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; 22 cancellations; Total= 8
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 spectators at the bombing set upon two reporters, one American and one Egyptian, hitting one, tearing at his clothes and yelling at the two that such attacks were their fault. "Search them" cried many spectators as the police took the two into custody, locking them in the back of a police car for four hours.
The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.
[...]
The transcript made it clear that the foreign dignitary Woodward was discussing was Bandar, although Rumsfeld would not say that. "We're going to have to clean some of this up in the transcript," Rumsfeld said in the omitted passage. "We'll give you a -- I mean you just said Bandar and I didn't agree with that so we're going to have to -- I don't want to say who it is but you are going to have to go through that and find a way to clean up my language too."
All told, the Pentagon transcript omits a series of eight questions and answers, some of them just a few words each. Yesterday Rumsfeld is described the deleted passages as "some banter."
As a result, we are all going to believe Pentagon transcripts. Excellent work
TWO WORDS DON'T GO TOGETHER: "Schoolchildren" and "blasts." Killers.
The death count from a series of suicide bombing in the southern city of Basra rose to 68 this afternoon, a toll that included as many as 23 children on their way to school.
More than 100 people, among them 4 British soldiers, were wounded in 5 explosions, with 2 more would-be bombers captured later.
[...]
Bodies of schoolchildren were burning inside the bus, witnesses said. Iraqis helped pick up bodies as ambulances rushed to the scene. Burned corpses were brought to the city's hospitals.
The overall view is that this is crap. And the result is not going to be pretty. And none of us will be happy.
Crap.
Read The Rest of the depressing stuff as you wish.
The military already has identified unmet funding needs, including initiatives aimed at providing equipment and weapons for troops in Iraq. The Army has publicly identified nearly $6 billion in funding requests that did not make Bush's $402 billion defense budget for 2005, including $132 million for bolt-on vehicle armor; $879 million for combat helmets, silk-weight underwear, boots and other clothing; $21.5 million for M249 squad automatic weapons; and $27 million for ammunition magazines, night sights and ammo packs. Also unfunded: $956 million for repairing desert-damaged equipment and $102 million to replace equipment lost in combat.
The Marine Corps' unfunded budget requests include $40 million for body armor, lightweight helmets and other equipment for "Marines engaged in the global war on terrorism," Marine Corps documents state. The Marines are also seeking 1,800 squad automatic weapons and 5,400 M4 carbine rifles.
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, charged that the president is playing political games by postponing further funding requests until after the election, to try to avoid reopening debate on the war's cost and future.
Weldon described the administration's current defense budget request as "outrageous" and "immoral" and said that at least $10 billion is needed for Iraqi operations over the next five months.
"There needs to be a supplemental, whether it's a presidential election year or not," he said. "The support of our troops has to be the number one priority of this country. . . . Somebody's got to get serious about this."
[...]
But even that will not be enough, said Robert F. Mecredy, president of the defense group at Armor Holdings. As the two-front uprising in Iraq began taking its toll last month, the company's O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt Armoring Co. subsidiary cranked up its Ohio defense plant, turning out 214 heavily armored Humvees in March, revving up for 220 this month, even building its own bulletproof-glass operation to augment faltering suppliers.
But by September, Mecredy said, O'Gara's funding from the Army will be running out. Mecredy arrived in Washington yesterday for a week of intensive congressional lobbying. To keep Humvee production at the Army's requested rate, he said, Armor Holdings will need $354 million more by Oct. 1, the beginning of fiscal 2005.
[...]
But that is putting a further strain on the budget. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. is now churning out 50,000 steel "shoes" for Bradley treads a month, and will be up to 70,000 by June, Motsek said.
Other problems are being worked through. The backlog of rear rotor blades for Chinook transport helicopters has become serious, he said, with 24 Chinooks now grounded in Iraq. Pre-positioned military stockpiles in Kuwait are critically short.
Someone named "Gary Nolan," who apparently wrote what I wrote, is vigorously denounced here. Damn that Nolan fool!
I've pointed out in comments four times, so far, that I believe Limbaugh was joking about the alleged murderous intent, but why it, nonetheless, isn't seemly, nor would the defensive reaction from the same commenters be the same if a similar joke came from the left, but I'm still repeatedly being informed that it was a joke, so ha!
Not going to get a good grade on the "comprehension" portion of the test, guys.
Some comments (not Michael's!) at Michael Totten's post further unpack for us how this incident reveals the perfidious nature of the left, you see.
Still running over 280 hits an hour at 8 a.m. Passed 4,000 hits for yesterday. Significant datapoint: average length of stay is 46 seconds.
Before his high-profile visit to China last week, Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that Beijing leaders allow him to speak, live and uncensored, to the Chinese people.
[...]
Anyone who tuned into CCTV-4, China's all-news television channel, at shortly after 10 a.m. last Thursday could have watched Mr. Cheney deliver an address to students at Fudan University in Shanghai. A State Department linguist provided simultaneous interpretation.
The broadcast, however, received no advance billing in the Chinese news media and was not repeated. And authorities promptly plastered leading web sites with a "full text" of the vice president's remarks, including his answers to questions after the speech, that struck out references to political freedom, Taiwan, North Korea and other issues that propaganda officials considered sensitive.
[...]
The Chinese transcript was prepared immediately after the address by the People's Daily, the main newspaper of the Communist Party, and was distributed to newspapers and websites across the country. It provided a faithful translation of most of what Mr. Cheney said. But it dropped numerous references to "political freedom" and "individual freedom."
Whereas Mr. Cheney praised "rising prosperity and expanding political freedom" across Asia, the official Chinese transcript refers only to "rising prosperity." It drops his statements that "the desire for freedom is universal" and that "freedom is indivisible."
It also wiped out any record of what Mr. Cheney said about the Taiwan Relations Act, a Congressional law that mandates that the United States sell Taiwan military equipment so that it could defend itself if it came under an attack from the Chinese mainland. China maintains the act violates agreements with the United States.
Mr. Cheney said that the war on terror must not be used as a pretext to suppress "legitimate dissent." The Chinese, who have battled dissidents they say are terrorists in their largely Muslim region of Xinjiang, dropped that phrase.
The longest elisions involved Mr. Cheney's references to the North Korean nuclear crisis, Pyongyang's alleged acquisition of nuclear technology from Pakistan, and the problem of proliferation generally. China, which is closer to North Korea than any other country, is acting as a broker in negotiations over how to end North's nuclear program.
[...]
The edited text, without indications of editing changes, was posted on the websites of the People's Daily, the New China News Agency, and other online venues.
An editor at the People's Daily website involved with preparing the transcript denied that any censorship had occurred. The editor, who declined to be identified, said missing sentences or sections are attributable solely to the speed with which the transcript was prepared.
WHEN YOU THINK "HEZBOLLAH," you think only one thing! Great television!Who doesn't?
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Quick. What is the name of the Palestinian village near what is now the Israeli city of Ramla that was destroyed in 1949 and replaced by a town called Yavne?
Too difficult? It's Yibna. Try another.
What structure built of gray sandstone in 1792 became the source of all oppressive decisions the world over?
This one should be easy: the White House.
If you answered both questions correctly, you might be prime fodder to compete on "The Mission," a game show running on Al Manar, the satellite television channel of Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese group.
Contestants from around the Arab world compete each Saturday night for cash and the chance to win a virtual trip to Jerusalem. To heighten the drama, points won by the finalists translate directly into steps toward the holy city that are flashed onto a map of the region.
[...]
The game show, begun last fall, is a tad more subtle than the channel's other offerings outside its fairly straightforward news shows. The program "Terrorists," for example, plays endless loops of film from Israeli attacks that killed civilians. "Sincere Men," drawing its name from a Koranic verse about the strength of the faithful when facing battle, profiles either Hezbollah fighters who undertook suicide missions or those in waiting.
"The Mission" follows a standard game show format, with contestants quizzed about history, literature, geography, science and the arts. But at least half the questions revolve around Palestinian or Islamic history, and at least one contestant is usually Palestinian.
"We wanted to put it into a form that would appeal to a wider segment of the population," said Ibrahim Musawi, a spokesman for Manar and the director of its English news. "It is not in an ideological or a direct way, but in an entertaining way."
I can picture the Hezbollah Vanna White, and Kathy Lee Gifford/Kelly Ripa, now.
I was no clerk, nor had I any capacity to become one. The only place I ever found in my life to put a paper so as to find it again was either a side coat-pocket or the hands of a clerk or secretary more careful than myself.
[...]
As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.
[...]
While I was at West Point the tactics used in the army had been Scott's and the musket the flint lock. I had never looked at a copy of tactics from the time of my graduation. My standing in that branch of studies had been near the foot of the class. In the Mexican war in the summer of 1846, I had been appointed regimental quartermaster and commissary and had not been at a battalion drill since. The arms had been changed since then and Hardee's tactics had been adopted. I got a copy of tactics and studied one lesson, intending to confine the exercise of the first day to the commands I had thus learned. By pursuing this course from day to day I thought I would soon get through the volume.
We were encamped just outside of town on the common, among scattering suburban houses with enclosed gardens, and when I got my regiment in line and rode to the front I soon saw that if I attempted to follow the lesson I had studied I would have to clear away some of the houses and garden fences to make room. I perceived at once, however, that Hardee's tactics--a mere translation from the French with Hardee's name attached--was nothing more than common sense and the progress of the age applied to Scott's system. The commands were abbreviated and the movement expedited. Under the old tactics almost every change in the order of march was preceded by a "halt," then came the change, and then the "forward march." With the new tactics all these changes could be made while in motion. I found no trouble in giving commands that would take my regiment where I wanted it to go and carry it around all obstacles. I do not believe that the officers of the regiment ever discovered that I had never studied the tactics that I used.
HOW OUR GOVERNMENT LIED TO THE SUPREME COURT and we got stuck with more than fifty years of secrecy laws that says that judges can't be trusted, only the executive can.
THE FAILURE REVIEW BOARD. Matt Welch has typically sensible observations on the value of the September 11th Commission, and the Bush Administration's endless attempts to prevent it, delay it, deny it, and through surrogates, smear it (my words, not Matt's).
In case you were wondering. I read them long ago, but don't presently have a copy. Reading this piece by Larry McMurtry on Grant and Mark Twain (whom he also covered in the previous issue; Clemens, of course, arranged for the publication when Grant was, not for the first time, broke), I thought it probable the Memoirs were online, and so they are.
Give them a try, sometime, if you feel like it. Twain, though self-interested, called it "the best general's book since Caesar's."
Before the car I was in had started, a dapper little fellow--he would be called a dude at this day--stepped in. He was in a great state of excitement and used adjectives freely to express his contempt for the Union and for those who had just perpetrated such an outrage upon the rights of a free people. There was only one other passenger in the car besides myself when this young man entered. He evidently expected to find nothing but sympathy when he got away from the "mud sills" engaged in compelling a "free people" to pull down a flag they adored. He turned to me saying; "Things have come to a pretty pass when a free people can't choose their own flag. Where I came from if a man dares to say a word in favor of the Union we hang him to a limb of the first tree we come to." I replied that "after all we were not so intolerant in St. Louis as we might be; I had not seen a single rebel hung yet, nor heard of one; there were plenty of them who ought to be, however." The young man subsided. He was so crestfallen that I believe if I had ordered him to leave the car he would have gone quietly out, saying to himself: "More Yankee oppression."
SIMULATING MARS. I've read about this project before, and it strikes me as closer to "Space Camp" than to actual science, but it's an amusing long piece to read, nonetheless.
Then James yells from downstairs. "Hey, guys. We're all dead! Someone left the door wide open."
Oh, darn.
Read The Rest according to how much you might be amused.
LIFE IS ALWAYS MORE COMPLICATED THAN YOU KNOW. I hadn't known about this. The subhead sums it up well:
The Daughter of Uzbekistan's President Took Her Children and Ran, Opening a Custody War That Has Entangled Two New Allies
[...]
On a table she left a note for her husband. She mentioned an old movie playing on cable -- "The War of the Roses," the 1989 dark comedy featuring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as hate-driven spouses whose divorce turns into an orgy of revenge. She jotted down the time the show would air and pointedly suggested he watch.
Whether that was prophecy or threat, a war soon broke out. It turns out that divorcing Gulnora Karimova, known as "the Uzbek princess," is no simple matter. Her father is Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan and autocrat nonpareil, who rules over a repressive Central Asian country where prisoners have been boiled alive. He also happens to be a key ally in America's war on terrorism.
Karimova took the kids in 2001 and has been ducking an arrest warrant issued by a New Jersey judge ever since, hiding out in Moscow, where she knows officials won't cross her father. As for her husband, Mansur Maqsudi, an Afghan American businessman, he has learned the price of crossing his powerful father-in-law. Since Maqsudi and his wife split up, the Uzbek government has effectively taken away his Coca-Cola bottling plant, imprisoned three of his relatives and deported 24 more of them at gunpoint to war-torn Afghanistan.
[...]
This tabloid drama threatens to complicate U.S. relations with its important new friend in a volatile region. The State Department, Justice Department, Internal Revenue Service, Interpol and various courts, embassies and congressional committees have all been drawn into the fray. Teams of American lobbyists have been recruited to fight the ground war. As New Jersey Superior Court Judge Deanne M. Wilson said at a court hearing last year, "This is not just a garden-variety custody case."
Sometimes stories, being real, are too colorful. This one has more valuable detail on just who our brave ally in Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov, is. And it appears it's even possible that Karimova, who does not come off well in this tale, to putit mildly, might just wind up inheriting rule of the country herself.
THE NEW TEMPLE: HOLOGRAMMIC. I read about this lunatic idea somewhere before, but I don't recall where, and it didn't have a pointer to this article.
It's lunatic, but of an interesting kind.
Yitzhaq Hayutman holds the key to peace on Earth - it's on a floppy disk in his pants pocket. With his full white beard, bald pate, and well-pressed khakis, the 61-year-old Israeli cybernetics expert and tech investor looks like Moses done over for a Banana Republic ad. Right now, he's showing me how he wants to position an airborne hologram over the Dome of the Rock, a gold-capped shrine that's one of the most holy sites in Islam. "The blimp will go there," Hayutman says pointing into the blue. "And eventually the Messiah will come."
[...]
For 1,500 years, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have fought for control of this 35-acre plateau in the heart of Jerusalem. The dispute remains one of the main obstacles to peace in the Middle East. Jewish teachings say that a temple must be built here - many say on the exact spot where the Dome now stands - in order to induce the arrival of the Messiah and the coming of peace on Earth. Fundamentalist Christians interpret this to mean the Second Coming of Christ and actively encourage Jewish building efforts. Muslims categorically oppose any encroachment on their holy site, from which they believe Mohammed ascended to heaven to receive the Koran.
All sides acknowledge that tensions on the hill have the potential to start a war, but Hayutman believes he has found a way to resolve the intractable conflict. "What most people see is that if the Muslims are here, surely there is no temple," Hayutman says. "They do not understand that technology has given us the tools to realize the prophecy right now."
He has two big ideas, two ways to engineer the apocalypse. The first: a hovering holographic temple. Hayutman wants to set up an array of high-powered, water-cooled lasers and fire them into a transparent cube suspended beneath a blimp. The ephemeral, flickering image, he says, would fulfill an ancient, widely revered Jewish prophecy that the temple will descend from the heavens as a manifestation of light. Hayutman hopes to finance the project with some of the proceeds from a $20 million patent-infringement suit he and his partners have filed against Palm.
The rest of that money would be poured into Hayutman's second idea for jump-starting the end-times: a virtual temple within a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. The goal is for thousands of people to join in its construction on the Web. Hayutman even wants to display progress reports in the floating hologram as a kind of apocalyptic scoreboard.
Pic:
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for fascinating crazed thinking, though not for important thinking. But it's not clear this, um, plan would make matters worse.
PEACE WITH HONOR. Good for Bush.I don't say that often. And I have no reason to give him personal credit for this.
But, hey, the administration in power gets the blame and the credit for what's done on their watch.
And this is so very much the right thing to do. Finally.
SARABURI, Thailand — The reward for helping the Americans during the Vietnam War took 29 years to materialize, but for the 15,000 Laotian Hmong in this sun-baked refugee camp, it was a payout beyond their wildest dreams: U.S. citizenship.
"I can't believe we'll be Americans," said Sui Yang, 60, who fought with CIA-backed Hmong guerrillas against the communist Pathet Lao in the mountains of Laos. "We heard rumors for years this was going to happen, but they were always only rumors. Most of us gave up hoping. I thought we were going nowhere."
Yang, a soldier in America's "secret" war in Laos in the 1960s and '70s, rolled up his trousers to show scars from deep bullet wounds. He spoke of U.S. choppers that supplied his guerrilla band in the jungles, and of downed U.S. pilots the Hmong rescued. He remembered his shock when the U.S. abandoned Indochina in 1975, and when Laos fell to the communists.
He and his friends fled to Thailand, and for years the Hmong languished here in Tham Krabok camp as the last major group of refugees from the Vietnam War era.
In the mid-1990s, the United Nations closed its refugee office in Laos, and the United States said it had no plans to resettle additional Hmong. Stranded and largely forgotten, they eked out a living making handicrafts and taking dangerous rock quarry jobs that Thais shunned.
Then, in December, the future brightened: U.S. Ambassador Darryl Johnson came to Tham Krabok and announced, "We will take everyone who is eligible and wants to go." (Drug users and criminals are ineligible.) The airlift is expected to begin in July.
We've owed these people for thirty years. Finally we're doing right by them.
Stinchon and other officers, awaiting the resolution of negotiations over the U.S. military's standoff with the cleric, got a firsthand look at his militia's questionable marksmanship Tuesday when their six-vehicle convoy was forced by rocket-propelled grenade fire to cross a bridge over the Euphrates River and race through the town of Kufa.
As the U.S. forces sped the wrong way down a busy commercial street at 50 mph, about 50 Sadr followers fired machine guns and AK-47s. None of the soldiers was hit.
"We should have been dead," Heyward said.
Because the attackers positioned themselves across the street from one another, some appeared to have shot their own men as well as hitting bystanders, U.S. soldiers said. Eight civilians were killed in the fighting.
SEARCH. I've re-installed the Atomz search function, with a new account. This seems to have cleared up the previous problems that generated results including a couple of other blogs; on the down side, the results seem a tad eccentric in terms of overly-generous interpretations of what's being searched for.
I've contemplated installing the more elaborate search option, but it would take up what seems to me to be an undue amount of space on the sidebar; my compromise, for now, is to add a link to the Search Tips.
I'll continue working on this as time and energy allow; feedback welcome.
What an extraordinary story, and piece of journalism.
In a box delivered by rolling handcart on the morning of Feb. 26, 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court received 40 copies of a petition so unusual a clerk decided he couldn't accept it for filing. First, though, he turned through its pages.
In a preliminary statement, he read these words: Three widows stood before this court in 1952. Their husbands had died in the crash of an Air Force plane. The lower courts had awarded them compensation. But the United States was bent on overturning their judgments, and — to accomplish this — it committed a fraud not only upon the widows but upon this Court.
[...]
The clerk read on: At the heart of the case is a set of reports the Air Force prepared on the accident…. The Air Force refused to produce these reports, even to the district judge…. The United States took the case to this Court … contending that the reports contained "military secrets" so sensitive not even the district court should see them…. This Court took the government at its word, and reversed. But, it turns out that the Air Force's affidavits were false. The Air Force recently declassified the accident reports. They include nothing approaching a "military secret." … In telling the Court otherwise, the Air Force lied…. It is for this Court in exercise of its inherent power to remedy fraud, to put things right.
The clerk didn't need to puzzle over which long-ago case the petition addressed. Although U.S. vs. Reynolds wasn't familiar to the public, law students everywhere knew it to be the landmark 1953 ruling that formally established the government's "state secrets" privilege — a privilege that has enabled federal agencies to conceal conduct, withhold documents and block troublesome civil litigation, including suits by whistle-blowers and possible victims of discrimination.
U.S. vs. Reynolds' ramifications reach beyond civil law: By encouraging judicial deference when the government claims national security secrets, it provides a fundamental basis for much of the Bush administration's response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including the USA Patriot Act and the handling of terrorist suspects.
Be warned that this is a very long story, and, frankly, you can really skip past all the personal details about Judy Palya Loether, and her father as well, if you like; they're interesting color, but not truly essential.
This is not a "must-read" story, but it's a story, and law, I knew nothing about, and I look forward to reading the second part tomorrow.
Coming Tomorrow
Judy Palya Loether climbs into her mother's attic in search of secrets. What she finds is a key to her own past and the government's way of hiding facts.
I'll be there.
Later: the second part is here. Now that I've read it, it becomes crystal-clear where all the personal detail on Judy and her father was going, as foundation, in the first part, to set up the story in the second part of how Judy became, eventually, the driving engine in the discovery of the relevant documents, and the return to the Supreme Court.
Guaranteed Pulitzer here. I also change my mind; this is a "must-read" story.
X-45 AGAIN. I presciently posted about the X-45 the other day, wondering if there were any up-to-date news about it. Turns out there is today.
A robotic plane deliberately dropped a bomb near a truck at Edwards Air Force Base on Sunday, marking another step forward for technology the U.S. military hopes will one day replace human pilots on dangerous combat missions.
Under human supervision but without human piloting, a prototype of the Boeing Co.'s X-45 took off from the desert base, opened its bomb bay doors, dropped a 250-pound Small Smart Bomb and then landed.
The inert bomb struck within inches of the truck it was supposed to hit, Boeing said, adding that had the bomb contained explosives, the target would have been destroyed.
[...]
Horton, who was sitting 80 miles from the target, authorized the drone to drop the bomb, which was released from 35,000 feet as the plane flew at 442 mph.
[...]
The Y-shaped, tailless plane has a 34-foot wingspan and weighs 8,000 pounds empty. It is the first drone designed specifically to carry weapons into combat.
WHY FALLUJAH? Michael Gordon has some sensible views here.
It seemed clear back in June that there were several reasons for the troubles in Falluja, a city of a quarter million that is located some 65 kilometers, or 40 miles, west of Baghdad. Falluja was not on the invasion path of American forces on their way to Baghdad and thus did not witness the full display of American might.
[...]
Since Falluja is located on the major highway that goes from Baghdad to Jordan it is also a city virtually impossible for Westerners to avoid. In Falluja, worlds collide.
[...]
The 82nd Airborne Division was the first unit to dispatch troops there.
[...]
A 1,200-strong squadron of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was given responsibility for Falluja after the 82nd left and took casualties.
So the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division was then handed the mission.
[...]
Soon, however, the 2nd Brigade left to return to the United States. The Falluja mission was handed back to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment and after that to the 82nd Airborne, which sought to train the nascent Iraqi security force to control the city.
This month, the Marines returned to Iraq to take responsibility for Falluja and western Iraq.
Not that long-term relationships, experience, or continuity matter much.
Walk into the suites of Lowry Digital, the company that Mr. Lowry started six years ago, and the first sight that strikes you is the computer bank — rack after rack of Macintosh G5 computers, 600 of them, holding a combined memory of 2,400 gigabytes.
Beyond this room is a super-sanitized, temperature-controlled chamber. Inside, a technician wearing a white smock and cap monitors a pair of machines called the Imager XE-Advanced, made by the Imagica Corp.
The Imagica machines are ultra-sophisticated digital film-scanners. They are loaded with reels from the original negative of the 1967 James Bond movie "You Only Live Twice."
The spools advance slowly, one frame every four seconds, which is how long it takes the Imagica to scan across a frame 4,000 times — a process known as 4K scanning.
During the scan, the machine creates a digital replica of the frame, consisting of 4,000 horizontal lines of data. A cable then transmits this data to a hard-drive server in an adjoining room.
To put the magnitude of 4,000 lines in perspective, a television displays broadcast signals as 480 lines. High-definition televisions have up to 1,080 lines. (The greater number of lines, the more detailed the image — the more closely it resembles a seamless, lifelike picture.) Impressive as HDTV looks, 35-millimeter film has far more color and detail. Engineers calculate that 4,000 lines of data would be needed to reproduce all the visual information in a frame of film — exactly as many lines as the Imagica delivers.
[...]
Thirty-five years ago, Mr. Lowry, who is now 71, patented a method of cleaning up NASA's live televised transmissions from the moon. Six years ago, as the DVD took off, he set up Lowry Digital — then a two-man R & D shop — to apply his techniques to digital restoration.
[...]
Since then, he has bought hundreds of computers, hired a staff of 30 and worked on 80 DVD's — including the long-awaited DVD of "Star Wars" — erasing wear, tears, dirt, scratches and other ravages of age.
Yeah, but they'll still be sealed in a really annoying way.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 if you're into techno-geekery.
The SUGV (pronounced "sug-vee") will be a smaller and lighter version of the PackBot, a 42-pound robot with tanklike rubber treads designed by iRobot, a company based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
IRobot, which was co-founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist Rodney Brooks, is the same company that developed the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner.
American soldiers are already using PackBots to search inside caves in Afghanistan, and to remove roadside bombs in Iraq. A PackBot proved its worth last week when it uncovered a bomb in Iraq and was destroyed in the process.
"One robot was blown up," said retired Vice Adm. Joe Dyer, general manager of iRobot's government and industrial robotics division. "That was a cause for celebration, because the robot saved the life of a soldier."
Hillary wants to be on the VP ticket so that she dispels the notion that the Clintons are sabotaging the campaign and so that she can also go out there and really be the star. She'd be the star because she'll be the one bringing excitement to it. And, by the way, she'll get all kinds of criticism and the Republicans will launch all they've got at her, and she'll endure that. They know that they're pretty confident Kerry is going to lose and if Kerry wins there's always Fort Marcy Park. So they're rolling the dice on this.
A number of blogs have noted this fine piece of work, but why should they get to have all the fun?
Fort Marcy Park, of course, is where the body of Vincent Foster was found. You remember him. He's the former lover of lesbian-feminazi Hillary Clinton, who had Foster murdered.
Or so we've heard before from Limbaugh and his upstanding, honorable, ilk.
And now we learn that Hillary, in keeping with her murderous liberal personality, plans the assassination of President John Kerry, once she's blackmailed her way onto the ticket.
This excellent work is, incidentally, filed by Limbaugh under "John F-ing Kerry Stack."
This is the man the Vice-President of the United States, Richard Cheney, grants chatty interviews to.
What does it say that this man is the most popular [choose-your-preferred adjective] radio personality?
What does it say?
Read The Rest Scale: there's more fine lunacy where this came from. Of course.
ADDENDUM: Welcome, Instapundit readers. I welcome your views. Please read the comments, and make one. Thanks, and have a good time exploring here! (Running count: 2000 or or so in the past three hours.)
ADDENDUJM: New running count: 3,474 as of 9:16 p.m. Rocky Mountain Time (which no one pays an f' for, by the way). Other counts: no donations.
Comments, after a brief delay, due to free enterprise arrangements, working again; just so you know.
ANOTHER ADDENDUM: This is a tad weird. I confess I wasn't happy at the attention this story was paid attention to. I mailed out e-mails pointing to it to 14 lefty bloggers. None linked, three with explanations that it had played out or been paid enough attention to. "Everyone" knew!
I wasn't satisfied, and mailed out seven more e-mails.
I've gotten over 20,ooo more hits from those links.
More hits than anything I've ever said or done.
But, I guess, they're not "everyone."
It seems to me that the story wasn't played out. i don't know what to say about those who think it was. "Lacking imagination" orccurs to me as does "talk to me in future when you have this delusion."
I dunno, I'm not an approved lefty blogger, we know. A long list of lefty blogs don't link to me. Because, I guess, I don't criticize Bush enough, or I don't get enough attention. Or something.
It's not, of course, as if anyone is trying to talk across an echo chamber, or make sense, or reach agreement.
That would be horrible.
We must never agree on anything.
How good that everyone knows their lessons.
Michael Totten links here, to agree with me. His commenters shout at him. Funny, that.
UNCONGEALED. David Edelstein loves Hellboy, and has a few things to say about successful genre movie-making.
Last year, while sitting through the Rings cycle (not the Wagner; the Tolkien, all three Peter Jackson epics back-to-back in one day on a big screen), I talked to a young woman—someone who'd waited in line for 12 hours—who marveled: "Peter Jackson gets Tolkien. He's a fan. The problem with George Lucas is that he's not a fan of Star Wars, so he doesn't understand what people who grew up with Star Wars love about Star Wars." Now, I admit that this line of reasoning is counterintuitive: George Lucas, who created Star Wars, is a bad director for new Star Wars movies because he didn't grow up loving Star Wars? That's preposterous, right? Well, as a general principle it might be, but I think in this case she was dead-on: Lucas forgot the fan-boy enthusiasm that gave birth to the first Stars Wars movie, and so the material congealed into a series of ornate, digitized pageants. The highest praise I can bestow on Guillermo del Toro, the 39-year-old Mexican-born director and writer, is that he's in a class with Peter Jackson as a fan-boy who gets it—a brilliant filmmaker who has a kind of metabolic connection to horror and sci-fi that helps him transform secondhand genre material into something deep and nourishing. Del Toro reaches into himself and finds the Wagnerian grandeur in schlock.
[...]
Good superhero movies—from the first Batman (1989) to X-Men (2000)—are like superhero comics, in that they come from a distinct emotional place: that feeling of adolescent outsiderness that drives kids to live through … superhero comics. They inspire so many geeks (and geeks-at-heart) because they're about turning one's freakishness into an asset, making it a source of power and connection.
Correctamundo!
Read The Rest as interested. See also here for quite a lot of critics gushing about Kill Bill, Vol. 2.
The joy when Quentin Tarantino's creations speak is the opposite. Despite their hilariously florid rapping, his folks are also incredibly cagey: they never give the entire game away. This shrewdness is the template for the long dialogues in "Kill Bill Vol. 2," the most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.
In this deliciously perverse picture — Mr. Tarantino delights in distending climaxes and emotional connections for so long we almost forget about conventional satisfactions — everything is operatic, including the despair and the pauses. This is an epic of Conradian proportions (Robert Conradian proportions). Uma Thurman, whose speaking voice has a lyric, teasing quality — if Dusty Springfield had been an actress, she would have been Ms. Thurman — is just the performer to convey Mr. Tarantino's mordant slyness. (She also shows a rueful expansiveness that gives this film a heart.) His movies are about loss and betrayal, and "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is a double-burger helping of those motifs. It is rich, substantial and sustained, yet also greasy kids' stuff, a wrapper filled with an extra large order of chili fries, stained with ketchup, salt and cheese.
THE UN IN KOSOVO. What is going on here? (See also here.)
Two American women working as prison guards with the United Nations in Kosovo were killed Saturday and 10 other Americans and an Austrian working as prison officers were wounded when a Jordanian, also with the United Nations, opened fire on them, officials said. The attacker was shot and killed.
[...]
"They were leaving the detention center in three vehicles after a routine training day, when they came under fire," said Neeraj Singh, a spokesman for the United Nations police service in Kosovo.
He said that at least one Jordanian officer began shooting and that the Americans returned fire, killing him.
These reports are too early to make sense of this. I do hope some sense is soon made of it.
Mr. Sendak, who based the character of Max in his children's book "Where the Wild Things Are" on Mickey Mouse, is an exact contemporary of the cartoon rodent: both were born in 1928. "I was around 6 when I first saw him," he said. "It filled me with joy. I think it was those primary colors so vivid and pure, taken up with the most incredibly beautiful animation, reminding you of Fred Astaire. Oh! And his character was the kind I wished I'd had as a child: brave and sassy and nasty and crooked and thinking of ways to outdo people." The joy leached from Mr. Sendak's voice. "Not like the lifeless fat pig he is now."
[...]
More surprising was his personality; if it was based, as many people say, on Disney himself (he provided the voice), you've got to wonder about Walt. The original Mickey — who made his public debut in "Steamboat Willie," the first synchronized-sound cartoon — was only partly civilized: uninhibited, bare-chested, rough-and-ready to the point of sadism. His chums were farmyard animals like Claraballe Cow and Horace Horsecollar, and, like most cartoon characters of the period, he blithely trafficked in fistfights, drownings, dismemberments. For violence, the shipboard shenanigans of "Steamboat Willie" far exceed those in "Steamboat Bill Jr.," the Buster Keaton feature that inspired it. In one sequence, Mickey tortures various animals — banging cow teeth, tweaking pig nipples — in order to produce a rendition of "Turkey in the Straw."
[...]
So, sometime in the mid- to late 1930's, Mickey settled down. Barnyard cohorts and rail-riding adventures gave way to suburban domesticity with his non-wife Minnie ("They just lived together as friends," said Mr. Smith. "For a very long time") and their unexplained nephews. At the same time, Mickey's perverse qualities were grafted onto his new supporting cast — Donald Duck and Goofy, especially — who by the 1940's, according to Mr. Smith, eclipsed the mouse in popularity. Like Walt, whose politics started a rightward drift after a studio strike in 1941, Mickey was no longer a hungry Depression prole; by the time he started shilling war bonds, the transformation from amoral Huck Finn to virtuous, conservative Aunt Polly was complete.
Mickey had transformed visually, too, from the elegant semi-abstraction of 1928, when his face was basically just an array of seven circles, into something cuter and less boldly graphic. Though the ears were barely altered (they floated around his head so that no matter which way he turned you always saw them straight on), everything else gradually became more "real" and "expressive." The cheeks puffed out, the limbs acquired volume and the eyes, formerly just pupils floating in a vague sea of white, got moored into upright ovals. The overall effect of these changes was that Mickey came to seem less ratlike, more human — and far younger. In an only partly silly investigation, the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used calipers to measure drawings of Mickey at three different stages and compared the resulting proportions to those of living animals. His conclusion was that Mickey, while aging chronologically, had become "progressively more juvenile in appearance." Indeed, he had become an infant.
[...]
And while a wide range of industry experts agreed that Disney needed to put new Mickey content in front of kids' eyes, their detailed suggestions for fixing his character were so various and contradictory, it's no surprise that Disney has seemed unsure which way to turn. He needs to be more high-tech. He must go back to his roots. He has to have edge. He should be a patriot. He has to be mischievous like contemporary cartoon characters. He should come in different "flavors," as Spiderman does ("classic" and "theatrical"), to appeal to different audiences. He has to be specific. He has to be universal. Mr. Arad, of Marvel, all but said Mickey needed to have his head examined. "Decide who is the guy under the ears."
Art Spiegelman, author of the "Maus" books, thinks he knows the answer. "How would I renovate Mickey for our times?" he said. "Easy. Make him gay. He's half way there anyway. You keep the voice the same as it's been; beyond having him take a passionate interest in Broadway musicals and occasionally wearing pink shirts, you don't have to do much. You just have to change the world around him."
Underlying Mr. Spiegelman's suggestion is the idea that Mickey should be taken back from children: that his evolution from pig-nipple-tweaker to bland role model should be reversed.
Here's another way to go:
Myself, I'm still hoping to see GroeningLand, and the beloved live characters of Itchy and Scratchy.
Read The Rest as interested in the decline and fall of Mickey.
The silly thing is that what Nighthorse Campbell said was, while crude, essentially innocuous. It's the lying about it that was, as ever, stupid and damaging.
GOOD LITERATURE MAKES FOR GOOD MEDICINE. As in much of life, story is more essential than commonly realized. Better healing through narrative.
There is nothing unusual about the case with which Rita Charon, a plenary speaker at a medical conference in Gainesville, Fla., began her lecture. ''A 36-year-old Dominican man with a chief symptom of back pain comes to see me for the first time,'' she said. ''As his new internist, I tell him, I have to learn as much as I can about his health.''
The familiarity, however, ended there. Charon described listening to her patients in markedly different terms than other physicians do. She did not -- as she told it -- interrupt the man with pesky questions about his pain but rather listened in an analytical way as if he were a character giving a soliloquy.
''I listen not only for the content of his narrative but for its form -- its temporal course, its images, its associated subplots, its silences, where he chooses to begin in telling of himself, how he sequences symptoms with other life events,'' she said. ''After a few minutes, he stops talking and begins to weep. I ask him why he cries. He says, 'No one has ever let me do this before.'''
[...]
The crowd of physicians, psychologists, nurses and English professors had come to participate in a conference on what is called ''narrative medicine,'' but in large part they had come simply to hear Rita Charon -- the leader of the burgeoning movement that seeks to situate storytelling at the center of medicine. Charon, a 54-year-old internist with a Ph.D. in literature, is the director of the pioneering Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, which teaches literature, literary theory and creative writing to medical students and whose practices are rapidly being incorporated and adapted by schools across the country.
Narrative medicine imports terms from literature to describe the doctor-patient relationship. In describing his backache, Charon said, the Dominican man was actually telling an ''illness narrative,'' which can be interpreted just like a literary text: by examining the presentation of character, the structure of the tale and the plot of the disease. Regardless of the outcome -- the diagnosis or treatment (which Charon did not relate) -- what is central is the telling and receiving of the tale.
[...]
By describing communication skills as ''narrative competence,'' Charon is trying to move literature from the margin to the center of medical education. Vital skills are termed ''competencies'' in medical schools. Narrative competence holds that listening is a skill that can be taught through the study of narrative (in the jargon, ''narratology''), just as anatomy can be taught through an anatomy textbook.
[...]
Disturbingly, psychological testing of medical students shows levels of empathy consistently decline during medical school and residency.
[...]
Yet medical students are so flooded by feelings that they have no time to examine or process that a significant proportion are thought to be suffering, literally, from post-traumatic stress disorder.
[...]
You have only to think of the stories of Nazi commandants humming Wagner and weeping over Goethe in the death camps to realize that studying the humanities does not necessarily make you any more humane than studying finance makes you care about the poor.
[...]
Frank's vision of how a lost sense of story could be restored to medicine is both lucid and profound. ''At the simplest level, narrative medicine means I take seriously that life really is a story,'' he says. ''When a doctor tells you, 'You are sick,' he's not just diagnosing; he is initiating a new chapter in the story of your life.'' Thus, he says, a physician practicing narrative-based medicine must be conscious of being a character in the story of the patient's life and taking responsibility for the part he or she chooses to play.
The attacks of Sept. 11 seemed to come in a stunning burst from nowhere. But now, after three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.
The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.
[...]
The new information produced by the commission so far has led 6 of its 10 members to say or suggest that the attacks could have been prevented, though there is no consensus on when, how or by whom. The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, has described failures at every level of government, any of which, if avoided, could have altered the outcome. Mr. Kerrey, a Democrat, said, "My conclusion is that it could have been prevented. That was not my conclusion when I went on the commission."
[...]
In an intense stretch this month, the commission pried open some of the most closely guarded compartments of government, revealing the flow and details of previously classified information given to two presidents and their senior advisers, and the performance of intelligence and law enforcement officials.
The inquiry has gone beyond the report of a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committee in 2002, which chronicled missteps at the mid-level of bureaucracies. Urged on by a number of families of people killed in the attacks, the Kean commission has used a mix of moral and political leverage to extract presidential communications and testimony. Among the new themes that have fundamentally reshaped the story of the Sept. 11 attacks are:
¶Al Qaeda and its leader, Mr. bin Laden, did not blindside the United States, but were a threat recognized and discussed regularly at the highest levels of government for nearly five years before the attacks, in thousands of reports, often accompanied by urgent warnings from lower-level experts.
¶Presidents Clinton and Bush received regular information about the threat of Al Qaeda and the intention of the bin Laden network to strike inside the United States. Each president made terrorism a stated priority, failed to find a diplomatic solution and viewed military force as a last resort. At the same time, neither grappled with the structural flaws and paralyzing dysfunction that undermined the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., the two agencies on which the nation depended for protection from terrorists. By the end of his second term, Mr. Clinton and the director of the F.B.I., Louis J. Freeh, were barely speaking.
¶Even when the two agencies cooperated, the results were unimpressive. Mr. Kean said that he viewed the reports on the two agencies as indictments. In late August 2001, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, learned that the F.B.I. had arrested Zacarias Moussaoui after he had enrolled in a flight school. Mr. Tenet was given a memorandum titled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But he testified that he took no action and did not tell President Bush about the case.
[...]
Mr. Tenet took his terror warnings directly to Mr. Bush. Ms. Rice said that at least 40 meetings between the C.I.A. director and the president dealt "in one way or other with Al Qaeda or the Al Qaeda threat." Mr. Tenet later said "the system was blinking red," adding that no warning indicated that terrorists would fly hijacked commercial aircraft into buildings in the United States.
On July 5, Ms. Rice and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, asked Mr. Clarke to alert top officials of the country's domestic agencies. "Let's make sure they're buttoning down," Ms. Rice said. The F.A.A. issued threat advisories, but neither the agency's top administrator nor Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation, was aware of the increased threat level, said Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member, at a hearing last week.
[...]
The briefing paper was presented to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6 at his Texas ranch. The memorandum, declassified on April 10 by the White House at the commission's request, included some ominous information. It said that Qaeda operatives had been in the United States for years, might be planning an attack in the United States and could be focusing on a building in Lower Manhattan as a target.
[...]
Thomas J. Pickard, the F.B.I.'s acting director from June to August, said he telephoned top agents to advise them of the threat. But the commission found that most F.B.I. personnel "did not recall a heightened sense of threat from Al Qaeda."
The commission found several previously undisclosed intelligence reports to Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and national security aides dating back to April and May, when the volume of warnings began to increase. Mr. Bush was given briefing papers headlined, "Bin Laden Planning Multiple Operations," "Bin Laden Threats Are Real" and "Bin Laden's Plans Advancing."
[...]
In August 2001, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. came as close as the government ever did to detecting anyone connected to the Sept. 11 plot. That month investigators finally made progress in the fractured effort to track down two men, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who on Sept. 11 were aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The C.I.A. had investigated the pair off and on since they had been seen at a Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. But they were not placed on a State Department watch list until Aug. 23, after they already were in the United States. Moreover, the C.I.A. failed to tell the F.B.I.'s primary investigators on the Cole case of a key connection between the two men and a Cole suspect until after Sept. 11. "No one apparently felt they needed to inform higher level of management in either the F.B.I. or C.I.A. about the case," one commission report said.
In mid-August, after the arrest of Mr. Moussaoui in Minneapolis, the commission disclosed, Mr. Tenet and his top deputies were sent a briefing paper labeled "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." But they took no action on the report.
The commission found several missed opportunities in the Moussaoui investigation that might have detected his connection to a Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that planned the Sept. 11 attacks. "A maximum U.S. effort to investigate Moussaoui could conceivably have unearthed his connections to the Hamburg cell," one commission report said. The report added that publicity about Mr. Moussaoui's arrest "might have disrupted the plot. But such an effort would have been a race against time."
The September 11th Commission has done outstanding, invaluable, work.
We know much, thanks solely to its work, that we did not know before, essential information not uncovered by the Congressional inquiry.
We now know how badly, specifically, our government failed us, over two Administrations, and that this was unnecessary.
What happened on September 11th was probably preventable. And we now know many specifics of what was done wrongly, how it should have been done differently, and how to try to avoid those mistakes in future (we'll make new, original, mistakes instead).
We know how badly the FBI and CIA failed us. We know how our political leadership -- in two administrations -- failed us.
I think this Commission has done work that is almost unprecedented in its usefulness -- certainly, say, the Warren Commission, which told us almost nothing useful, stands in dire comparison.
The good news is that it's still proceeding. We still have more to learn from future hearings and staff reports.
You are a Secular Centrist. Secular centrists like you tend to be:
* Strongly supportive of gay rights.
* Believe strongly in the separation of church and state.
* Less supportive of affirmative action than most college students.
* Less likely to be concerned about the environment than most college students.
* Less likely to believe in basic health insurance as a right than most college students.
A number of people have blogged this. I see that Norman Geras protests, having gotten the same result as above in this rather simple-minded little test:
I protest on that last point. I got this result despite 'strongly agree[ing]' on the statement 'Basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it'.
The first thing to say is that I never thought it would be this bad.
[...]
Nonetheless, over the past two years many conservatives have grown increasingly exasperated with the administration's inability to execute its policies semicompetently. When I worked at The Weekly Standard, we argued ad nauseam that the U.S. should pour men and matériel into Iraq — that such an occupation could not be accomplished by a light, lean, "transformed" military. The administration was impervious to the growing evidence about that. The failure to establish order was the prime mistake, from which all other problems flow.
On July 21, 2002, my colleague Robert Kagan wrote the first of several essays lamenting the administration's alarming lack of preparation for post-Saddam Iraq. Yet the administration seemed content to try nation-building on the cheap.
Many of us also assumed, wrongly, that the administration would launch a fresh postwar initiative to globalize the reconstruction effort. My friends at the Project for the New American Century urged the U.S. to go to the U.N. for a reconstruction resolution, to build a broad coalition to aid rebuilding and to establish a NATO-led security force. That never happened.
Brooks then manages to find some chipper things to say. It strikes me as rather reflexive.
Bush hasn't lost Brooks yet. But Brooks is shaken.
I hesitate, just now, to post anything at all relating to either Iraq or terror (of Afghanistan); there's so much bleak news of late.
But there's lots of interest in this piece, including:
Jordan's King Abdullah II, asserting that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network is "still very, very effective," said Friday that his security services had foiled a plot to blow up major government buildings and perhaps the U.S. Embassy in Amman.
[...]
The monarch said his security services had followed the trail of the suspects and captured five trucks packed with 17.5 tons of high explosives, which apparently were intended for an attack on the Jordanian prime minister's office and the intelligence ministry.
"It was a major, major operation," Abdullah said. "It would have decapitated the government."
Casualties would have been "in the thousands," he added. "It couldn't have been more sinister."
[...]
Abdullah's comments amplified a little-noticed announcement issued two weeks ago. On April 1, Jordanian officials said they had arrested several terrorist suspects and were hunting for two cars laden with explosives. Five days later, the State Department said the attackers were linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist believed linked to al Qaeda, and intended to attack the U.S. embassy in Amman.
[...]
Asked for an assessment of al Qaeda's strength after three years of intense U.S. pursuit, Abdullah said quickly that it had increased.
[...]
Abdullah declined to comment directly about Bush's apparently dramatic shift in policy toward Israel -- throwing U.S. support behind Israel's decision to leave some Jewish settlements in the West Bank in place and agreeing that Palestinian refugees cannot be allowed to return to their homes in Israel, which they left during the country's 1948 war of independence.
Abdullah said he had not been forewarned by Bush, an omission that would be widely considered a significant diplomatic snub to a major U.S. partner.
"There were discussions beforehand with members of the administration, but what came out in Washington was different," he said. "We really are at a loss for information. ... Washington has taken us a bit by surprise.
"Honestly, we don't know what the implications are."
[...]
On other issues, Abdullah was discreetly critical of Bush administration policy and of Arab politicians:
-- Iraq: He warned that the country might be descending into further conflict. "We're getting closer to that line that makes civil war a possibility," he said. "Six months ago, I didn't think it was a possibility. I still don't think it is, but for the first time we're nervous."
Mr. Grove, who is now a gossip columnist for The New York Daily News, has said that when he was writing Reliable Source in the late 1990's he sat on the scoop that Newt Gingrich was being unfaithful to his wife. "I guess I'm just a wimp," he told the now defunct monthly Capital Style.
Here's something we know there's gossip about, but may not soon see:
She was fired from The American Prospect magazine after six weeks (during which she playfully called its co-editor, Robert Kuttner, "Crazy Bob" behind his back) and was required to sign a confidentiality agreement about the terms of her dismissal.
Something else:
Washingtonians generally divide into two halves — politicians and journalists — and both halves are obsessed with reading about themselves.
Funny, I could have sworn there was a whole 'nother group there called "bureaucrats," and yet another group of folks unconnected to government; the last group includes some people who are "unemployed." A number, rumor has it, are rather tan. But they're not real people; they're in some other "half" of Washington, the third half.
Here are two bits rather far away from each other in the story, that work much more nicely put together:
Jack Shafer of Slate called Ms. Cox a "heaving puke" in a column that also lambasted Gawker.com, the New York-based gossip blog created in 2002 by Nick Denton, the publisher behind Wonkette. "Her enthusiasm for penis jokes cannot be as great as her blog suggests," Mr. Shafer wrote.
[...]
"There's a whole kind of salacious news, a whole sordid underbelly to Washington that goes completely unreported," said Mr. Shafer, who admits to scanning Wonkette several times a day.
I'd rather be called names by an influential reader who finds it necessary to read me several times a day, than have nice things said about me by someone who finds me too dull to actually read.
Read The Rest: 3.5 out of 5 as interested; it's a good piece.
Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is an exuberant celebration of moviemaking, coasting with heedless joy from one audacious chapter to another, working as irony, working as satire, working as drama, working as pure action. I liked it even more than "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" (2003). It's not a sequel but a continuation and completion, filmed at the same time; now that we know the whole story, the first part takes on another dimension. "Vol. 2" stand on its own, although it has deeper resonance if you've seen "Kill Bill," just released on video.
[...]
There is a lot of explaining in the film; Tarantino writes dialogue with quirky details that suggest the obsessions of his people. That's one of the ways he gives his movies a mythical quality; the characters don't talk in mundane everyday dialogue, but in a kind of elevated geekspeak that lovingly burnishes the details of their legends, methods, beliefs and arcane lore.
[...]
The fight with Elle Driver is a virtuoso celebration of fight choreography; although we are aware that all is not as it seems in movie action sequences, Thurman and Hannah must have trained long and hard to even seem to do what they do. Their battle takes place inside Budd's trailer home, which is pretty much demolished in the process, and provides a contrast to the elegant nightclub setting of the fight with O-Ren Ishii; it ends in a squishy way that would be unsettling in another kind of movie, but here all the action is so ironically heightened that we may cringe and laugh at the same time.
[...]
Of the original "Kill Bill," I wrote: "The movie is all storytelling and no story. The motivations have no psychological depth or resonance, but are simply plot markers. The characters consist of their characteristics." True, but one of the achievements of "Vol. 2" is that the story is filled in, the characters are developed, and they do begin to resonate, especially during the extraordinary final meeting between The Bride and Bill -- which consists not of nonstop action but of more hypnotic dialogue and ends in an event that is like a quiet, deadly punch line.
Put the two parts together, and Tarantino has made a masterful saga that celebrates the martial arts genre while kidding it, loving it, and transcending it. I confess I feared that "Vol. 2" would be like those sequels that lack the intensity of the original.
But this is all one film, and now that we see it whole, it's greater than its two parts; Tarantino remains the most brilliantly oddball filmmaker of his generation, and this is one of the best films of the year.
