-is-hopelessly-falling apart.
This is, he said impatiently, ludicrous. Anecdotes aren't trends, and trends aren't conclusions.
What I am prepared to defend:
I'm prepared to defend the idea that there were justifiable arguments for the invasion, based upon noble ideas.
I'm not talking about the Bush ideas, whatever they may be. I'm talking about my ideas and arguments. And, yes, Tom Friedman's ideas.
I'm prepared to defend the idea that there was and is good cause for hope that the invasion of Iraq will turn out far and away for the best.
But that's about as far as I go, various lesser ancillary sub-arguments ignored for the moment.
I have hope. That's all. It may yet be crushed into a pitiful, shredded, pulp.
I can't agree with the idea that the various arguments, pro and con, are "simple." It disturbs me that you think they are, Avedon, though given your consistent position, and that of many who agree with you, I can't be surprised.
Regarding the points you bring up:
It was unjustifiable to invade without even letting the weapons inspections be completed.
That has the problem that, by definition and nature of circumstances, the weapons inspections could never be "completed." Even if one million inspectors covered every square inch of Iraq, and one hundred miles below, with Magic Super Cosmic X-Ray Detector Rings, and for good measure, did the same with Syria and Iran to make sure Saddam Hussein hadn't shipped stuff off for safe-keeping, and they then declared "Iraq is weapons free! Yay!," they'd then either have to leave, in which case we start all over again from Day 1 -- I mean, you're not going to make the argument that Saddam Hussein would have reformed, and decided to give up all WMDs, are you? -- or, my goodness, the inspectors would have to stay until the reign of Uday and Qusay's kids' or whenever.
Meanwhile, the only reason that regime let in inspectors was the fact that one hundred thousand troops were parked on his borders. Do you dispute that if, say, we had waited another year, and the troops were brought home, Hussein would not have then kicked out the inspectors? Do you think he wanted them there and would have left them there voluntarily?
And how long could most of the effective military force of the US and UK be left surrounding Iraq? A year? Two? If you claim more, I will challenge that as close to impossible, and bring the figures and facts to bear to demonstrate it.
No, a longer term stay for such a massive deployment of force was, by nature, not possible. Circumstances compelled it to be short-term.
So, in other words, the alternative to war was either: a) continuation of sanctions that everyone agrees was inhumane and killing more Iraqis that died either in the war or subsequently -- this is the pro-Iraqi people leftist argument?; or b) letting the sanctions, containment, and inspections regime collapse within a year to three years, thus releasing Hussein from his bottle, as well as continue the horror of his grinding killing of his people. Or, sorry, c) patting Hussein on the head, and saying "well, we don't like you, but there's nothing we can really do about that, so let's let bygones be bygones, and see how that works out. Can we make deals for your oil now, please? Oh, and try to be nicer to your people, please."
These don't seem to me to be compellingly sensible humane leftist alternatives. Your mileage may vary.
And it was stupid to destabilize the only secular country in that group.
Sorry, that one is so far out in left field, it stupifies me. Apply the same logic to the notion of "it was stupid to destabilize Nazi Germany," or "it was stupid to destabilize Pinochet's Chile," or "it was stupid to destabilize Poland in 1980." Since when did you become a supporter of the stability of fascist regimes?
When did "stability" become the Prime Directive? Particularly of genocidal dictatorships?
Lastly, on that, on my planet, in recent years, Iraq was far less "secular" than Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, or the United Arab Emirates. I'll provide details if you need them.
In conclusion, as I've said many times, the whole thing might come completely apart, and it may all end in tears. And serious tragedy. I can think of numerous horrible scenarios, many all too likely. You may get to, in the end, say "Ha! I was so right, and those who didn't see it were fools!"
All I'm saying for now is that I'm not declaring any such thing in return at present, and we'll see what happens. It was a gamble. Win some, lose some. The alternative to the gamble, however, was not attractive.
Thanks muchly for the other kind words. Your friend, as always, Gary.
UP, UP, AND AW--, WAIT, WHAT SECTION? Slightly weirdly, the NY Timesprofiles comics artist Alex Ross in their "Home and Garden" section, with an account of his Halloween party, complete with picture of Ross looking goofy in a Phantom costume (who the Times unsurprisingly though erroneously describes as a "superhero"). The article, being in the section it is, is as much focused about the house and the Ross's collections of comic art and action figures as it is about Alex Ross, Comics Guy.
Which, may I say, strikes me as a big steaming pile of... stuff.
But the after effects, the ongoing guerilla war in Iraq, is not a sign of failure in the anti-terror war, as Sen. Tom Daschle claimed on ABC News last night, but of success. It forces al Qaeda and its allies to fight us there - and better there than again in New York or Washington of elsewhere on American soil.
Possibly I'm just simple, but I fail to understand how or why al Queda is prevented from making attacks in Washington, D.C., or NYC, or Chicago, or Nashville, or Los Angeles, or Portland, or wherever in the US, because the US is occupying Iraq.
Don't they have, like, a choice in this matter?
I'm nothing but an arm-chair general whose highest military rank was Assistant Patrol Leader in the Boy Scouts, but I seem to recall the ancient military precept of "hit them where they ain't."
As in "soft targets."
A lesson al Queda has generally seemed to learn quite well. Is invading Iraq (an act I still am inclined to defend, as any regular reader knows) somehow supposed to give them amnesia? Make them so enraged that they'll decide "we must not attack the US citizens at home, any more! Attacking Paul Bremer is a far higher priority now!"?
As an ancillary point, I'm sure the Iraqi people are happy to be cast in the role of flypaper (I'm sure that US personnel in Iraq are equally happy, and, say, it can't even be asserted for the non-military personnel that "it's their job"); promulgating this meme, this "strategy," will surely work wonders in our Grand Strategy of winning the hearts and minds of the Islamic and Arab peoples.
The massive American build-up around Iraq serves as a baited trap that Al Qaeda cannot ignore. Failure to react to the pending American attack would demonstrate Al Qaeda's impotence. For the sake of their own reputation (as well as any notion of divine sanction), Al Qaeda's cadres must show CNN and Al Jazeera they are still capable of dramatic endeavor.
Fair enough. And, again, what prevents al Queda from demonstrating such a "dramatic endeavor" in a major US city? Yes, it's obviously easier to launch attacks in Iraq. But "easier" doesn't translate to "impossible in the US." And any remotely significant attacks in the US would have a thousand, maybe ten thousand, times the effectiveness of pin-prick killings in Iraq. And al Queda isn't stupid enough to not realize this.
This assertion that the reason we should have invaded Iraq is to draw out the enemy so we won't be attacked is simply illogical and if it were truly found out to be the reasoning of the US government -- which I doubt is the case, though I could be completely wrong on that -- I would need a great deal of convincing that this wasn't quite loony.
Read The Rest depending on how much you care about these sort of food-fight arguments.
"I'VE LOOKED INTO HIS HEART, AND HE'S A GOOD MAN." Someone said that about this man.
For those who have not kept up their Russian, "oligarch" is a term of art for "rich Jews" who made their money in the massive privatization of Soviet assets in the early 1990s. It is still not a good thing to be a successful Jew in historically anti-Semitic Russia.
Since Putin was elected president in 2000, every major figure exiled or arrested for financial crimes has been Jewish. In dollar terms, we are witnessing the largest illegal expropriation of Jewish property in Europe since the Nazi seizures during the 1930s.
Unfortunately, the implications of Khodorkovsky's arrest go beyond the suppression of democratic voices and the return of official anti-Semitism. This arrest must be seen in the context of increasingly aggressive, military and extrajudicial actions in Ukraine, Moldova, the South Caucasus and Chechnya. In the past month, Putin has demanded that Ukraine sign a concessionary economic treaty; Russian intelligence services have been detected behind election irregularities in Azerbaijan and Georgia and in influence-peddling in Moldova and Abkhazia; and Russian gunboats have confronted the Ukrainian Coast Guard in an illegal attempt to seize a valuable commercial waterway.
For the balance of his first term, Putin has skillfully taken advantage of America's necessary preoccupations with the war on terrorism and the liberation of Iraq. Now Moscow and the capitals of Eastern Europe are watching carefully to see how Washington responds to this latest crackdown. If the United States fails to take a hard line in response to such a high-visibility arrest, chauvinists in the Russian Ministry of Defense and the FSB will correctly conclude that there will be no meaningful response to the reestablishment of a neo-imperial sphere of influence in the new democracies to Russia's south and west. In addition to the expected Cold War thuggery and opportunistic financial seizures, we should expect that the new powers in Russia will rig the crucial elections in Ukraine and Georgia next year and continue to prop up the brutal dictatorship of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.
Finally, the incarceration of one man in Moscow's notorious Matrosskaya Tishina Prison poses painful questions for U.S. policy. It is now impossible to argue that President Bush's good-faith efforts at personal diplomacy with Putin have produced democratic outcomes.
"You know, you remind me of my dad. You were head of the Federal Security Service, after decades in the KGB, and my dad was head of the CIA! My dad has a good heart. I can tell you do, too. I'm sure your briefers didn't do a profile on me and tell you about my being born again, and that your talking to me about your religious convictions was purely spontaneous and truthful."
I'M CLOSING IN ON MY SECOND ANNIVERSARY of having moved to Colorado and the Southwest, and I'd just like to say that having seasons of local news being All Fire All The Time is boring.
(National news is paying no attention, of course, but there are now over 500 acres burning in Boulder County alone, and thousands more acres burning in Colorado, with many towns being evacuated.)
So I expect Governor-Elect Schwarzenegger to get right on the job of personally putting out all the fires in Cah-lee-for-neea and the Southwest, including Col-or-ahdo, in the personal inimitable tradition of his that we all know so well.
He'll probably use One Big Colossal Explosion, followed by a quip such as "you're fired!," or "you're blown!," or "hasta la vista, flameboy!"
UPDATE: Twenty minutes later, I smell smoke. Crap.
CORRECTION: I just ran across this survey of left-wing bloggers as to who the twenty greatest Americans are. A "representative" of each of 28 blogs is listed as "contributing." One of the blogs is Amygdala.
One of three things seems most likely:
a) One of my vast horde of editorial underlings wrote in for me.
b) I have amnesia.
c) John Hawkins is confused.
To the best of my knowledge, Amygdala did not participate in this survey. For the record.
I hate such tasks as attempting to figure out who "the twenty greatest Americans" might be, since the field is so large, and reasons for being nominated so many, and thus I wouldn't be very likely to try. But I will say that most of those people on that list were great Americans, with the arguable exception of Lyndon Johnson, who did some great legislation and was also a despicable human being, not to mention can we say "Vietnam"? Thomas Paine was important, but was also a loon. U. S. Grant was a great American, but for all that he contributed so greatly to winning the Civil War, and to Reconstruction, he's unlikely to be on my hypothetical list of 20 greatest. 400 greatest, maybe.
CHILDISH MALIGN STUPIDITY: As carefully documented by this blogger, Brian, the real Riverbend blog, done by a woman in Iraq, is being plagiarized, faked, and twisted by an obviously odious person at riverSbendblog.blogspot.com - note the extra S.
Research by Brian at "Bending Truth" indicates that the thug involved is a 70-year-old Republican activist sometimes known as "Diego," who has a multitude of alias and a history of this sort of attack.
All too reminiscent of the worst of Usenet, isn't it? That's because the gentleman involved has a long history of similar Usenet abuse.
Meanwhile, although Brian has well-documented how the fake blog violates the Blogspot Terms Of Service numerous times, Blogspot is asking Riverbend to first send a snailmail complaint before they will take any action.
Which seems very weird, not to mention unreasonable, given that she lives in frigging Bagdad.
You might want to let Pyra know what you think of that here.
Meanwhile, don't get confused by the faker. He's working on a second fake at riverbendsblog.blogspot.com.
The Bush administration is weighing whether to shift scarce intelligence resources in Iraq away from the search for unconventional weapons in order to bolster counterinsurgency efforts, American officials said on Tuesday.
The shift of some intelligence officers, linguists and other specialists could reinforce efforts to identify and remove those attacking American soldiers, international workers and Iraqi civilians, the officials said. But, they said, the Central Intelligence Agency is wary about undermining the search for chemical and biological weapons and evidence of Iraq's suspected nuclear program.
"There are competing demands for the services of a finite number of individuals," a senior American official said. "Obviously, you don't want to fail to support the security needs in Baghdad, but on the other hand you don't want to fail to support the weapons hunt."
I wonder whatever happened to that Osama guy. I vaguely recall something about "dead or alive." Something about killing thousands of Americans.
Eh. Who can remember stuff from that long ago? It all becomes vague and unimportant. We've got to get with today's priorities!
First, the blogosphere rewards hyperbole. Strongly worded, over the top denunciations get far more attention (links, trackbacks, little digital pats on the head from celebribloggers, commenters saying "you go girl" or the like) than temperate criticism. If you're a blogger in search of more traffic, you know what you have to do. Even when you're not really angling for attention, this dynamic is always in play in the blogospheric ecology: your over-the-top, hyperbolic posts will get linked a lot, while your measured, reasoned, temperate ones probably won't.
It's one of the things that makes reading blogs interesting, of course. But occasionally, it can involve negligent or willful misinterpretation of the intent of someone's words, particularly if they refer to (or can be construed as bearing on) one of the hotbutton blogospheric topics, like antisemitism, anti-Americanism, etc. At its worst, the tendency can lead to posts which fabricate an outrageous scenario, as in the infamous case of the Dissident Frogman's "missing" flags. More often, it's simply a matter of well-intentioned spin, featuring genuine outrage, to be sure, but at times seeming to be more concerned with the rhetorical effect within the microcosm of the post than the matter being commented on. The unfortunate result can be that clumsiness of expression, especially when treating of difficult or touchy matters, is deliberately miscast as malevolence, without a serious attempt to understand or engage with what the author might have been getting at. Sentiment, outrage, passion masquerade as analysis.
Dr. Frank went on to make a number of other points, many of which I agree with, one of which I wrote a partial disagreement about in his comments, and a couple of which I feel are sufficiently complex that I choose not to address them just now.
But Dr. Frank is always worth reading. The point I quoted above I fully agree with and, although I, of course, slide into such excess myself at times -- a bit too much lately -- it generally makes me cranky, and when I do it myself, I generally feel regretful and a bit dirty later.
ADDENDUM: Having now read the article Dr. Frank was largely agreeing with, I find I wildly disagree with it, as a glance at my comment to his post would suggest. Don't have the energy now to get into it, though. I absolutely do think there is value to assigning levels of fault to levels of prejudice, however. We all have some degrees of some prejudices. We are not unitary beings, and claiming that we are, if you'll pardon the phrase, all, universally, nothing but black-and-white on such issues, either pure good or pure evil, is simply nutso wrong, and an extremely damaging way to view people and the world.
Read The Rest: Nah. That's all you need to know. I hear, though, that Mel has made some last minute changes, and given Jesus a wacky robot buddy named "Sparky" who loves to do Three Stooges impressions. Together, they fight crime!
This will make the movie a bit more punchy and commercial. Look for the sequel: Jesus Weapon: II Holy Ghosts!
IF IT'S ONLY ONE QUARTER AS BAD as this in the Iraqi bribery, corruption, and inefficiency, situation, it's not just bad, it's sickening. And be clear: we're talking about American corruption, not Iraqi corruption.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. (Don't forget to click through all the pages.)
THE DARK ART OF INTERROGATION, Mark Bowden's famous article, is also the best guide I've ever seen to attempting to resist interrogation. Were I in authority in al Queda, the lengthy piece would be mandatory reading.
You can decide where to place it on the scale, though. No coercion here at Amygdala!
No, really. Real physics -- ok, with "Mach" substituting for "warp" -- with a wind tunnel and holographic interferometry. See for yourself. (Via Sore Eyes.)
WHO WILL BE THE NEXT PHAROH? This superb piece of journalism by Mary Anne Weaver, from the October Atlantic Monthly, is finally online.
It's far and away the best examination of the current tension in Eqypt over who will succeed Hosni Mubarak.
Indeed, to many of those assembled in the fair's main hall, Mubarak seemed to be walking perhaps the most precarious tightrope he had ever walked. As he made his way through the crowd, a prominent writer asked him if it was true that in an effort to avert war in Iraq, Saudi Arabia had attempted to persuade Saddam Hussein to step down.
Mubarak, normally a man of stolid demeanor and few words, looked genuinely startled. "Impossible!" he replied. "No President ever steps down!"
In all his years of rule, Mubarak has never appointed a Vice-President or designated successor (fortunately, it's not as if anyone ever tried to kill him, or anything).
Will it be Lieutenant General Omar Suleiman, chief of military intelligence, or Mubarak's son, Gamal, or a sheik, or someone else?
Plenty of good writing on the increasing Islamization and anti-Americanism in Egypt.
About 8:40 I went into their . . . clubhouse? Meeting place? Super-secret undisclosed location? Whatever you call it, it's where they meet. I stood quietly in the back while they did official club stuff, and took a few more pictures with my cool cameraphone . . . and then I hit the wrong button and made it ring at about 6900 Db. Color me embarrassed. When I finally took the stage, I apologized and said, "Sorry about my cell phone ringing. I just thought I'd put some more distance between me and Wesley by showing you all how technically incompetent I am."
It got a big laugh, so I guess it was worth it.
Upside-down rocketship. Clubhouse, Wil. They've owned a clubhouse since the late Sixties, and the efforts to pay for one have been a defining aspect of the oldest science fiction group in the country (since 1934).
Visiting the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, a sprawling hospital complex in Northwest Washington, the first thing one notices are the young faces. Soldiers in their teens and early twenties sit in the waiting area, baseball caps on their heads, mothers at their sides. The second thing one notices about these young men evacuated from Iraq is that many of them are not whole. Where there should be arms and legs, there are too often only stumps. For all of its contemporary architecture, high-tech wards, and superb physicians, the place has the feel of a Civil War hospital.
Walter Reed is located only a few miles north of the think tanks, government offices, and, yes, magazines that pressed for war in Iraq. But it is a different country altogether. Different because, with the exception of two visits by the president, few of the war's architects have come to see the mangled 19-, 20-, and 21-year-olds on whom they rely to accomplish America's aims abroad. Neither, for that matter, have many news organizations. The New York Times has yet to devote a full article to the subject, unless you count a fictional story by Jayson Blair. Nor have any of the three major newsweeklies. This despite the fact that, nearly every evening, huge C-17 and C-141 transport planes land at Andrews Air Force Base, on the outskirts of Washington, ferrying wounded Americans from military hospitals in Europe. Unlike at Baltimore-Washington International Airport--where soldiers returning on leave navigate their way through crowds of news crews and cameras--flights at Andrews land under cover of darkness, with no TV lights to guide the wounded to waiting ambulances. Instead, their stories have been left to local newspapers in Texas, Georgia, upstate New York, and elsewhere, which convey news of the maimed to hometown readers.
The near-invisibility of the wounded has several sources. The media has always treated combat deaths as the most reliable measure of battlefield progress, while for its part the administration has been reluctant to divulge the full number of wounded.
And again, the wounded are ignored. But you can point it out.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5. (Again, use "cypherpunk" for ID and password.)
OH, THAT EXPLAINS IT! I guess I knew this, but hated to put it in such plain terms.
In reality, there are a handful of genuine Democratic isolationists--people like Dennis Kucinich, who opposes rebuilding Iraq, just as he opposed Clinton's war in Kosovo. (There are also a handful of genuine Republican isolationists, for instance Texas Representative Ron Paul, a libertarian who opposed the $87 billion and the Iraq war itself.) There is a slightly larger contingent of genuine hawks, who support military interventions even when launched by presidents they loathe. Joseph Lieberman is the best Democratic example, John McCain the best Republican one. Finally, there is that large group of congressional Democrats and Republicans who are hawkish when the commander-in-chief hails from their party and dovish when he does not. Ideologically, it makes no sense that Democrats--who say keeping the United States safe requires improving the lives of people in the Muslim world--would oppose Bush's request for grants to rebuild Iraq. And it makes no sense that Republicans--who opposed even modest nation-building efforts in Haiti and the Balkans--would endorse such a costly one in Iraq. But on Capitol Hill last week, intellectual consistency hardly mattered. Democrats voted against the reconstruction money for the same reason Republicans opposed the Kosovo war: They consider the president a dangerous liar and don't want to empower him in any way.
It's true. The overwhelming number of our national politicians -- from both parties -- and I say this as someone who has always defended the principle that politics can be a noble occupation and that those in office have a difficult row to hoe in making honorable and productive compromises -- are today largely partisan hacks who give no thought at betraying their country's, and the world's, interests, at the expense of their party's.
Disgusting, but true.
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5. (Use "cypherpunk" for password and ID.)
NOT CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT: Gregg Easterbrook doesn't seem to understand what the difference is between a scientific theory, and simply speculating (or believing) with no falsifisable basis.
But the article left out the really interesting part, which is what the question of other dimensions says about the spiritual debate. At Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other top schools, researchers discuss ten unobservable dimensions, or an infinite number of imperceptible universes, without batting an eye. Scientists banter offhandedly about invisible realities that might incorporate trillions of billions of galaxies, and suppose such things are real in spite of there being no physical evidence whatsoever to support such speculation. No one considers discussion of other dimensions to be peculiar. Ten unobservable dimensions, an infinite number of invisible parallel universes--hey, why not?
Yet if at Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or top schools, you proposed that there exists just one unobservable dimension--the plane of the spirit--and that it is real despite our inability to sense it directly, you'd be laughed out of the room. Or conversation would grind to a halt to avoid offending your irrational religious superstitions.
To modern thought, one extra spiritual dimension is a preposterous idea, while the notion that there are incredible numbers of extra physical dimensions gives no pause. Yet which idea sounds more implausible--one unseen dimension or billions of them?
The answer, Gregg, is "neither, until one idea is tested and proven."
Now, which is the falsifisable one, Gregg?
Read The Rest Scale: 1 out of 5. (What the heck is a literal "spiritual dimension," anyway, and just how, exactly, does it fit into physics theory? WTF?) (And just how "plausible" is quantum theory, relativity theory, and contemporary particle theory, as measured by mere Newtonian, let alone, say, Aristotelean, thought?)
ADDENDUM: BusyBusyBusy's typically apt "shorter" version:
Theoretical physicists stubbornly prefer science to magical thinking, even though science is complicated while magic easily explains lots of stuff.
WHEN HARRY BEAT POLLARD so hard about the ears that the Independent columnist helplessly confesses:
OK, you've all got me banged to rights. It's a pretty awful post, I concede. I went out of my way to keep saying weasel words pointing out the principled objections to such a ban. But they were, clearly, not enough and my weak argument has been, quite rightly, shot to pieces.
And it's not much of an excuse, either, to point out that I wrote the piece after being up for nearly 36 hours in a row and feeling like shit. If it's good enough to offer for publication, it should stand or fall on its merits. And, clearly, it falls.
So what does this all mean?
It means you're all right, and I'm wrong; a smoking ban isn't the way forward.
It means I find smoking to be such a truly disgusting habit in the way it affects others (and I don't mean medically - I didn't mention passive smoking once) that I am reduced to spluttering what is clearly ill-thought through nonsense in reaction to my hatred for the habit.
JOHANN HARI ONGeorge Galloway (now expelled from the Labour Party):
The truth is that, to all decent people, Galloway and his dwindling band of comrades were rotting in a political graveyard before any of these accusations emerged. We do not need allegations of financial crookedness; we already know that he is morally crooked. The evidence for his authoritarianism is clear (indeed, I had documented it at length in this column, and said that he should be expelled from the Labour Party long before the current scandal). He has said that he would describe himself as a Stalinist (death toll: 30 million) if it was not "making a rod for my own back". He describes the day the Soviet Union fell as "the worst day of my life". He supports the death penalty. He praised General Musharraf's coup in Pakistan, saying that "in poor third world countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians. Pakistan is always on the brink of breaking apart into its widely disparate components. Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together ... Democracy is a means, not an end in itself." (I know Bush and Blair have also praised Musharraf; they too should be ashamed).
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. The excellent Hari, by the way, is now blogging, along with others, at the excellent (mostly British) leftist site, Harry's Place. from which I swiped this.
WE'RE NOT THE SAME RIVER. A thoughtful bit from Eric Idle:
"You look more like you do now than you did then. "
A woman said that to me last night at the signing. Good isn't it? I feel more like I do today than I did then too. We are constantly mistaken for those who we were. But we're not them. Those young men are dead. Gone. We older, wider and greyer men are their descendants. They were smart, young, bright and clever and terribly energetic. We have to talk about them as though we were them. But we're not you know. I used to be Eric Idle in that group. But now I'm not. I'm not even like him. He drank and smoke and ate meat. He was married to a blond Australian. I'm none of the above. But looking at his pictures he was quite cute, and mercifully, he didn't know it. He had a lot of insecurities which have since been ironed out by a jolly good shrink. (I know the English disapprove of shrinkage, but then they still think smoking is a good idea…and look at their tabloids. They're bonkers.) I think that's why some interviews are so taxing for me. They want to talk to him. And I'm not him, any more than Ringo is still Ringo. Sometimes I have to pretend to be him, and I can still do his material and sing his songs, but clearly I'm a totally different person.
"Totally" seems a bit of an understandable over-statement, but the observation is well-taken for all of us. I suspect some examples of some people's emotional problems results from confusion and lack of understanding of this, and unwise attempts to reconcile necessary distinctions between past-Us and present-Us.
Martin Amis's new novel reads like a sendup of a Martin Amis novel written by someone intent on sabotaging his reputation. It bears as much resemblance to Mr. Amis's best fiction as a bad karaoke singer does to Frank Sinatra, as a kitchen magnet of Munch's "Scream" does to the real painting.
It is a novel that takes every theme, narrative technique and preoccupation of the author and turns it inside out, revealing how qualities that have established Mr. Amis as one of the foremost stylists of his generation can easily devolve into self-indulgence and mannerism; how daring choices in subject matter and form can mutate into mere grossness and hollow pretension.
I think of Mike setting out on his great journeys. Well mine won't be so bold. Around North America in Eighty Days. He's probably in Pakistan eating dog with an Oxford educated goat-herder and part-time weapons dealer, while I am headed for an executive class seat on Air Canada, but chaque a son gout, as the French say when looking at English food. I still feel somewhat nervous encroaching on the Palin territory of writing a travel diary based on a journey and perhaps I should avoid the whole coffee table book concept. Perhaps I can skip straight to the dining table book and produce a book so large eight people can have dinner on it. I want to avoid any unpleasant sense of stealing Michael's thunder, though it is true, I reason, that all the Pythons' have been involved in documentaries: Jonesy walked half way to Jerusalem in crusader armour holding a spear, Gilliam is the heroic subject of a classic documentary about the non - making of a movie, and even Cleesy went to Madagascar to invade the privacy of the lemurs. So this must be a Python thing. What is this urge to probe and examine by ex-comedians? Are they tired of dressing up as women? Surely not. In any case I am mistaken so regularly for Mike I decide I surely have the right to go ahead and be the first to write a dining table book. Perhaps a bedside table would be even better with lots of photographs of naked women. Publishers like that sort of thing. But then there's the wife to face, and I don't really anticipate there will be all that many nude women in the theater at my shows. Perhaps if I do it serially on PythOnline, no one can accuse me of doing it for the money. Everyone knows the readers of PythOnline are tight bastards. It's a wonder they interrupt their free downloading to even visit the site…
There's an immense amount more, as he's already completed twenty-eight days out of the planned eighty.
Read The Rest Scale: why, it's almost as if he's funny.
-- Entertainment Weekly, "100 Greatest Videogames," May 9 issue
"We received your interview request for Julia Roberts. Unfortunately, she is not available. Thank you."
-- Julia Roberts' publicist
Julia Roberts' weapon of choice is the M19 SSM rocket launcher. Not the zippiest firearm in the toolkit, sure, and does diddly in close-up melee action. But it's got a double-barrel rocket payload, and pound for pound, it punches like a mofo. Julia Roberts' favorite trick during multiplayer capture-the-flag matches is to camp near the team banner from a high vantage point and wait until the other side's closing in. And at the last possible second, when they're right about to nab it, pop out in the open with that hand cannon and...
"Dance, ya little bitches, dance!" Julia Roberts hoots, as the blast impact flings three opponent squaddies airborne. Her whole wiry body explodes off the Eames couch in the Emperor's Suite at the Peninsula Hotel, and she jabs her middle finger at the 64-inch plasma flatscreen, as their crispy corpses hit the ground like rag dolls.
Ms. Roberts is trying to live a normal life, according to People magazine's latest 50 Most Beautiful People issue, and in it, Denzel Washington says, amazed, "You'd be amazed how down to earth she really is." But he's not amazed now, because he's been trying to get her bony ass off the couch for the last five minutes.
[...]
Up Sunset, Jennifer Garner huffs and then heaves her copy of Entertainment Weekly into the back wall of the Viper Room. She cannot believe her bitch publicist got her to tell the EW stringer that "Ms. Pac Man" was her favorite videogame. This article was supposed to get her in tight with her geek boy "Alias"/"Daredevil" fan base, but then here comes Miss Thing all talking about "Halo," some intense, blowing-crap-up deal, while there she is naming some old school, girly-girl arcade game every female in the whole damn world has played.
Once again, she thinks, clenching her fists, America's sweetheart has preempted us all. Damn Julia Roberts and her Xbox, Jennifer Garner seethes, damn her.
PHILOSOPHICAL LAUGHING: I missed this Malcolm Gladwell piece the first time. Ostensibly about the original SNL crew, it's, as usual for Gladwell, about social dynamics.
We are inclined to think that genuine innovators are loners, that they do not need the social reinforcement the rest of us crave. But that’s not how it works, whether it’s television comedy or, for that matter, the more exalted realms of art and politics and ideas. In his book “The Sociology of Philosophies,” Randall Collins finds in all of known history only three major thinkers who appeared on the scene by themselves: the first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch’ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun. Everyone else who mattered was part of a movement, a school, a band of followers and disciples and mentors and rivals and friends who saw each other all the time and had long arguments over coffee and slept with one another’s spouses.
[some examples of social groups elided]
Collins’s point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction -- conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re onto something.
[...]
[excellent example elided]
[...]
What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it “philosophical laughing,” which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. But there’s more to it than that. One of the peculiar features of group dynamics is that clusters of people will come to decisions that are far more extreme than any individual member would have come to on his own. People compete with each other and egg each other on, showboat and grandstand; and along the way they often lose sight of what they truly believed when the meeting began. Typically, this is considered a bad thing, because it means that groups formed explicitly to find middle ground often end up someplace far away. But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.
To which I say to all of this: yes, yes, yes! I've observed all of this, and very much agree.
Uglow’s book reveals how simplistic our view of groups really is. We divide them into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two states -- the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity -- you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible. You get Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and a revolution in Western philosophy. You get Darwin, Watt, Wedgwood, and Priestley, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. And sometimes, on a more modest level, you get a bunch of people goofing around and bringing a new kind of comedy to network television.
SHE'S VERY FEY. Typically long New Yorkerprofile of Saturday Night Live head writer, Tina Fey. Further proof that bitter, judgmental, and caustic can make for successful comedy.
Read The Rest: if Fey's ever made you laugh. Or if, you know, you'd rather complain about how vulgar, nasty, and awful her humor is.
SQUARING THE CIRCLE: Hwang Jang Yop, the highest-ranking defector from North Korea, the inventor-ideologist of their "juche" self-reliance doctrine, tutor to Kim Jong Il and advisor to him and Kim Il Sung for over forty years, is coming to the US for the first time, and will address the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
This is a good thing, but the tough part is this:
In a recent interview in Seoul, Mr. Hwang, 80, made it clear that he would oppose any deal in which Mr. Kim would give up his nuclear bombs but remain in charge in North Korea.
[...]
"I absolutely oppose giving North Korea guarantees if the North withdraws its nuclear weapons program," he said. "I completely oppose any policy that will ensure maintenance of the North's dictatorship."
That's terrific in theory, but in practice, how do we balance this justly moral sentiment against the need to deal with the nuclear threat from North Korea? How do we balance, in essence, the lives of South Koreans against the lives of North Koreans?
I don't have any sort of precise answer on that, and falling back on banalities such as (my words) "we have to carefully balance the need to negotiate for the best possible nuclear safeguards against the need to not grant legitimacy and strength to the North Korean government" really doesn't get us very far in any sort of useful way.
North Korea remains an immensely worrying trouble spot, not least because, as in so many other situations, the correct answers are far from clear.
THOSE WELFARE QUEENS!: Imagine handing over $5.7 billion tax dollars totally unnecessarily to support a bunch of people who are doing very well for themselves. That damn liberal nanny state!
So here's another version of their story, and how your government which always speaks of "fighting waste, fraud, and abuse" is giving your money away.
The welfare queen's name is "Boeing."
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. (If that link is temporarily not working, try starting here.)
Here is some other background. This is a truly important story. Tell me again how we can trust these folks with our national defense?
RETURN TO HEART OF DARKNESS. It's been a while since I've said anything about Congo (you can try dropping the word into this blog's "search" function on the upper left, for a recap), but while this detailed account of the wide-spread role cannibalism and magical thinking are playing in the wars and chaos in Congo is almost too horrifying to read, it is our duty not to look away and not to refuse to pay attention.
To glimpse the depth of magical thinking, of spiritual vision, that lies beneath the cannibalism, I arranged for a display of spiritual power. In khaki slacks, a neatly pressed white dress shirt and a gaucho-style hat made of ''witch material,'' Vita Kitambala, a Mayi-Mayi military general and traditional priest, demonstrated his capacity to deflect bullets. The strength he claimed was not due to cannibalism, as far as I know. He would not reveal the rituals or substances that allowed him, according to his troops (who ranged in age from 8 to adulthood), to make his soldiers fly or to make himself invisible. He would agree only to give evidence of his ability. So, one morning, he directed one of his soldiers to set a green flip-flop on the patchy grass of his Mayi-Mayi garrison. Amid the rectangular huts, another gunman shook a black jerrycan. With AK-47's and grenade launchers, a great crowd of troops had gathered in the sun, amused but not terribly excited. Water from the jerrycan was splashed onto the flip-flop -- the same sanctified water, blessed secretly by the general, that the soldiers had often splashed on themselves.
They all knew of the water's bulletproofing power in battle. They had laughed, the previous afternoon, at my skepticism, my deprivation of faith, when they told of the things their general could do. ''The mzungu cannot believe,'' they said, using the Swahili word for ''white man.'' They had their knowledge, a truth they took for granted, and there was no ceremony, no fanfare, to the demonstration now. A teenager standing over the flip-flop fired down so suddenly that I missed the aiming. The green rubber was unscathed, but I requested another display. The general offered to let me choose any gun in the crowd, to let me fire it, so I would know there were no tricks. He offered to let me shoot at the chest of any soldier.
I declined. I suggested we place my notebook on the ground, douse it with water, shoot and see if it survived. No, he answered, for I might already have performed my own magic, my own mzungu gris-gris, upon it. He worried, too, that when I returned home I would have the notebook analyzed to learn the water's secret elements.
At last a camouflage-patterned hat was drenched. This time I focused carefully on the gunman, on whether he aimed downward precisely at the target. He didn't. He lifted the barrel several inches as he fired. Dirt spattered up three feet from the hat. His move seemed so awkward, so obvious, that for a moment I believed I felt everyone's embarrassment.
But the general didn't look embarrassed at all. The spiritual force of the water bent the barrel, he explained matter-of-factly, causing the bullet to veer off target.
WE COMMENT ON OTHER PARTS OF THE BRAIN. In this case, the ventral putamen. And neural marketing.
So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better?
Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.
In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.
Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds.
Measuring brand influence might seem like an unusual activity for a neuroscientist, but Montague is just one of a growing breed of researchers who are applying the methods of the neurology lab to the questions of the advertising world.
COUNT THE REFERENCES in Kill-Bill. (No, if you don't like it, I don't expect this will give you the faintest cause to change your mind. And, no, I've not even seen it yet; sudden financial damage makes me dubious of spending money on a movie just now.)
Read The Rest: if you're interested in Tarantino; if not, not.
Read The Rest if you're interested in Massive Multi-player Online Games or in Star Wars. If not, not, and check out his take-down of the pomposity of Harold Bloom's response to Stephen King.
THE INEVITABLE RESULT: The Saudi opposition is beginning to be felt.
Asked if his organization's purpose was reform of the monarchy or its removal, he said, "Before Oct. 14, even people who agreed with us thought we were talking about things that were impossible in Saudi Arabia, and they called me impractical and unrealistic. But now I am confident to say that the downfall of the regime is an inevitable result of what has started."
HOW US POLICY BROUGHT DOWN OUR FRIEND, THE PRESIDENT OF BOLIVIA. Jeffrey Sachs here :
The roots of Bolivia's upheaval lie in chronic poverty and a regional economic crisis. But three precipitating factors were directly related to the United States and a rising tide of anti-Americanism. The most important was the U.S. demand in recent years that Bolivia eradicate tens of thousands of hectares of coca, thereby robbing 50,000 or so peasant farmers (and perhaps five times as many dependents) of their livelihoods, without offering any realistic alternatives.
The second flashpoint was the recent announcement by the Sanchez de Lozada government of its intention to export natural gas to the United States, via a pipeline to a Chilean port, provoking rumors that Bolivia's gas was being given away to much-distrusted U.S. and Chilean interests. The third factor was the strain throughout 2003 of politically explosive International Monetary Fund austerity measures backed by the United States.
On a visit to the White House last year, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada told President Bush that he would push ahead with a plan to eradicate coca but that he needed more money to ease the impact on farmers.
Otherwise, the Bolivian president's advisers recalled him as saying, "I may be back here in a year, this time seeking political asylum."
Mr. Bush was amused, Bolivian officials recounted, told his visitor that all heads of state had tough problems and wished him good luck.
Now Mr. Sánchez de Lozada, Washington's most stalwart ally in South America, is living in exile in the United States after being toppled last week by a popular uprising, a potentially crippling blow to Washington's anti-drug policy in the Andean region.
[...]
"The U.S. insistence on coca eradication was at the core of Sánchez de Lozada's problem," said Eduardo Gamarra, a Bolivian scholar who is director of the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami.
Dr. Gamarra and others point to events in Bolivia as a warning that United States drug policy may sow still wider instability in the region, where anti-American sentiment is building with the failure of economic reforms that Washington has helped encourage here.
In Bolivia the backlash has strengthened the hand of the political figure regarded by Washington as its main enemy: Evo Morales, head of the coca growers' federation, who finished second in presidential election last year.
And so the War On Some Drugs brings down governments, and, as always, sabotages itself. What a colossal waste of money and humanity this policy has caused over the past eighty years.
When broken down geographically, the poll reinforces the differences among the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in central Iraq and the majority Shia in the south, illustrating the difficulties facing any group trying to form a constitutional government. "The data suggest that Iraqi citizens have different ideas of what democratic and Islamic political systems mean on a functional level," the survey says, and "no public consensus on what type of political framework is best for Iraq."
The survey was based on 1,444 interviews in seven urban areas designed to include the religious and nationalist tendencies of Iraq, the Shia and Sunni Muslims of central and southern Iraq and the Kurds of the north.
In two cities (Irbil and Sulaymaniyah) polled in the Kurdish north, a Western-style democracy or a mix with Islam is overwhelmingly favored. In the southern cities of Basra and Najaf, where the majority Shia predominate, almost two-thirds of those polled thought it important that religious leaders play a large role in politics, and an Islamic state is far more popular.
Even in Baghdad, almost 60 percent of the respondents thought it important that religious leaders play a major role in government, and more than half of the respondents considered it "very important." The capital city was almost evenly divided, with about a third favoring a Western democracy, another third a mix of democracy and Islam, and the final third wanting an Islamic state with sharia, the religious law, as part of government.
The State Department poll showing respondents' desire for a religious role in government appears to run counter to what Bush administration leaders expected. Last month, Vice President Cheney referred to a Zogby International poll which he said showed overwhelming opposition to an Islamic government.
"If you want to ask them do they want an Islamic government established, by 2 to 1 margins they say no, including the Shia population," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
According to the poll, 92 percent of those surveyed in Najaf favored an Islamic state; in Basra, 31 percent preferred an Islamic state and 23 percent wanted a mix of democracy and Islam.
Incidentally, Cheney's ability to believe in what he wants to believe is something truly to behold, to be bewitched by, and not at all to be bothered about. No, siree!
And, then, of course, he makes sure that Condaleeza Rice and Andrew Card find all the True Facts to support this reality, and they "objectively" explain it to that nice nan in the Oval Office.
Electrochemical fuel cells could provide an elegant solution to energy generation and waste disposal — by linking the two. A microbial fuel cell harvests electrons produced during microbial metabolism and channels them to generate an electric current. In this month's issue of Nature Biotechnology, Swades Chaudhuri and Derek Lovley show that a metal-reducing bacterium, Rhodoferax ferrireducens, provides a constant flow of electrons to graphite electrodes with more than 80% efficiency. As growth is supported by energy derived from the electron-transfer process, these fuel cells result in self-renewing and impressively efficient long-term power production.
WHAT SHOULD PUBLIC POLICY, AND THE LAW, BE ON RE-DISTRICTNG?
This is a question that will strike most folks as unbearably dull, and understandably so, but it's also a quite important one.
The gist of this piece, as is most of the rest of what I read on the topic, is that it's quite arguably entirely legal to redistrict voting districts every darn year, if you like, and that the recent tradition of most of the past century of only doing so every decade unless forced otherwise by a court, is just that: a tradition.
But it also doesn't seem helpful, in the long run, whatever your partisan choice is, to allow for such a mess to take place so frequently.
Naturally, a classic alternative is having an independent commission do it. But perhaps something a bit more radical is called for -- some whole new algorithim for districting voting districts. (A really radical scheme would drop geographically-based elections, but I don't imagine we'll be going there any time soon.)
A privacy group hired a skywriter to write part of the Social Security number of Citigroup's chief executive above New York City on Friday, protesting the bank's lobbying efforts to keep lawmakers from tightening privacy regulations and demonstrating that even the privacy of bank executives is at risk.
Working during a break in cloud cover, an airplane scrawled the first five digits of CEO Charles Prince's Social Security number in 15-story numerals above Citigroup's global headquarters in midtown Manhattan.
The Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights called attention to the bank's backing of a Senate bill that would prevent states from protecting consumers' privacy.
THE WONDERFULNESS OF STALIN. The NY Timeslooks back at their Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty's, work from 1932.
Who loves omelettes?
RUSSIANS HUNGRY, BUT NOT STARVING
March 31, 1933:
It is all too true that the novelty and mismanagement of collective farming, plus the quite efficient conspiracy of Feodor M. Konar and his associates in agricultural commissariats, have made a mess of Soviet food production. [Konar was executed for sabotage.]
But — to put it brutally — you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. In fact, the Bolsheviki are more indifferent because they are animated by fanatical conviction.
Russians are different than you and me!
TALINISM DOMINATES RUSSIA OF TODAY June 14, 1931:
Stalin is giving the Russian people — the Russian masses, not Westernized landlords, industrialists, bankers and intellectuals, but Russia's 150,000,000 peasants and workers — what they really want, namely, joint efforts, communal effort. And communal life is as acceptable to them as it is repugnant to a Westerner. This is one of the reasons why Russian Bolshevism will never succeed in the United States, Great Britain, France or other parts west of the Rhine.
Stalinism, too, has done what Lenin only attempted. It has re-established the semi-divine, supreme autocracy of the imperial idea and has placed itself on the Kremlin throne as a ruler whose lightest word is all in all and whose frown spells death.
Try that on free-born Americans or the British with their tough loyalty to old things, or on France's consciousness of self. But it suits the Russians and is as familiar, natural and right to the Russian mind as it is abominable and wrong to Western nations.
There's more. Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.
It's worth noting that whitewashing of admirers of the Soviet Union continues today. Why is it that support for the brutal and murderous regimes of Stalin, or his successors, or of Mao and his, gets a pass because of the "good intentions" of the Communists (I know perfectly well about the good intentions; my mother was a member of the Party in the Thirties), but, say, the Nazis, or Mussolini, or Franco, don't? They thought they had perfectly good intentions, as well, as did their supporters.
